Social media marketing is a trend, not a fad.  Moreover, it’s a terrific extension of your content marketing strategy.

What’s clear from current research is that when we evaluate social media, we are not talking about the marketing longevity equivalent of the hula hoop or the Lambada.

Social media marketing is here to stay.  If you are not already active in venues such as a business blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Slideshare, and YouTube, you should be asking yourself whether it’s way past time to jump in with both virtual feet.

The answer to the question is yes with an important caveat…

…Before making the commitment to one or many possible social media outlets, it is vital to determine whether:

• you understand the target audience that you intend to reach
• you have something valuable to communicate to that target audience
• you have someone with the time, skill, and enthusiasm to execute a consistent social media program–either inside or outside your organization
• you will make the time to listen and respond to your social media audience.

There is nothing sadder than a business blog whose most recent post was a year ago. And, there is nothing less impressive than a Facebook fan page with only a few fans and hardly any messages to or from those fans.

Yes, social media can be an extremely effective marketing tool. But, you will need to make a serious company commitment to ensure that it is effective for your organization.

Social Media is the First Cousin to Content Marketing

Social media is really all about content marketing. We have often written about the need to develop a content marketing mindset. This requires companies to think like publishers.  And, that sounds an awful lot like social media as Wikipedia defines it:

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

Because social media is in a constant state of flux with new technologies and tools coming and going you might feel intimidated at ever trying to understand the essence of social media. But as Paul Gillen explains in his excellent book Secrets of Social Media Marketing, “there is nothing mysterious about social media. The practices that we all use to maintain meaningful relationships in our personal lives apply just as well online. It’s just that the media is different.”

In a sense, social media goes back to the earliest times, when people gathered together in the marketplace and shared information about crops, food, neighbors, the evil King, and rumors of a scary dragon lurking in the forest.

In the 21st century, we talk about the same sort of stuff, but much of it has moved online and become highly mobile thanks to the Internet, iPhones, iPads, and a host of other leading-edge devices.

Just a few years ago, social media was a relatively marginal phenomenon. Today,  just like the Internet, it is absolutely mainstream and therefore belongs as a core part of your marketing mix.

Five Reasons Why You Should Begin Your Social Media Marketing Efforts Now:

1. Your customers are using it to make buying decisions. Millions of web users, both in the business to consumer and business-to-business markets, are reading blogs visiting Facebook, and tweeting daily. They are relying increasingly on social media for buying information in both the b2b and b2c worlds.

2. Smart news organizations are with the social media program. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and your local newspaper have made social media fundamental to how they learn and how they report.  If it’s good enough for their information gathering and sharing where it really counts, it’s certainly good enough for the rest of us.
3. Your competitors are using it. You’re almost certainly paying attention to your smartest competition.  I’d be surprised if most of them haven’t already dived headfirst into social media waters.  Organizations as diverse as law firms, interior designers, real estate agents, and roofing companies are using blogs, podcasts, videos, and user communities such as Facebook to demonstrate their expertise and thought leadership. Don’t let those tough competitors outmarket you via social media.
4. It can be your most cost effective marketing strategy.  The required financial investment in creating a blog, for example, can be close to zero.  The real investment will be in time and thought required to craft a content marketing strategy which provides valuable information to your customers and prospects.  You may need to hire specific content creation resources either internally or externally.
5. Your old-style marketing is less and less effective. Because buyer behavior has changed, you cannot expect traditional advertising and public relations alone to drive buyers to your business as it did a decade ago.  You may certainly want to use those traditional tools to drive them to your online home. That’s where you can prove to prospective customers that you are a reliable supplier who can be trusted, based on your knowledge and understanding of your their problems.  A regular blog, a Facebook fan page, an uploaded Slideshare presentation or a series of informative YouTube videos may be just the ticket to prove that you are the best choice to provide essential solutions.

