Authors

October 29, 2010: An Exciting Future For Books

With Nelson, Coupland, and Alice  – plus eReaders, iPads and other new tablets to empower them – the book has a very exciting future…

October 15, 2010: Photos as Content

An important category of content that often doesn't get the attention it deserves from companies is photos. As any photographer can tell you, images have tremendous power to communicate. In this era of self-publishing ease, photos can be readily shared with others, and shared they are. Over 10 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook, over 7 billion to Photobucket, and over 5 billion images have been uploaded to Flickr. That is a lot of sharing! Most of these photos – at least on Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa, and other image sites – are viewable by the public.

October 14, 2010: The New Smart Customer

Purchase behavior is no longer ruled by the tidy linear AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) sales process that allowed advertising and mainstream media companies such tremendous sway in the not too distant past. Today, the new smart customer has innumerable ways to research a potential purchase before making a buying decision. The above slide deck from Sapient details how smart customers are profoundly changing the sales cycle and buying process. Companies that want to succeed in this complex environment should take note.

October 08, 2010: B2B Content Has A Significant Impact On Sales Results

The purchase consideration and buying process for more complex products can involve many steps toward an eventual sale. Most buyers in this situation look for content to help them make a final decision. These buyers seek out content on competing websites, search for third-party reviews in traditional or digital media, solicit advice from others in their profession, and often look at more complex content such as videos, podcasts or webcasts before making a buying commitment. This type of process gives companies ample opportunities to increase sales success by focusing on content that will sway decisions in favor of their products or services.

October 06, 2010: A Content Strategy Lesson From The Rolling Stones

Mark Fidelman presents a thorough and entertaining slide deck on what a band such as the Rolling Stones can teach us about content. It's an enjoyable and instructive overview for people who want to learn why content strategy is a vital keystone in building an organization's marketing and branding efforts.

September 30, 2010: Why Content Strategy Needs To Move To Marketing Priority One

Let's put it bluntly – for many companies, content is a challenging conundrum or annoying afterthought.

It's understandable. For years, more direct routes to build revenues dominated the sales and marketing funnel. You ran a promotion; people came in and bought your offerings. You ran advertising, and if everything worked out, people bought your products or at least went to one of your locations or made a call to learn more. You expected your PR efforts to get the word out with targeted articles, reviews or mentions in consumer or trade media. You handed out sales sheets and talked the talk at trade shows, hoping to reap the rewards after the event. In this old hierarchy, content often played a subordinate role in getting people to buy. However, those days, if not completely over, are greatly diminished.

It's 2010! Advertising can still be important to get attention. Promotion is still valuable to win trial purchases. Trade shows continue as a key marketing tactic. PR remains important. However, the goal of all of these more traditional forms of marketing – at least for high involvement products and services – is often to drive people to your content so it can continue the job of affirmation, education, inclination, and encouraging a level of engagement that completes the sale.

September 24, 2010: Blog Advertising

Advertising has always "rented" content provided by other companies. It might be space in a good magazine article; commercial time within a top-ranked TV show; ads adjacent to stories in the newspaper; or ads in search-engine results and other online content. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that advertising is increasingly "renting" the content provided by blogs.

Top blogs in this country pull in a huge number of readers (See Technoratie Top 100 Blogs list). As any media buyer knows, the more eyeballs there are for any type of content, the more potential there is to rent adjacency for advertising. It wasn't that long ago that blogs were dismissed as a more "out there" concept. However, it is clear that blogs have moved into the mainstream. According to the latest figures at BlogPulse:

• There are 146,970,704 identified blogs;
• There were 64,653 new blogs created in the last 24 hours;
• There were 1,085,237 blog posts indexed in the past 24 hours

September 16, 2010: Crowd Sourced Innovation

Chris Anderson (not the Chris Anderson of Wired fame), delivers a compeling TED Talk on how web video is driving "a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print." Chris Anderson labels  this Crowd Accelerated Innovation.

September 15, 2010: New Comprehensive B2B Content Study Released

A new report on B2B content marketing trends, benchmarks and budgets was published today. The study was developed by Junta42 and MarketingProfs, and surveyed over 1100 U.S.-based B2B marketers. American Business Media and the Business Marketing Association also assisted with the project. A free PDF download of the report is available here.

September 03, 2010: Does Your Company Have A Clear, Compelling Story To Tell?

[The post below pertains to the B-to-B world, but much of it applies in the B-to-C realm, too.]

Every organization needs to have a good story to tell or why would anyone want to listen. It's the first thing people want to know when you meet them: what is your story? They want to know what you can do for them.

September 01, 2010: Facebook vs. Brand Websites

A recent article in AdAge asks a telling question: What Happens When Facebook Trumps Your Brand Site? That is exactly what is happening to some popular brands. Their Facebook popularity is exceeding the popularity of their own brand websites. Starbucks has 12.7 million fans on Facebook. Coke has 10.7 million, and there are many more companies with Facebook fan numbers well into the millions.

September 01, 2010: CMOs Signal Aggressive Increase In Spending

According to a new Duke University Fuqua School of Business study involving hundreds of CMOs throughout the country, it looks like 2011 will see healthy increases to many areas of the marketing budget. Overall gains in CMO budgets are estimated at 9.2%. The only area facing diminished budget allocations is traditional advertising.