commbasics

Been up to my eyeballs developing content and conversation over at the new launched ARM Connected Community (check it out, lots of cool stuff) so I've been negligent on posting the past couple of weeks.  Then UBM Tech goes and starts blowing up the PR Agency industry earlier this week and it's probably time to do a spot analysis.  As reported in BtoB Media this week , UBM Tech's Create unit is designed to cut out the middle man in marketing services (meaning agencies and third party creative services) and provide soup-to-nuts communication chains between the companies that pay them and the customers of those companies.  In other words, you want to guarantee you will show up in a UBM Tech publication news story? Then talk to one of their sales agents.  And be prepared to pay through the nose because you will be buying event services, graphic and video services, content creation services and a bunch of other stuff.  “Historically our customers t...

The content that matters is not about you. It's about the problems your customers are trying to solve. Over the past few weeks I'm mentioned the changes in search technology from Google (Hummingbird) and how it will affect both B2B media and marketing.  I've also touched on google's concept of the Zero Moment of Decision (ZMOD), the moment when a customer actually decides to Google a company or product to make a purchase decision (which is actually long after the decision has been made). Today, however, I sat down with a good friend by the name of Douglas Alexander, who told me a very interesting story about his product search and selection process.  You may recognize Douglas's name from reading EBN, Electronic Purchasing Strategies or any number of component engineering and design publications.  He's currently writing what may become the definitive educational book on component engineering. I published the audio from the discussion on my Spreak...

Much marketing strategy in almost every industry is sheer guesswork and, in the past, that was the best you could do. Hummingbird changes that. The web is now more collaborative then competitive and your content strategy must have an element of collaboration in it. The major update in the Google search algorithm , Hummingbird, is not only going to affect the SEO/SEM profession and the online media industry, as I wrote about last week.  It's going to have a major effect on branded content development within corporations. As things were under the old search technology, the branded content movement put current and former advertisers in direct competition with the media supporting their industry for audience engagement.  A reader could put in a few keywords and would find links to both media and corporation content and the reader would have to guess at which was the most appropriate.  That won't work anymore. As I have been saying for several months, keywords m...

Have you noticed that your web traffic seems to have fallen in the past month?  If not, you're lucky.  If so, don't blame Google's major overhaul of it's search algorithm , "Hummingbird." Blame your content instead.  And if you're and SEO expert, this might help .  As I've said about previous upgrades, Panda and Penguin, Hummingbird is less concerned with keywords as it is with context.  But the first two are focused on the engagement searchers have with content.  Hummingbird is all about context. (I find this remarkably coincidental that The Age of Context , by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel came out this month in time for this announcement from Google.  Well Played guys.)  So what does "all this context stuff" have to do with you?  Here's a brief explanation from Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand.com. "Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may bett...

The first tenet of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics is "Seek truth and report it." Speculation is not truth. I got into an interesting discussion on journalistic integrity regarding the reporting on Google founder Sergey Brin 's impending divorce and I thought I'd layout my position here for an open discussion.  The story was initially reported by Liz Gannes of www.AllthingsD.com, got picked up by Techmeme and found its way to my eyes through a report by Rob Hof at Forbes that was in my Facebook feed.  I commented that it was not something I consider newsworthy and even Rob seemed apologetic about doing the piece.  (Note: I have known Rob professionally for many years and consider him a preeminent business and tech journalist).   Sergy Brin My comment was followed by several folks who defended the story as being newsworthy.  So I felt I had to actually read the story I didn't want to read and found this in Rob's ...

My Brit pal and partner in "crime," Peter van der Sluijs just did a brief post on whether "old web is dying."  His post was actually referencing a similar piece by his social media consultant Brendan Cooper  waxing wistful over the death of the freewheeling (and free) social web. There have been several much more hyperbolic articles on this over the past few months (and I've been waiting for the right push.  This was it.) about how Google and Facebook are doomed; about the corporational takeover of the web; about how it's all falling apart, blah, blah, blah.  It was actually nice to read a couple of reasonable view about how things are changing.  I especially liked Peter's pithy assessment: "It’s easy to hyperventilate about the next big thing and whether or not Blogs / Twitter / Facebook are too yesterday for words.  If you do that, you miss the big picture." That, in a nutshell, has been the problem with mo...

We've looked at content for purchase content, owned content and social content in the previous posts and we're getting close to the end of our series.  Today we look at the reality and difficulty of earned content. This is why earned media is so valuable. The chart indicates relative costs and effort that go into the various forms of content and how the market audience views those various forms. Paid content (advertising) is the most expensive of all media and requires the least amount of effort but is the least trustworthy .  Owned content costs less and takes about more effort but us not viewed with the same level of suspicion, generally because there is a level of human contact involved.  Social content takes more effort but even less cost than owned because you can do it even without a website. Social begins to cross the trust barrier because objective third parties may have the opportunity to state their position... if social is done right.  ...