Written by Robert Bruce.

Google’s been pissing people off lately. Panda, Penguin, Parakeet (okay, I made that last one up), who knows what’s next …

Then there are the social networking evangelists whose entire fortunes are deep in Zuckerberg’s asset.
And finally, the faithful content producers, who labor slowly and quietly to build their businesses one thousand words at a time.
It can all seem a bit much to keep up with. SEO isn’t bad. Social networking sites aren’t evil. Content marketing isn’t impossible. But it can feel like it sometimes.
To clear some of this confusion and frustration up for us, I’ve asked Lee Odden to jump on the show and tell us how the smart, systematic integration of search, social, and content can attract an audience … and keep businesses — both large and small — sanely profitable.

In this episode we discuss:

• The 3 phases of a holistic customer attraction plan
• What the changes in search algorithms really mean for online publishers
• How to intelligently plan a content strategy that works
• Why it’s now essential that you become a “holistic” content producer
• 5 content optimization audits you need to perform
• 3 steps to implementing your systematic content plan
• How to scale your content efforts on a limited budget

Listen to what Lee has to say about integrating content, social, and search on www.copyblogger.com

Rethink Your Content Marketing by Aiming at Billions of Buyers on the Move

For those of us who been around computing since the early days of PCs, the consumer move to mobile devices and away from desktop and even laptop computers is astonishing–and maybe a little terrifying.

Smartphones Soar

First, smartphones such as the Blackberry, Nokia, and iPhone entered the picture. But, as recently as 2007 total smartphone sales were only 122 million. Alex Cocotas of BI Intelligence predicts that annual smartphone sales will hit 1.5 billion units by 2016. That’s 10X growth in less than 10 years.

Tablets Triumph

In the first year of its existence, 1981, the IBM PC sold 100,000 units. Most of those buyers were geeks or leading-edge business users. Apple’s new iPad sold 3 million units in its first weekend and more than 50 million units since the introduction of the first iPad just 2 years ago.

As Tim Bajarin reported in Techland.Time.com in April of 2012:

While the iPod and even the iPhone have been groundbreaking in their own right, it is perhaps Apple’s iPad tablet that may have the most profound impact on the world of personal computing since it is the first computer that is truly portable and easy to carry with you everywhere you go. Yes, the iPhone and smartphones are more portable, but because of their small screens, their computing capabilities are limited. But with their larger screens, the iPad and similar tablets deliver much of the power of a laptop (minus the keyboard) and almost as much flexibility as you can get from bigger portable computers — but in a much smaller package.

IPad users still include geeks and business types but they’re just as likely to include your six-year-old and your grandmother. When I visited our local Apple store, the average customer was a senior citizen who really wanted to learn how to use their iPad effectively. Of course, they all seemed to be carrying iPhones, too. You can bet that their mobile devices will soon–or may already have displaced their PCs.

Social Media Goes Mobile

In research released April 13, 2012, eMarketer predicted a massive shift to mobile devices:

… by 2014, 33.3% of the U.S. population will visit social networking sites using their mobile phones at least once per month. That’s up from 18.7% at the end of 2011. Most of those visits are expected to go to Facebook. In fact, eMarketer estimates that the number of mobile Facebook users in the U.S. will jump from 49.4 million at the end of 2011 to 93.9 million in 2014… In other words, not only will people consume more content via mobile devices in the coming years, but they’ll find much of that content through mobile social networking activities.

IPad and Its Mobile Cousins to the Information Rescue

The iPad, iPhone and their competitive cousins are what we really want from our information devices. They turn on immediately. They’re super responsive. They connect easily to the Internet. They are both powerful and portable. And, perhaps best of all, they don’t rely on a resource hog of an operating system that hangs up when you most need it.

