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!!

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.

A Compelling  and Affordable Video Did the Trick

Normally in Hollywood, when you’re trying to get someone to join the cast of a picture, it involves actors and their agents, directors, studios, sending scripts back and forth, and lots of other rigmarole.

When you’re trying to attract a big star like Amy Adams, at best, this process is inefficient. At worst, it is completely ineffective.

The producer of the new Muppets movie, Jason Segel, decided to use content marketing to appeal to Amy Adams, who had lately been appearing in pretty serious dramas such as, The Fighter. Although he probably had no idea that his approach involved content marketing, his perfectly targeted video illustrates all the best of what content marketing can be—and can accomplish.

Jason, assisted by Kermit the Frog, begins with a sweet little song that was addressed to only one person: Amy Adams. They continue with a heartfelt appeal, telling her how much they love her and how much she would love being in the movie. Clearly, Jason understood the need to customize content for his target audience. The video is not an expensive production.  In fact, it consists of Jason and Kermit sitting, singing, and talking.

Obviously, this affordable content marketing video worked. Even in a world of multimillion dollar salaries for actors and movies with hundred million dollar budgets, this charming little video won over Amy Adams.

If it works for her, it can certainly work for you and your customers. Create a custom video that demonstrates how well you understand your customers and their needs. You will find it one of the most effective ways to break through layers of people and layers of resistance.

Watch the video below and start brainstorming what you can accomplish with your own video efforts:

I guess there might have been a lot more than this video that persuaded Amy to join the film. But, the video itself makes for a wonderful story about the magical Muppets movie.

Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet will dramatically accelerate the move to e-books

The shift from print business-to-business books to digital versions, whether Kindle, Nook or iBook has been nothing short of astonishing.

Symptomatic of the change is the increasing amount of floor space that Barnes & Noble is devoting to its Nook e-readers. In our Naples store, the Nook retail area takes up almost a quarter of the ground floor book related space, excluding the café and the music section.

Apple’s iPad, as the pioneer in the tablet space, has captured the vast majority of the tablet market so far. But, its price point at $500 and up makes it a bit expensive for what may be a secondary computing device for most people.

Nonetheless, more and more business book readers are using the iPad not just as an e-reader, but as a comprehensive content consumption and creation device. Although, a tablet like the iPad is limited in terms of its virtual keyboard, for example, many of us business users have found extraordinary productivity applications in addition to standard e-mail and calendaring.

Now that the Kindle Fire at $199 and the Nook Tablet at $249 have entered the market just before the Christmas shopping season, we can expect that millions and millions more business users will gravitate toward these very powerful content-centric devices. As one commentator noted: The Kindle Fire offers 80% of the iPad’s capability at 40% of the price.

I believe it’s potentially more important that all three tablet computers offer content in color with the possibility of embedding dynamic content such as slideshows and other kinds of dynamic visual presentations. This means that authors and publishers are no longer cost limited to black and white text and images, as they are in hardback or paperback books.

Tablet devices will enable authors and publishers to offer much richer content that benefits both readers and authors. Readers will link out frequently to consume more great content from websites, blogs, YouTube, Slideshare, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The fact that you can link out to all that additional content from every e-book on the very device that you’re using makes the Kindle fire, Nook Tablet, iBook–and all of the e-book applications on the iPad–irresistible as a primary reading vehicle.

Does this mean that print books will disappear anytime soon? No, but I believe it does mean that virtually all of future book sales growth will come from e-books. And, the new Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet will dramatically accelerate the acceptance and use of e-book versions of business-to-business titles.

Kathy Saenz of Neighborhood America Shares What It Takes to Make Video an Effective Content Marketing Tool

Even a micro business can use video effectively to communicate with its customers online.

But, as we amateur carpenters know, you can wind up with a mess instead of a masterpiece unless you understand how to use a potentially powerful tool well.   In that spirit we’re happy to can share with you six terrific tips for using video successfully from talented Southwest Florida professional, Kathy Saenz.

We recently caught up with Kathy, who is Neighborhood America’s corporate communications manager, for a brief interview on the best ways to communicate with video. Kathy’s unique background as a university trained former TV producer and reporter taught her what it takes to tell great stories in our short attention span world.  She has been able to help Neighborhood America add  video communications to their core marketing capabilities. When it comes to using video effectively, Kathy and her company really get it.

