Hubspot

The Rise of Dynamic Content

by Geoff Livingston
August 29, 2012August 29, 2012

Today’s release of Hubspot 3 marketing automation software at the Inbound Conference marks the rise of dynamic content, a method of customizing the way individuals view content, images or actions. Now small and medium enterprise marketers can easily deploy dynamic content segmented by niches.

Dynamic content harnesses database marketing to serve unique content to people based on a wide variety of factors, including their sales history, social media preferences, historical content preferences, and prior interactions with the company.

Delivery mechanisms for dynamic content include both online web pages and forms, and emails. Of course, if you engage in direct mail, you can deliver print pieces based on segmentation and individual preferences (depending on your vendor).
Read More »The Rise of Dynamic Content

The Return of the Blog Roll

by Geoff Livingston
April 25, 2012April 26, 2012

Image by Rod Senna

Surely you have seen the many studies, articles and posts (see Gini’s take) — including a couple on this blog — over the past few months about corporate blogging’s decline. In thinking about the matter, I decided to reverse my personal decision to exclude a blog roll here.

The best way to support blogging is to highlight your favorite reads as often as possible. While I do this every hour during the business day on Twitter, these blogs seem to get shared the most on my feed. Of course, there are many great blogs out there, so feel free to add them in the comments. And you can always visit my blog roll on the first column to the right.

Here are the blogs:

Blog Against the Machine

by Geoff Livingston
March 27, 2012March 27, 2012

They say that professional blogging is a dying social marketing tool. The University of Massachusetts revealed a 25% drop in the number of corporate blogs in the Inc. 500 (from 50% of the general surveyed population to 37%).The next generation of trade media — team and professional “blogs” — have risen to the fore and dominated their various niches. Lost in the dust are the individual and small business bloggers who can’t create enough content to compete effectively against the content machines.

In the marketing sector we have strong professional trade media plays from Hubspot, MarketingProfs and Copyblogger. Individual blogs like Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer have augmented the individual voice with guest posts, providing daily or near daily offerings to remain competitive. In the nonprofit sector, I helped start a similar professional team blog, Inspiring Generosity.

Most individual bloggers — blogs like this one, which feature, one, two, maybe even three posts a week — simply cannot command the traffic to generate competitive market attention in the face of these machines. They don’t cover breaking news like these more professional outlets. Responding to the news cycle requires a dedication to blogging. Most people with jobs that are tied to other activities beyond social simply cannot afford to spend the time necessary to compete.