Welcome back to Content Marketing & Merlot! After a brief hiatus, Brody and Jayme are back with a big announcement and an awesome interview with Jason Falls and Erik Deckers.

DivvyHQ™ Spells Relief for Content Marketers

For the past year, Brody & Jayme, along with partner Brock Stechman have been hard at work on a new software application that is designed to provide relief from the pain that we all feel surrounding the use of spreadsheets to manage editorial planning, content production and collaboration between content teams. In this episode, Brody & Jayme provide some of the back story that led up to the development of DivvyHQ™  and address several of the inefficiencies that the application addresses.

To learn more or sign up for the free beta, please visit DivvyHQ.com! We’d love for you to try it out and give us some feedback.

“No Bullshit Social Media” – A New Book from Jason Falls & Erik Deckers

Despite what the “social media purists” say about the best practices of social media, at the end of the day, most businesses want to know how they can use social media to make money. A new book from Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer & Erik Deckers of ProBlogService.com provides us with “the All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing”. Here are a few things we cover in the interview:

- How should companies get started in social media? Just start? Or do they need to develop a social media strategy?

- What are the pitfalls of a shotgun approach vs. a strategic approach?

- How do companies figure out which channels/outposts to focus on?

- What are the benefits of developing a foundational, ongoing social media effort vs. going with a campaign mentality?

- What are some of the best ways to build a large following on social media sites?

- How much time and resources should be committed to the social media effort?

- What are some of the best ways companies can measure their efforts?

- What are your predictions on how Google+ is going to play out long term?

Thanks again to Jason & Erik for sharing their “no bullshit” approach and if you’d like to buy their book, get it here.

Like what you hear? Leave us a review on iTunes! Special thanks to Cellar & Loft for our wine of the month: Terra Romana Sauvignon Blanc.

Until next time, we’re toasting your content marketing success!

Welcome to episode #5 of Content Marketing & Merlot, with your hosts, Brody Dorland and Jayme Thomason!

Like what you hear? Leave us a review on iTunes! Special thanks to Cellar & Loft for our wine of the month: Milbrandt Vinyards Traditions Merlot 2008

Discussion Topic: Should Companies Hire Recent College Grads to Manage Their Social Media Presence?

As more and more companies realize the power of social media, they also realize that there needs to be an investment of resources in order to do it right. For busy small businesses, finding the time to dedicate to it is a major challenge and many don’t have the budget for hiring an experienced marketer or agency to outsource the task. They may, however, be able to afford a recent grad or intern to manage the effort. So there’s the question…Would it be better to put your online reputation and social communications in the hands of a recent grad? Or just stay away from social until the company finds the budget?

Have a listen and we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Aha Moments: Ahava Leibtag Shares Content Marketing Lessons from the Healthcare Industry

With a colorful background, including: writing for the Jerusalem Post in Israel, re-writing regulatory policies for federal government agencies, and then transitioning into healthcare marketing with her agency, Aha Media Group, Ahava Leibtag brings some great lessons to the table that every content marketer should understand.

Here are a few topics that we cover:

• Tips on how to turn technical subject matter into consumer-friendly content

• The importance of understanding your target audiences and testing content

• The biggest marketing mistakes that healthcare organizations are making today…Stop the presses!

• The Four Rules of Hospital Websites

• How to improve content and websites in phases when working with small budgets

• Tricks and tools to measure content marketing results

• The power of talking to end users/customers

• Insights from CONFAB 2011: The Content Strategy Conference

• Content strategists are the coolest set of nerds…(we concur)

Thanks again to Ahava for all the content marketing goodness and until next time, we’re toasting your content marketing success!

Cheers!

Welcome to episode #4 of Content Marketing & Merlot, with your hosts, Brody Dorland and Jayme Thomason!

Like what you hear? Leave us a review on iTunes! Special thanks to Cellar & Loft for our wine of the month: Domaine Duseigneur Rosé

In the News: The Alamo Drafthouse Sticks to Their Guns

Quick backstory: The Alamo Drafthouse is a small chain of movie theaters/bar combo located in several major cities including Austin, TX. They have a strict no texting/no talking policy and will throw you out if caught doing it during a movie. Well that very thing happened to a women a while back in Austin and she immediately called the theater and left a flaming voicemail. The folks at the Alamo Drafthouse have turned this very voicemail message into a PSA that they now play before every movie.

Watch the PSA: Uncensored Version

Content Marketing Lessons – We love how the Alamo Drafthouse is providing a niche product/service. They understand what kind of environment their customers want and they’re sticking to that unique value proposition. Additionally, situations like this may be opportunities to capture raw bits of “user generated content” that you can spin in many ways. Positive situations, like testimonials via email or a glowing thank you from a customer left on voicemail, can be used on your website or within social media channels. Negative situations might be training opportunities or uniquely spun into a PSA like the Alamo Drafthouse has done.