Summing Up the Social Media Marketing Imperative

You can use core social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, both effectively and inexpensively to compete against competitors large and small. But, as with every content marketing effort, it’s vital to make a consistent long-term commitment and to build your social media strategy on a solid understanding of your target customers. By understanding those customers, you will be able to communicate and to interact with those customers in a meaningful way.

We’ll be writing more extensively about the how and why of social media marketing tools in the weeks ahead.

Great Content Marketing Advice from the Original Guerilla Marketer

I get lots of useless emails from allegedly savvy marketers. But, much more often than not I can count on Jay Conrad Levinson for succinct, actionable, affordable advice.

Here’s the latest gem from his Guerilla Marketing email:

Let your clients on hold learn how to connect to your Web site for pertinent information. Encourage the people who answer your phones to give your Web address to every caller who identifies himself or herself as an Internet user. Think of your Website as 24-hour answering service. Assure your callers that they can always phone your store or office for information, but let them know they now have a Web alternative as well, open 24 hours every day.

You’ll find lots of great stuff on his site: www.gmarketing.com

Thanks, Jay.

Just When You Hoped Things Might Slow Down, They Speed Up

The smart folks at CMO.com understand the need to make these rapidly changing trends understandable and actionable.

What words come to mind when thinking about the digital marketing landscape? Complicated? A deep morass? Or a land of opportunity?

No doubt, digital marketing has experienced a huge uptick in the number of channels and devices at its disposal, further underscoring the need for marketers to determine the best allocation of their budgets. Shifting priorities and increased competition have not made life any easier.

As I see it the biggest shift is to mobile devices, particulary the iPad.  The iPad is quickly becoming both pervasive and practical for daily business use. That means that content marketers have to change the way they deliver content to our customers. Content must be mobile friendly–and increasingly interactive and actionable.

Here’s the entire Digital Marketing Trends Infographic:

You can read more great stuff and download the full size Infograhic at: CMO.com

Get content. Get customers.,has now sold more than 10,000 copies in its hardcover, paperback, and eBook editions.

Even though Joe Pulizzi and I wrote and updated it in the early stages of the content marketing revolution, our book’s vital lessons and detailed case studies are just as valid and valuable today. The range of organizations that we analyzed extended from huge multibillion dollar public companies to midsize companies with a few hundred employees and even to very small single owner organizations.

If you haven’t yet read Get Content Get Customers, we know that you will want to run out and buy the book because it is chock-full of content marketing knowledge that you can put to work immediately.

But, just to wet your content marketing whistle, here are the top 10 takeaways we gleaned from some brilliant content marketing practitioners. These represent the themes that we recognized again and again as we examined how organizations are putting content marketing to work.

1. Only content that is intrinsically valuable to your customers will work as a core component of your content marketing strategy.

2. You must have a thorough understanding of your customers and what is most important to them. If you do not understand the problems and challenges they face, you cannot hope to create content that is truly relevant to them. Without understanding their problems, you cannot provide solutions.

3. A comprehensive content marketing strategy may provide a complete or partial replacement of traditional advertising and marketing. Such a strategy can be both more effective and less expensive than doing things the old-fashioned way.

4. Print magazines can be a powerful weapon within your content marketing arsenal. They enable you to reach out with precision to your customers with carefully targeted messaging that is totally under your control.

5. Great design adds significant value to content marketing by making it more accessible, more appealing, and more actionable for your customers.

6. Your best content marketing investment may be in the creation of a dedicated internal or external team who understand how to produce great content and who live and die by the success of your content marketing program.

7. Drink your own Kool-Aid. Whenever possible, use your own company’s products or services to prove their worth to your customers.

8. Get your customers to participate actively with the content you create in print and online. Begin a conversation and keep it going in order to earn their loyalty and trust.

9. Relevant and valuable content is just the first step in turning a prospect or visitor into a customer. You must then make it easy for them to buy.

10. Most of the best practices from the larger companies we profiled can be emulated in whole or in part even by very small organizations. It’s not the money. It’s the content marketing mindset that counts. Big ideas can trump big bucks.

