One of the most frequent questions I receive while traveling is about blogging. The questions revolve around how to get started, what to talk about, and even what software to use. My questions back to them usually startle the person, because so many start thinking about what they want to say, other than how they can impact the reader. Here are a few…Continue reading

New research from Skyword found that business-oriented web pages with images performed 91% better than those pages without images. Skyword examined the performance of tens of thousands of posts in performing the study, and was able to segment the value of images for business purposes (excluding entertainment, news and sports posts, among others). So, images don’t just make a little difference…they make a ton of difference. Adding a little commentary and common sense to the study, it seems reasonable that posts with images both perform better in search results and are also shared at a higher rate than those posts without images. This puts an ever increasing importance on both the managing editors and content producers (the people that make your content look pretty) within the organization (full content marketing team information here). Of course, this should come as no surprise.  In the magazine business, we had a saying that the cover of a magazine serves just one purpose…to...

Yesterday, Robert Rose and I held a workshop at Openview Venture Partners‘ headquarters in Boston. The workshop was based on our new book, Managing Content Marketing. The most compelling part of the workshop (at least according to the participants) was the topic of developing a content marketing team within the marketing department. Here’s some of what we covered.Continue reading

Joe Pulizzi talks to Pam Didner, Global Integrated Marketing Manager for Intel, about secret agent action flicks and Intel’s hip new social platform, The Museum of Me. CAPTION Joe Pulizzi: The “Intel Inside” campaign from the 1990s transformed Intel from a brand only engineers and technologists recognized to a household name. At the time, it was a completely new and transformative way of positioning a computer component. Do you see content as another transformative change in marketing for Intel? Pam Didner: Yes. Understanding our customers’ pain points and creating relevant and compelling content to address that are a mandated strategic direction. Content marketing is everything we do on the B2B front. On the consumer front, we call it experience marketing. Experience marketing is about putting customers in the center and telling a story to which customers can connect emotionally. It’s no longer about speed and performance or product features, it’s really about what our products’ features...

A decade ago when I worked for Penton Media, Google was a hot topic.  To partner or not?  Do we open up our web content to Google’s spiders? It seems a silly discussion today, but it was big business then.  Publishers and editors were of the mindset that Google was somehow stealing their content by indexing it and serving it up to Google’s search engine. As more publishers realized the number of relevant readers they were getting to their websites, Google turned from axis to ally.Continue reading

Thanks to my good friend Mike Azzara for the following guest post on a VERY important issue. Suddenly, everybody wants to talk about paid, earned and owned media – PEO. The reason PEO is so top of mind is that the roles of each media type, and their relationships to one another, are radically changing as we speak, and few brand marketers yet understand how it will all shake out. Meanwhile, a growing number of brand marketing thought leaders are suggesting that synchronized PEO media strategies are already mandatory. Everyone understands the traditional PEO roles, but just to set the stage: paid is media you buy – you get total control over messaging, reach and frequency, as much as your budget allows; earned is what others say about your brand – you get no control but you can influence outcomes if you’re smart; and owned is content you create (content marketing) – you control the messaging, but not so much whether anyone reads/views it.Continue reading

Whether you are new to content marketing or have been practicing it for a while, here’s a great new resource for you: The Grande Guide to B2B Content Marketing from Eloqua. If you aren’t familiar with Eloqua’s series of Grande Guides, they are intended to be consumed in the time it takes to enjoy your 16-ounce morning coffee. This guide is a bit heftier and may require a Venti, but it’s packed with good information: An explanation of what content marketing is — and why your company needs to care Fundamental tactics used by content marketers An explanation of why content marketing is so important in B2B 10 reasons why a content marketing program may not be working with suggestions on how to overcome each 5 reasons you shouldn’t be a content marketer How to measure content marketing A case study from OpenView Venture Partners A bunch of additional content marketing resourcesContinue reading

I  had the opportunity to sit through another great Drew Davis presentation at the Niche Digital Conference this week. I don’t know how Drew finds the time to test and review online technology like he does, but he found a couple places I wasn’t aware of for building your personal brand online.  Here they are. About.me I caught onto About.me about six months ago (here is my profile) and now use it when people want to find out everything about me, both to my personal and business ventures.  It includes my business sites and the majority of my social media identities.Continue reading

Get ready to hear a lot more about Klout in the next few months. What is Klout?  In basic terms, Klout measures your online influence and your ability to drive interaction on the web. My good friend Drew McLellen wrote this excellent overview of Klout, but the power can be summed up in this paragraph: There are a wealth of tools that count what you do. The number of tweets, how many comments your Facebook status update receives, and the quantity of thumbs up you get on your YouTube videos. But there are very few that allow us to see how the sum total of our interactions are perceived and what actions they inspire.  That’s what Klout does…everything that you do on the web can be summed up with one little number…your Klout score.Continue reading

I had the pleasure of presenting to over 100 HVAC contractors today at HVAC Comfortech 2011 on how they can position themselves as THE home comfort services expert in their region. The central theme of the presentation was blogging. First off, blogging is just a tool...nothing more, nothing less.  But for businesses, especially smaller businesses, blogging can be a powerful way to share expertise and solve the pain points of customers. I started off by sharing how Marcus Sheridan, CEO of River Pools and Spas, has become the leading expert in the fiberglass pool business by consistently blogging and sharing information that his competitors simply were not willing to share (hat tip to Jeff Molander and his excellent new book Off the Hook Marketing, which I would recommend to anyone interested in amazing social media case studies that have actually generated revenue).  How did Marcus do it?  Here is some insight from Content Marketing World. In 2007, Marcus was struggling in a tough economy...

If you did not hear the news, a few weeks ago Google purchased Zagat, one of the largest and most respected media companies devoted to restaurant reviews (see the company announcement here).  Most reviews of the buyout, like this one from the NY Times, were focused on how Zagat’s user-generated reviews fit quite nicely with Google’s focus on localized search, which now can go head-to-head against services like Yelp. To me, it’s something a bit more. To publishers and content marketers, the purchase means that Google is now positioning itself as a creator of content.  Dare I say, a publisher. Long has Google preached the “do no evil” mantra…that the tools that Google creates are all about distributing content to help people solve problems. Do no evil or not, Google now both distributes and creates the content.  With the purchase of Zagat, Google will be distributing it’s own content among the other brands and media companies vying for attention and...

Coming off the very successful Content Marketing World, I thought about all the relationship building it took that helped make CMW the largest event in the industry.  Frankly, it was a combination of a number of things that made it happen (I’ll share the story on that in an upcoming post). BUT, what really amazed me was the first step to the majority of our relationships with the leading content thinkers around the world. Commenting on Blogs Yes, I said it. What opened the door to, dare I say it, the majority of my relationships and friendships with the speakers at CMW was commenting on their blogs. How did I first make contact with David Meerman Scott?  I commented on his blog.  Mike Stelzner…same thing…as well as Brian Clark, Jay Baer, Bernie Borges and Drew Davis. The Forgotten Skill of Blog Commenting I was recently at a large marketing conference where I asked the audience how many of them had corporate blogs.  About 50% of the room had a blog.  Then I asked how many...