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Content Marketing: Can You Master It?

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By Cision

The online world is awash in content; it’s ubiquitous, invading our every sense and cell of brain power.

Are you contributing to the torrential downpour of words to ether? Are you doing it well and have you mastered it?

It’s anyone’s guess who has mastered content marketing; in fact, I proffer no one. If you are a blogger, then your mastery of content marketing is slim to none, as blogging takes years of daily learning and there’s always more to figure.

The biggest culprit in content marketing is Google. Look every day at Google’s announcements, and you’ll find yet another app destroyed and algorithm rejiggered much to the chagrin of we onliners who think we’re grasping the solutions only to be dismantled with one flick.

Last Friday, I was keynote of the content marketing track at ConvergeSouth. This presentation truthfully made me ponder the meaning of content marketing and where people are headed on this journey.

Do you know?

In this SlideShare deck just below, I provide you with several ponderances:
1. Timeline of a Blogger – Years 1, 2, and 3 and what you may expect (from my POV, of course)
2. Content Marketing definition, data and ideas for content
3. Marketing Automation tools

Content Syndication

A successful content marketer needs tools to syndicate content. In a test campaign I did with Cision Content Marketing Suite, five of my blog posts were amplified to the Washington Times, USA Today and Bloomberg. In 13 days, I saw my traffic rise exponentially with 90 percent unique visitors. It’s a fantastic solution and for serious bloggers wondering about what’s next, this is a grand opportunity and especially for company blogs.

Attend a FREE Webinar

Are you familiar with Cision? It is the mainstay of public relations solutions for we who do media relations. Over the years (and I launched my career with Bacons, the precursor to Cision), the company has methodically innovated additional solutions and tools for public relations and companies to boost engagement and execute more systematically with an eye on results.

You’re invited to join me and Heidi Sullivan, SVP of Digital Content with Cision at 2 p.m. ET on Halloween, Oct. 31, 2013 for a discussion, What Is The Future Of Content?

It’s free to sign up, and based on my call with Heidi yesterday to plan our approach, there’s going to be a lot for you to hear.

Here’s the link:

If you have your own thoughts about content and its future alongside yours, please share in comments. Maybe you’ll sign up for the webinar and post your question in the online chat feature during our session?

Buy Message Mapping E-Book

Lastly, did you hear I launched my second book?

Message Mapping: How to Sizzle External Communication with a #RockHot™ Tool for Leaders

You can see why you need this business guide and get your copy (PDF ebook) via https://MessageMapping.co.

Context Marketing Is Newest Social Media Buzz

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light-bulb.jpgWhen you put a noun in front of “marketing,” you get a new trend, #RockHot topic and buzzword. I’ve said that in a blog post or two. It was bound to happen sooner or later – content marketing is being dethroned. Instead of content, insert “consumer.”

Consumer is king and content is queen.

We bloggers and content marketers are the royal subjects to none other than the king. In this case, that’s the consumer, our community, our followers, engagers, lurkers, subscribers, and readers.

It is our inherent duty to deliver relevant and remarkable content our king can use. When a consumer shares and comments on the content you create, then you’ve done your duty. You can remain in the monarchy.

I bet you’ve gotten bored with the “content is king” mantra, too. So, it was no surprise that “context” has become the latest trend on the ‘sphere.

What Is Context Marketing?

I am a HubSpot user; aiming for that digital marketing certificate to put a label on my educational investment this year. When you do inbound marketing, you first must know your buyer persona. Who is most likely to purchase your services or product? What are the demographics around them?

With that knowledge, you begin to feed appropriate content that matters to your prospects. Give them what they need at their doorstep.
• Use RSS feeds to deliver relevant blog posts.
• Build your email marketing list and develop solid content in newsletters.
• Engage at a higher level with even higher level professional content.
• Become the authority for your audience with remarkability.

You’re likely already doing context marketing. Now, you just need to be aware of its cognitive definition.

Give consumers what they need, in the best place at the right time.

Use EverPost To Influence Klout

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EverPost.jpgVia a LinkedIn group, a pitch came from someone I didn’t know asking for a review of EverPost.co. I let it sit and slide to the bottom of the priority list until a better time to find time.

About EverPost

To my utter delight, EverPost is the simplest tool I’ve come across for content shares of others’ material.

You register free with Twitter or Facebook.

Choose which channels you want to share on — either LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Select five categories of topics you’d like to follow.

