Content Marketing Today

Thanks to my co-author, Joe Pulizzi, and some helpful contributors for making your search for the right implements a lot easier.

If you are starting from scratch, it's almost impossible to figure out what social media and other related online tools will be genuinely useful for marketing your business.  Fortunately, Joe has taken the time to assemble and comment on 42 of the most worthy in his blog.

You'll find that a common thread among many of the 42 is that they involve both inbound and/or outbound communication. In other words, they will help you send a message to your target buyers or listen to what those buyers are saying about you.

My five favorites of the less well known among the 42 that Joe highlights are:

Read More

Jump Start Your Online Public Relations for Free

They call it public relations for a reason.  Although PR methodology has focused primarily on getting the traditional media to write about your company or your client’s company, the goal has always been to influence ‘the public', that is those members of the population that you want to impact positively.

Thanks to the infinite reach of the Internet, you have the capability to extend that influence dramatically.  But, you need to change your approach and your toolkit as part of a 21st century PR strategy.

If your primary public relations strategy still amounts to sending press releases to a finite number of media contacts, you fail to take advantage of the Internet.  You are not reaching the new influencers, to use Paul Gillen’s term.

You need to do do more than reach those influencers. You need to take advantage of the emerging power of social media by creating a new kind of release to reach a much broader audience.  We have written previously about Shift Communications’ template that offers a useful template on which to create your news content: Social Media Release Template Makes It Easier to Get Social.

Now, another powerful tool has emerged: PitchEngine, which lets you create and share social media releases for free.

Read More

 

A Length of Wire, a Bunch of Sticky Notes, and a Red Marker Tell an Appealing and Amusing Story

Evernote is a cool web-based application that lets you save notes, web links, webpage clips, documents, images, and even iPhone  phone voice notes. Because the application is both versatile and unique, Evernote requires a bit of explaining.

Most of their explanation takes the form of short videos which illustrate the wide range of capabilities to which users can put Evernote.  In fact, they lead off with a video on the home page.

But, my favorite is a very brief video that uses stuff all of us would have at home to tell the Evernote story in just 44 seconds.

Read More

Great MindMap from the Mindjet Folks Simplifies Twitter and Proves Power of Mindmapping

On the most basic level, it's easy to explain Twitter in a few bullet points:

• Twitter is a micro-blogging service that you can use from anywhere you can get an Internet connection.
• You sign up and give yourself an identity that lives on Twitter, such as mine--Twitter.com/newtbarrett.
• You can then post 140 character text messages which may include hyperlinks.
• You can choose to follow fellow members whose ' tweets ' will show up automatically on your Twitter page.
• Other members can choose to follow you to see what you have to say.
• The heavy hitters on Twitter may have thousands of followers and may post dozens of tweets per day.
• Every Twitter member can pass on or ' retweet' other messages so that the reach of what you have to say is potentially huge and global.
• All of this happens in real time

At this point, you may be thinking, "Okay, I understand that, but what's the point?  Why would I want to do any of that stuff?  That's where this great mindmap created by Mindjet's Michael Deutch comes into play. It illustrates why you need to care about Twitter for your business--and how to get smart about using it. Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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. 

Read More

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.

Read More

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. 

Read More