Now define your goals, and try to make them quantifiable. For example: What do you want to accomplish? Leads, sales, or something else?

Generate a content calendar. Don’t try to wing it because it can lead to rushed, poorly thought-out posts that no one will want to read. Plan around key dates:

• What trade shows are you planning to attend?
• When do you have product releases?
• When are your prospects’ buying cycles and what stage of the buying cycle are they in?

Then supplement with helpful, informative topics; don’t make the mistake of trying to sell in each post. No one wants to read a sales pitch.

This calendar will help sell the ideas to your superiors, because…

You need to have buy-in at every level of your organization. Social media tools are usually free, but your time and the time of your co-workers are not.

To get good content, you are going to need additional resources from many, if not all, of the departments in your company. Writing for these resources is outside of most people’s daily workload and you may need help to persuade them.

Plus, someone will need to own these tools, manage the calendar, and work with the corporate website owner.

Now commit, integrate, and support. Ever seen a blog that hasn’t been updated in two years or a Facebook page with no information? How about a company that never responds to comments on these pages? Yeah, it’s sad.

Social tool abandonment happens for many reasons. Maybe they didn’t have time to properly run it or they left their job and no one inherited the ownership. These types of things can make your brand look small and weak. It’s vital for multiple people to have access to the social media tools and to share ownership.

Integrate and support your posts with your traditional and digital marketing campaigns. If your communications work together with a consistent topic and message, then all of the tactics will produce better results.

According to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg, the News Feed changes are designed to give users a more personalized and customized experience. The three main changes are as follows:

• Visual content will be more impactful—photos and videos will receive increased prominence in the News Feed.
• News Feeds will have sections—users will be able to filter content, similar to selecting a specific section of a traditional newspaper.
• Mobile and desktop experiences will be integrated—Facebook will have the same look and feel on all devices.

So how does the “new” News Feed changes affect your content marketing strategy? It’s not as simple as just posting more content more often. A page’s posts are 40-150 times more likely to be seen in the News Feed than on a page, so it’s crucial for marketers to understand how content is placed into the News Feed.

Content, from both individual users and brands, is pushed to the News Feed based on EdgeRank, the proprietary Facebook News Feed algorithm. EdgeRank is comprised of three factors:

• Affinity: Measures how close a user is to the content creator. For example, if a person has “liked” your page, his or her affinity score toward your content is higher than users who have not “liked” your page.

• Weight: Measures how users interact with content. The weight score increases with a post’s popularity. User actions such as shares, “likes”, and clicks all increase the weight score.

• Time Decay: Measures the value of a post over time. In today’s 24-second news cycle, “new news” quickly becomes “old news.” Time decay represents how the value of a post decreases over time.

The higher a post’s EdgeRank score, the more likely it is to appear in a user’s News Feed. When you consider EdgeRank as part of your Facebook content marketing strategy, you increase the likelihood that Facebook users see your page’s posts.

So what can brands do to proactively include EdgeRank in their content strategy?

• Review your current Facebook analytics: Look at what types of posts, and what content, engaged your users the most. This information will tell you what types of posts and content are likely to have high “Weight” scores.

• Find opportunities to include visual content in your posts: With the increased emphasis on visual content in the overall News Feed, plus the knowledge that visual content is more likely to generate comments and posts, brands can increase a post’s “Weight” score by making it more visual. For example, instead of posting just a link to a product page, consider including a photo of the product with the link.

• Keep posts timely, but don’t “spam” your followers: Posting content frequently will ensure that your posts have a higher “Time Decay” score – but over-posting can lead to negative user feedback, which lowers the “Weight” score. A Facebook best practice is to post no more than 2 to 3 times per day, with posts scattered throughout the day. In certain cases, such as real-time posting during an ongoing event, a brand may want to post more frequently.

