5 Tips to Liven Up Long Stories
Here are five tips to liven up your long written content for the visual media era.
advertising
Liveblogging the FTC Workshop on Native Advertising
This post offers a live blog of the FTC’s Workshop on native advertising, “Blurred Lines: Advertising or Content” held in Washington, DC on December 4.
The Inevitable Downfall of Native Advertising
As more brands move to blend content with ads, we can expect less consumer trust, lower yields, and a need for higher levels of quality to achieve success.
Social Results Will Stay Small
If you think small, you stay small. That’s why companies and brands that treat social like a unique practice — a box within the larger whole — will struggle to achieve results and intangible outcomes.
Building seemless customer experiences should take the fore in all strategies. Yet according to the CMO Survey, the integration gap in companies is not closing, in spite of years of research showing that cross-tactic coordination produces more sales.
The struggle to achieve ROI and real business impact with new media strategies is a direct result of focusing on individual tactics. Rather than simply discuss integration, an easier approach may be to consider building from the customer’s viewpoint.
Customers don’t care about social, in-store, mobile, content marketing, white glove treatment for influencers, or any of the other strands of spaghetti you see strewn across the marketing blogosphere wall. They don’t care about integrated multi-channel approaches either.
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Coping with the Klout Reality
Marketers and individuals will have to deal with social scoring in the form of Klout and its sister technologies.
As time progresses, technologies and alliances evolve. I haven’t written about Klout outside of general discussions on social scoring for a good long while.
There wasn’t much to say. I agreed in principal with many of my colleagues and their continuing coverage about the broken nature of influence metrics.
But I had a second reason: As a professional communicator, it’s become increasingly clear that we won’t escape Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.
The business marketplace cannot help itself. It will chase quick fixes to community building, recruitment and measuring individual online capabilities, making social scoring an obvious play. I have three reasons for coming to this conclusion.
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The Advertising vs. PR Debate Won’t Exist in 30 Years
USOC Chair and Olympic Gold Medal Winners Scott Blackmun, Katie Ledecky, Missy Franklin and Heather O’Reilly are interviewed by Christine Brennan.
Last Thursday night, USA Today celebrated its 30th birthday in grand fashion at the National Portrait Gallery. Media and Washington luminaries gathered to witness the introduction of the new multimedia USA Today, and discuss the future of media 30 years from now.
Olympians, politicians and even a budding rock star took the stage and weighed in from each of their profession’s perspective. Many focused on how technology was blurring the lines between in home and mobile, between small and large screen, and print and multimedia.
The conversation continued in a special section called USA Tomorrow with luminaries like Twitter and Square Founder Jack Dorsey discussing convergence of media and technology.
That was the big take-away for me, how convergence will force more fluid communication between people through media, even in politics. As this great discussion continued, I could not help but think about our side of the business, the dark side. Marketing.
Read More »The Advertising vs. PR Debate Won’t Exist in 30 Years
Using Sex to Sell Social
Perhaps you have seen the September issue of Fast Company.
The cover headline refers to sex and social media with Mindy Kaling’s demure yet suggestive picture. Yet Mindy’s story doesn’t focus on anything about sex.
Instead it discusses how the Office screenwriter built a substantial personal brand on Twitter, and garnered a TV sitcom. It’s even got some cool stats on TV social network sharing.
The cover baits men and women who may be interested in Kaling’s sex appeal and how social media embellishes it.
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Will Social Rule the Marketing World?
No. It won’t.
The truth? Online media — all forms of it — increasingly rules the world, but social is just a piece of that converged puzzle.
When you look at the numbers direct marketing rules the world, at least from an overall marketing spend perspective (see above chart from the Marketing in the Round infographic), money is being invested in direct tactics like email marketing, direct mail, search, and more first. That’s because the direct marketing approach yields the most ROI at a 10:1 ratio, according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).
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