Here Are Kathy’s 6 Secrets to Video Success for Small Business:

1. Make sure that you are telling a compelling story. Kathy notes that there is a danger of using video to share the same boring statistics or data that handicap effective print communications. Instead, think like a TV producer or reporter and come up with a compelling angle that illustrates the successful use of your product or service. This approach lets enthusiastic customers make an engaging case for the real-world benefits of your products and services. Kathy gives the example of the video they shot of their mobile solution client, Adidas, in the slam-dunk context of the NBA All-Star week. Click here to take a look at the video.
2. Be concise. Keep editing down, down, down. Folks don’t want to spend a lot of time waiting for you to get to the point. Kathy notes that, with rare exceptions, your video should be no more than 2 to 3 minutes long. If you go beyond that point, you are not likely to capture your prospective customers attention.
3. Do real interviews of your company team members or third party spokespeople. Don’t shoot a video of people who have memorized a script and then read it word for word. This comes across as stilted and less than compelling. Instead, do a real interview which enables your subject to be more natural, to exhibit their real personalities, and to be believable when they’re talking about your company and your products.
4. Don’t skimp on good audio production values. A small investment in good quality audio equipment will pay off in providing professionalism this to your video. A simple, but important, touch is the use of a wireless lavaliere microphone on your interviewee’s lapel. Rather than use a camera microphone of questionable quality, you can improve sound quality dramatically by investing just a few hundred dollars. This makes your small company sound like a big company.
5. Provide good quality lighting to show your subjects at their best. You should invest in the right set of front and back lighting to make your subject look good. If you’re not careful, the folks you’re interviewing will look washed out or display the dreaded raccoon eyes. Kathy noted that if you want to shoot in natural light, go outside rather than try to shoot near a window. Again, the investment in good lighting equipment is relatively modest, probably less than $1000. But the investment lets you put the very best light on your company, its products and services.
6. Unless you are skilled in each of the five previous elements, seriously consider hiring an outside expert. It is difficult enough to use content marketing effectively in a more traditional verbal and static visual context. When you move into the unfamiliar world of video, you will benefit from the hard-won expertise of someone like Kathy who knows how to tell a great story quickly and compellingly. And, if no one within your organization communicates well within a video context, you may also want to hire a professional to be your video spokesperson. This can be just as effective online as it has been for decades on television.

I also asked Kathy to share the biggest mistake to avoid. She emphasized that you should not use a bad video just because you spent time, effort, and money to shoot it. The last thing you want to do is show your CEO or an important customer in an unflattering performance. Wait until you’ve got it just right to go live online.

A great example of effective video that can be created without breaking your budget

Here is a video that features Kathy introducing Neighborhood America’s CAPTURE product that enables companies to gather and organize user contributions to their websites.  It illustrates how effective video and a professional like Kathy can be in telling a compelling story for a small company.

The Bottom-Line: You have only one opportunity to make a great first video impression. So, be sure to make the effort in time, equipment, story development, and talent so that your customers watch and respond to your online video. Just like any other potentially powerful tool, video will work for you only if you learn how to use it right.

Inspiration from ‘Visual Blogger’ Mark Smiciklas of Intersection Marketing

It’s hard to make things easy. And, it’s even harder to be amusing at the same time.

But the very best visuals take a complex idea or series of connected ideas and make them instantly understandable. Just the right visuals make those ideas even more memorable when they are funny as well. In the case of the Intersection Marketing blog from Mark Smiciklas, he manages to do both consistently.

I have written before about the importance of adding visual elements to content so it was particularly gratifying to find that Mark Smiciklas had represented my article, Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy simply and clearly with a big graphic accompanied by five bullet points.

When I visited Mark’s blog I was intrigued to see that he is a terrific visual thinker. Most of his creative blog posts lead with a graphical representation of the topic that he will discuss. Because his visuals are so well done, the amount of explanation required is minimal. Sometimes there is almost no extra print content below his image. Occasionally he will add a few very brief paragraphs.

It’s worth noting that his visuals usually integrate just enough text explanation to clarify his concepts. This makes for a powerful communications combination.  In addition, he often builds on what other good thinkers have written at much greater length. Folks like David Meerman Scott and Chris Brogan, for example. That makes for pretty good social media marketing because he is adding to the online conversation.

Here are two of my favorites (other than what he did about us, of course):

Crap + SEO = Optimized Crap

The New Marketing Strategy

Summing up: When you have big ideas that you want to share, give serious thought to using accompanying illustrations that will embed what you want to say exactly–and sometimes eternally–in the minds of your audience.

