The Quality Boom
Content publishers realize the need to produce complete stories with multiple types of media assets. That means quality producers will be in demand.
content
Breaking Up Google
Google pushes the boundaries of fair data use. Whenever it changes its algorithms, it creates tidal waves of changes across the media industry, and directly impacts every single business with an Internet presence.
People Need Content
People need content. To beat those who already have frequency, the most sizzle, the best personalities, and overall distribution strengths, you have to change the rules.
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.
Integration Won’t Be Enough
I’ve been considering the impact of algorithms, automation tools and contextual media on marketing as we know it. It’s becoming clear to me that integrated marketing won’t be enough to make a company, nonprofit or individual competitive in this coming… Read More »Integration Won’t Be Enough
Plagiarism and Stealing
Recently, I’ve witnessed several acts of plagiarism and stealing. As the need for content and attention (a result of good marketing ideas) increases, it’s likely individuals will engage in more thefts.
Unfortunately, stealing ideas and content is something that impacts all businesses and individuals trying to monetize their online activities (here’s a piece on how to detect plagiarism).
It’s too damn easy. Copying and pasting content, whether it’s via source code or simply highlighting text on a screen, makes all words accessible. Blogs are frequent targets for plagiarism.
The intense demands of content creation and the ensuing burnout that many individuals complain about creates a sense of desperation. Publish or perish, as academics used to say. When publishing becomes difficult or impossible, some people turn to stealing ideas and content.
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.
Read More »Social Results Will Stay Small
The Content Quality Problem Here and There
More brands and people continue filling the channels with their blogs, infographics, white paper, etc. As a result, we’re experiencing a deluge of content, most of it suffering from over-messaged, self-important corporate sales talk, or worse, shoddy workmanship.
There’s no better example of this issue than our own marketing space where the effort to produce consistent content creates an ever increasing level of drivel. In fact, there’s so much “me, too” content, getting beyond a headline skim requires some real shake-up in the social media marketplace or a dramatic post.
When readers find themselves inundated with ever increasing quantities of the same, creators find themselves producing content with diminishing value. The situation devolves to the point where content becomes spam.
We all know what happens to spam. It doesn’t get read, it’s unsubscribed from, deleted, and relegated to the annals of digital indexing somewhere deep in Google.
Read More »The Content Quality Problem Here and There