I’m amazed that so many seemingly smart people are *still* using the words “marketing” and “advertising” interchangeably.

While I see the silliness everywhere, a good example is all the hoopla around General Motors’ decision to stop advertising on Facebook.

The GM news broke during the same week as the Facebook IPO a few weeks ago.

Mainstream media reporters and citizen journalists jumped on the story. Except for the awesome newsjacking of the Facebook IPO by GM I didn’t think it was a big deal so I chose not to write about it.

The resulting headlines such as The Real Reason GM Left Facebook and General Motors unfriends Facebook imply that GM was no longer communicating to fans on Facebook.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Some people like Mitch Joel and Yaseen Dadabhay got the story right. But most did not. – Stop confusing social media marketing with advertising on social sites by David Meerman Scott

We see plenty of companies that appear to have jumped into content marketing without a sound strategic plan in place.  How can we tell? First of all, messaging is inconsistent and unclear. Key audience concerns aren’t addressed in a meaningful and original way. And the entire content mix of blogs, email newsletters, social media, and the rest has a random and haphazard look and feel.  If marketers at these companies are more than disappointed in the results, it’s easy to see why.  It doesn’t have to be this way.

If you’re new to content marketing, or if your efforts so far haven’t delivered what you’d hoped for, here are some ideas to help you create a content marketing plan that really works.

Key questions:

1. What are your goals?

Your big-picture goal may be to become an industry thought leader, but to get there you must reach a series of interim goals.  As you develop your plan, ALWAYS tie specific numbers and timelines to some or all of the following goals:

• Engaged followers or fans on social networks.
• Newsletter subscribers
• Leads captured from eBook or whitepaper downloads
• Webinar attendees
• Blog post subscribers
• Website visitors from inbound links
• Increase in organic search results – When It Comes to Content Marketing, If You Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail by Michael Teitelbaum

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Business brands got a new way to manage and monitor their reach to fans through the admin panel with Facebook’s recent introduction of timeline for pages. In the admin panel, brands can see what content is interesting to fans and what their conversations look like about the content. The newest feature for brand pages enables brands to view the percent of fans that are reached for every piece of content posted on the page.

According to Facebook, the average post on a brand page only reaches about 16% of its fans – not as high as most brands would like. This new feature, available to brand pages only, is a quick and easy way to see how many fans view what your brand posts and it can also help you decide what types of content to engage fans with in the future.

In this episode of the Future of Engagement, Murray Newlands takes a look at the recently released feature and discusses both the conversation surrounding it and what it can do for your brand.

Highlights:

• New Admin Feature
• Easily Accessible
• Increases Engagement Optimization

This graph was created using the social media monitoring tool Alerti.  A look at the graph above shows the range of responses to this new feature on Facebook page Timeline. Most of the commentary surrounding the new feature is neutral, however almost a quarter of commentary has been positive. This shows the effectiveness of the feature for brand pages. Alerti is a great tool for bloggers since it lets them see what people are saying on certain topics through different social media platforms

Get Alerti for free for 3 months using the alertivideo promotion code!

We talk a lot on this blog about how email marketing and social media should be integrated. It helps grow your social reach, increases email click-through rate, promotes lead generation and reconversions, and builds a better relationship between brands and companies.

But you know what else it does? It brings users back to your website. And it’s critical that social networks are doing this, because like you (you awesome inbound marketer!), content is updating on these sites all the time. People are bound to miss something! The key to using email to increase site traffic is crafting emails that actually provide value for the user — not just so they click through on the emails, but so they continue to open the emails as they land in their inbox every day or week.

So let’s take a look at how some of the big social networks are using email to encourage users to get back on their websites and interacting with their content — you know, what all inbound marketers hope their email recipients will do! – How the Big Social Networks Use Email to Increase Engagement by Corey Eridon

English: Jack Dorsey and Barack Obama at Twitter Town Hall in July 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The age that we live in is dictated by multiple forms of digital communication. We are always connected to the world around us through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you’re someone who promotes their business largely through social media, terms like digital influence should matter to you.

According to digital analyst, Brian Solis, digital influence is a measure of how influential you are on a social network, i.e. it measures your ability to influence people in your network. This rank or unit of measurement has begun to change the way users connect on social networks ñ instead of connecting with people that have the largest number of fans or followers, they now want to connect with those who have the maximum influence. When you connect with an influential user, you ultimately increase your influence and reach.

Measuring influence as a score may be flawed because it may not truly represent the actual reach of a user, tools that measure this factor are a good place to get data on what type of users to connect with.

