Some changes in the marketing blogosphere may be a signal of things to come.
This view is necessarily colored by the sub-segment of the blogosphere I observe, i.e. blogs about business marketing, technology, knowledge management, content management and social entrepreneurship. It represent a particular view, focussing on content-rich, technology-oriented business blogs. Continue Reading »
Joe Pulizzi is the driving force behind Junta42, the web community on everything about content marketing and custom publishing. Over the past 7 months, Junta42 has produced a continuous stream of relevant content, now adding up to a knowledge base of close to a 1000 articles. With the recent addition of the top content marketing blog list and the consequent increase of activity, it’s high time for a discussion with Joe about the emerging discipline of content marketing, and how it is supported by Junta42. This article is a digest based on an e-mail discussion.
When monitoring rss-feeds in a reader, here’ a take on keeping your inbox to the internet clear, while trying to keeping up to speed in your limited time.
Instantaneous abort
Sites with excessive ads (a discrete ad in the lower right column is OK though).
Anything containing the words ‘affiliate’, ‘home business’, ‘money’, ‘free’, … It’s not all bad, but statistically, it has a much lower quality content share.
If any pop-up box moves in.
If a clear summary is absent in your reader, ditch it. Probably it’s a machine-generated spam blog or a link farm.
If a post is excessively short (less than 100 words)
Tier 2
Stop reading list posts.
Skip posts with lame openings. The article may get better, but if you’re pressed for time, why take the risk? In any case, there is abundant content for your very limited time.
Check the source. The reason I need an ‘instantaneous abort’ mechanism is because I’m monitoring search terms from Google’s blogsearch as rss-feeds. This is a very powerful method not to miss anything, but produces a lot of low-quality content as well. Separating out known quality sources in a separate folder helps a lot.
If it still doesn’t suffice
In this case, you’ll need to qualify sources, and let them only in after they meet your stringent criteria. If you’re disappointed (once or a couple of times), be ruthless to wield them out. Your view on your segment will no longer be panoramic, but you can be more confident not to waste your limited time.
Addendum February 16
Especially for this month, but probably beyond, avoid anything containing the word ‘viral’, and if you’re based in the USA, anything with the word ‘recession’.
With over 150 social bookmarking tools to choose from [1-2}, the selection of Diigo is not obvious. But here’s a number of features that - in combination - make Diigo the tool we would never want to be without:
Highlighting: when browsing, you can highlight sections of a page. And as long as you are logged in to your Diigo account, these highlights are preserved during subsequent page visits, from any computer.
Productivity: the mere fact of highlighting (from the toolbar) already bookmarks the page (in seconds). The toolbar allows you then to add tags.
Comments: in addition to highlights and tags, you can annotate pages with personal comments, which you can choose to keep private or make public.
Groups: you can create groups where members collaborate to share and comment on bookmarks within a theme. Members can be ‘be invitation only’ or you can make groups open for any interested Diigo user.
Lists: a personal thematic collection of bookmarks can be easily organised in a list.
RSS feeds: Diigo produces annotated content streams based on your personal bookmarks, lists or groups.
Email alerts: groups members can receive alerts of new postings to a group, which can also be aggregated on a daily or weekly basis.
Tag management: tag clouds are great, but they come with a few issues that Diigo attempts to address, at least in part:
Inconsistent tagging (e.g. renewable, renewables, renewable.energy, “renewable energy”): merging tags by simply editing them is straightforward
popular tags: some tags tend to accumulate 100s of bookmarks over time, making them unusable. Diigo lists ‘related tags’ as a further filter. For example, if you have 100s of tags on ‘renewables’, a specific renewable technology, or country could act as a more specific filter.
Thanks to Jon and Joe, we now have 2 ‘ultimate lists’ of business marketing blogs, which complement each other very nicely.
Many of you will already know Jon Miller (Marketo)’s big list of b2b marketing blogs. With its recent addition of 50, it lists 138 b2b blogs. But best of all, Jon also offers an up-to-date OPML file allowing you to subscribe to this list in your reader with a few clicks.
Complementary to this, Junta42 has just launched its list of top and upcoming content marketing blogs, which lists 82. The additional twist is that registered Junta42 users can vote on the blogs listed, adding a user ranking to the Junta42 rank.
The bloglist of Junta42 is only one of the site’s features. Mainly, Junta42 is a vertical social bookmarking site for content marketers. Registering for a free Junta42 account not only allows you to vote on your favourite marketing blogs, but also submit your favourite bookmarks, or vote and comment on others’ submissions.
So if you’re a professional marketer, involved in business marketing, the following actions should take less than an hour, and offer the best return ever on your time invested:
get Jon’s OPML listing, and subscribe to the ultimate list of marketing blogs in your reader
register for a Junta42 account and vote on the recent bookmarks and top blog listing
Welcome to the sixth edition of the marketing carnival. Reflecting on the first 6 editions in this carnival experiment, I think the jury is still out on their use for business marketing. A few observations with mixed feelings:
Carnivals attract many contributions - for example this carnival attracts about 60 submissions per month.
The quality of contributions on average is low. Some bloggers appear to use carnivals for massive self promotion. Some submit up to half a dozen articles per month. Many contributions are off-topic. Some even have broken links. It takes time to filter contributions.
At the same time, carnivals have helped me to discover some good blogs flying below radar.
Ardeth Albee from Marketing Interactions blog-tagged me to share 8 random things, imposing me to a small dilemma. While I’m usually game for trying new experiments on the web, I’m also a rather private person. So here’s the result of my struggle: Continue Reading »
Custom content marketing offers tremendous potential for corporations and associations to strengthen brands and reputations, while broadening and deepening relationships with customers and members.
Simply defined, custom publishing is “a targeted publishing program delivered to key audiences with a goal of increasing brand perception, improving brand loyalty and influencing or improving the overall decision making process”.
Many business marketing organisations already have a long tradition of using custom publishing to support their marketing activities. A series of new technologies are developing to reshape marketing as we know it. In particular:
the emergence of novel tools for productive marketing
the potential of the web to create corporate branded channels
the possibilities for customer / member interaction
Therefore, I’m pleased that the Custom Publishing Council announces the first-ever but very timely conference in this emerging field, to be held in New Orleans March 9-11. The conference targets practitioners and solution providers alike and covers both strategic and practical aspects.
The custom publishing council also publishes a blog and a magazine.
Another year’s gone, and the time-sheets are processed. Hereby a few benchmarks for our blogs at Leonardo ENERGY.
The length of our posts varies between 100 and 500 words, and takes us between 0.5 and 6 hours, depending on the amount of fact checking needed (as well as insight checking) and how straightforward it is to structure the story. Taking a median of 2 hours per post and 2 weekly posts consumes half a day per week for content.
Added to this comes scouting for new stories. We monitor a number of RSS feeds through Google Reader. Clearing these takes about half an hour per day, but not all this time should be allocated to blogging. Keeping up to speed on your sector has value and you probably should do it, even when not blogging. Continue Reading »
Steve Krug’s book on web usability reads in half a day, but changes your perspective on websites forever.
With lots of practical advice, you can use it when preparing or developing a new web project, as well as for auditing and improving a running site.
Offering guidance on language, buttons, banners, navigation and home page design, this book is useful if you’re a participant in a web development team, or a manager commissioning and approving web development.
My favourite chapter is the one with hands-on advice on setting up usability testing, including a sample script painting a vivid image of a session. It enables you to get started immediately.
Navigation is a challenge for any website, and one of the longer chapters in the book. According to the author, navigation isn’t a feature - it is the website. And it serves a variety of purposes: Continue Reading »
(3 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
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