For those of us who do a lot of writing, building complex spreadsheets or other very sophisticated applications, we will probably have to hang on to our desktop or laptop computers. But for many of you and, most importantly, for many of your customers, the use of computing devices is primarily:

• to connect and communicate wherever we are whenever we want
• to consume information via the Internet, including e-mail, news, web-based content
• to get our social media fix
• to consume locally based information from word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDF files, etc.
• to write a e-mail or text messages
• to listen to music, watch videos, watch TV or movies
• to play games
• to research purchases.
• to shop online
• to pick a local retailer so we can buy right now.

We can do all of that with an increasingly rich and robust set of mobile computing devices that include not only the iPad, the Kindle Fire, Android tablets but the iPhone, Blackberry, Android smartphones.

That means that just when you thought it was safe to go back into the content marketing water, you will have to do substantial rethinking. But I think it’s more a matter of adjustment than a dramatic change in your approach to your customers.

How to Take Advantage of This Content Marketing Mobile Inflection Point

You are almost certainly using the Internet as a primary content marketing weapon.  And, it is probably delivering significant a better results than many of your traditional advertising and marketing practices. Now, begin to think slightly differently as your customers go mobile for much of the information they consume.

• Make sure that your website is fully readable on the most important mobile devices which would include the iPhone, the Android, and the iPad. That may mean giving up Flash. At a minimum, it’s critical that any flash on your website takes a secondary rather than a primary role on your home and on your landing pages.
• Consider working with a developer to create an iPhone or an iPad app that will take advantage of the unique capabilities of these two pervasive computing devices.  In particular, think about how the touchscreen might improve your users interaction with your content.
• Get social with Facebook, Twitter or other applications that can reach out to your customers with special offers while they’re on the move and in a buying mood.  
• Provide special offers, coupons, or dedicated discounts that mobile users can bring with them directly on their smart phone or iPad.  Don’t make them print something out if they can to show it to you on their mobile device.

We are at the beginning of a fundamental transformation in the way that we all consume information. Our customers and their computers are on the move as never before.  Just as you may have tried to reach traveling prospects with billboard ads on the highway, now it’s time to make sure that you’re connecting with them on the virtual highway.

The good news is that, unlike driving a Corvette on Route 66, your prospects can slow down to pay attention to what you have to say. Just make sure that the new mobile information you’re providing is still relevant and compelling as all good content marketing must be.

Written by Nick Bilton on the NYT Bits Blog.

Google and Facebook are being left behind in the shift toward mobile, and the amenities available to their employees might offer some explanation for a slow transition.

Google and Facebook, young and successful companies that they are, risk being left behind as technology shifts from PCs and Web browsers to mobile devices.

This month, when Google showcased a new design for Google Plus, the company’s social network, it was as if mobile phones and tablets were still a glimmer in some future inventor’s eye. The made-over Web site was beautifully designed, but the smartphone app and mobile site were completely ignored. During the site’s redesign, a Google spokeswoman told me, “Today, the mobile experience will not change.”

Facebook is also struggling with mobile, as evidenced by its recent $1 billion acquisition of Instagram. Its mobile app, which is sometimes painfully slow, was updated only after the Web site was redesigned for Timeline.

I have a theory on why they both have been slow to capitalize on the shift to mobile.

It’s that working at these companies is like going to work on an all-inclusive cruise ship. The analogy is apt in terms of the luxury — and the isolation.

See on bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Written by Geoffry James. 

Facebook’s latest $1 billion acquisition smacks of a desperation that LinkedIn consistently manages to avoid.

With all due respect to Facebook, paying $1 billion for Instagram smacks of desperation.

It’s as if CEO Mark Zuckerberg is terrified of becoming irrelevant and is willing to spend insane amounts of money in order for Facebook remain on the forefront of cool.

Read more at Inc.com: Full coverage of the Facebook-Instagram deal
That’s a hopeless quest, though. Facebook may be many things, but it’s not cool any longer. It lost that imprimatur back when it allowed corporate pages (yes, even yours) and advertising.

Where Is the Love?

More importantly, nobody seems to love Facebook any more. People seem mostly tolerate it, because it’s convenient. And that’s why Facebook remains vulnerable.