Listed below are five tools that measure social influence:

Klout

The Klout homepage says that the Klout Score measure influence based on a userís ability to drive action. Every single post or tweet updated by you influences people in your network in some way. Klout helps measure the number of people you influence and the percentage of your influence.

Klout calculates influence for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Foursquare.

PeerIndex

Quite like Klout, PeerIndex, attempts to measure a user’s authority on social networks through their online actions. Scores are assigned for three parameters ñ authority, audience, and activity.

The Authority Score is a measured by the number of followers you have, the number of people you engage with, and also the number of people you reach.

PeerIndex is available for Facebook and Twitter.

mBlast

mBlast provides detailed analytics for measuring influence on social networks, blogs, websites, and articles. Itís ideal for brands that want to expand their presence on digital mediums.

mBlast doesnít only provide influence statistics as a score, but provides brands with detailed insights into how influential users are talking to their audience.

TweetLevel

TweetLevel is a tool that is apt for businesses to find influential users for a specific topic, for calculating number of tweets on a particular topic, and to find shared links for these topics. This not only helps in finding influential Twitter users, but also enables brands to see what kind of data they are sharing.

TweetLevel is only available for Twitter.

Kred

Kred, as the name indicates, is an application that measures your online credibility, reach, and influence. Influence and other scores are measured in terms of the number of followers, how you interact with users in your list, and the reach your tweets have.

Kred is available only for Twitter.

As mentioned earlier in this article, these tools should be used as a starting guide for determining influential users that share the same stuff that you do, however for brand or product promotion, digital influence may not always provide correct data. In such a case, itís best to spend time analyzing your list of influencers, and finding who would be the correct fit for your brand.

Author bio: Joe Linford contributes for www.broadbandgenie.co.uk, the social shopping site for broadband, smartphones and mobile broadband dongles

It’s about where your people are and what they want.  It’s about the ones who pay to get it. It’s about effective marketing.

Recently, Trendwatching released a brief on (R)etail (R)evolution that highlights four ways that e-commerce is transforming including the bridge between the online and offline experience. What’s online becomes a part of our offline shopping with tools like:

• QR Codes:  cell phone users can scan for more information including special discounts, and
• Digital Coupons:  online subscribers can download and use in the store.

This can be exciting but that depends on how you use it.

Change Is Good, If It’s Smart And Efficient

Upgrading the way your clients interact with your business has a lot to do with what THEY want.  You don’t have to wait for complaints to make wise adjustments. But you do have to watch how they shop and how they respond to you and other companies and services like yours. You can get that information by observing and by asking.

Every update to your business and your marketing should serve a specific purpose; because effective change is not about copycat or bandwagon behavior. It’s about what actually works. – It’s Not About Imitation, CopyCat or BandWagon Marketing by Jamillah Warner

• How to Use Data to Enrich Your Content (ProBlogger)
• Clearing Clouds of Confusion – The 5 Categories of Social Media Software (Convince and Convert)
• The Cost of Losing a Customer’s Trust (GigaOM)
• Why Social Learning Benefits Your Business (Mashable!)
• Four Mistakes That Could Damage Your Online Reputation (Marketing Profs)
• How to Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts (CIO.com)
• Why Content Matters in B2B Marketing: A Conversation with C.C. Chapman (Marketo)
• Marketing is Becoming the New R&D (eConsultancy)
• Marketing Needs a New Metaphor (Harvard Business Review)
• Bloggers: Participate in New Research On Blogging (Social Media Explorer)
• Facebook Vs Google: By the Numbers (CIO.com)
• Tell Me Something That Matters To Me (Future Lab)
• Jeff Cohen Talks Social Media and Its Value in B2B Marketing (Marketo)
• What Do You Mean, Exactly, by Social Media? (PR Squared)
• 25 Facebook Campaigns That Will Inspire All Marketers (Simply Zesty)
• How the Right Tools Can Remedy Your Website’s Traffic Problem (HubSpot)
• Don’t Think About It As Content, Think About It as Information (GigaOM)
• Five Ways to Use Facebook Timeline for Business (Marketing Profs)
• Extreme Trust: Can Honesty Be a Means of Competitive Advantage? (Part I) (Future Lab)
• Extreme Trust: Can Honesty Be a Means of Competitive Advantage? (Part II) (Future Lab)
• Brands Will Go GaGa Over This New Facebook Feature (Business Insider)
• 14 Proven Ways to Simplify Your Blogging and Get More Done (ProBlogger)
• Are CEOs Getting the Social Media Thing? (CIO.com)
• 5 Tips to Maximize Your Brand’s Facebook Reach (Mashable!)
• Study Gen Y: Moving communication to social networks (The Strategy Web)

Users can search by topics or trends, start or follow conversations about them, and plenty of other options. Twitter is buzzing with questions: Will So.cl survive social media world? Why do people change social networks? As social and search continue to converge, brands and SME’s will need to take new tools that combine social and search into account when planning marketing.

