Content Marketing Today

Leading edge transit technology supplier, NextBus is cited as a great example.

You may think of professors as ivory tower folks who live in a world apart--even an IT Prof within a business school.  But J.P. Allen is a different breed.  He has a great blog that focuses on "the future of IT, business, and society on the new Web."

In a recent post he gave a shout out to NextBus as a great example of a cool company with a cool WordPress-based website, NextBusNews.com. 

Websitegrader.com from HubSpot might make you humble, but it will also make you a lot smarter about how you present yourself on the web.

Since I'm in the content marketing business, I spent a lot of time looking at websites to assess what kind of job they do in presenting content that is relevant and valuable for their likely target customers.  Of course, the success of a website depends both on the quality of content and on the quality of its visitor friendly design.  Moreover, it's important that visitors can find it in the first place. 

Now, a great new tool, websitegrader.com, delivers a meaningful score from zero to 100 --with 100 being perfect--for the marketing effectiveness any website on the net.

Then it's high time you--and I, for that matter--learn about Twitter: What it is, how it works, and why you should probably be using it.

In that spirit, I have invited Chris Griffith, our local blogging and real estate pro, to make Twitter understandable to the rest of us. Take it away, Chris.

Have you heard of Twitter? Do you know what a tweet is? Count me in with some of the millions people who are Twitterers that tweet. Twitter is social networking, micro-blogging site that helps people and businesses communicate. It’s a way to form relationships and stay connected.

If the UK government with its mega-billion-dollar budget has confidence in WordPress to power its prime minister's website, I think the rest of us can confidently consider making a similar move.

The surprising news came from Chris Garrett's blog, ChrisG.com.  Chris writes consistently great stuff about blogging and new media.  Nonetheless, I was a little surprised to read this morning about merry old England's move to a blog-powered website.  But, I think we can learn something from our friends across the pond.

Want to understand RSS?  Think of the Associated Press.

Like many Web 2.0 applications, RSS may seem more complicated than it really is.  It's one of those three letter acronyms (or TLA's for those in the know) that seem unknowable by normal people at first.  But it is both simpler and more powerful than you might think.

To put RSS in context it's the 21st-century version of the Associated Press.  For anyone reading newspapers, especially local newspapers, you will notice that many of the articles you read come from the AP.  That's because your local newspaper cannot afford the reporting staff to write comprehensively about the broad range of topics you would expect to find in any newspaper.  In Southwest Florida, our business sections often are 90 to 100% derived from syndicated stories from the AP.

We may not need print newspapers anymore but we still need the news.

For those of us who care about the future of journalism you will want to take a look at Mindy McAdams' blog, Teaching Online Journalism.  I landed there serendipitously earlier this week and discovered two very different but perhaps unintentionally related articles.

Perhaps as print dies,the iPhone will emerge as the savior of journalism.

More than 10,000 visitors voted with their mouse clicks to make these the 6 hottest articles out of 126 that we have posted in the virtual pages of ContentMarketingToday.com from January through June 2008.

They range from transforming an old-fashioned brochure site into a killer sales machine...to why you need to unlearn traditional PR in the 21st century...to why you must publish an eNewsletter. 

Read on to find out why these articles were so popular with so many marketers.

Lou Bortone is an experienced TV and video producer with a great sense of humor.  He also understands the importance of content marketing.  Best of all, he eats his own video dog food.  That is, he uses amusing and sometimes wacky videos to promote his services by teaching us how to use video effectively on the web..

Lou calls himself the "online video guy" and refers to his series of videos as "loutube" as opposed to YouTube.  I receive his new eNewsletter which is frankly promotional, but was effective in motivating me to check out three of his videos. 

I picked out the one below in which he gives five tips for better videos.  The tips are great because they are aimed at people who know little of anything about how to produce a video.  He stresses that it's basically inexpensive and easy to do an effective video if you pay attention to certain fundamentals.  So check out what Lou had to say in the video below.

Transform In-Person Content Marketing into Online Content Marketing

If you are selling complex products and services, text and images may not take your visitors where you want them to go.  That's why so many companies are providing video presentations on their websites.  These tools do a great job of walking your prospective customers through lots of information in a logical and compelling way.

Adding videos can be very effective, but they may be time-consuming and often expensive to produce professionally.  This is especially true if your organization is very small.

There is a great free alterative approach.  Be visual without video. Simply repurpose a great sales presentation that you would normally give in person into a self-guide online sales tool. You can make this happen with a combination of Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Docs.  And, if you don't have PowerPoint, you can use the Google Docs Presentation software.  There is almost no learning curve for you--and none at all for your visitors.

Cool company uses videos to explain complicated concepts for its customers.

Common Craft is a very small company with a very big idea.  And, it is one that you can emulate easily and inexpensively.

To understand what they do, think for a moment about the current generation of UPS television commercials. These uniquely simple UPS commercials use drawings to explain complex supply-chain concepts. 

UPS is big enough and wealthy enough to afford unbelievably expensive television advertising.  They could have gone with a cast of thousands, elaborate outdoor shots, and expensive spokespeople.  Instead, they offer commercials that are content rich.  They understood that their customers almost certainly did not understand many of the concepts and practices behind their ability to get packages exactly where they needed to be, when they needed to be there, anywhere in the world.  To make the complex simple they use animated drawings that perfectly illustrate a variety of supply chain and logistics concepts.  This content is powerful because it makes customers believe that UPS understands its business so well that it can explain even the most complicated process in a very simple way.