"I still catch myself thinking I know better than the wealth of data at my fingertips. That’s not to say your intuition and savvy as a marketer aren’t valuable. You need both. ... take a holistic look back at what worked well, what didn’t, and what you can double down on in the year to come." - Year End Analysis: How to Plan Your Content Based o…

A good holiday break longread: "As people talk back to organizations, organizations find they have trouble telling their story and listening to their customers at the same time. The forces of change affecting content can test the conventional responsibilities of marketing and IT and customer service. "

"The idea here is that when you use storytelling tricks to get your point across, people are going to be more responsive. This is true in everything from PowerPoint conversations to business deals. "

"The rise of content marketing, despite well-publicised scepticism, continues — as illustrated by a new report ... - almost two out of five marketers (38%) still question whether content marketing can deliver measurable ROI. - 70% believe that content marketing helps drive sales leads more effectively. The metrics that are being used suggest a …

Another salvo in the "Content is (not) King" debate: "For every hour of writing a piece of content, they spend two to three hours working on the distribution of it - within their own channels and beyond. The frequency of publishing is reduced in order to spend more time on the distribution of it."

"Content marketing is in its purest form connection marketing. It is offering the right content to the right people with the right frequency and consistency. "

"without giving up their traditional skills, journalists are becoming more and more information "managers". They are behaving like human filters which ... verify and add context to what user-generated content they think to be relevant, and feed it onto Web pages or mobile applications. Thanks to the rise of new social media curation platforms, t…

"Content Marketing is about devising, producing, and using content to market your products or services. You don't start Content Marketing from the content. You devise the content strategy, from scratch, around what you are marketing, and what form or forms of content will most effectively do that." A refreshing view from a fellow grumpy old …

"Persona research is a science in itself, where the basic idea is identifying your audience. It is unavoidable to have a clean understanding of the audience's requirement, the discovery process, their knowledge and their interests in order to deliver appealing content, ultimately helping in your conversion process. This post focuses on how to c…

"Now that content marketing is the hot marketing buzzword, what are the critical elements your content needs to rise above the noise to drive measurable business results? To help you, we surveyed 19 top content marketing experts to get their advice and here's what they say." Good stuff here. PS. Point 1: "Stop being amazing, and start being…

"I'm going to curate and occasionally publish a great little list of content links."

"Trello's a fantastic free app which is fun to use, and makes planning content workflows a snap. The video outlines a workflow, and you can download the Trello board shown"

If only RM also read the article you link to, auto-tagged it (auto-translating it if necessary) and provided faceted search, it'd probably provide 70-80% of a Hub. Neat tool for group efforts like bloggingportal, too.

Good questions on content strategy: "Is a content strategist someone who is a master of the English language, someone who can spin snappy marketing content into a flexible web design that responds to the screen real estate and capabilities of a mobile device? Or, is a content strategist someone who examines your current content lifecycle in an a…

"Content marketing is the art and science of using text and visual content to promote your business without being overtly sales-oriented. Content marketing can be in the form of articles, blog posts, white papers or eBooks as well as visual and audio content like videos, Google+ hangouts and podcasts. In contrast to newspaper writing, which repo…