Voila! A board appears with content from a variety of sites in the categories of topics you want to peruse.

Click share or auto-schedule, and your share is on its way to the channels you selected.

It’s so simple, and there’s a plethora of content at your fingertips to push out to the Interwebz.

Why I Love EverPost

  • Did I say it’s simple?
  • There is zero learning curve; sign up and go.
  • I do want to share good content without strings attached; this enables that.
  • I get to share a wide range of topics from one dashboard. If I get tired of posting content in one category, then I go back to the drop-down menu and select another after deleting one of my chosen five.
  • There are no comments from the dashboard; however, you can go to the blog and read the entire post before sharing (ahem, as you’re supposed to).
  • The tweets show up with the author’s Twitter ID; they can see that a new person is sharing their material.

Klout Is About Influence

Triberr, my fave blogger sharing platform (please ask to join my tribe!), is getting into the influence game. That means influence scoring is going to be more about the Klout number, too.

If you’re at all concerned about lots of shares to keep the Klout score high, then you need to use EverPost.

In about 10 minutes, you can share 20 blog posts. Yes, you can scan the post and vet it prior to sending, too.

I find it always a challenge to concern myself with keeping my Klout score high. I don’t have the ability to sit around on the Interwebz and share content all day. Were I to be able to, my influence score would be higher than it is now.

Perhaps I’m going to use EverPost every day this week to see if I can sustain a higher Klout score just so those numbers prove I’m really an influencer. LOL.

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Clipsi: A New Social Collaboration Tool

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clipsi-beta-logo.jpgClipsi is a new social collaboration tool currently in beta. I’ve been toying with it and am impressed in the earliest stages with what I see. As someone who makes a total mess of bookmarks (I do not organize), I can see how Clipsi will help me curate, collate, collaborate on a Pinterest-style or Storify-style board the content I want to reference and write about.

I’m excited for my colleague and friend, Neicole Crepeau, who is one of the founders of this awesome tool. Please ask for an invite to the beta in comments below…Neicole?

How would you describe Clipsi?

Clipsi is a collaboration tool designed for business users. It uses the Pinterest metaphor, putting extracts or clips from websites and documents onto an online bulletin board, where people can work with them and discuss them. We’re in the very early stages right now, but our product roadmap involves a slew of features to enable teams to use Clipsi boards as a tool for organizing and discussing content.

Right now, a lot of what I see on your blog is about using Clipsi for marketing. How does that fit with this collaboration idea?

We’re following the familiar model of releasing a free product to gain broad adoption, with a plan to add additional paid versions with richer features. Since user adoption is critical to a young startup with a new product, we built the free version with features that help marketers and content creators. When marketers and content creators use Clipsi to market their content, it increases awareness of Clipsi, too. So, we let people create great boards, clip from their ebooks and content, share the boards and clips broadly, and embed the boards on their own websites. We expect the free version of Clipsi will always be a useful content curation and marketing tool, while also being a useful social collaboration tool.

jon-buscall-clipsi.jpgHow can bloggers use Clipsi, then?

I think there a couple of ways. First, you can create boards for your econtent to give potential readers a “peek inside” of your book or PDF. As well as putting reviews and articles about it on the board. You can embed the boards on your book download page or in blog posts, and encourage reviewers to do the same.

Second, you can create boards to enhance a blog topic. Say you’re writing about PR versus Marketing. You could create a board with clips from PRSA documents and charters, articles on the difference, and forums where debates are happening. These days, we don’t want to make our posts too long, but a Clipsi board lets you provide information, right on your blog post, for people who want to dig deeper. And they can discuss and debate the topic more via the Clips. And, you can keep the board updated, adding new information from time to time, to keep the discussion fresh.

You have a Public Boards page and a Top Boards page. What is the difference and what is the plan for these pages?

Public boards at this point are any boards that are not private. In the free version of the product, you get one Private board (indicated by the lock icon) and that board can only be used and viewed by you. All other boards can be accessed by others and appear on the Public Boards site automatically. In the Pro version, we’ll be offering Private Team boards, where you can invite a group of users to work privately on a board.

Top Boards is a page we manually curate and that only contains boards that meet certain criteria, as outlined on this page: https://about.clipsi.com/how-to-get-on-our-top-boards-page/.

We will definitely be adding categories to both pages in the future, and you’ll be able to specify a category for your board when you create it.

Clipsi lets you curate by clipping sections of a source document or article. Doesn’t this promote more plagiarism?

