commbasics

Yes, yes, I know. Your customers are far too busy and intelligent to use social media and, even if they do, they do not use it for business-related activity. That’s an inaccurate belief. More than two-thirds of the population of North America and Europe are actively involved in social media on a daily basis, which means it is highly likely that your customer base does use at least one medium every day. Two bits of information came out in some conversations today regarding how to optimize search for your website. Most of the conversations were around a report on Search Engine Land where Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, confirmed what the Google algorithms look for in search engine rankings. Here are the two most important activities you can do, based on my understanding: Engaging content is the most important thing for SEO Links back to your site The first activity is all under your control. You identify and create the content on your site and if it is se...

This final post of the series looks at how to become a valuable source of information and attract important connections. But first, let’s address whether you should even try. In my previous posts about Linkedin I talked about the value of the platform, the frustrations users are having, changes that Linkedin might consider to reverse those frustrations and how you can screen contacts more effectively to minimize spam. This final post of the series looks at how to become a valuable source of information and attract important connections. But first, let’s address whether you should even try.  A communicator is a person who can bring disparate and anonymous people and groups together through the distribution of information those people and groups find valuable. If you don’t care if they find that information valuable, or you don’t really like bringing people together, you might consider avoiding social media altogether. That is a valid option. There are people that have plenty of bus...

...if your content is crap it doesn't matter how much you spend on social media, unless people find your content amusing, useful or thought provoking, NO ONE WANTS TO READ IT! With all the negative feelings about Facebook in the marketing communications industry, I gotta say: Facebook has been doing great by me. The big meme blasting the social network recently has been the video purporting that if you pay to boost likes they are probably fake. Then came the fashion magazine magnate who spent tens of thousands of dollars on Facebook advertising and got zero return.  Finally, marketers are pissed that Facebook is downgrading organic feeds. The problem with all of these complaints is the fact that if your content is crap it doesn't matter how much you spend on social media, unless people find your content amusing, useful or thought provoking, NO ONE WANTS TO READ IT!  What marketers forget is, before all this failure of their social efforts, was an uprising of users who ...

Media houses assume they are still trusted and that their move to “communities” filled with sponsor-developed content has not hurt that position. That assumption is misplaced. It’s time to wrap up this series on truth and trust in content.  Over the past few posts I’ve talked about how truth appears differently to people, based on their personal perspective, and to report truth you need to view it from multiple angles.  I’ve also showed how modern media lacks the resources to gather that information adequately and how corporations, once dedicated to limiting that access through their marketing, now find it in their best interest to increase the flow of trusted information.   Let me set the table. Content marketing is not SEO . Tara Meehan’s post in iMedia Connection demonstrated how companies measure social on SEO metrics of clicks and unique visitors in the form of likes and followers, neither of which has the value they did 5 years ago.  This decreased value ...

hat you have to realize is that to your customers, your view of the truth is nowhere near as important as theirs is to them. That seems like such an obvious statement, and I bet you think you actually know what your customers consider to be true. But from what I hear from customers and from advertisers and from readers, very few companies and publications actually have a clue regarding what those audiences consider to be truth. In my last post I talked about the importance of understanding truth from other perspectives, rather than focusing only on yours.  Today I want to give you a specific example.  Dan Lyons over at Hubspot wrote a blog post last month about the use of content to build trust and relationship by demonstrating truth... even though it was complete fiction. You can see the video content produced by Google India on the blog, but briefly it was about how two young people in Pakistan and Lahore transcended national bigotry, politics and xenophobia using tech...

There's a change coming to your news feed on Facebook .  Boring content will be relegated to social media purgatory . Users should be happy about this, but companies using the social network to promote their company may be seeing failure in their content marketing . It's been a poorly kept secret that Facebook games its Edgerank algorithm to favor companies that pay to promote content, but some companies have been able to get around paying for play by swamping their feeds with a constant flow of content, that is not only self serving but boring.  Now Facebook is saying if everyone is ignoring your spam, then they aren't going to let it rise in users newsfeed to any level of visibility. That's not just true of companies, though.  The biggest criticism of Facebook is that people posting pictures of what they are eating or thinking is useless.  I've been seeing complaints lately of people saying they aren't seeing posts by friends and family...

