mommyjenlin

Content Truly Is King In the middle of this amazing "lost" Steve Jobs interview is some of the best thinking on content and product development I've ever discovered. Jobs discusses the very important distinction between process and the masterful craftsmanship required to develop great products. Listening to this extraordinary segment I thought Jobs was contradicting Dov Seidman's book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything . On repeated listening not so much. Jobs is warning against process police taking over and attempting to substitute hollow business process where passion, commitment and genius should rule. Seidman is suggesting that creating the kinds of teams Jobs was famous for leading is the only business process anyone owns. There are no secrets and intellectual property is a poor substitute for fast moving new market creating genius (iPad, iPhone for example). "People get very confused that the process is the content." Content Greatness Unde...

Stories Matter The web moves in phases. The first phase was presence. In 1999 when I built my first website, FoundObjects.com (now RIP sadly), having a website was sufficient to generate Return On Investment (ROI). The next phase was the battle for commerce. The move from "brochure-ware", websites that were little more than printed brochures that happened to be online, to limited interactivity. Once the conversational door was open the social tsunami began. Where once we lucky few Internet marketers lectured now, in the social era, we listen and curate. Having conversations means we develop different kinds of websites. One easy to spot difference is the ubiquity of social share buttons. Social signals such as Facebook Likes and Tweets confirm our claims and the conversations taking place on our new more social websites. Why Stories Matter NOW No one speaks first, so conversations must be present and robust. Speaking in stories creates more vulnerability than "marketing ...

Content Marketing As A Virtual Cycle When the great curator Robin Good's Scoop.it feeds hit 1,000,000 views every content marketer should take note - curation is the key to successful content marketing. I created controversy recently at Phil Buckley's SEO Meetup , the largest such Meetup in the country, suggesting curation should be 90% to 10% creation for successful content marketing. Curation isn't alone. My ratio left out important gears such as social (the blue gear above) and e-commerce (the green gear). Content Marketing's Gears create a "virtual cycle" where the gains and momentum of one creates gains and momentums in others. Content Marketing's Gears, when balanced, function as a positive perpetual motion machine where any turn of any gear helps all gears. TIME is the most difficult dimension to illustrate. Content marketing has a longer gestation. Time is part of Google algorithm. Your website creates expectations. New websites don't have mil...

Diversified Content Marketing No one cared when I preached, "Content marketing" in 2003. Now everyone is creating "inbound marketing". Some good things happen when everyone does something online. Overall quality of whatever the group marketing is doing tends to go up. One very big bad thing happens too. Chances for your content to shine are reduced by the noise of success. This post is about how to fortify your content marketing with the four horsemen: Four Horsemen of Content Marketing * Content creation. * Content curation. * User Generated Content (UGC) engine. * Ecommerce. Content Marketing Horseman #1: Create Daily When you don't know what you don't know create a lot of content every day, but always have "narrowing the funnel" as your goal. Narrowing the funnel is when you can safely reduce your traffic net because you know what content brings converting traffic. The key is connecting the top of your content marketing funnel (traffic generatio...

  Content Marketing Needs Great Visuals This amazing and very atypical painting by the artist Jean Michel Basquiat is a great example of every web site's limitless need for original visual content. The content marketing tsunami is in full force. Recent surveys by the Content Marketing Institute and Internet marketing guru Brian Solis show 90% of B2B marketers doubling down on their content marketing. Think you can make any money doing things online when and how everyone else is doing them? NO would be the answer to that question. Let's say you are riffing great 500 word blog posts daily. You want to get your thoughts in front of people who can help spread your message. Advocacy is the only advertising left. The old "word-of-mouth" or WOM a misnomer. Social nets inject jet fuel into WOM. Google and other search engines have been water-boarded into accepting "social signals" as an important way to verify claims and index web pages. Advocacy begins with your im...

Think Mobile First Holiday 2013 Don't be fooled. Even if your mobile numbers aren't in double digits yet your e-commerce website is being influenced by mobile devices. Email is easy to curate on mobile devices. If your e-commerce website is like most then email marketing is among your most profitable (if not THE most profitable) channel. Friends who run a $100M e-com site report they are processing 25% top line sales via mobile (pads are the majority of their mobile sales), so $25M is being spent on their website via mobile. In one of my most recent "Scoops" I asked if we weren't all " app builders now ". This post shared 40 video tutorials on how to build apps. Today's post is about how to think "Mobile First" for success during Holiday 2013 by creating "Like Me" tribes supported with great mobile content marketing. Mobile Is Here Holiday 2013 is time to think like an app builder. How can your e-commerce team develop engaging, fu...