I have to thank Mark for making this post really easy. His illustrations are so good that they get most of the hard work. But, I guess that’s the point.

How to go from clueless to compelling to transform prospects into buyers

In 2007, the mention of content marketing brought as many blank stares from small business owners as the mention of a website did 10 years before. In fact, in 1997 when we started our small business magazine in Southwest Florida, few owners had websites, let alone an online marketing strategy.

In 2009, most small businesses do have websites and the term, ‘content marketing,’ has gone from obscure to fashionable. When I say fashionable, I mean that the usage of the phrase has skyrocketed in the past two years. For example, the number of visitors to our website who arrived because they had done a search for ‘content marketing,’ has increased by a factor of 10.

I’m delighted that content marketing has come out of the shadows and into the spotlight. Even so, for most small businesses, developing a content marketing mindset and a strategy to follow just does not come naturally. Fortunately, the fundamentals of a successful small business content marketing strategy are much more commonsensical than you might think.  In fact, they build on what have long been best marketing practices.  Even those content marketing elements that require a new mindset have a simple and compelling logic that even the smallest business can grasp and adopt.

Here are the six steps that can put you on the path to an effective content marketing strategy:

1. Precisely define your ideal customer and develop an in-depth understanding of the problems they face and the solutions they seek. You cannot hope to market and sell to an ill-defined and poorly understood group of prospects. This is critical even to the behemoth, Wal-Mart. They can tell you that their ideal customer is the person who lives paycheck to paycheck. Their current tagline, “Save Money. Live Better,” carefully reflects their understanding of the frugality and aspirational character of their customers. I think it’s much more powerful than its 19-year-old predecessor, “Always low prices.” As a small-business owner, you have even less margin for error than Wal-Mart and certainly must be at least as precise in your understanding of your target buyers.
2. Determine how your company can solve those problems and provide those solutions. Stop defining the value of your products and services as a big set of features–or even a vaguely defined set of benefits. The beauty of your benefits is strictly in the mind of the beholder. Therefore, you must determine what problems you will solve and how you will solve them. That’s what genuine customer benefits are all about: the positive outcomes that your prospects can envision as a result of working with you and your company.
3. Establish as a primary content marketing goal to become a trusted source of information for your target buyers. Trust is the all important element that can transform prospects who were initially skeptical into long-term customers who have faith that you can and will deliver results for them time after time. That trust begins when you provide content that is relevant and meaningful for your target customers in that context of solving their problems.
4. Develop an online presence that is increasingly rich with relevant content with each passing week. This means that, although you will need the timeless content typical of a standard website, you must absolutely have the more timely content typical of a blog. Moreover, your content and your company will become more valuable over time as you keep adding critical mass of information online. For a small business, building a blog-powered website is the surest way to fulfill this component of your content marketing strategy.
5. Take on the role of traditional media in the minds of your customers by thinking like a publisher. Imagine, for a moment, that you are your target customer’s favorite magazine or newspaper. Thus, when you create and publish content that is vital to your customer, present it just as compellingly and accessibly as savvy publishers do. This is easier to say that it is to do. Therefore, you may need to get help from professional writers or journalists who know how to tell great stories to a well defined target set of readers–or in your case, buyers. In fact, I am beginning to believe that one of the most significant future marketing expenditures will be contracting with talented writers who can translate your knowledge into accessible and compelling content.
6. Make it easy for your customers to transition from learning from you to actually buying from you. In other words, you must provide complete and easily accessible online product, company, and contact information. First, you teach your customers what they are desperate to know and then you make it incredibly easy for them to buy. Put yourself in the customer role for a moment and look at your website objectively. Would you find it easy to buy from you? If not, begin by adding whatever product and service content is missing. Then, refine your structure so that the path from interested prospect to committed customer is simple and straightforward.

It doesn’t take a lot of space to define the six vital steps. However, it will require a major rethink on your part about your approach toward marketing. In addition, you will need to allocate both time and talent to implement a successful content marketing strategy that replaces the old-fashioned stuff that just doesn’t work very well anymore.

Use Free Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Directories to Bring Your Business Front and Center on Local Web Searches

(Guest post by WordPress fanatic and small business web consultant Don Campbell)

If your business is an “offline” business with a physical storefront, the most effective way to improve your search rankings in Google is to list your business in the free local business directories from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Once you are listed in these directories, you have a chance to get listed in the “Google 10-Pack” – which is an invaluable way to get the word out about your business when people type in search terms in your local area.

