There’s been a ton of great discussion about content activities, methodologies and deliverables. For most of us, that makes up the bulk of our work. But if you don’t have a conceptual framework for those activities, I’d argue that you’re not really practising content strategy. Here are five ways to think...

How does a toy company that sells easily replicable building blocks build an iconic brand? Our April issue of Chief Content Officer magazine explains the strategy LEGO used to fight copy-cat toy companies. In the 1980s and 1990s, LEGO faced a tremendous threat from competing construction toys. After...

Great content marketing starts with one thing: understanding your audience, whether it’s a prospect or customer. Sounds simple in theory, but it can be difficult to collect the important info. Last week, I shared some ideas on how to research your buyers. This week, I want to take it a step further...

I first heard the term content curation in this post by Rohit Bhargava back in 2009. Rohit positioned that, as more corporations and individuals create content, the role of the content curator is needed.  Rohit describes this position as: Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make...

QR codes (or Quick Response codes) condense information into two dimensional op-art squares that connect offline media to online content via a smartphone. Also known as mobile tagging, QR codes act like URL references on offline media and other flat surfaces.Continue reading

In the second issue of Chief Content Officer magazine, to be released next week, we share our befuddlement about Quora. The premise of the super-hot social site seems sound: posit a question and get crowd-sourced answers back, prioritized by their popularity. But actually navigating around and understanding...

Think all video interviews go smoothly? Think again. If interviews are part of your plan to capture exceptional, engaging video content, you’re counting on someone else to give you what you want. And that can be risky. What’s the biggest challenge in any video interview? Capturing content that is interesting,...

Say what you will of Howard Stern, the man is a genius. If you get the chance, this article in this month’s Rolling Stone magazine is worth the read. The self-proclaimed “King of All Media” dishes out some pretty amazing advice for us in the content marketing business.  Here’s...

Sometime in the 1970s, Howard Moskowitz was commissioned to experiment and find THE perfect level of sweetness for Diet Pepsi.  That is, what would the perfect Diet Pepsi taste be that appealed to the largest audience? When the data came back it was scattered beyond belief. No bell curve or anything...

Released today at the Custom Content Conference, the Custom Content Council with Roper Affairs released the preliminary results of a CMO and Consumer Attitude study on custom content marketing.  The original study was performed in 2006. Here are the highlights of the 2011 study: Chief Marketing Officers 35%...

You can find dozens of really good applications, books, and blogs on how to simplify your work, become more productive, and manage your time. Much of this advice is good, but it doesn’t cover how to manage the deluge of “tasks” that come along with social media and creating content: e.g. responding to...

People ask me all the time: “Isn’t there such a thing as too much content?” The answer: of course. How do you know? Well, if the content is NOT valuable and relevant and NOT working for your business, it’s NOT worth developing and distributing.  If it is, then do it. Although...