Interactive white papers and video white papers are helping revive the reputation of the B2B marketing workhorse. Some say the value of the B2B white paper is slowly eroding under the weight of its success. White papers were once the simple, functional, unfussy marketing tactic of B2B. These days, so...

A video producer explores the limits of DIY and the absolute importance of b-roll. I never argue that all video must be professionally made. In many cases, creating your own video is in fact the best approach. But all of us also know that self-produced business videos can look … well, self-produced....

Tools social influencers use to launch words off the page and into social streams. Optimized Copy InboundWriter.com Natural language programming, or NLP technology, is the behind-the-scenes science that evaluates your content’s context. Inbound Writer’s interactive editor lets you experiment with different...

A column about dynamic design and content optimization.  According to our research at IDG Connect, B2B buyers complain the relevance of marketing content—defined by how well it supports their purchase decision-making process—has declined by 31% over the past five years. Marketers can’t fix this problem...

In Best Practices, Mediocre Results , Robert Rose claims marketers who focus on measuring up to others are less willing to take risks and less likely to stand out.  Here, he offers tips about how to move beyond best practices—and become more than just average. 6 Ways To Move Beyond Best Practices 1....

Too much talk about Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter ‘followers’ is dumming down your analytics. If you were asked for the most important metric you track related to your online marketing efforts, what would you say? What is the very first thing that came to mind? Depending on your responsibilities within...

Why a hyper focus on measurement and incremental gains makes marketers average. Let’s talk about how a myopic focus on measurement can suck all the innovation and success out of our strategy. Here is an experiment: Walk around your office and ask everybody three questions. The first question: “Should...

In this post-Panda world, shallow content written for keywords rather than people won’t just leave you with a website no one wants to read but could actually cause a decline in your rankings.  You won’t just see a decline for those pages with poor content but for your entire site! Proper...

“How do we know it works?” “Can we prove that we’ll affect the bottom line?” Aren’t these the client questions you receive most often about social media? When my clients ask them, I explain that social media is about building relationships with customers. All the different tools — Twitter, Facebook,...

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...

I’d like to see a show of hands: How many of you have Google Analytics installed on your websites? Most of you? Great! How many of you have at least one “goal” set up within your account to track your conversions? Ok, I probably just lost about half of you. Final question: How many of you have a monetary...

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...