Consumer-oriented social networking sites are like television networks: People will switch when there’s something better on another channel.

With its awkward design, 1990s-style layouts, weird privacy policies, and intrusive advertising, Facebook is vulnerable to the next best thing. Frankly, I think it’s just one online conversion program away from losing its customer base and becoming the next MySpace.

That’s not true of LinkedIn, though. LinkedIn is all about business and people’s resumes. Because its scope is limited to fundamentally dull information, LinkedIn is simply not vulnerable to something “cooler.”

See the full story on www.inc.com

Great Video from AT&T Illustrating the Contents of Their New Research

As the study indicates, inexpensive, modern grassroots marketing techniques — both online and offline — have grown to be among the most popular for small businesses in the past several years likely due to ease of use and general affordability.

According to the 2012 AT&T Small Business Technology Poll, nearly 60% of small businesses surveyed plan on spending as much or more in 2012 as they did in 2011 on online marketing efforts. For more information, please visit AT&T for more info on the research.

Via www.youtube.com

The new Facebook Business Page is not only a visual transformation of the site, it is a game changer for the marketing function.

The fact that Facebook will automatically transition existing business pages to the new format over the next thirty days means that marketers will have no choice but to evolve from the static “tabs” mindset to a “Timeline” mindset based on continually fresh, engaging, and authentic content.

As part of the redesign, the company has effectively shelved Facebook tabs as default landing pages, a strategy which many large corporations, small businesses, and social marketers had spent time, energy, and significant budget building out. These default tabs, while effective in certain cases for driving “likes” and other calls to action, were essentially landing pages like what you see on traditional websites.

Never content to settle for the status quo, Facebook is shaking things up by moving to a timeline design. While specific posts can be “pinned” to the top of the page, these get automatically unpinned after seven days. The idea is that continually fresh content will engage fans — that the best way to drive fan engagement is to make marketers more engaged and having to post, monitor, and respond more often on their Business Pages.

Grab the rest of the article at adage.com

In November, we told you the latest forecast – that social network advertising would top $10 billion by 2013 and that Facebook was on its way to pull in over $5.5 billion this year in ad revenues. A new survey from ad buyers suggest that those figures are too modest, that the demand for social media ad buys could blow away all previous predictions. Here’s the data that caught our eye, courtesy of the Advertiser Perceptions survey as reported in Ad Age. Here’s how Ad Age broke it down:

Nearly 1,200 people involved in deciding how ad dollars are spent digitally, 59% of respondents said they would increase social-media-ad spending in the next 12 months, compared with just 4% who said they would decrease spending on social platforms.

The survey also found that, on average, social-media advertising will make up about 27% of digital budgets over the next 12 months, compared with 22% in the previous 12 months. No other digital category — including ad networks/exchanges, media companies, demand-side platforms, portals and agency-trading desks — expect to see in-budget share gains over the next 12 months.

Via socialmediainfluence.com

With digital ad revenue projected to overtake all other platforms by 2016, it is the key to the financial future of news. Are news organizations transitioning their legacy advertisers to online platforms?

Between 2011 and 2015, revenue from digital advertising in the United States is expected to grow by 40% and to overtake all other platforms by 2016.
Yet how much of that growth will go to underwrite news remains in doubt and throws into question the financial future of journalism as audience continue to migrate online. What will happen pivots in part on whether the news industry can move into the more lucrative areas of digital advertising, particularly using consumer data to target ads, persuading major legacy advertisers to also advertise online and moving into new revenue areas. A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue.
Of the 22 news operations studied for this report, only three showed significant levels of targeting. A follow-up evaluation six months later found that two more sites had shown some movement in this direction, but only some, from virtually no targeting to a limited amount on inside pages. By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook.
Via www.journalism.org

What is it that women seem to love and understand and guys don’t? (about Pinterest, of course)

Perhaps, it’s Pinterest’s self-description which doesn’t make it sound like a guy thing:

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

Check out this great Slideshare presentation  from 6S Marketing to understand what’s going on with Pinterest?

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.