• Post compelling, relevant and varied content: We all love puppy and kitten photos, but are these working to build affinity amongst users and your brand? Posts that are compelling and relevant to consumers will increase the likelihood that they will click on your content, visit your brand’s page, and take other actions that increase the “Affinity” score.

To see a preview of the News Feed changes, and to sign-up to use the “new” News Feed, visit https://www.facebook.com/about/newsfeed.

Begin by identifying exactly who your target is. Create a persona for your target, whom you will support along their purchase journey.

Based on this persona, deliver the type of content this audience will appreciate. If it’s teenagers, they may not want to read white papers, but may read an infographic or watch a short video.

Understanding your target’s media consumption and social networking habits will help you determine where content needs to be placed, and how and where it should be promoted. Your website or blog may be the place for detailed content, but Twitter and Facebook posts can drive your audience there with minimal effort.

It is critical to understand your target audience’s purchase cycle. Understand when they do research, when they are in evaluation mode, and what happens at the moment of purchase. Deliver content that helps them make decisions at each point in the purchase cycle.

As a marketer, be clear about the purpose of every bit of content you deliver. Is your goal to influence, educate, or drive specific action—or are you just looking for referrals?

Having clear goals will help you measure the success of your content marketing activities. Determine your key performance indicators and let them be your guide to revise and optimize your content and your strategy.

And remember, it’s okay to retire older content as part of the optimization process.

There are many ads that are lauded for their humor, originality, and willingness to take a risk. For example, Fiat, Toyota, Kmart, and Orbit Chewing Gum manage to deliver their messages with equal parts humor and efficacy without being swallowed up in a sea of retractions and apologies for bad judgment and grossly inappropriate content.

Yet other brands (most recently, Hyundai) have crossed the line and managed to change brand perceptions overnight—and not in a good way.

Clearly, edginess grabs attention. Risk-taking is part of a good marketing strategy, but the question is, when does it become a PR nightmare and when do the words “damage control” become synonymous with the brand?

Bad judgment is perhaps an occupational flaw. We (marketers) are like the popular athlete in high school—always trying to be the center of attention. Sometimes that approach backfires.

With a little forethought, we can still take risks, be edgy and creative, and manage not to offend…at least the majority of the people.

Of course not everyone shares the same sense of humor, but there are a few guidelines that will help avoid back-pedaling and a torrent of apologetic posts on Twitter.

Ask these questions of the campaign concepts:

• Is it funny without resorting to 5th grade bathroom humor? And if it does resort to bathroom humor, is it done in a way that keeps the humor, but subtracts the gross-out factor? (For example, see the Kmart “Ship Your Pants” commercial). Keep in mind that this spot did manage to offend at least one outspoken group (Christian women), but the vast majority of viewers found this ad to be hilarious.

• Is there a dark side to the campaign? Will the message of the campaign outweigh/outshine the dark drama? If the answer is no, throw it in the bone pile (e.g., see the Hyundai spot).

• Is the message an amalgam of racial, religious, and/or sexual preference stereotypes? If so, is the humor universal or judgmental? See this Häagen-Dazs commercial for a good example of how not to offend.

• Is the humor timely? The fate of a risky ad campaign is precariously balanced on the tenor and events of the day. Imagine a poorly executed/timed ad deployed on September 11. Of course you can’t predict what’s going to happen at any given minute, but you should be keeping track of the pulse locally and globally.

• Is the risk worth the reward? Or, more importantly, will the risk be rewarded at all?

From Amanda’s speech:

“I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, ‘How do we make people pay for music?’ What if we started asking, ‘How do we LET people pay for music?’”

Crowdsourcing is the act of soliciting contributions (money, labor, information, etc.) from a large group of people, typically an online community.

Zach Braff used Kickstarter to raise $2.5 million dollars from 37,000 donations to fund the sequel to his original movie “Garden State.” To help bring in support, he is providing gifts to different donation levels. Offers include production diaries, a backer’s thank you screening, one’s name placed in the movie, the opportunity to name a character, or for $10,000 dollars, an individual can say a line in the movie!

