Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

An unfortunately accurate corrective to the recent "Facebook is dying" meme. 2013 truly was the year everyone just couldnt be arsed checking the facts: "A British academic studying social media found that young people use lots of new-fangled services, such as Instagram, because their parents are on Facebook. “What we’ve learned from working with …

The above image is from Drake Baer's FastCompany article "Why Successful People Have So Many Groups Of Friends", which is all about networking for career success, something I've never done and am very unlikely to start.

Some key points from "The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement ... to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms: - Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them.... - Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, re…

Good post from @JamieJBartlett: "Social media wants to turn you into a narcissist. Tell everyone about yourself: you're important! Where are you? What are you eating? Who are you with? What films do you like? The world wants to know! Actually, the world doesn't want to know: it's a marketing ploy. The more you share about yourself, the more …

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. "

Yet another tool. Sigh. Apparently: "Tackk allows anyone, to create anything, and share it anywhere. There is no software to download, no login required, nothing to join + no special design or development skills needed. In fact, those who have used Tackk, literally call it "ridiculously simple." And we agree. Simply visit the Tackk home page and…

Reason 1: "To many, it just seems like noise. " They discover this only now?

One of the reasons I created this Tumblr was to use it as a 'first draft’ of a Content Hub (see post), an idea which crystallised after reading Sloan’s original content strategy piece on Stock and Flow.The Hub is basically my way of saying that there’s more to life than the Stream. Unsurprisingly, Alexis Madrigal’s piece in the Atlantic caugh…

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.

This video is aimed at developers interested in combining machine translation, automatic semantic analysis, human curation, faceted and federated search, and social media to create a machine-assisted multilingual longform content curation engine.

" Engaging employees internally has a direct impact on how the company is perceived externally. While the term employee engagement (or any of its variations) don't appear in the report, it's clear that combining social media with good management practices produces more engaged employees who have a direct impact on how the outside world views the o…

"What drives sharing? It’s a mix of attention, emotion, and reaction. Here’s hard data on which news stories took off and which didn’t on social." - Nieman Journalism Lab

Pour le Journée Européenne du blogging multilingue, a video of one minute (waltz) length sur the bloggingportal.eu reboot, avec une "first look" à les wireframes et pas un mot dans mon accent francais de vache espagnol.

"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. "

"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."

Data from bloggingportal.eu, extracted by BrusselsBlogger, gives some idea of the dominance of English as a blogging language on EU policy.

"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. "

"Knowing who is in your community is key to success for any and all Facebook marketers. Often times who you think is in your community is far different than who really is or who you wish was in your community. As part of Tabsite’s “Get a Grip” Series on Facebook Marketing where we help marketers look at key aspects of their Facebook strategy, thi…

" social marketers mistakenly equate the strength of their community with the size of their following. They establish fans on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as key performance indicators and then blast them with brand messages. The truth is that the strength of your community has much less to do with how consumers are connected to y…

“There is a huge audience of readers out there craving this kind of storytelling ... With phones and tablets, they now always have a reading device available on them to dig into something.”

I received a couple of interesting reactions to the post about rebooting BloggingPortal, but as some of them were by email I decided to reply in FAQAO (Frequently Asked Questions And Objections) format, which I just invented, in case others have the same questions.

“We now know that there’s sleight of hand, and special effects, behind what we read in the newspaper.”... You didn’t know before?? What’s the % of newspaper stories with PR behind them in some way? 40%? 50%? More?

"A majority of digital marketers haven’t received any formal training in digital marketing: 82% report learning on the job."

"many marketers still feel in the dark when it comes to digital know-how, according to new research from Adobe. More than 80% of professionals are still receiving their digital training informally on the job and only 9% feel fully confident their digital efforts work, the poll of 1,000 U.S. marketers found."

"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…

With BlogActiv feeling a bit creaky, I spent the summer taking a hard look at Google+ and Tumblr, and integrated my GTD (Getting Things Done) system with my online presence.

"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…