Once upon a time, you had an opening on your content marketing team.

Combing through the resumes, you winnowed the pile to a half dozen potential unicorns who should know how to craft content that grabs (and keeps) your audience’s attention while keeping the brand’s goals top of mind.

On the appointed day, you clicked on the video conference link and, up popped one of the finalists. Of course, you asked a bunch of questions. After all, you were looking for answers.Continue Reading

Yes, it’s once again time for fools to rush in. Every April Fools’ Day, some brands decide to break from their mold to execute a content “joke.” (Few do it well.)

Unfortunately, foolish content knows no time of year. So instead of focusing April Fool’s content, I decided to look at brand content from the rest of the year to see who’s foolin’ around (and who isn’t).

I found examples in three categories – entertaining, celebratory, and culturally informative content. Let’s explore them. Continue Reading

Almost everybody loves best practices.

They let you learn what’s worked for someone else. They save you time because you don’t have to do research to understand the best way to proceed.

But many people erroneously equate “best” with “infallible” or “in every circumstance.” That’s not the best thinking for best practices.Continue Reading

They’ve been in my life for over 10 years.

For most of that time, they gave me what I wanted. It wasn’t perfect, but no relationship ever is.

Then, those imperfections cropped up more often.

The community of sources on HARO no longer gave me what I needed. I wondered if it was me. Was I requesting something that wasn’t possible? I adjusted my queries. Lowering my expectations helped. It wasn’t the best, but it worked well enough.Continue Reading

You finally did it.

Your team worked hard to get the content ready for the next 30 days.

It all fits well on the editorial calendar, neatly designed by themes on topics relevant to your audience in formats they want. Even better, the necessary stakeholders approved it all. You uploaded the content and scheduled it for future publishing dates.

Then, something happens that’s out of your control.

A war erupts in Europe. A school shooting happens in the US. A monarch who served for an unprecedented 70 years dies. Romaine lettuce is recalled because of E. coli contamination. A group launches an initiative to expose gender inequality and sexual harassment in Hollywood just before awards season.Continue Reading

The world survived the first three months of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.

But what are marketers doing now? Did your brand follow the shift Dennis Shiao made for his personal brand? As he recently shared, he switched his primary platform from Twitter to LinkedIn after the 2022 ownership change. (He still uses Twitter but posts less frequently.)

Are those brands that altered their strategy after the new ownership maintaining that plan? What impact do Twitter’s service changes (think Twitter Blue subscriptions) have?Continue Reading

ChatGPT arrived on the scene to a lot of fanfare – positive, negative, and nonplussed reactions.

I’m excited. I see ChatGPT as a real-life learning tool to help humans see something we usually talk about theoretically – the potential of artificial intelligence.

Sure, AI content creation tools have been around for a while, but they aren’t as ubiquitous or as free as ChatGPT. Now that an AI text-creation tool fits my budget, I decided to conduct a few experiments to better understand AI’s potential for creating content.

At first, I wanted to prove real-life writers are better than a bot. (I have a vested interest in the matter.) Continue Reading

Vish Khanna often tells people he’s self-taught because he’s never had formal professional training in marketing.

But, he says, that’s not the whole truth.

“The reality is … I was taught by a series of mentors over two decades,” says Vish, the 2015 Content Marketer of the Year who now works as the chief commercial officer at HealthPrize.Continue Reading