Have you ever captured a piece of user generated content and spun it into a piece of marketing content? We’d love to hear your story.

Visit our LinkedIn Group and tell us about it.

Joe Pulizzi Interview

We really enjoyed our interview with Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and the author of the recognized handbook for content marketing, Get Content Get Customers. Here are some of the topics covered in the interview:

• • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see companies making when they get started with content marketing?
• • Content Marketing is kinda like sex at this point…We’re doing it, but a lot of us aren’t very good at it.
• • The power of an editorial process and how we all need to be thinking like publishers.
• • The Chief Content Officer job description
• • What are some tips or exercises that companies can do to get out of their tactical mindset?
• • Assuming a small company has started dialing in their content strategy, what are some of the best content marketing tools/vehicles that can be used to execute that strategy and ultimately move the needle?
• • What’s the ideal frequency for blogging?
• • Blogging and Email – A great one-two punch.
• • The backstory behind the Content Marketing Institute – the How-To Resource for Content Marketers
• • The skinny on the upcoming Content Marketing World – Cleveland, OH, September 6-8th.

Thanks again for Joe Pulizzi for a great interview and for the Alamo Drafthouse for sticking to their guns. We appreciate you. We hope you open one in Kansas City some day!

Cheers from Brody & Jayme!

Welcome to the 3rd episode of Content Marketing & Merlot, with your hosts, Brody Dorland and Jayme Thomason!

Like what you hear? Leave us a review on iTunes! Special thanks to Cellar & Loft for our wine of the month: Washington State Cabernet Sauvignon from Kiona Vineyards

Blogging is So Over

An interesting article came down the pipe this week that caught our attention. The article titled, “Blogging is So Over”, was written by Rebecca Rolfes, founder of Imagination Publishing. Her article talks about how many of her go-to thought leaders aren’t blogging anymore, but that some organizations are hiring free bloggers by the thousands. “So on the one hand, blogging may be over and on the other, it’s on the rise—but you can’t make any money at it…” she says.

Some bold statements here and we don’t really agree with either. From our vantage point, blogging is more important than ever, and you can absolutely make money through this vital online marketing vehicle. Here are a few considerations:

Your business has to be findable online. Blogging brings major SEO benefits in the form of regular, fresh content that relates to your products or services and the benefits to which they a provide. Fresh, high quality content means food for search engine spiders, backlinks and higher search engine rankings. Smells like money to me.

Technology benefits – Adding a user-friendly blogging platform to a site that is otherwise hard to manage gives marketers the tools to take website content publishing into their own hands. When marketers have better tools, doesn’t that correlate to more sales?

Static websites (brochure sites) don’t give visitors a reason to come back. Companies need to think of themselves as publishers and try to create something that your customers will crave and come back for on a regular basis. Much like a popular magazine…imagine if your favorite magazine just didn’t show up one month. Would you be upset? That’s the ideal connection that we should all strive to create with our customers. These connections equal money.

Is Your Website DVR Enabled (with RSS)? One of the most misunderstood, but key technology components of a blogging platform is it’s RSS feed. That RSS feed gives you the ability to syndicate your content in many ways, and it allows your followers to subscribe to your content and get it fed to them automatically. If you don’t have a blog or RSS technology on your site, your customers can’t subscribe to you. No blog/rss, less money.

Bottom line, there’s a reason and a season for blogging and you need to consider carefully the commitment that a blog requires. When done right, you can definitely turn it into money.

How to Promote Without Being Self Promotional

Obviously most businesses have a need to promote their products and services, but there is a fine line that can easily be crossed where your marketing efforts become all about you (a.k.a. self promotion). Companies that are only talking about themselves, their latest award, their latest new client, their latest new service, etc., are going to struggle keeping customers engaged. So how can you keep your marketing from crossing that self-promotion line?

Promotion as a Service

We offer some good examples of how companies are creating a free service offering that shifts the promotional focus away from the company, and focuses on promoting something that their customers are really going to find valuable. Examples include Hubspot’s WebsiteGrader.com tool and Charmin’s Times Square Bathrooms campaign.

So here’s the question…If you need to promote a product or service, can you create something that serves your customers that also ties back to your product/service? A few idea starters that we discuss…Can you give away a free consultation? A free product? Ebook? Assessment? Audit? These types of freebies give you the chance to market the service and take the “self” out of your promotional message.

Upcoming Events

•  Wordcamp Kansas City – June 11-12, Kansas City (Overland Park)
•  Content Marketing World – September 6-8, 2011 in Cleveland, OH

Cheers from Brody & Jayme!

