Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

" If we wanted more email subscribers, we’d have to make it easier for people to subscribe." Quartz's new approach to enewslettre subscription, which has seen daily subscriber rates double since February, is like the 'Quick Subscribe' feature I always propose for online community sites: - some users may create an account to subscribe, but most wo…

"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…

"E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined " McKinsey continues with some basic rules for email communications, with brief case studies. Particularly like the impact of customising emails, something we did with the INFSO newsroom over 10 years ago…

Social media 101 perhaps, but worth sharing: "So what can you do to improve your SMO strategy and start generating some positive social signals that will produce powerful results for your business or brand? ...: - Reputation – building a strong reputation online that will have visitors viewing you as a trusted, reliable source. - Engagement …

"Crafting the perfect pitch: Create a message, tailor it to your audience, and include a call to action. Journalists, bloggers, and other PR pros receive dozens of email pitches a day. To make your pitch stand out, take a page from movie marketers. They’re experts in capturing the audience’s attention in three minutes or less and leaving them on …

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…

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

"we're expanding LinkedIn's publishing platform and testing a new feature that lets members write longer form posts about their expertise and professional interests. Posts are shared with your network and the LinkedIn community, and become a part of your LinkedIn profile. " - LinkedIn's Publishing Platform - Overview | LinkedIn Help Center A…

Good perspectives on the limits of audiovisual content re-use: "editor-in-chief of NowThis News ... stressed the need for publishers to create content on a platform-by-platform approach ... bearing in mind the wider context of how content is shared on different networks." In reality, this is no different from text content re-use. You don't necess…

"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

I wonder if their EC clients know? "Since 2006, Ketchum... has billed millions of dollars to the Kremlin to advise and assist Moscow with improving its image in the West. ... one former employee says the client is probably not getting its money’s worth: “I can imagine my old Ketchum colleagues holding their heads in anguish ... This is way, way, w…

Looks like one kind of newspaper has a long future - the worst kind: "Supermarket tabloids have long been an icon of unreliability, largely because of their outrageous claims and sensational, melodramatic design. But when individual pieces are shared via social media, these visual and context clues are typically stripped out... Without this conte…

Worth a look "Meet Haiku Deck, a completely new kind of presentation software. We make telling your story simple, beautiful, and fun."

"when you figure something out that's not trivial ... you're wasting it on Twitter or Facebook. ... The mission of blogging is to empower all of us to go directly to each other with our expertise. So if you know something as well as anyone else, or you learn something or know something that should be shared, then you should share it on your blog. …

Applies equally to projects, where for step 1 (quoted below) the focus should be the project's USP: "Define what exactly your company is, its motto and the sole purpose of its existence. Write down everything that you think your company/website is about. Is it about marketing tips, social media, mobile apps, etc.? Define the existence of your com…

I Just Love This: "For the love of Christ, please let the poor schmuck who is charged with the incredibly demeaning task of hitting the space bar to change the screen just do his one measly job with some dignity. He can figure out if you've finished talking about the slide or not on his own, you don’t need to manually tell him to go on each time.…

Well, plus ca change - absolutely none of the things some BloggingPortal editors said we'd do after our meeting in January have been done, apart from our own posts and what Stefan did, which is ironic given that he told us he had no time to do anything.

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 …

Nice animation about the uncertainty principle, although it’s not mentioned by name, confirmngi the theory that chemistry is what’s left when the physicists have figured everything interesting out ;)

Original linkTonight I'll be toddling along to Grilling Kippers, a UKIP-focused anti-Eurosceptic campaign from deep within the Brussels Bubble.

"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…

"Ektron does this as well, but with version 9, it has also baked in more native marketing functions like allowing for personas to be created based on attributes in a CRM or marketing automation system. What will a site look like to a current customer versus a partner, or a first time visitor versus someone who's closer to being ready to buy? Build…

FalseFacebook Paper: the video. Click the #fbpaper tag for some thoughts.

Points 4 & 8 my favourites: "4. LinkedIn will become the most important publisher. LinkedIn will become a premium destination for industry news, and you need to take part in that ecosystem early and often. Publish original content, network among peers in groups and raise your profile now." 8. Interactive content will trump static content. Expect…

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.

"Placing quantity above quality, asking for non-nitpicky editing, and seeking an entrée into a journalist's 'Rolodex'—these are a few of our least-favorite things." God, a pastiche of this for EU comms is almost inevitable...

"Online social networks spread like disease epidemics, and Facebook will lose 80% of its victims -- I mean, users -- by 2017, according to a study from Princeton University researchers." - 80% of Users to Get Sick of Facebook by 2017, Research Says - Editor's Blog - Internet Evolution

"As we enter a new year we have crowdsourced a checklist of 10 vital skills for journalists to produce digital content in the most effective ways ... We hope that the mix of skills, techniques and qualities listed below would help journalists to stay ahead of the game in terms of digital innovation, be able to harness the latest tools and techniq…

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…