April 21, 2012

This week’s best reads ¹

1. @allanschoenberg‘s post this week on B2B Voices was definitely one of my best reads this week. Avoiding the One Cup Approach to B2B Content goes beyond simply promoting content marketing as good B2B practice and examines the need for diversity in using social media to execute on your content marketing strategy.

Allan’s post works for me on a number of levels. Firstly it identifies a faux pas I see a lot of companies making – this is simply that they are using social media in a singular way….as a “push” mechanism for their PR. So what we end up getting via their social media efforts is the same old stuff we saw on the front page or their website.

He’s also identified why this problem crops up again and again, noting three good reasons – the one that stands out to me is lack of content. More…

This week’s best reads ^Reply

This week's best reads

The Content Matrix – On Tuesday @sharilee tweeted this link to this graphic hosted on visual.ly (a good sharing facility for diagrams and other information based visuals).

Posted headstream on visual.ly/content-matrix

I thought it was really worthwhile not only because of all the different forms of content we as B2B marketers should have on our checklists, but also because it notes the *cost* of various different forms of content.

I didn’t agree with the way a few categories were placed (all said and done, case studies are actually very expensive to produce) but I did appreciate the way the matrix acts as a good reminder to make sure we have the little content tasks taken care of perhaps before we invest a lot of time and money in big content production projects.

Companies risk fines over new data rules (requires free FT.com subscription) – Data….rules….cookies. Yes I know…*yawn*. But this is an important article for anyone who runs a website, anyone who owns a business, or anyone who works in the marketing, PR or comms department of a company. This is particularly important if your site is an e-commerce site. More…

April 7, 2012

This week’s best reads ^Reply

This week's best reads

What a busy week. Trying to cram five days of work into four is never easy and Easter weekend activities were on top of me before I knew it!

Here we go – my best reads from this week:

The Cost of Bad Content: This was definitely the best thing I read this week. As you will see from parts I and II in my Content Marketing series, I take special interest in anything that does a deep dive on it as a concept and am especially interested when people actually apply some analysis. This post is excellent – it actually looks at whether people are assessing how much content marketing is costing to produce, and whether the content is measurably helping the business or if it’s in fact a waste. I think one of the best points Michael Brenner (@brennermichael) makes is that B2B marketers often focus on content marketing activities rather than the measurable results the content marketing should produce. He also points out that as a whole, we B2B marketers are not necessarily doing a great job of measuring the impact of *bad content*. I encourage you to read this post and ponder it. On my part, it’s inspired me to get going on the final part in my Content Marketing series.

I stumbled across Deloitte’s series of technology research reports and I am going to make a point of sitting down to read through each and every one of these (Global TMT Predictions 2012 is a podcost and is excellent). A good find.

*The other thing I read (which is now a few months old) was Want jobs? Upgrade your wireless network. This article looks at the number of jobs the move from 2G-3G created, and examines the move (in the US) from 3G to 4G and how it will likely have the same effect. From the article: “It sounds like a small number, but it adds up: By September, the study predicts the 4G network transition will have directly created 231,690 U.S. jobs.”

March 30, 2012

This week’s best reads ^Reply

This week's best reads

I’ve decided to add a new category called “This week’s best reads” just to highlight some of the amazing material I come across on a weekly basis – I promise to keep it all relevant this blog and will not be directing you to some of my usual web haunts (I’ll admit it, I love those photos of baby pandas as much as the next gal and my husband does send me some LOL articles from the Dailymail.co.uk):

Here we go – my best reads from this week:

Why You can – And Should – Measure The ROI of Social Media: I love this blog, and this post is spot-on. It highlights one of the most important points made by one of IBM’s latest reports From Social Media to Social CRM, which is that there is often a huge gap in why consumers follow businesses via social media and why businesses think consumers follow them via social media.

Only 13% of B2B Marketers Drive Leads with Social Media: @ilonah tweeted this article and I was intrigued as I’d just sat on the panel for PR Firm Cognito’s Breakfast Byte (Topic: Social Media in B2B Financial Services) and in the audience were a lot of B2B Marketers curious about how to better to drive leads using social media. I am not surprised that only 13% of B2B marketers feel social media is driving leads, but what was missing from this survey was quite a large comparison category – that being corporate websites.