Content Matters

Every now and then you hear about something that’s just plain cool. That’s the case with what Denise Wakeman does monthly on her Facebook page. She gives. Space on her Facebook wall, that is. 

Once a month, Wakeman hosts a “Brag About Your Blog” day on her FB page. It’s an opportunity for bloggers of all kinds—big, small, business, personal and everything in between—to let others know what they are passionate about.

By helping others get some visibility, she’s getting some as well. WE magazine found many of its 101 Women Bloggers To Watch in 2011 from Wakeman’s monthly events. Good blogging karma? You bet.

Check out the entire story 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.