In fact, if you don’t claim your Google Local Business Center profile, in some cases it can be scooped up by others who want to capitalize on the listings!

Claiming your profile is a free process that only takes a few minutes, so it is definitely worth the time and effort. Before filling out your profiles, you’ll want to have a nice description of your business handy, and ideally a few photos.

How To Claim Your Google Local Profile

Here are links to the top three local business profiles:

• Google Local Business Center
• Yahoo Local
• Microsoft (Bing)

List your business in each of these directories, and provide a link to your website when you fill out the profiles. Here are a few more tips for filling out your profile:

• Make sure your business title is the same across all three profiles
• Add photos and videos to your profile
• Categorize your listing properly (you get 5 categories – use them all!)
• Get some reviews – send links to your profile to some of your best clients and ask them to do a review for you
• See this link for more information on the factors that affect your local search rankings.

While you should claim these three profiles personally, there is another tool you might want to look at that will help you list your business in many other legitimate business profiles. This tool is called UniversalBusinessListing.org and it allows you to enter and maintain your business information in one place. It handles distributing your info to Google, Yahoo, Bing and about 7 other directory locations, including the online Yellow Pages. If you’ve manually claimed any of the profiles already, it won’t overwrite what you’ve done there. Google and Yahoo look at these other directories as evidence that your listing belongs to a real business, and this can help your search rankings in the 10-Pack.

Finally, make sure that when searchers do get to your website, that you provide a clear call to action – make it easy to see your phone number and address so they can contact you.

Don Campbell is President of Expand2Web where he helps small business owners build WordPress websites that rank highly in local search results. You can find him on Twitter at: @doncampbell

You may be wondering why something as seemingly simple as Twitter causes so much confusion and consternation among business people.

Perhaps, it best likened to a tool like a hammer which is simultaneously simple and powerful.  After all, a hammer can be used to put up a basic bookshelf or to build an entire home that will house a family for a lifetime.

Everything depends on whether you wield that hammer in an awkward, solitary way or use it skillfully and cooperatively with a team of other like-minded folks.  So too with Twitter.   Used poorly, you may do little more than smash your virtual thumb.  But, if you use it well, you can make a measurable difference in your content marketing strategy.  Happily, some terrific tools make the effective use of Twitter almost as easy as hammering in a nail.

(If you are brand new to Twitter, you may want to read our earlier post, Twitter for Business Made Easy , before continuing)

Here are six easy ways for Twitter to strengthen your content marketing efforts:

1. Share your best thinking concisely to deliver quick, obvious value. Those of us who spend a lot of time blogging, crank out hundreds of words to share our our knowledge on the topics with which we are most engaged. That’s good and important.  But a pithy, 140 character tweet can also convey a thought precisely and can then resonate through retweets across the twittersphere.  That can make for accelerated thought leadership.
2. Monitor and interact with conversations that take place within your niche markets. Because effective content marketing is as much about conversation as it is an outbound messages, you need to maintain a dialogue with customers, prospects, and industry thought leaders.  By using tools such as TweetGrid and TweetDeck, you can watch in real time what is being said so that you can respond and add value to the conversation.
3. Follow and familiarize yourself with critical trends in your market. Because it is so hard to stay current, we need all the help we can get.  Twitter is an ideal tool for following those trends in real time.  In fact, its website has been redesigned to focus on showing obvious trends. You can also use Twitter Search and another helpful tool, Monitter to see what’s happening right now in topic areas that are really important to you.
4. Create interest groups for others who are passionate about issues that resonate with your customers and prospects. Within these groups, you can focus on only those issues that are most pressing for group members.  One tool that Doriano Carta of Mashable recommends is tweetworks because it enables you to set up ad hoc groups on the fly.
5. Extend the reach of your blog posts onto Twitter automatically. We all want to reach as many people as possible with the writing we do on our blogs.  As we increase our use of Twitter, we will develop hundreds and perhaps thousands of followers to whom we may offer instant access to our blog posts.  A great tool called, twitterfeed, then seamlessly pulls your latest blog post on to Twitter.

Plenty of industry pundits consider Twitter just a fad. But, I’m pretty well convinced that, for content marketers, it’s a tool that may be as useful and long-lasting as your trusty hammer.