These lessons are fairly simple to express but much harder to put into practice. That’s why we know you will want to buy the book.

Get the paperback edition for overnight delivery. Perfectly priced at $13.74!

Or get the Kindle edition for instant gratification. Only $9.71 with the Amazon discount!!

How to Get  Readers to Spend Serious Time with Your Core Content

Be brief. Be complete. Be Enticing.

Headlines have always been important in print publications. They are even more important online.

They grab readers’ attention and lure them into reading entire articles.  If you have lots of great headlines, avid readers will linger much longer with your content.

Solutions for Short Attention Spans

Today’s readers have short attention spans. That’s exponentially true for your online visitors. You have seconds to grab them before they move on.  You need to show why they should care enough to continue reading. Otherwise, your content marketing efforts will fall short.

Easier said than done, you might think. Fortunately, a quick scan of this morning’s online edition of the New York Post illustrates the 3 shocking secrets that you can apply to your online headlines.

Here’s a Random Headline Selection from the December 29 Issue of the New York Post Online

• Gal Cuffed for Gun Possession at 9/11 Memorial
• NY Times Caught in Lie Over ‘Spam’ E-Mails
• Zoe’s Clothes Lost in Transit
• Jobless Claims Rise 15K to 381K, missing expectations
• Verizon Gamed Cell Phones, Suit Says
• Knicks Lose to Warriors; ‘It was awful’
• Chavez Blames Cancer on US

Here are 3 Shockingly Successful Headline Secrets We Can Learn from Them:

1. Be brief. No headline is longer than 8 words and 53 characters. That’s less than half a Tweet.
2. Be complete. Each headline tells a short, but full story. You know exactly what’ll you get if you read the entire article. No guessing required.
3. Be enticing. Each headline makes us want to read more. If the subject is important to us, we feel compelled to continue. Even when it’s not a hot topic for us, the best headlines often intrigue us enough to keep going.

My own headlines don’t always pass the New York Post brief, complete, and enticing benchmark. But, I think I nailed it today in 7 words and 42 characters with exactly the right amount of compelling content to entice you all the way to this sentence.

How’d I do?

8 Ways to Extend Your Print or eNewsletter’s Reach Far Beyond Its Core Subscribers

When you publish a monthly print or electronic newsletter that targets an important audience segment,  you probably invest heavily in generating the content that will make this newsletter relevant and valuable to its readers.  That is obviously critical.  But you can do much more to make that newsletter and its content work harder for your organization. How? Easy. Think outside the newsletter.

After all, the newsletter has a relatively finite reach, even online.  Think beyond this single content product.  You can dramatically increase the impact of your content marketing by thoughtful repurposing of the information and resources you developed in order to create the newsletter itself.

Here are 8 ways to extend the reach of your content far beyond the circulation of that print publication.  None of these require significant incremental expense. But they will consistently deliver dramatic increases in the reach of your content to prospective customers—and the impact it has on them.

1. Be certain that each newsletter story links to a dedicated page on your website or blog. You want your readers to find their way easily to your online home so they can discover lots more about your company, its products, and its people.  Your hyperlinked newsletter articles make the natural content connection.  In addition, try to link to more related stories on your site or blog from the original article.

2. Record audio and video of interviews for your newsletter for later repurposing. Post videos of interviews to YouTube and other targeted video portals specific to your industry. Upload audio to your website and blog.  Research podcast directories that may be relevant to your industry. Many of us would rather watch or listen to critical content.

3. Develop a news release schedule before your newsletter comes out. Target three or four key topics that affect your customers and the industry (based on the newsletter content). The release link should take them to the newsletter subscription page. Consider offering a free whitepaper or report as an incentive.

4. Discuss the newsletter and its content on your business blog. Post some of the key findings/issues. If you don’t have a blog, it’s high time you started one to connect to your customers.

