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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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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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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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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First, use it to understand your buyers and their needs. Then use the results to prove your credibility in the market.

Content marketers realize that understanding what is most important to your current and prospective customers is vital to your success as an organization.  You cannot possibly connect with your customers without that understanding. Just 10 to 20 years ago, the research necessary to develop that understanding was difficult, complex, time-consuming, and expensive to conduct and to share. All those reasons may well have provided small to medium-size companies with an understandable excuse to avoid their own primary research. Today, there are no more excuses.  It is fast, easy, and inexpensive to conduct high-quality research and to share it with the world. Here are some basics to get you started: Read More

Taking a Great Software Product from Good to Great.

MindManager 8 delivers a greatly enhanced set of mindmapping tools that enable one or more users to collaborate in person or online.

What is mindmapping and why should you care?  Basically, it is a way of organizing and illustrating information visually in the way that we actually think. 

Even for those who consider themselves non-visual, a MindMap represents information within an intuitively obvious structure consisting of a central idea or goal with branches of ideas and sub ideas. It enables users to grasp and to remember even complex concepts very quickly.

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Big bucks squandered to insert content free DVD in magazine

You can be sure that an advertising sales rep did a great job convincing the Harding Poorman Group to insert a DVD in the October 2008 issue of Book Business.

While conceding that they do show off their packaging technology, they blew the opportunity to demonstrate to their prospects the kind of rich content that DVD could and should contain.  In other words, it all boils down to a missed content marketing opportunity.  Prospects are likely to say, "I loved your packaging, but you don't show me why I should invest big bucks to put a DVD in a magazine."

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Guy Kawasaki adds our category to his news aggregation site

Keeping up is hard to do.  You are probably as frustrated as I am in your attempts to stay current on the web with the topics most important to you. There is a new tool that will simplify your life and now will keep you current on content marketing, too. 

Alltop.com, which was created by famous Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, works at solving that problem by gathering high quality information on a broad range of topics in one place.

The site is simple and intuitive to use.  It features content from leading information sources with headline links to recent articles.  The site even reminds you of the topics you have researched most recently.  When you cursor over a headline, up pops the opening paragraphs of the article.  That means you can cover a lot of content ground in a hurry.

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