Reading about the Google quarterly report yesterday gave me the subject of today's post.  Google is seeing a continued slump in ad rates and reports are coming out that show that mobile and online advertising is not seen as much by consumers as some in the media have claimed.  Yet budgets on mobile and online advertising are climbing fast.  How long before advertisers realize they are not getting a decent ROI and start pulling back? Of course, the knee jerk reaction is that the medium is at fault.  After all the content in the ads is the next thing to Shakespeare, right? It seems to me, and there are studies that back this up , that the approaches to content are still mired in the belief that online and mobile media are still "mass media" with the goal of reaching out the the lowest common denominator.  Campaigns are fileld with the wrong content targeted at the wrong people most of the time, which marginalizes customers. We recently had a me...

Don't get me wrong. The UBM sites produce good content ... right now. But you need people who know what good content is to produce it. I don't know, maybe that's the plan: force the content creators to go to the advertisers and then make them pay to put it on your titles. But what's to stop the advertisers from starting their own titles. Why should they pay? We've been following a string of thought regarding the changes at UBM properties. I've personally avoided making any judgement on the philosophical approach the company has taken.  It is what it is.  However, the recent round of layoffs really cut into the bone of their content development .  Calling Nic Mokhoff, Barbara Jorgenson and Bolaji Ojo redundant... even when you have all stars like Alex Wolfe, Patrick Mannion and Brian Fuller still on the team... is mindboggling to me. UBM has had a habit of cutting back far too much and then having to rehire too fast.  (I remember when Dave Burskey was...

Continuing on with our discussion on what makes good content, I want to give a big shout-out to Don Tuite from Electronic Design who provided, in a comment with an outstanding example of what it takes to make a good technical news story. Don pointed out that when he does a piece, he does a fair amount of editorializing, but that is tempered by a lot of information from many sources.  That speaks to the issue if truth in content.  An opinion is not necessarily untrue and passes the test when it is backed up by information from both sides.  To get to that point, however, requires a helluva lot of work. Don's outline of his process took not only days of research and discussion, but time to put it straight in his own head and then write down his perception of reality.  If lucky, he gets to do that 20 or 30 times a year.  There are about 5 editors in the industry like Don so we can count on about 150 stories with that kind of effort over the course of a yea...

Good content has to be about something you know, and that cuts out 99 percent of the stuff in social media. My last post on content as the driver of successful online programs got a relatively lively discussion over on my Facebook page and young Anton Molodetskiy (rhymes with "my broken jet ski") at the Hoffman Agency suggested I follow up with a post on what makes content "sharable."  Then a long time compatriot, Don Tuite (the analog guru at Electronic Design magazine ) tossed out a bunch of questions. "What about content nobody can find because it only shows up on page 10 of the search results? What about content that isn't true, but is truthy? If content is crowd-sourced, is it true? What makes for a 'trusted source.'?" So, at the risk of giving away the store, because helping companies do this is my business, it's probably a good idea to get into this.  Let's start with Don's last question. First, good content has t...

There was a significant kerfuffle last week as General Motors' pulled their advertising from Facebook, with prognosticators pointing to the failure of Facebook as a marketing tools.  Having been recently in the market for a new car, and having bought a GM car in the end, I can say with certainty that GM's use of Facebook advertising really sucked.  And Ford's was much better. Once I started online research for my car I started noticing ads for car manufacturers popping up on FB.  I noticed that GM ads were pretty standard.  Essentially, they said, "buy our car."  I was not impressed.  Then there was this one ad I found that didn't even mention who it was from.  It was a link to an article about the raw materials that go into electric vehicles.  I was considering EVs so I clicked on it.  It took me to a another manufacturers site, but not an ad. it was actually an article about the raw materials used in EVs. ...

The term “return on investment” (ROI) gets bandied about a lot in my business, as in “what’s the ROI of you service?”  We all know what that questions is supposed to mean: how much money can I make back from what I pay you?  But no matter how many statistics and case studies you throw at the questioner, the real question is: “How little can I actually pay you for your service?” I’ve started answering that question with another question: What is your content worth?  If the customer can answer that question, I can better answer their original question. Every company, especially engineering-driven companies, says their content has immense “value.”  They believe that their customers have an absolute need to hear what they have to say.  It is so vital that the customers very existence depends on purchasing a particular product or service.  At least, that’s generally how they answer the question.  But they can’t put a monetary value on that content....