In this episode of Future of Engagement, Murray looks at the So.cl network’s soft launch, what social media commenters think, and digs further into what this all means for your brand.

Highlights:

• Combines Social + Research
• Integrates with Facebook
• Features “Video Parties”

A look at the graph above shows the success of Microsoft’s successful silent launch of So.cl with conversation virtually non-existant prior to today. The graph was provided by Alerti social media monitoring tool. Alerti is a great tool for bloggers since it lets them see what people are saying on social media. Bloggers can use it to find out what to write about, learn what topic is hot, and more!

Get Alerti for free for 3 months using the freetrial promotion code!

Facebook has  released a new feature that shows  advertisers the percent of fans that  have seen and Liked specific posts on brand pages, Mashablereports.  This will allow brand page administrators to see what works and what doesn’t.

After GMpulled  its $10 million Facebook ad budget right before the social network’s IPO,  the company has has been pressured to prove that it can monetize. Sheryl  Sandberg even joked when speaking at Harvard Business School’s Class Day, “We’re  public now. So can you click on an ad or two?”

In March, Facebook revealed that a brand page’s average post usually reaches 16  percent of its fans.

“As the industry moves towards improving measurement – linking business  success to spending on Facebook – the more engaged audiences will obviously be  more valuable than the less engaged audiences,” Simon Mansell, TBG Digital CEO, told BI. TBG  Digital is a global marketing and technology company, specializing in Facebook  advertising and social media.

The new feature also allows brands to see if a “Like” was reached organically  or through a viral promotion. – Brands Will Go GaGa Over This New Facebook Feature by Laura Stampler

Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure check Future of Publishing out online at FutureOfPublishing.tv!

Got low site traffic? If you’re an inbound marketer, you know that investing in expensive tools and technology won’t solve that problem for you — you need to consistently create content to do that. But if you’re just creating content and lack the right tools and technology to back up your efforts, you’ll soon find you’ve hit a traffic wall.

We’ve talked a lot about how to increase site traffic on this blog, but we haven’t given a lot of real estate to the subject of using the right tools to support your efforts. To remedy that, we’ve not only written an entire whitepaper about using technology to support your marketing efforts, but this blog post will highlight an important section from that whitepaper that teaches us exactly how it can help you grow site traffic, too!

Setting the Stage: Identifying Your Traffic Problem

Let’s say you already have a robust analytics package in place. You take a look at your funnel, and your problem becomes abundantly clear: you don’t get much traffic to the top of your funnel. Just take a look at your numbers! – How the Right Tools Can Help Remedy Your Website’s Traffic Problem by Corey Eridon

The future of social communication is mobile, at least if you believe the latest round of evangelism coming from the technopunditry. I actually buy it, mostly, and I think the idea of being immersed in a web of background, insight and opinion at any given moment is kinda cool in a cyberpunk consensual hallucination sort of way.

Though, like William Gibson’s sci-fi, it’s the vision of a future that is probably a bit further away than most folks would like to admit. But the implications for brands and marketing are truly far-out.

The very nature of mobile is dependent on ‘right here, right now’ experiences; what you call up on your smartphone needs to matter at that moment, first and foremost (not to negate the likelihood of non-circumstantial browsing, but to put the activity and its product into context). That means the immediate future of mobile is price and location/availability. – Tell Me Something That Matters To Me by Jonathan Salem Baskin

Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian coined the phrase “marketing is the new finance”.

Varian foresaw great advances in ways to satisfy people’s needs, better matches between buyers and sellers, and a more robust advertising environment due to the availability of vast quantifies of rich, real-time, highly available “big data.” His predictions today ring truer than ever.

Now, the information-rich environment enabled by the net is transforming marketing into something more. Specifically, marketing is becoming the new research and development (R&D).

Marketers now have immediate access to consumer behaviors and reactions across multiple channels and media. This empowers them to take a leadership role in determining consumer preferences, meeting customer needs, and helping match supply with demand. In other words, driving the business.

Access to consumer behavior across multiple channels and media

Five years later, the information-rich environment enabled by the net is transforming marketing into something more. Specifically, marketing is becoming the new research and development (R&D). – Marketing is becoming the new R&D by Julie Ginches

Blog posts, whitepapers and other shareable content rely on supporting data—not because people just love a good color-coded pie chart (though they are pretty), but because numbers give stories shape. They add scale. They provide perspective. They quantify that something meaningful is happening.