We’re very concerned about plagiarism. This is fine line that any content sharing platform has to walk. Pinterest had the same challenges, Facebook, etc., which all post clips or excerpts. Like other platforms, our terms indicate that it is up to the user to be sure they are not violating a copyright.

They should ask permission if they are going to clip from a copy of someone else’s document that includes the full content, because it is viewable in our viewer. So, for example, in the case of your book, I had your permission and I removed all pages that I didn’t clip from so that your full book was not available via the viewer. Note that we also have a detailed take-down procedure. We abide by the DCMA policies and follow the procedures it outlines. Anyone who believes their copyright is being infringed can fill out our take-down request form at https://about.clipsi.com/copyright-complaint. We don’t want to encourage that.

Right now, you only allow clipping from documents in Dropbox. What if people don’t have Dropbox?

Dropbox is only the first cloud storage system for Clipsi. We picked it because it is the most widely used system. However, there are other common systems that we plan to integrate with. We have our eye on Box, for instance, as it is focused more on business users, which is our target market. But, we are a new product with a lot of features on our roadmap. So it’s one step at a time.

Embed code for your Verve board

Embed code for Social Media Marketing Data board

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Old PR Plus New PR Equals Hybrid PR

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 PR HatYou know those hybrid cars that are more expensive because they run on electricity and fuel? Think about public relations…our profession is like a hybrid car, too. We run on different platforms to deliver mileage for a campaign. We blend a variety of marketing disciplines, just like fuel and electricity to produce.

 On Spin Sucks June 3, Gini Dietrich wrote about the PR firm of the future. She’s seeking hybrid PR professionals to work with her team, and here are the criteria she’d like to see in that person:

  •  Media and blogger relations
  • Content development
  •  Content marketing
  •  Workflow development and email marketing
  • On-page search engine optimization
  • Issues management
  • Client service
  • WordPress coding (bonus)

Old PR

 Recently, I wrote a post right here about the blending of PR being its demise. In that post, which turned a few heads, I had a list of traditional PR and it looked like this:

  • Media Relations
  • Spokesperson Training
  • Message Mapping
  • Thought Leadership
  • Blogger Relations
  • Writing
  • Industry Analyst Relations
  •  Investor Relations/Stakeholder Communications
  •  Corporate Communications
  •  Internal/Employee Communications
  •  Events Planning/Execution
  •  Community Outreach

 

Hybrid PR

 Like Gini says, public relations folks need to be a bit of this and a bit of that to succeed in the new and blended frontier. We have to adopt more than just adeptness on the social channels. We have to jump into new and uncomfortable areas to ensure we’re innovating all the time.

 You know what the problem is with public relations professionals? Too many of them want to stay pure and not change.

 Here’s the rub – WE GET TO CHANGE! We’re in a profession that provides us with the gifts to re-invent, adopt new methods and offer a powerful combination of skills, expertise, and knowledge from content marketing, media relations, digital marketing, social media marketing, thought leadership, message mapping, industry analyst relations, investor relations, employee communications, special events, and so very much more.

I appreciate the word hybrid to describe what I offer. No wonder I’ve had such a challenge sharing succinctly about my services.

 Jayme Soulati offers a breadth of public relations services featuring content, social and digital marketing.

 Would that begin to describe what hybrid public relations looks like from your vantage point?

Customers At The Core

Regardless of what you offer, it’s really the customer who dictates what you pull out of the hat. If you’re not familiar yet with The ArcCompany, the Canadian upstart making inroads into huge insight, then you need to read this blog post or go find the truly provoking comments of Amy Tobin especially in her Sunday social justice post.

As you’re thinking of your customers, just for the fun of it, I’m going to end with another Gini list that helps define PR and the tactics that ought to be in use today. This is a list from Arment Dietrich; it’s “Some of the things we do” taken directly from this post, and if that’s not hybrid PR, nothing is!

  • Develop integrated offline and online marketing plans
  • Content development (white papers, videos, podcasts, blogs, eBooks, webinars)
  • Marketing that content we develop
  • Email marketing
  • On-page search engine optimization
  • Social media
  • Google+ authorship and authority
  • Online reputation management
  • Crisis communications planning and management
  • Employee communications
  • Social media policies
  • Media relations
  • Blogger relations
  • Monitor online conversations
  • Develop online audits
  • Community development and growth
  • Influencer relations
  • Word-of-mouth campaigns
  • Analyze data and web analytics

 

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