Why Christmas Happens Now Christmas for e-commerce merchants is happening right now. Christmas happens now because Google is setting their index. There is usually one BIG October Google surprise (to insure PPC payments go UP), but content that is winning now will probably keep on winning right through the holidays (and Vice Versa). Christmas is happening now because Internet marketing teams are looking hard at their numbers to figure out what is HOT and what is NOT. HOT products get special attention (and more inventory). NOT HOT products are moved to the "wait and see" or "not going to happen" areas (a lost limbo of a place). If that sounds like e-commerce is one big GUESS you aren't far off. What is or has been HOT so far is no guarantee of hotness in October - December. There are always 4Q surprises too. 4Q Surprises are products that weren't hot but got an Oprah mention or some other huge boost and suddenly became hot. E-commerce merchants can ONLY play ...

Content marketing is becoming a primary strategy to solve the challenges of massively scaling and diversifying marketing channels. But content does not naturally support both scale and diversity at the same time. The only thing that scales as endlessly and cost effectively as the digital world is data. As a result, data marketing is on the rise and will ultimately inherent the throne as the core strategy for modern marketing. What is data marketing? It's using interactive data to directly influence or add value to your prospects, customers, and partners. Think of it as content marketing without the editorial. Data marketing is already fueling the rapid growth of content marketing. The best pieces of content marketing are typically wrapped around a compelling piece of (static) data. The key is that stripped of editorial, data must become interactive and not only deliver personalized insights but capture and bring user input back.  Modern business solutions are increasingly...

Tips From How Content Gets Shared My friend and fellow Internet marketer Phil Buckley ( @1918 ) paid me a nice compliment this morning: I'm always impressed by the different ways + Martin W. Smith  slices and dices his data to find the actionable nuggets. Thought it would be interesting to share how I created the Content Marketing Social Mentions Study Phil was complimenting. As we wind our way through the journey of the post on MartinMartySmith.com we will discover some new ways of thinking about content marketing. This post is a step-by-step HOW To Create five new critical content marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Topsy not GA Google Analytics under counts social by up tot 30%. I like Topsy.com for social analytics. Here is Topsy's graph of ScentTrail's social mentions for the last 30 days: Content Marketing KPI #1: Daily Mentions Your content must spring legs and walk around the social world. This chart proves that is happening for ScentTrial. I don't ...

The local newspaper is in trouble. Heck the New York Times is in trouble. Fewer people read the paper and newspaper websites are not good . I love our local paper, the Raleigh News and Observer. I look at the N&O piece about Poetryslam, the Scrabble-like magnetic word game I created a lifetime ago, daily since it hangs framed in my office.  The News&Observer is in trouble because the web isn't the same as print. As obvious and clear as that statement is the TRUTH of it hasn't sunk in. The News&Observer is a content marketing mess. They haven't met and wouldn't know a keyword if it bit them on the butt. To say the N&O is a hot SEO mess is to be generous. Social? Not so much. The N&O's problems stem from beating a dead horse - the editorial-centric newspaper model: The Editorial-centric Newspaper Model assumed local news exclusivity and the old model drank from the profitable trough of classified ads and the local share of national ad buys (Sunday ...

A company that publishes over 460 websites, 200 mobile sites and apps, and 200 print titles knows something about media and content. Last week, I had the pleasure of discussing trends with executives from IDC's parent company International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading technology media company. Here's what I learned about the changing state of communication and content. The currency of information is shifting: The primary indicator of engagement is the "quality" time spent with content as well as the meaningfulness of the action that time drives. Someone who is truly engaged in a conversation is more likely to download content. Some content is Core while other content is Candy. Core content gets fewer pageviews but drives more meaningful action while Candy content attracts attention (such as page views or clicks) but doesn't drive much action. Be careful about using easy metrics like page views or clicks as a sole metric as they are easy to manipulat...

Many technology companies have directed their marketing and sales teams to look for business beyond the traditional IT customer.  The secret to marketing to the line-of-business executive is to think like they do. Huh? Is this a secret? Imagine you have a cute little terrier that you love dearly but who chews up everything in sight.  You fear that you will have to give the dog away if he keeps wrecking things.  As a super-busy person you rarely have time to read articles, however, one of the articles below will stop you in your tracks. Which one?        a) Animals around Our Home        b) Dogs: What do they do every day?        c) Why We Love Terriers        d) How to Stop Terriers from Destroying Your Home You know that the answer is D.  And if each of the authors had a dog training business, which one are you most likely to contact? Everyone...

I was surprised to hear so much talk about the 'buyer's journey' at a recent Sales 2.0 conference. More talk than I often hear at marketing conferences! Having said this, it was clear that many people who talked about buyer's journeys did not know what the term meant. A hesitant raise of hands at one sales enablement panel showed that a little more than half the room thought that their company used a buyer's journey framework. The panelists didn't buy that answer. Sniffed one, "Most companies lift the sales stages right out of their CRM system and call that a buyer's journey." What isn't a buyer's journey? It isn't a sales methodology. It isn't build rapport, uncover needs, identify options, propose solutions, and close the deal. It isn't a product life-cycle. It isn't development, launch, grow, mature, decline. It isn't marketing stages. It isn't build awareness, create interest, engage, and persuade. All of these...