Content Matters

One of the things I’m always stressing to my clients is that the content they publish must be centered around what their audience wants/needs to hear as opposed to what they as a company want to say/market. 

That’s why I love this post from Cloud Marketing Labs, as it takes this message of audience-centric content development into the foundation of website design. “Instead of creating your website around your products, create a site around the people who buy your products.” BRILLIANT! 

Want to make your site people friendly? Follow these steps:

1. Make your website people oriented.
2. Segregate your email marketing lists.
3. Have multiple media outlets.
4. Integrate with a CRM.
5. Specify type of content.

Read the complete post here.

I love the point Sally Hogshead makes in the post 7 Mistakes of Social Media Wimps: 

“In social media, if you blend in, you fail. You kill your message. Or worse, you dilute your personal brand. Social media isn’t ‘part of’ your personal brand. It IS your personal brand.”

So if you want to avoid being a wishy-washy, wimpy, wet blanket “wussy” (the word she really wanted to use in the headline), then steer clear of these 7 mistakes:

1. Fear of criticism.
2. Serving overcooked mushy white rice.
3. Over-sharing.
4. Making it all about you.
5. Constantly regurgitating other people’s content.
6. Anti-social behavior.
7. Trying to be all things to all people.

Read the complete post here.

As a writer, you’d expect me to love words. And I do. And I love learning new words. Thus, I am compelled to share the article The Quick 10: 10 Things You Didn’t Know Had Names from those brainiacs over at Mental Floss.

Sidebar: If you haven’t read Mental Floss, it’s a magazine “where knowledge junkies get their fix.” And it lives up to the brand promise issue after issue.

Back to the story: Check it out to learn the meaning of petrichor, zarf or scroop. I promise these word are real, as made-up as they sound. In fact, if you went to Starbucks today, you probably used a zarf to keep that hot coffee from burning your sensitive fingertips.

Now if I could just find a reason to use badinage in a sentence to make your glabella wrinkle…

PR is all about perception. And, as you know, perception is reality.

Everyone makes mistakes, and companies that acknowledge missteps and fix them quickly, appropriately and with customer needs placed first can elevate their image in spite of the error. Those who don’t…well, they end up in stories such as PR Blunders & How To Avoid Them by Tom Harnish.

Being self-serving, overreacting to situations and being completely insensitive to customer needs will put you the fast track to PR disaster. Don’t make knuckle-headed mistakes. Learn from these gaffes instead.

My best PR advice: Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask how you’d like to be treated. The Golden Rule will always help make your PR efforts shine.

My husband and I love to ski. And since we live in Texas (for now…), that doesn’t happen nearly enough. So, we must live vicariously through the pros who post kick-ass videos—like this one and this one—of adventures on their super fats in the back country doin’ rodeos and grabin’ tree tops.

We noticed most of the videos we watch are on Vimeo rather than YouTube. With all the traffic YouTube gets, why would these guys use Vimeo? What are the pros and cons of each platform?

This post from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism’s Craig Newman explains just that. In a nutshell, Vimeo is for the pros and YouTube is for the hacks—in production value, that is. But, of course, YouTube has popularity and ease of use.

Newman goes into more detail, so you’ll want to check out the complete story for all the details. But which should you use? Both, of course.

I love seeing new approaches for doing business, and here’s a great example courtesy of saidbylaura. It’s Artsicle, a Netflix-type company for the art world, She writes:

“Forget spending hours looking for pieces that resonate with your or attending endless openings in search of your new favorite artists or dealing with snobby gallery owners. Artsicle brings the options to you (for a mere $50 a month, that is).”

To learn more, check out her post here.

There’s a TON of opinions on social media and how to incorporate it into your comprehensive marketing strategy. Who’s right? What should you do?

Of course, the answer is different for everyone depending on clientele needs and your goals. But having research data and best practices can help steer you in the right direction.

Subscribers, Fans & Followers is a collection of nine social media reports from Exact Target. Not only are the reports rich in data, but they are also designed in an engaging—almost editorial—way. No boring pie charts here. 

And the good news: the reports are free.

Here’s a summary of each. You can download all of them here.

Report 1: Digital Morning
By understanding your customers’ daily digital tendencies, you can deliver marketing messages in the right place—at exactly the right time. 

Report 2: Email X-Factors
When it comes to marketing communications, email still works—if you understand the characteristics that set email apart from any other interactive channel. 

Report 3: The Social Profile
Marketing messages are not one-size-fits-all. It’s essential to understand the 12 distinct consumer personas so you can get to know your audience based on personalities, not just age, gender, or other demographics. 

Report 4: Twitter X-Factors
Twitter users are the most influential online consumers, and using this social media tool correctly can greatly impact your brand’s bottom line. 

Report 5: Facebook X-Factors
Facebook fans look at marketing message much differently than other social media sites. By studying Facebook’s five unique characteristics, you can develop an ROI-boosting strategy specific to this channel. 

Report 6: The Collaborative Future
Despite common assumptions that email, Facebook, and Twitter are in direct competition with one another, consumers communicate freely across these channels—and so should you.

Report 7: Social Mythbusting
Info on the social web changes so quickly. This report revisits the data from our first six installments in order to deny, debunk, and deliver the answers you need to build a strategy based on the truth—not just commonly-held assumptions. 

Report 8: The Social Break-Up
Unfortunately, social relationships don’t always last. By exploring consumers’ motivations and actions as they end their online brand relationships, you can keep the romance alive after the social “honeymoon” is over. 

Report 9: The Executive Summary
This report is the capstone, taking more than 100 pages of social media research and boiling it down into the digestible insights necessary to build integrated, cross-channel campaigns. 

You’ll need a comfy lounge chair and a big cup of coffee to get through all the data, but the insights gained will be worth it. And they didn’t pay me to say that.