5. Send out news releases through a keyword-optimized service such as PRWeb. Make sure that they really are newsworthy. You’ll be surprised at your reach beyond your static newsletter readership. You’ll be picked up in the blogosphere and even by traditional reporters who are always looking for news stories.
Remember, news releases are for much more than getting press; they are for building key links and for helping bloggers and influencers find your site. Industry bloggers will be key to extending the reach and impact of your newsletter.

5. Continue the news release program after your newsletter is released, pushing the audience to  videos, an eBook, or key articles.  Your newsletter content can still be the foundation for newsworthy stories weeks or sometimes months after it hits the virtual street.

6. Be sure to make RSS feeds available for your newsletter and for all of your web content. This is an easy and free way of syndicating your news stories that will extend your newsletter subscriber base dramatically.

7. Be sure each article integrates social media sharing capabilities so that enthusiastic readers can tell your stories to their colleagues and friends on Facebook and Twitter.  If you’re lucky, a great article may go viral and be spread across the web by enthusiasts who value and want to share your content.

8. Provide something remarkable and different on your website or blog for download. This does two things:
1) continues the conversation with your current customers
2) gives you information on prospects so you can begin a conversation with them.
Something remarkable may be a free eBook about the 10 trends in your industry, or a free white paper on a new, cutting-edge technology. Eliminate the sales pitch. Seek only to educate at this point.

Don’t settle for a lonely newsletter. Go above and beyond to get the content marketing results you need.

Beautiful blog design and compelling, relevant content by historical novelist Catherine Delors.

This is one of the best websites I’ve seen from a novelist. It brings us deeper into the 18th century period about which she writes. The engaging content and simple, but elegant style are a perfect match. Kudos to Catherine.

More about Catherine and how her writing journey may inspire budding authors:

Catherine Delors was born and raised in France. She graduated from the University of Paris-Sorbonne School of Law and became the youngest member of the Bar of Paris at the age of twenty-one.

She later moved to the United States and passed the California Bar. She worked at a few large American law firms before setting up a solo practice following the birth of her son.

She now splits her time between London and Paris, while remaining a partner in an international law firm based in Los Angeles.

Her second novel, For The King, was published in July 2010. Catherine is currently writing on a third novel, a prequel to Mistress of the Revolution. She is also researching a fourth one, which shall revolve about Jane Austen and her French connections.

For those of us who are authors–or would-be authors, she traces her journey from unpublished to published:

From unpublished to published: the journey

“What does it take for a first-time novelist to find a publisher? There must as many paths as there are writers. My advice here is based on own experience. Follow it or not, at your pleasure.

First have fun writing Enjoy every moment of it, the exhilaration, the bursts of creativity, the times of crushing self-doubt, of discouragement, the passion. Watch what happens to your characters. They are like kids: they grow up before your eyes, they become independent, they take off, they live their own lives. You think about them while driving to work, in your bath, at night during your moments of insomnia.

This is what I experienced with the character of Villers in my story. At first I conceived him as a pampered aristocrat, what we would call nowadays a womanizer, a brilliant, vital but shallow man. I wondered how on earth I would be able to make him interesting. In fact, he was the character who surprised me most. He gained in complexity, in bitterness, in violence as I wrote on. Now I realize that my readers like him far better than I do.”

Read the rest on her website: CatherineDelors.com

Enjoy her blog: Versailles and More.

I don’t have to say too much, because this terrible email campaign is eloquently awful and speaks for itself.

After reading the entire email, it’s easy to see where they go terribly wrong:

• I don’t know the sender and won’t likely trust BIG promises from a stranger: Stranger Danger!
• header is generic and tells me nothing—why would I open?
• they refer to an ‘amazing and an excellent opportunity’.  What the heck is it?
• 4 days only!! Wow, that spurs me to action
• unnamed product that costs $100s.
• they expect me to click through to to a strange site for an expensive mystery product. I don’t think so.

I did change their name in the email copy below—to protect the guilty.

Read it and weep:

eMail Header: “You’re going to love this!”