It’s not just for music and movie projects either. Formlabs in Massachusetts is designing a high-end 3D printer for the desktop and asked for $100,000 to make it happen. The company has raised almost $3 million. Kickstarter funds projects for almost anything: art, fashion, technology products, games, and more.

Loyal fans and brand supporters have shown that they are willing to financially support a community, a belief system, or technology that they are emotionally connected to. They also feel that connection when they receive something that solves a real problem and when they feel a sense of control over the things that influence their lives.

Will this work for every company? Of course not. But many entrepreneurs find crowdsourcing to be an effective method to connect with financial backers that support their companies’ brand missions and goals. Building this emotional connection with prospects should be what a company looks to create when it’s in its infancy stage or about to launch a new product or service.

True or false: Word of mouth marketing has its own acronym and trade organization.

True, and for a mere $3,000, you can become an annual member of WOMMA.

What is the definition of a meme (rhymes with team)?

A. The cultural analogue to a gene, which self-replicates and mutates in response to selective pressures

B. A word coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene

C. A shortened form of the ancient Greek word mimeme, meaning “imitated thing”

D. An image, video, website, hashtag, or other element that spreads from person to person

Clearly D is the only one that relates to marketing communications. But this was a trick question because all of the above accurately describe a meme. Think about that the next time you share one of those Victorian lady “quotes” on Facebook!

Which of the following is NOT real?

A. Astroturfing

B. Nano-campaigning

C. Limerclicks

D. Reverse graffiti

E. Trolling

Okay, I admit it: I made up C. But how fun would it be to write pay-per-click ads that are also limericks?! All of the other answers are real (Google them for proof).

So what crazy or clever terms have you heard for marketing strategies, tactics, or trends?

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Great ideas stem from great research. In this video, you’ll see how Martino Flynn helped Welch Allyn use brand research to develop a strategy for repositioning the brand to more accurately reflect who the company is today.

If you want to get your branded content on an iPad, whether it’s a sales aid or a consumer-facing piece, you probably have considered building an iPad app. Native apps are great, and allow you to take advantage of just about every feature and function the iPad hardware and software have to offer. Apps, however, can be complex to design, build, and update; and for applications that are primarily showcasing content, the cost and time requirements can be prohibitive, often pushing the investment out of balance with expected return.

The iBooks format, on the other hand, allows for the production of an iPad multimedia “book” that’s easier to create, update, and distribute. Creating a custom iPad app requires a high level of programming skill, and while there’s a core set of development tools that Apple offers, there are many different methods and techniques that a developer can choose from. Ultimately, the app is built with code, many assets, and a distribution process that’s rigid and can be tedious to navigate. Creating an “iBook,” on the other hand, is much simpler. There is a single, free authoring program from Apple that’s used to make iBooks. And while it supports complex HTML objects, a great deal of multimedia functionality is built into widgets that are relatively easy to integrate into a book layout—more familiar territory for graphic designers and many marketers alike. And while there is a commercial “iBookstore,”you can make your own “iBook” and simply distribute it as a file that anyone with an iPad and the free iBooks app can open (very useful in the case of, for example, a multimedia brochure). Sure, you can distribute iPad apps within your own company “ad hoc,” but this process is still regulated by Apple and requires some setup for every iPad on which the app needs to be installed. Distributing an “iBook” (assuming it’s all your own content), in contrast is just about as easy as sending someone a PDF.

How do you know if an iPad app or an “iBook” is the better way to go for your project? Consider what you’re trying to achieve. If you need complex functionality, such as access to the iPad’s camera or complex gestures, and if you have some time and money to invest, an iPad app can be almost anything you can dream up. But if you have content you need to showcase in a slick tablet experience, or maybe don’t have a huge budget and all the time in the world, consider the iBooks format, which suits many marketing application needs, such as sales aids, how-to books, any type of reference booklet, and more.

