Place all your content eggs in someone else's basket, you'll get what you deserve. Facebook it, after all, a business. Some basic advice here, but it amounts to the same thing: monitor, optimise & diversify: "Facebook organic reach was around 6% in February, 2014 — a decline of 49% from October. For brands with more than 500,000 likes, the fall-o…

"It’s hard to fake being useful. You have to know what you’re doing, from your strategy all the way through your execution. But when useful content is so important to your credibility, it’s hard to justify anything less. ... How do you make content useful? ... craft it with users’ real needs, decisions, and questions in mind" Insight 2 from resea…

Maybe the EC should focus on being useful online, rather than being trendy on Facebook? From the ever-good Digital Tonto: "Brands need to become publishers [who] begin with an editorial mission ... [so] stop thinking about content and start thinking about what you have to offer the world ... stop thinking about promoting and start thinking in te…

"He says that his goal is to capture the readers attention like these [clickbait] articles, but then get them to interact, think about, share, and meaningfully engage with the content. " - 2014: The future of content marketing - an interview with Brian Solis - Technorati Business

The Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Pulizzi took a deeper look at the recent CMI/MarketingProfs B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks study. Of the many interesting points here, this is what resonated with me the most:“Implementing content marketing in larger enterprises can be a political nightmare — not to mention the added complications caused by …

"On SlideShare you can upload your presentation and if it gets popular, it can be viewed by millions of people. If you know how to make the presentation, you can not only get traffic to your site, but you can also improve your rankings with Google, expand your followship on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc., attract more s…

Good intro to the maths of virality, and why Upworthy's best friend will kill them eventually: " As a result, there’s a direct feedback loop between C and FBT [Facebook Throttle - the % of friends who will see a user's FB share]: the higher your clickbaitiness (C), the less that Facebook will throttle you, and the more likely that your articles w…

There’s nothing more devastating than a rigorous debunk sprinkled liberally with acid. A model to keep in mind whenever setting the record straight: be entertaining.

Excellent advice here: "The right mix of content will always be “it depends.” If you’re selling jeans or computers to shoppers at the mall, it probably doesn’t matter that much what Red Bull or Intel or SAP are doing, content-wise. Their activities may provide ideas and inspiration — but at the end of the day, you’re in a different vertical, selli…

"Do You Need a Separate Mobile Content Marketing Strategy?"

3 cheers for less warm fuzziness! "In 2014, we need to move away from measuring our content marketing with soft engagement metrics such as ‘retweets’, ‘shares’, ‘linkbacks’ and ‘Likes’, and start having adult conversations about ROI. ... whilst engagement may make your marketing team feel warm and fuzzy inside, it counts for nought if your conte…

" Content marketing is really about providing valuable information or content to current and potential customers for the purpose of building trust, branding, awareness, and positive sentiment. A successful content marketing campaign establishes you as an expert in your field, and that sets the groundwork for a long-term business relationship."

"My favorite part ... is that I’m usually wrong" Refreshing!

Most stuff on my TumblrHub tagged 'content strategy' are also tagged 'content marketing', so I've been pondering the distinction for a while. Quite like this take: "Content strategy is a field of practice useful for content as marketing and content as a product or service. In other words, the practice is distinct from the purpose."

"Changes in Google’s search algorithms have twice hammered the young company in recent years, leaving its brands ... hemorrhaging traffic." Variety writes like this is a bad thing? Thank Google for rewarding quality.

"Basically, your business blog should provide prospective customers another tool to research your industry, company, products, and services without giving them a hard sell. "

"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. "

"The following is a visual model of all the core tenets I espouse so fiercely here at The Sales Lion and with all our clients as well (To view each, just use the scrolling buttons on the site). I know each of these 12 tenets, if followed, get results– specifically by building your brand, increasing traffic and leads, and finally by generating a lo…

A useful matrix of the pros and cons of 6 different approaches to meeting the single biggest challenge in content marketing - feeding the beast consistently

"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 …

"But the strategy of marketing itself as a fast food alternative to Big Food has clearly worked well for Chipotle. Now Chipotle is betting that it can sell even more burritos by lambasting the Big Food companies that drug animals in the name of profit. That's the message of a new short film and game the company launched Thursday that takes a cu…

"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…