Hi Newt,
This is simply amazing and an excellent opportunity for you.
With the start of Holiday Season, we are ready to roll out the
Happy Holiday – AjaxPress Christmas event.
For 4 days (from 19th Dec till 22nd dec Midnight EST), you can
snatch 3 of our best selling products [worth $291.00 & $131] at
70% OFF.
Here’s where you can grab the offer:
hotlink to their deal page here.
We’re holding this Kick-Off Christmas sale as a way to say HAPPY
HOLIDAY to you.
Here’s the most exciting part – if you had to buy these products
individually you’d expect to pay a minimum $291.00 or $131.00 -
but in this spirit of holiday season you can grab all 3 products
(bundled) and get instant access for less than $88 or $40,
one-time investment…
As all of our 3 products are our primary products, we won’t be
bundling it EVER again like this (maybe next Christmas, but we
can’t promise that). What we can promise you RIGHT now is, this
is one of the best deal we’ve ever offered at this measly price.
After the end of this AjaxPress Christmas event, all products
will go back to their normal prices.
So, Don’t let this great deal skip away.
Hotlink to their deal page here.

And oh, suggest it to your friends too (they gonna love it).
Stay tuned for our next email to find out which products we have
bundled.
Cheers,

Tens of Thousands of Disappointed Users Expected Much More from Jeff Bezos and His Crew

As many content marketing thought leaders have pointed out, Amazon is a superb content marketer. When it comes to books, for example, the content they provide increasingly replicates and replaces the individual attention that independent stores have provided for hundreds of years. Amazon learns what you like, makes great suggestions, invite you to participate in evaluating books, music, videos, and tons of other products.

Although they were not the first to deliver an e-reader, the Kindle quickly came to dominate the e-book marketplace. Moreover, Amazon was brilliant to enable Kindle functionality on your PC, on iPad, on an iPhone on a Android phone, and pretty much anywhere you are likely to consume books.

So, naturally, those of us who are genuine Amazon fans expected much more From the hugely hyped Kindle Fire.

I, along with hundreds of thousands of other Amazon fans, pre-ordered the Kindle Fire, expecting that it would be the kind of game changer represented by the original Kindle. Imagine my surprise to find that it was deeply flawed. I believe that these flaws stem from the critical content marketing rule that Amazon violated with the Kindle Fire:

They didn’t understand their customers’ needs.

It’s safe to say that many buyers of the Kindle Fire are already users of the iPhone, the iPad or a smart Android device.  Moreover, a high percentage certainly read Kindle books on non-Kindle devices. They are used to Amazon’s open approach to delivering content.

Therefore, their expectations would include a high level of tablet computing functionality and a first-rate set of apps that would at least come close to matching what the iPad delivers.  I can only assume that Amazon figured that a $300 savings versus the base iPad would dramatically lower expectations from customers. If so, that was a most unfortunate assumption.

How did they abuse us? Let me count the ways:

• the Fire suffers from a generally cumbersome interface that only reinforces how good Apple is at making it easy for their iPad and iPhone users to be super functional, almost from the get-go.
• they overhyped the Silk browser, which turned out to be very slow–in fact, dramatically slower than the Safari browser on the iPad and iPhone.
• The Wi-Fi antenna requires a very strong signal to deliver acceptable throughput.
• The homepage with the scrolling set of icons representing most recently opened content is pretty lame
• And, the fact that you cannot delete any of those icons means that every family member will know what every other family member was doing on the Fire.
• Because you set up one-click ordering with no password, your kids–or pretty much anyone–could purchase what ever Amazon sells. Yikes!
• The Amazon app store is missing some of the most popular apps that are available on the iPad, iPhone and even the Android marketplace. To get at this stuff, you can sideload or jailbreak the Fire, but that’s not something the typical user is capable of doing.

