Public Relations & Social Media Insight

You can’t escape having a content style guide for very long. While it’s easy to share standards between one or two content marketers, it’s very hard to scale without a system in place. If your organization is among the 45% of companies with plans to expand their budget for content marketing and inbound practices in 2013, there’s no better time than the present to start brainstorming a style guide for blogging: For hundreds of years, publishing organizations and media have used style guides to define standards in-house, and quickly get new writers up to speed.

Don’t think of it as a tool to train your writers on how to use grammar and spelling, but instead as the experts of Intelligent Editing put it, “to provide [guidance] for instances when many possibilities exist.” Your company’s content marketing is your online voice, and a consistent tone will ensure you’re able to achieve memorable branding. Whether you’re planning to scale from one to two dedicated content creators, or you’re starting to utilize freelance copywriting services, a content style guide can help your whole inbound marketing team write in the same voice...

By understanding the customer journey across media, devices and platforms, marketers can better optimize search and social marketing performance....

On the one hand, there’s a temptation to spend a lot of time and resources developing “the perfect” strategy. On the other hand, you could also just start cranking out content and see what sticks. Neither of those approaches really work well in a practical way. What does work? There’s one thing that can help answer many of the concerns marketers have about content and that also helps you cut to the chase for practical implementation: Understanding the customer journey.

Google Think Insights has a great post with tools to help marketers better understand how different content and channels affects customers during the buying cycle or customer journey to online purchase. Check it out and then come back....

How many times in the past six months have you read or heard someone reference the phrase “paid, owned, and earned”? I’d venture to say that the answer is more than you can count on your hands (and maybe even your feet as well!).

In this post, I’ll explore the evolution of social media marketing that eventually led us to the paid, owned, earned trifecta, and I’ll dive into a few brands that have found success employing it. As brands first began experimenting with social media, they were focused on the acquisition of fans, followers, and advocates. Number of “likes”, hashtag use/trends, and fan increase, these metrics of social success were easy to track and quantify. Soon after, as social media platforms designed solutions for brands, companies began formulating social and digital teams who understood and realized the value and speed of online word of mouth.

Through industry and analyst research, they learned that consumers are more likely to engage and transact business with brands that integrate social media, and so they began cultivating content that inspired engagement. From this new interaction, they began seeing actual, authentic expressions – opinions, stories, photos, Tweets – earned out of engagement with their consumers. Wanting more and more of this valuable direct contact, brands began finding ways to generate this compelling content and drive people to sites that contained other authentic content. In doing this, converged media was born.....

In response to my post defining social selling, I realized that I needed to take a step back and define “What is a social business?” There is a lot of talk about the social business and too often it involves a discussion of social tools and channels.

In this article I’ll offer my own definition as well as plenty of links to other resources you can check out for more ideas on how to help your organization transform into a social business. A social business is not a business that sends a lot of Tweets or has a ton of Facebook FB -2.01% likes. A social business is one that realizes that it operates in a more transparent and social world. And so it makes customers and employees equally as important as its shareholders and profits. tools and channels....

Computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier has turned his back on the “information wants to free” meme to which he once subscribed, and he thinks advertising as a business model for media is doomed. It’s not just that Craigslist and other Internet businesses have snatched ads away from traditional media, he reckons; it’s that in this digital era, when Google and Facebook increasingly own most of the inventory, not to mention the ad servers and distribution channels, relying on advertising to prop up your media company just doesn’t make sense.

youLanier, the guy credited with coming up with the term “virtual reality,” outlines this thesis in his new book “Who Owns the Future?” which examines the effects network technologies have had on our economy. In an interview with Nieman Journalism Lab, Lanier builds on that case, stating flatly that advertising isn’t a viable business plan for media businesses in the long term. He tells the publication...

The buzz around startup culture lately is all about “minimum viable product.” It’s the idea of creating a product as quickly as possible — in its most minimum viable form — so you can then make it better by adapting it to what your customers really...

What if we could pinpoint the metrics that provide the biggest bang for our buck in terms of telling us whether our efforts are paying off while taking the least amount of time to measure? Focusing only on what matters (and nothing more) could satisfy the ROI demons, keep bosses and clients happy, and give social media marketers more time to do what we’re supposed to be doing: engaging and connecting with our communities.

So, whether you’re still struggling to measure social media effectiveness or simply want to declutter your measurement efforts, Here’s your minimalist guide to social media metrics....

Your digital footprint is huge. Okay, well, truthfully, I don’t know what size it is. But here’s what I do know: your digital footprint has a huge effect on your online marketing. But seriously ladies and gentlemen, we have one humdinger of a topic, which in my biased opinion, has yet to inspire a truly helpful online article.

So, here and now, I set out to offer you the ultimate list of easy and effective ways to enlarge your digital footprint, increase your findability factor (otherwise known as search results), and drive traffic to your website. We begin with the easy ones. The following four ideas—and the ideas within the ideas—are absolute musts....

Twitter’s latest ad product provides a call to action right inside a tweet — showing the company is finally creating marketing tools closer to the “bottom of the funnel.” Even as Twitter has grown into a media and marketing giant, not everyone is persuaded that the social media site is useful for selling things. As one marketer recently lamented to me, the platform’s effectiveness is hard to measure — and justify to clients — because “no one’s going to buy a car off Twitter.”

[Update: Twitter says "au contraire" and sent this research] The perception, then, is that Twitter is useful for what the ad types call “top of the funnel” marketing — building brand awareness and so on — but that it has yet to deliver paying customers in the way that GoogleAdwords can.

Today, though, it appears Twitter has responded with a new ad product that will make it easier for brands to assess what they get for their marketing bucks. The product, called a “Lead Generation Card,” lets marketers post expanded tweets that invite users to sign up for stuff right inside Twitter. The company showed what this might look in a blog post describing the product...