Think about it: which statement would you rather share?

• Teenagers are texting like crazy, more than ever.
• The average teen sends 60 texts per day, up from 50 in 2009 (Pew Research Center).

The second statement tells you that there’s a behavioral trend happening and that the trend has real implications for business, communications, and a number of other fields.

But you can’t just throw a bunch of stats into your content and expect instant gravitas. Finding and interpreting facts to support your argument takes thought, and they should add depth, not clutter, to your point. Here are the essentials you need to know to use data wisely and effectively. – How to Use Data to Enrich Your Content by Conor Powers-Smith

• How to Select the Perfect WordPress Theme for Your Blog (ProBlogger)
• How Do You Tailor Content to Different User Levels? (ProBlogger)
• 9 Steps to Take When You Loathe Your Own Blog (ProBlogger)
• 5 Ways Marketers Should be More Like Bob Marley (HubSpot)
• The Fallacy of Timing Blog Posts & Social Media Updates (Small Business Search Marketing)
• Twitter tiptoes further into the media business (GigaOM)
• Yahoo Launches Big Data Analytics Tool for Online Advertisers (CIO.com)
• Narrow Your Google Searches with a Custom Date Range (CIO.com)
• Social Mobile and Desktop Applications for the Digital Marketer (Socialnomics)
• Seven Principles of Content Marketing (PR Squared)
• Your data has a secret, but you — yes, you — can make it talk (GigaOM)
• Get Obsessed With Your Message (ProBlogger)
• To Tweet or Not To Tweet, Social Media: A Blessing and A Curse (Small Biz Trends)
• How Content Creators Can Think Like Fiction Writers (Spin Sucks)
• 10 Simply Awesome Examples of Email Marketing (HubSpot)
• Dave Kerpen Discusses How to Make Your Business “Likeable” With Social Media (Marketo)
• Marketing Metrics that Matter (Marketo)
• Is Eliminating the Bargaining Power of Customers More Important Than Working on the Customer Experience? (Future Lab)
• Introducing The Rebel’s Guide To Email Marketing (Social Media Explorer)
• 7 Enlightening Infographics About Email Deliverability (HubSpot)
• Social Media Bring Business, But Add Security Quagmire (CIO.com)
• What Blog Tasks Are You Embarrassed to Admit You’ve Overlooked? (ProBlogger)
• LinkedIn Vs Facebook: Who’s The Best At B2B (Simply Zesty)
• To Investigate Culture, Ask the Right Questions (Harvard Business Review)
• Facebook Timeline: 9 Best Practices for Brands (Mashable!)

Over the last few days we’ve been talking about taking your blog to the often-elusive “next level.”

We’ve seen tips for developing your voice and message, creating stronger calls to action, and increasing traffic.

If you’re already working on those aspects of your blog, and are happy with your approach, you’ll probably be hungry for other ideas, looking to the future, and trying to predict what will be most successful tactics for you.

I know I do this myself—I’ll get an idea like the QLD blogging challenge and throw myself into making it happen.

That’s great—one of the best things about blogging is that it lets us pursue our passions!—but I have noticed a tendency to let things drop off my To Do list as these new ideas pop up. An example was pointed out by Ed Boyhan on my Google + post. He wrote:

“Seems kinda odd: here you are providing some useful info on how some use G+, but nowhere on this page is there a “+1? button to let me share with a circle I have for future reference. Makes me doubt your involvement in the G+ community.”

This is a valuable comment for two reasons. First, it’s a reminder of something I need to do, which dropped off my list. Whoops! Second, it explains what the implications of that oversight are—how that looks to my readers, which gives me motivation not just to get that task back on the To Do list, but also to actually act upon it and make that change to my blog. – What Blog Tasks are You Embarrassed to Admit You’ve Overlooked? by Darren Rowse

With few questions asked, the bank gives you $10,000, but takes a $500 fee. With a smile, they tell you to be in touch whenever you’re on your feet and ready to get them that design work. That’s a pretty good deal, right?

In the past two years, Kickstarter.com has redefined the way that start-ups and small businesses raise capital. The online fundraising portal takes a 5 percent cut, which can be a sizeable chunk of change, but they also work with you to promote and market your campaign and make sure it’s successful. And once it’s funded, they’re out of the equation.