How are users reacting? Not very favorably judging by the reviews on Amazon.com. More than 20% give one or two star reviews. That represents a lot of very unhappy customers. Here is a representative comment from a 2-star reviewer, who otherwise loves Amazon:

The bottom line is it’s just not the Kindle I have come to know and absolutely loooooove…I soooo wanted to love the Fire but was just disappointed and became more and more so as I kept using it…printed out the return label already…I ordered the Kindle Touch for my mom for Christmas so I’m going to see what it’s like (hopefully it’s exactly like my old Kindle Keyboard 3G except with a touch keyboard instead of the physical one) and if I like it then I will order the Touch 3G for myself. If it is also a disappointment then I’ll go back to the Kindle Keyboard 3G. Rarely ever disappointed with an Amazon purchase but seriously so with the Kindle Fire.

Amazon has shown in so many ways over so many years that it loves and understands its customers. But the Kindle Fire demonstrates that, at least this once, it has broken the vital content marketing rule, "Understand your customers."

I, and zillions of others, are still pretty confident that Amazon will listen to the cries of customer dismay and respond quickly and appropriately. Their customer understanding will have come late, but hopefully not too late to salvage a product with so much potential.

Let’s hope that it does not become the Yugo of tablet computers.

Content Marketers Can Deliver Great Information Products to a Targeted Customer Base

Fortune 500 companies have long had the technological resources and investment capital required to build sophisticated content marketing solutions—and to manage huge amounts of demographic data relating to their prospects and customer bases. Many of these firms, such as Best Buy, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, and Amazon.com, probably know more about us than some of our relatives do. They also do a terrific job of delivering relevant and compelling content to different segments of their prospect bases.

Smaller companies, however, have had to rely on media companies to deliver their message to their targeted buyers . This has certainly been true with print publications and, until  recently, online as well. Affordable technology is now changing all of the rules.

Just a few years ago, it would have been laughable to imagine that a very small organization could create and maintain a Web site that could be updated daily—and that would allow visitors to interact and even buy products and services. Today, this is not only possible but pervasive. In fact, a 10-person company may be able to outmarket a 10,000-person company in a carefully chosen niche.

There are four core components underlying the shift in the technological balance of power away from media giants and toward companies of all sizes:

• The ability to create sophisticated online publications such as Web sites, digital magazines, and e-newsletters
• The ability to manage huge amounts of data relating to current and future customers
• The ability to leverage social media to engage targeted customers
• The ability to do each of these simply and inexpensively

A sophisticated Web site that would have cost $500,000 in 2001 can be replicated today for $5,000.  Even solopreneurs with a modest amount of talent and training can put WordPress to use to build a blog-powered website. Ann Porter with KitchAnn Style : Unique Design for Distinctive Living delivers a simple but image rich website/blog that illustrates her design knowledge and visual sense. She did this on her own at no cost.

The same is true with the online equivalent of circulation development and management. Print publications must still invest enormous amounts of money in acquiring and retaining subscribers. But, online, mailing list and eNewsletter software that integrates with social media costs less than $100/month even for a sizeable mailing list of 10,000 or more. Constant Contact powers the NextBus monthly newsletter which reaches 1000s of transportation executives at a cost of less than $50/month. This technology powerhouse delivers sophisticated transit solutions that benefit millions of bus and rail passengers. And, their small staff and modest marketing budget can achieve results that outshine much larger organizations. They also use WordPress to power their news site.

Social media may be the ultimate leveling force as small company content marketers can use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ to build an interactive community of customers and prospects. Often, as with George Bowers Grocery in Staunton, VA, they can outcompete Kroger on Facebook in the local market. Click here to read more about their creative approach to social media. In fact, they have increased their Facebook fans/likes by almost 40% since we first wrote about them in January 2011.

Low-cost, easy-to-use Web technology and the emergence of business-friendly social media solutions now enables medium-sized manufacturers, small companies, or one-person service firms to build online content solutions that are more sophisticated than what most media companies were putting online just a few years ago.

In fact, with focus, creativity, and a little outside help, these smaller organizations often do a better job of providing targeted content that fully engages their best customers than do some of their billion-dollar competitors.