April 22, 2013

Turn social into your own personal media empire

Your personal newsroom calls for authentic, purposeful engagement

If you read your local newspaper or a typical magazine, you’ll realize that most journalism is specialized. You have your columns, reporting, reviews, editorials, letters to the editor, and ombudsman. However, most companies don’t have the volume or diversity of news required to need such staffing.

That said, enough does go on each and every day in your office, among your staff, in your business, in your industry, with you and your very own personal brand that you need to cover the entire newsroom on your own, including the advertising and publicity (because like the news, everything comes down to driving revenue, and if you can’t prove that all the time, energy, and resources you’re spending online aren’t feeding sales, your one-man-social-media-band is not long for this world.) Continue reading →

February 25, 2013

The power of content marketing for business

Image by 10ch (Creative Commons)

Valuable content gives companies a leg up on the competition

Target audience: Marketing professionals, SEO specialists, businesses, brands, Web publishers.

Editor’s note: Quality content has always been a hallmark of quality websites. In “Valuable Content Marketing,” a new book by Sonja Jefferson and Sharon Tanton, the authors provide a deep dive into content marketing to explain how businesses can create high-quality content that targets your customer base and elevates your site’s ranking in search engine results. Here’s an excerpt from their book.

Guest post by Sonja Jefferson and Sharon Tanton

With potential customers being inundated with companies’ marketing efforts, standard marketing practices and mediocre content is quickly dismissed by most audiences; buyers no longer tolerate or respond to marketing that is less than good. To stand out, content should be truly valuable, providing a unique, educational, and perhaps even inspirational element to readers. In short, it should be content they appreciate — content that is generously shared and willingly received. Continue reading →

November 28, 2012

Lean content marketing: How to do it right

Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, at last night’s Lean content marketing event (photo by JD Lasica).

5 rules for creating content with social appeal

Target audience: Content marketers, agencies, marketing professionals, businesses, brands, start-ups, nonprofits, social enterprises, educators, journalists.

Last night I attended the first Lean Content Marketing meeup put on by Scoop.it, the content curation platform, at their San Francisco headquarters. About 80 folks, a mix of marketers and entrepreneurs, turned out to hear Leo Widrich, CEO and co-founder of Buffer, offer his five cardinal rules of content marketing.

Content marketing, which my partner David Spark prefers to call brand journalism, is the practice of creating content relevant to your brand to gain greater visibiilty in search results and in social channels. Simply put, if you don’t create content, you can’t be an influencer, and you won’t get people talking about your company, product or service.

Where does lean content marketing come in? We’re a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, where the conventional wisdom holds that a company that’s lean and product-focused will out-perform one that’s too marketing-centric, Scoop.it’s Arabella Santiago explained. Thus, like lean startup culture, the marketing sector could learn a few things from smaller, nimble means of spreading the word about a great new product — with social media at the top of the list. Blasting out a brand message doesn’t work if the underlying claim or value proposition is bupkis. Continue reading →