Want your content to make the biggest possible impact? Get your tone right. It’s not the style, flavor, or spin added in later. It’s the implicit message of what your brand is all about. Get 10 tips to make your voice sing and learn what company uses the word “weirdos” to set its tone.

Keeping up with competitors' marketing and thought leadership activities is essential. Failure to do so can lead to lackluster results from “me too” projects, wasted resources, abandoned initiatives, and squandered customer goodwill. Find out how to get started with benchmarking for content marketing.

With the proper planning and execution, businesses and associations can host and coordinate award programs with the same cachet, prestige, and high quality winners as those traditionally run by media outlets. Here are some of the critical elements to keep in mind when launching an award program, and how we’re practicing what we preach at CMI.

A few weeks ago, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) relaunched its online platform for thought leadership content, bcgperspectives.com. Content marketers can learn a lot from how the company handled its launch efforts. Take a look at some examples.Continue reading

Even if you’ve never been a reporter for your campus newspaper or have never edited copy and page proofs late into the night on a deadline, you can appreciate the intensity and focus (and coffee consumption) instilled by a press deadline. Longshot magazine harnesses that same intensity: crowdsourcing content to produce an entire 60+ page magazine and related podcasts, from topic announcement to final pages, in two days (in both digital and print editions). Longshot was co-founded by Gizmodo’s Mat Honan, The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal, and GOOD magazine’s Sarah Rich. Their first effort that followed this “48-hour” model (which was produced under a since-redacted title that provoked the ire of CBS’s attorneys) won a 2010 Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism.Continue reading

When he changed marketing jobs from a local bank to become Director of Digital Marketing at the Cleveland Clinic, Scott Linabarger went from a world where every piece of content—even minor word changes on the bank’s website—had to be reviewed by legal and compliance, to the Wild West where practically anyone could write and post an article on the world-renowned hospital system’s website. That was a little too “loosey goosey” for Scott, as he noted yesterday in a late morning session at Content Marketing World 2011 in Cleveland. So he implemented some internal controls. Today there are still 200-plus contributors to the Clinic’s website and related digital media, but someone on his staff now reviews it all—for grammar if nothing else—before it’s posted.Continue reading

Building a content factory requires the right attitude in addition to an effective system for generating authentic stories that focus on the problems of customers and clients. That’s how AJ Huisman (@AJHuisman), Marketing Director from Kennedy Van der Laan, a legal firm headquartered in Amsterdam, led off his presentation near the end of the first day of Content Marketing World 2011 in Cleveland. Continue reading