Content Marketing Today

Use TweetGrid to monitor what's being said about you, your company, your customers, and your competition.

Your business does not exist in a vacuum.  Quite the contrary.  Your success depends upon how well you satisfy the most important needs of your customers.  Their level of satisfaction will be relative to what your competition is doing and what other customers are saying about you to their friends.  If you fail to monitor those external elements, only good luck will rescue you from disaster.

That's where Twitter and TweetGrid come in. 

Simply put, Twitter consists of a universe of 140 character messages in cyberspace communicated amongst members who are sharing their thoughts about a zillion different topics and interests. These messages are delivered as soon as they are sent.  Therefore, if you are logged in to Twitter, you will receive them instantly. 

In the past year, Twitter has grown at a phenomenal rate to become both a social and a business tool. Although there is plenty to say about Twitter, we will examine only its usefulness as a source of feedback to help you understand what's going on among people and organizations that are critical to your success. Thus, Southwest Airlines was able to monitor a tweet complaining about ticket counter customer service in real-time.  They actually responded to solve the problem before the customer had left the counter.

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Terrific new book from Paul Gillin takes the mystery out of using online conversations and communities to connect with your customers.

Nothing is more rewarding than to read a book that is at once valuable, timely, and engaging. Secrets of Social Media Marketing is all that and more.  Paul has a genius for making the complex simple enough to understand without oversimplifying.

Is there a need for this book?  You bet!

"There has been more change in the media world in the last five years than in the previous 500."--Peter Koran, President, Media & Advertising, IAC

Understanding social media marketing is so difficult because it seems to be so different.  For decades, most of the rules of communicating with customers stayed the same.  You figured out who you were going to sell to.  You did your best to create a product or service that would have value for that target audience.  And then you blasted out your marketing message in print, on billboards, on radio, and since the 1950s on TV.

Now, and in the future, much of those old methods go right out the virtual window. Happily, Paul's book teaches you exactly how to put social media marketing to work by telling you what to do and precisely how to do it.

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Your schedule is probably chock full with projects and people. But, take just an hour on Friday to stop working in your business so you can work on your business.

You won't want to miss this compelling teleseminar with some of the best online marketers in the business.  We know that relentless change in marketing realities make it hard to keep up. Join us for 60 minutes and let us help you get up to speed on what's working today--and will work in the months and years ahead.

Join 4 Experts to learn how to deliver the information your customers need.

If you are free on Friday, January 23rd at 1pm, don't miss this free Author Teleseminar with Joe Pulizzi, Chris Brogan, Paul Gillin and myself as we talk about how to create content marketing strategies that  will make a measurable difference in your business.

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Save Money. Save Time. Work Anywhere. Collaborate with Anyone. Simplify Computing. Strengthen Security.

Back when a mainframe computer filled an entire room, users all accessed programs remotely on terminals which were the ancestors of today's PCs and laptops. Soon we will be accessing software and data remotely again--but from the Internet cloud. We will achieve dramatic improvements in productivity and reductions in costs. Until recently, almost all of us had moved to a model of individual PCs or Macs on which all of our business applications lived.  Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics all lived locally. If we worked in an office, we left them behind at night on the company PC.  That changed slightly as the pervasive use of laptops allowed work to follow us almost anywhere.  We are about to change again. Thanks to the Internet, lots of smart companies and business people, are moving everything to the Internet cloud. Read More

A creative mindset enhances what are certainly limited marketing dollars in a tough economic climate.

The Bell Tower Shops is a relatively small but charming shopping center in South Fort Myers, Florida. 

It is anchored by a Saks Fifth Avenue on the north and a Fresh Market on the South. Shoppers can stroll in the shade as they traverse the nice blend of stores and restaurants.

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Social media-powered grassroots marketing is vital to drive changes required to build strong regional economies.

The social media outreach that worked so well for Barack Obama must be put to work for businesses individually and collectively. That lesson came home to me at the January 15, 2009 meeting of Project innovation which is designed to develop a strategy to diversify and strengthen our local economy.

Our speaker was an articulate South Carolinian, Jim Fields, Executive Director of the Palmetto Institute.  He and his colleagues have been working hard to make their state a magnet for the kind of people, jobs, and companies that will ensure long-term prosperity. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that his organization is talking to the same folks that helped Barack Obama devise his social media version of community organizing, Blue State Digital. 

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My co-author,Joe Pulizzi, delivers a persuasive presentation to Cincinnati PRSA.

Public relations practitioners, like most of their marketing colleagues, are struggling with the new realities posed by the decline of traditional media and the rise of unfamiliar new approaches.  The effective use of content marketing will almost certainly replace much of traditional public and media relations. 

Joe's presentation to the Cincinnati PRSA did a terrific job of explaining why these fundamental changes are happening--and how to leverage content marketing to best serve client marketing needs.

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Use the Wonderful Wordle to Illustrate the Essence of Your Thinking and Writing.

Thanks to the PGreenblog, I discovered an astonishing tool online that takes the black and white linear line up of words from your blog or website and turns them into glorious multi-color word-based designs. 

Wordle lets you create something much like a tag cloud where the size of the words represents their frequency of use. It can tell you or your visitors what's lurking inside the pages of your site. You may also discover that you are under or over-representing certain words or phrases in your writing.

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Charmin goes right to the bottom with its big and bold Times Square campaign.

Thanks to Neil Davidson in a guest post at Avangate's blog for reminding us that interruption marketing is not dead. 

Sure, we are bombarded by way too many messages in way too many places.  We are practically numb from the information and advertising onslaught.

But, that doesn't mean we can't be influenced by genuinely creative interruption marketing.  See if you can apply this kind of creativity in your own marketing efforts, so that you are generating a different kind of relevant and compelling content. So awesome and outside the box that it just can't be ignored! 

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You won't be able to engage and interact with your visitors if they don't click through.

I've been paying a lot of attention recently to the potential power of social media news releases as an effective content marketing weapon.  These releases appeal both to traditional news organizations and to the broader blogosphere.

Marketwire's Social Media 2.0 Plus is a fascinating tool to enable small to medium-size companies to compete for attention with the big guys.  But it will work only if compelling, customer centric headlines lead visitors to access the news release. I was pleasantly surprised to see that a significant percentage of the headlines really did the job. 

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