Further Reading:

http://www.futurebook.net/content/app-vs-ibook
http://stormadvies.com/blog/differences-apps-ibooks/
http://www.plankdesign.com/blog/2012/04/ibook-vs-app/

In early April, after the flow of negativity reached a max, and JCP failed to respond to customers, Johnson was released from his position as CEO. While most brands would stop there, maybe just issuing a press release to announce the change had been made, JCP took it a step further.

On April 30, JCP launched an ad featuring a series of all-American vignettes to the tune of an understanding voiceover that says:

It’s no secret. Recently, JCPenney has changed. Some changes you liked, and some you didn’t, but what matters from mistakes is what we learn. We learned a very simple thing, to listen to you. To hear what you need, to make your life more beautiful. Come back to JCPenney, we heard you. Now, we’d love to see you.

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Not often do big brands identify mistakes and own up to them – but it’s even more rare to publicly address them in such a fashion.

At the close of the ad, viewers are asked to visit the new JCP Facebook page where the brand says: “we’re listening.” Are they listening? Travel on over to the page and you’ll see hundreds of comments from disgruntled fans, and nearly instantaneous responses from a team of JCP representatives. Here’s a sample:

If you’re on Twitter, there’s also a hashtag to follow: #jcpListens

The incredible power of the customer’s voice grows every day as more and more brands embrace the benefits of social media. Negative situations can greatly impact a brand, but it comes down to how a brand responds when the customer calls. Addressing issues when they happen can only help a brand, and through social media, brands are able to respond in real time, providing customers with peace of mind by knowing that their concerns are heard.

Bravo to JCP for understanding the issue and realizing the potential that social media presented to address it. It takes courage to own up to faults, and even more to open up chains of communication on social media, where fans can be exceptionally vocal. Already, not even a day into the campaign, JCP is seeing positive energy coming its way on social media – fans and customers praising the brand for the initiative. See how easy problem solving can be with a little transparency?

Knowing that they had a truly unique new product with a bunch of cool features, Sid Bhattacharya and his team at Xerox began thinking about demo videos a little differently. Sure, it’s something that every product introduction needs—but why do you have to do it in the same way as every other product introduction? Why not stand out instead?

The Assignment. Sid and his team identified the top features of the new Xerox^® ConnectKey^® multifunction printers. Then he charged Martino Flynn with producing five, two-to-three minute vignettes that focused on a single, compelling benefit for small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs). The purpose was not only to get customers excited about what the product could do for their offices, but also to motivate the sales force.

He encouraged us to have fun with it—music to the ears of a creative person—and instead of trying to deliver the entire users’ manual in a video, just give the viewer bite-size chunks of information to whet their appetite for more. Made perfect sense to us.

The Solution. To convince the audience that ConnectKey^® would make a real difference in their office, we had to deliver our message in a believable environment—so we created a fictional SMB office with realistic characters. We knew that if the viewer saw themselves (and their co-workers) reflected in the characters, we’d make the connection (pardon the pun) that our client was looking for.

We used a pseudo-documentary style to tell the story of ConnectKey through everyday, slice-of-SMB-life situations. The “fun” came in the lighthearted way we set up the stories to draw the viewer in. Then we delivered the hard product information in character “asides,” where they speak directly to the camera about features and benefits in a personal, human way—explaining how ConnectKey made their jobs easier and made them more productive.

The Result. Early returns have been outstanding. In the first six weeks after release, the series has already attracted thousands of YouTube hits and has been enthusiastically received by customers and salespeople alike.

“I was able to demo these myself at a recent Canada kickoff event, and we have used them many times at the Gil Hatch customer center for internal training events,” Sid says. “Each time, they generate the right reaction and laughter, as well as an appreciation for the simple, yet powerful message they convey.”

To see for yourself, simply click the links below:

Always There | Something for Everyone | Always On Guard | Anywhere, Anytime | Set For Success