Welcome to the 2nd episode of Content Marketing & Merlot, with your hosts, Brody Dorland and Jayme Thomason!

Special thanks to Cellar & Loft for our wine of the month: Kiona 2004 Cabernet Merlot!

Content Marketing in the News

In this segment, we review several sections of Erin Kissane’s new book, The Elements of Content Strategy, available from A Book Apart. There a lot of great stuff in this book, including a general discussion of content strategy as a new and emerging discipline. This is not a “how-to” content marketing book, it’s a guide to the “what” and “why” of content marketing. In this episode, we discuss Erin’s creative illustration of a typical online search as a trip to the hardware store, the issue of too much content on the web and the notion of content strategists driving the user experience.

Featured Topic – Edge Shaving Gel “Anti-Irritation” Campaign

As our featured topic, we discuss the campaign that Edelman Digital created for Edge Shave Gel to help the brand stay top of mind and take a larger share of the shave gel market from its main competitor, Gillette. With a strong focus on “owning the position of irritation prevention”, Edelman came up with this “Anti-Irritation” campaign that centers around engaging with people online (mostly on Twitter) that are irritated with something. They latched on to the Twitter hashtag #soirritating and then do “random acts of kindness” depending on the irritation that has been thrown out. It’s been a great campaign for them and I think all of us should take note of how they created a campaign that truly speaks to Edge’s core value proposition and desired market position.

Interview with Kevin Magee of Expion

In this interview, we talk with Kevin Magee about some of the ins and outs of the Expion social media management and monitoring platform, some of the things he’s learned from brands like P&G, Wendy’s, Starbucks and Lowe’s, and he shows us how we can apply some of their successful strategies in our own content marketing and social engagment initiative.

Upcoming Events

• •  Content Marketing World – September 6-8, 2011 in Cleveland, OH
• •  CONFAB – May 9-11 in Minneapolis, MN
• •  Allure New Media Webinar: Google Analytics Crash Course – April 22nd, 2011 – 12 p.m. (Noon, CST)

Welcome to the flagship episode of Content Marketing & Merlot! We’re really excited to deliver the latest in content marketing strategy, tips, tools and stories from industry experts who are making it happen! To listen to the episode, click the play button below. If you’d like to download episodes automatically to your iPod or mobile device, click the iTunes icon in the right sidebar.

Special thanks to Cellar & Loft for our Wine of the Month: Pine Ridge 2006 Soma Merlot!

A Little Back Story

The episode kicks off with a little of the back story behind our careers and how we started using content marketing to market our own entrepreneurial ventures. We tell the story of how Allure New Media was formed out of a desire to create a live seminar series and bring new media strategies to the Kansas City business community. During the seminar development process, we also realized that there hadn’t yet been a book published that was offering a process similar to what we were creating. Hey…Let’s write a book! It didn’t take long for us to realize the path that was being laid out before us.

The Present – Why Content Marketing?

Much like the recent resurgence of Merlot after taking a hit in the movie “Sideways”, content marketing is making a big resurgence due to the growth of our online marketplace over the last decade. With a large majority of consumers utilizing the internet and social influences to guide purchase decisions, content marketing has quickly emerged as the driving force behind the most successful companies online.

So Why Merlot?

If the Sideways reference wasn’t enough…We also have a wine reference that we use quite often when trying to explain the concept of “delivering value” at our live seminars. Think of Twitter as the world’s largest house party. You don’t really know many people at this party, but you’re going to do some networking to make this event fun and build some relationships that might bare fruit. What kind of reaction do you think you would get if you walked up to a table full of people, interrupted them and proceeded to give them a sales pitch? Who invited this guy? But isn’t that what traditional advertising does on a regular basis? On the flipside, picture that table’s reaction when you present each of them with a glass of Pine Ridge 2006 Soma Merlot…A different reaction perhaps? You’ve brought some wine to the table, or something of value that added to the experience of that conversation.

Content Marketing defined: The process of creating and delivering valuable content that drives consumers to a desired action.

The Future: Content Marketing is Getting a Corner Office

We wrap up the episode with an interesting trend that is emerging quickly among larger organizations. Content marketing and social media are forcing a changing of the guard within many organizations. With content sitting at the core of these new media marketing programs, companies are hiring “Chief Content Officers” (CCOs) to take on the roles of content strategy development and governance across all marketing channels. Jayme specifically references an article by Greg Matusky title, “The Hottest New Job in Public Relations: Chief Content Officer”. It’s a great article that talks specifically about the job description of this new, c-level role.

Thanks for listening…we’re just getting started folks!