commbasics

For about 5 years I’ve been following a half dozen surveys about the investment in social media.  All of them say the same thing: Spending on social marketing is up and continues to rise.   Integration of social marketing into the overall program is lacking. (According to the 2013 Duke University CMO Survey , only 3.4 percent of B2B companies claiming their social media activity is integrated into their current programs.)  Less than 30 percent of marketing executives actually ask for, much less use the data gathered from their social marketing effort. Marketing executives are finding it difficult to quantify the results But one study I found this month brought up something very interesting that demonstrate why the final three bullets are problematic.  The customer focus is completely off. Engage Sciences, a company providing social analytics services, discovered that most companies put 75 Most effort focused on new customers percent of their resources developing...

Being able to state what you don’t know can be more engaging that what you do know. We're in the home stretch for this series on creating engaging content.  And here is tip #4... Embrace Ignorance Again a bad thing made good. Being able to state what you don’t know can be more engaging that what you do know.  Note I said “state” not demonstrate.  You can take a strong position but still admit it’s only an opinion, welcome people to prove you wrong and then change your mind when they do.  This builds trust and credibility.   In this blog over the past decade I have made some uncomfortable prognostications about the state of the media and corporate communications.  Many people have disagreed with me and I have never shied away from having others with more knowledge than I show me how I was wrong.  I’ve made this blog a soapbox for a lot of journalists, publishers and marketing people to tell me when I’m wrong, and when I am I fess up.  I...

Continuing out series on tips for engaging content is, perhaps, the hardest discipline to get people, especially those in the executive suite and marketing people, to do.  It's caused, from my view of a misreading of Geoffrey Moore's book, Crossing the Chasm . The simplified message that everyone gets wrong is that you need to become the leader in your particular niche.  the way people get it wrong is that they think that means to SAY you're a or the "leader" in your content.  That might have worked in the 20th century when few people could verify that claim, but today I find that anyone that says it is probably just taking a walk . Because it is so easy to debunk claims in content, the next tip is crucial in creating engaging content Accept humility The most important rule in social content is talk a lot more about anything other than you or your product.  The most commonly stated ratio is 7 pieces about anything else before you mention you...

Last week we began our series on tips for engaging content with a call to brevity, and today we're taking our own advise and giving you a real short tip. Practice Incompleteness This sounds bad, but it is a good thing for engagement. Note that this post is one part of a larger series.  When I was a novice blogger, I would try to write comprehensively and leave no stone unturned.  While unique visits were high, I noticed that after about 15 seconds readers and viewers dropped off and no one commented other than spammers.  So I started serializing my longer ideas.  Not only did unique views go up dramatically, so did time spent consuming content, comments, sharing, likes… every type of engagement you look for. An added plus was the comments often made me change direction, add insight and rethink my positions.  That increased my reputation as a fair-minded source of information and analysis.   When you are exploring concepts that might be new, readin...