Amy Harrison recently gave us 5 Things Every Copywriter Needs to Know About Their Prospects based on Lagos Egri’s 1946 book, The Art of Dramatic Writing. She casts prospects as protagonists in their own stories, and challenges content marketers to mine their prospects’ past experiences, present conflict or need, and possible actions.

Approaching content marketing from an educational standpoint, I often modify a favorite teaching strategy called K-W-L: Know, Want to Know, and Learned. I’d draw three columns on the board or have the students do so in their journals and together fill in what they already knew (or thought they knew) and what they wanted to know about a particular topic. After the lesson or unit, we’d return to the chart and fill in what we learned, sometimes making changes to the original Know column.

When it comes to … Read More »

In my earlier post, Content 101, I mentioned the 3 C’s of large-scale content marketing strategizing. Today I’ll dive into day-to-day content planning, once again borrowing some principles from the field of education. After all, content marketing brings customers in by offering something, and often that is information or a skill. Sounds a lot like teaching and learning!

Understanding by design, or backwards design, is a planning framework that starts with the desired end result and, you guessed it, works backward. In teaching, the obvious goal is knowledge, but there are different ways to measure that: written tests or quizzes, performance tasks, or project deliverables, to name a few. I often wrote these objectives as “I Can” statements, as in, “I can identify the four trophic levels,” … Read More »

Did you know that teachers are the ultimate content marketers? It’s true! They generate squillions of activities, assignments, and assessments in order to move their students toward that noble but slightly nebulous goal of “learning.” Their payoff is not in dollars but the very tangible benefits of an educated populace.

More than once in my teaching career, I had the arduous task of designing an entire course from scratch with nothing but the Ohio Academic Standards to guide me. I had a flashback to that past life this week as we sat down to plan Innogage’s content strategy for the coming year.

If you feel like your online content marketing is a bit haphazard when it comes to form and/or function, maybe it’s time to sit down and plan a little. As a teacher (and, further back, a student), I found that the keys … Read More »

Having spent some time in the military, I’m all for differentiating between social media tactics and social media strategy. When it comes to social media, however, many companies overlook, or are not aware of the power and the implications that exist with engaging the company in social media. Consequently, companies will rush in to get a Facebook page, a blog or some other social media profile because “everyone is doing it,” and they fail to set up a strategy, a plan for their activities. The resulting abandoned blog, and Facebook fanpage with little activity is proof to them that this “whole social media thing” doesn’t really work.

But this is not true. A company wouldn’t be successful without a business strategy. In the same way, social media engagement can only be successful if and when the company is willing to … Read More »

Ross Furlong of blogstar.co.uk, recently posted a great infographic about business blogging in one of the LinkedIn groups that I follow. With the post, he asked a good question: are corporate blogs an inward facing vanity project or a marketing powerhouse for customer engagement?

*Original infographic posted here: http://www.blogstar.co.uk/our-blog/

Why Do Businesses Blog?
In answer to his question, I reflected on the stats concerning “why” a business blogs. Seventy percent of the responders said that they blog to share expertise, in comparison to the 52% who said that they blog to attract new customers. While sharing expertise is a definite draw for people to read your blog, if this is your ultimate goal for blogging, you haven’t yet internalized the purpose of a corporate blog.
While sharing expertise is what we are doing when we write for … Read More »

I read a blog post today by Lee Odden on his Top Rank Online Marketing Blog and I felt compelled to post about it.  It’s not often that I agree with everything in a blog post but Lee really nailed it with his post called 5 Tips on Business Blogging With Minimal Resources.

One reason I got so excited when I read Lee’s post – it validates the functionality we have worked hard to put into InnoBlogs.  Lee wrote this post because blog management is NOT easy.  It takes work and strategic focus and dedication and a team – which is then hard to manage and control… With each of Lee’s points about business blogging, I immediately recognized functionality we built into InnoBlogs to assist with or relieve each challenge.  Here are the Five points Lee makes … Read More »

One of the things that drives me nuts about most software is the disconnect between the technical coders and the nontechnical users.  Have you ever bumbled around inside Facebook or Flikr?  I have.  Just because you have a huge presence doesn’t mean that creating intuitive software is easy!  At InnoGage, we strive to make our business blogging software incredibly easy to use.  It’s part of our core mission.  I was encouraged recently to discover that we are doing something right with ease of use…

Case Study: the InnoBlogs Search Engine Optimizer at Incept

We recently released InnoBlogs version 1.4 which changes the business blogging game.  Simply put, I got tired of not being able to answer the CFO’s question of “what’s my return on investment (ROI)”.  I know there are many people who believe that you shouldn’t … Read More »

By Kristen Carter

Have you ever clicked onto a blog , read a few sentences, and immediately clicked off thinking “Wow, that author had no idea what he or she was blogging about“? Because virtually anyone can post anything on the Internet people are typically very critical about what they read online.

Besides spending my time blogging, I also frequent classrooms at The Ohio State University where I conduct graduate work focused on search engines, SEO, and credibility. As I dive ever deeper into the literature surrounding these topics, I am amazed at the importance scholars place on the concept of Internet credibility.

What is credibility and what does it have to do with blogging? In a nutshell credibility is the perception of believability. If you could travel back in time a few hundred years and have a conversation with a man named … Read More »

I picked up a tweet from Jean-Philippe (JP) Maheu, CEO of Publicis Modem, about a great execution by Nike on a Facebook video.  I have a lot of respect for JP, having followed his career and hearing him speak several times, most recently at the last Kellogg School of Management Marketing Conference.

So, I naturally hit his link to the video to see how good this execution was.  I was instantly Shocked, however, to discover that the only way I could view this video was to FIRST click “LIKE” on the FB Fan Page.  Let me make this perfectly clear.

Nike made me commit to Liking their video BEFORE they let me see it.

So… I clicked “Like” and then was permitted to watch the video.  To Nike’s credit – it was a beautiful execution.  Once of the best I have ever … Read More »

One of the things I am involved with in Columbus is the American Marketing Association Special Interest Group on Social Media or AMA SIG – Social Media for short.  Instead of doing our usual speaker / Q&A format we mixed it up a bit with Round Tables!  Watch the video for how it went.  You can check out photos from the event on this Flickr Set!

AMA SIG Social Media Round Table Discussions from TOM WILLIAMS

Here are a few of the take aways from the Different Round Tables:

Using LinkedIn for Business – Hosted by Nate Riggs:

Think about LinkedIn outside of your profile. Focus on how your updates reach other people’s profiles across the network
To get the most out of LinkedIn, you need to engage. Get in the habit of checking LinkedIn for updates … Read More »