Biznology

When you put lots of energy, time, and passion — but no plan — into your social media marketing and PR campaigns, you’re a forager. And you surely won’t starve foraging. You’ll always be fed. Social media foraging does get protein in the pot, though that protein is generally more in the form of grubs than it is prime grade lean steak. As they say, “look under enough rocks and you’ll eventually find a snake” (to eat). And, growing your followership, engaging heartily and consistently, and building up your Klout and reputation means that you’ll increase your snake-finding opportunities. But what you’re really doing is setting up a system where you know where to look and under which rocks.

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Bill Gates, in 1996, predicted ”content is king,” Bill said content would revolutionize the internet because it “allows material to be duplicated at a low cost, no matter the size of the audience. When it comes to an interactive network such as the internet, the definition of ‘content’ becomes very wide.” Michael Eisner, in 1994, said businesses have to “reinvent themselves every seven years, as businesses mature and situations change.” These two statements make me believe, today, as Bill’s prediction still continues to come true, it has “matured” to be “Video content is king.” Here are 37 reasons why. Read the remainder of this entry »

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The primary Google Penguin update and all of the subsequent Penguin updates have targeted sites that were guilty of “over-optimization.” These sites were taking SEO to the extreme and participating in activities that the Google Webmaster Guidelines advised against in an attempt to gain an unfair advantage over the competition. Site owners that used a keyword-rich domain name as opposed to the brand name, created keyword-rich microsites to rank highly for specific keywords that would then direct visitors to the main site, wrote low quality content that was written primarily for the search engines instead of target audience members, and relied too heavily on keyword anchor text usage saw a huge dip in traffic and rankings. Read the remainder of this entry »

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Content marketing can only be effective if the content you’re producing is relevant and informative enough to attract your target audience and hold their attention. Relevance will most certainly depend on the specifics of your audience, which is why smart content marketers think in terms of audience segments. These might include the different roles, industries, and organizational sizes of your target audience members, for example. Those are fairly common ways of breaking your audience down. But one important way you may not have thought about segmenting your audience is by where they are in the buying cycle. Read the remainder of this entry »

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One of the more astonishing things about the social media revolution is that companies have had to dramatically loosen the reins on employees speaking publicly about their workplace over just the past few years. Until social media and blogging democratized the creation and distribution of online content, companies relied only on company spokespeople, and it was easy to keep a lid on unofficial communications, because there were few channels. Then user-generated online content was invented, first with blogging apps and then with social media, and in short order, companies large and small had to figure out this radically new landscape. Employees, executives and spokespeople had to figure it out too. Read the remainder of this entry »