Monthly Archives:: December 2011

Content Curation and Adding Value

by in Content Marketing.

Go to the source if you’d like the rest of his perspective. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to you and your organization…

via A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation | Power Tools for Thought Leaders.

The above post came to my attention today. All of the text in that post is taken verbatim from the following HubSpot article, A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation (Oct, 2010).

The original HubSpot article provides some useful advice on content curation, including the following three important rules for great curation: 1. Find the best content, 2. Add value, and 3. Attribute.

I think point 2 is particularly important. If you want to enhance your thought leadership in your domain and drive traffic to your website, then you should avoid simply duplicating 3rd party content. You need to add your own expert perspective and provide value above and beyond the original article.

How to Get Others to Retweet Your Content

by in Content Marketing.

For the sake of Twitter, if you follow a few simple best practices, more people are likely to retweet and spread the distribution of your content, giving it a much broader reach and a better opportunity to get found by a new audience of prospective customers beyond your direct followers.

via 11 Guaranteed Ways to Get Others to Retweet Your Content.

Here is a summary of the 11 ways to motivate others to retweet your content:

  1. Be one of the first to tweet breaking news
  2. Avoid being too self-promotional
  3. Include links to your website, not just to 3rd party content
  4. Know your audience
  5. Retweet others’ content…which encourages them to retweet your content
  6. Ask others to retweet your content. According to Hubspot research, Tweets with the words “please ReTweet” produce 4x more retweets.
  7. The best time to tweet is “late in the day and week.” Here at Intigi, we use the fantastic app, Timely. Another popular option is Bufferapp.
  8. In your tweets, use @ mentions for influencers in your space
  9. Keep your tweets brief so retweeters can add their own content
  10. Include social media sharing buttons on your content (e.g., your blog)
  11. Use relevant hashtags when possible

We are integrating many of these best practices into Intigi and our own content marketing efforts!

Invest in your landing page to reap the benefits of your online marketing efforts

by in Content Marketing.

Can you believe only 13% of SMB websites have a local phone number on their home page? I sure can. Think of all the missed opportunities. I often hear SMBs say that they don’t care about clicks to their website, all they care about is calls and people walking in the door. Well, this stat, along with the general crappiness of most SMB sites says that they really don’t care about any of it.

via Mobile: The Ghost Of Future Local SMB Marketing.

SMBs are spending a significant portion of their marketing budget to advertise online, but many have ineffective landing pages. To reap the benefits of your online ad spending and content marketing efforts, it’s critical that you have an effective landing page (and website). Here is an article with 101 landing page optimization tips, provided by the company unbounce.com.

Google Will Change Web Marketing in 2012

by in Content Marketing.

Google is poised to completely alter how websites market themselves over the next year.

via Google Will Change Web Marketing in 2012 – Brian Whalley – Harvard Business Review.

There are two key points raised in this article.

First, Google plans to insert more information and data directly onto the search results page. For instance, if a user poses a question as a query, Google might present the answer on the search results page. This is a scary proposition for companies that provide competing data and information, such as Yelp and Kayak.

Second, Google is reducing the amount of information and data available to marketers, and in some cases charging marketers for information and data that was previously free. The article suggests that Google views its data as a competitive advantage and thus it needs to be protected from free and open distribution. It’s clear that Google’s ability to attract advertisers — in view of growing competition from Facebook and other companies — rests on its proprietary data about consumer preferences and behavior.

B2B Companies Embrace Social Media Marketing

by in Content Marketing.

More business-to-business companies are using social media as part of their marketing mix. Some have found that sites for professional networking, like LinkedIn, are an effective way to generate leads, while more casual social media mainstays, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are helping B2B firms reach customers in new ways.

via More B2B Marketers Embrace Social Media Efforts – eMarketer

An eMarketer survey of B2B companies indicates that 89% use social media for marketing. Of these companies using social media, 58% use LinkedIn, 50% use Facebook, and 43% use Twitter, according to the Sagefrog Marketing Group.

83% of law firms plan to use blogs for social media marketing

by in Content Marketing.

Pursuant to a LexisNexis Survey on the Use of Social Media in the Legal Sector released today, 94% of the AmLaw 200 law firms (200 largest law firms) plan to use blogs in their social media marketing initiatives.

via 94% of large law firms plan to use blogs in social media marketing initiatives : LexisNexis Survey : Real Lawyers Have Blogs

93.1% of law firms plan to use LinkedIn, 74.9% plan to use Twitter, and 57.1% plan to use a “consumer social network,” such as Facebook and/or Google+. For more data on how law firms expect to use social media marketing, visit the article linked above.

The Benefits of Blogging

by in Content Marketing.

Content marketing, due to its subtle and nurturing nature, might sometimes be mistaken for a ‘fluffy’ marketing technique which doesn’t drive measurable results to your business. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

via Content marketing: The hard numbers | Red Rocket Media Blog.

According to a Hubspot article, companies that blog enjoy 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages.

Launch of ‘Boards’ Dilutes Quora’s Brand

by in Content Marketing.

Quora is taking a step beyond Q&A this morning with its latest product launch, boards. Users can now set up their own personal-themed bookmarking boards, sort of like a Pinterest for text-based information.

via Quora Expands Beyond Q&A, Launches ‘Boards’ — A Way To Personally Curate Information | TechCrunch.

“Boards,” from my view, delivers a unique value proposition to a different target market (i.e., relative to the “Quora Q&A” service). As a result, Boards will likely dilute Quora Q&A and confuse existing customers. In addition, it now exposes Quora to a range of competitors in the curation space, such as the new Delicious, Scoop.it, and Pearltrees, just to name a few.

To maintain its positioning and brand, Quora should either launch Boards as a standalone product that is (initially) just loosely coupled with Quora Q&A (e.g., 37Signals with Basecamp and Highrise comes to mind), and/or look for opportunities to expand within the Q&A space.

In any event, no product has yet solved the “curation” problem, and I’m glad to see another company enter this important and growing market space.

Top 10 Most Significant Search & Social Marketing Stories of 2011

by in Content Marketing.

2011 has been the year of revolutions and webolutions. Here’s a list of the 10 most significant, earth-shattering digital trends to have rocked the online marketing world this past year.

via searchenginewatch.com

#2 on the list is Google’s “Freshness update” which has an impact on 35% of all searches.

For more information on Google’s Freshness update, here as an article from Google’s Official Blog – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search….; and an excellent post on SEOmoz – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-fresh-factor

Annual Content Marketing Retreat 2012

by in Content Marketing.

Do you want to learn what it takes to succeed with content marketing, with a drill down into the latest approaches, tools and services that make measurement, content creation, curation, publication and distribution more effective. Are you ready for the 2nd Annual Content Marketing Retreat in 2012?

via sys-con.com

Side note – It’s ironic that a write up for the 2nd Annual Content Marketing Retreat is overlaid with a massive AT&T flash display ad (i.e., interruption marketing). Even worse is that I can’t find a way to close the ad, short of reloading the page.