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.”

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.

• Continue reading This week’s best reads →