Just in case you’ve missed the phenomenon completely, here’s how it works: Businesses, bands, entrepreneurs, and people with good ideas create a video explaining what they want to do and how much money they need to do it. They then create a series of rewards for people that contribute at different levels. If you’re a band raising money to record a new album, $10 might get backers a copy of the CD when it’s done. $25 might buy a CD and poster, while $2,500 gets a house concert.

The Kickstarter team reviews the campaign before it launches and helps to ensure that it’s got a good chance of succeeding. Once it goes live, backers can pledge at whatever level they choose. Their credit cards and PayPal accounts are only charged if the project meets its pre-determined financial goal.

When the campaign ends, the project’s founder collects their money, pays Kickstarter 5 percent, and with their now fully-stocked bank account, gets to work on creating the rewards they’ve promised their backers.

Sound intriguing? Here are a few errors to avoid in making sure that your Kickstarter campaign doesn’t fall short of its goals:

Don’t Be a Panhandler

Kickstarter campaigns that fail to meet their goal often have a common theme: they don’t make financial sense for the backer. I’ve been sent links to several campaigns that offer next-to-nothing for as much as $20. Last week, I supported a friend’s project to film a documentary about the sport of kiteboarding (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1148654711/with-a-kite). I gave $25, which seemed very reasonable for a signed DVD once the project was completed. 56 people agreed with me and backed at that level. However, only three people gave the minimum $5 backing, which included only a “virtual fist bump.”

If you’re not a non-profit organization doing charity work, don’t seek out altruism. Give your backers a deal for paying up front for your work. When paying ahead-of-time saves money, people will do that, but if your prices are the same (or higher) than the finished product, you’ll be hard-pressed to find support.

Don’t Overlook the Video

A Kickstarter campaign is defined by its video. If you’re hawking a quality product or service, you want to present it at the highest possible level.

You don’t have to create a Super Bowl commercial — people are already at your page to learn about what you’re offering, so it’s not necessary to hook them in with dancing polar bears and talking babies.

In 2010, the LunaTik watch became one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns ever (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1104350651/tiktok-lunatik-multi-touch-watch-kits). After setting a goal of just $15,000, the company raised nearly a million dollars ($942,578), vastly surpassing their initial mark.

How did they do it? First of all, their video showed detailed images of the watch, which allows an iPod Nano to snap into it and work as a wristwatch. The four-and-a-half minute video leaves no questions about what the watch is and what it will do. Secondly, the rewards saved people money. 2,432 backers agreed to pre-order a watch for $25 that would later retail for $35. (Notice again that only 128 backers gave $1 just to support the product and receive nothing — why bother taking the time to type in credit card or PayPal info?)

Don’t Forget to Market

Yes, Kickstarter has a built in platform to get the word out about your venture. There are lots of people who browse the site, finding start-ups that they have no connection to and deciding to back them.

However, the great majority of backers will come via your own online networks. Most funding comes in the first day of a campaign. Launch with alerts on Facebook, Twitter, and every other platform you use, and implore your friends to spread the word.

First, get people to your Kickstarter page. Once they’re there, if you present a clean video and rewards that save them money for a product or service they’re intrigued by, you’ll find success. Skip any step in that process, however, and you’re likely to fail. Remember that with Kickstarter, you only get paid if your project meets its goal.

About Anita Brady

Industry veteran Anita Brady is the President of123Print.com, a leading provider of high quality customizable items like customizable business cards, letterhead and other materials for small businesses and solo practitioners.

Listening to the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson I am left with the impression that nothing was more important to Steve Jobs then using technology to produce great products that delivered a great user experience.  Good enough was good enough, even great, for many in the computer industry.  Only insanely great was good enough for Steve Jobs.  Anything less was simply not good enough, it was not ‘art’ and not ‘worthy of artists”; great artists don’t want to put their names on good enough art.

Given that Apple, Amazon, Zappos, USAA, SouthWest Airlines, Zanes Cycles, Richer Sounds, Salesforce.com, O2, American Express.. have shown what can be done by focussing on the customer, why aren’t companies focussing on the Customer Experience?  According to Mindshare the biggest issue with companies and executives is turning VoC into changes in the business such that a powerful impact is made on the Customer Experience.  Why is it an issue? Because of ‘Other Priorities’.  What can these other priorities be?

Clearly THE priority is the share price and the way to hit that is to focus in revenue generation and profitability.  How do you increase that?  The standard framework is that put forth by Michael Porter in the Five Forces model. – Is Eliminating the Bargaining Power of Customers More Important Than Working On the Customer Experience? by Maz Iqbal

Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to Like Future of Publishing on Facebook!