Too much talk about Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter ‘followers’ is dumming down your analytics. If you were asked for the most important metric you track related to your online marketing efforts, what would you say? What is the very first thing that came to mind? Depending on your responsibilities within...

Why a hyper focus on measurement and incremental gains makes marketers average. Let’s talk about how a myopic focus on measurement can suck all the innovation and success out of our strategy. Here is an experiment: Walk around your office and ask everybody three questions. The first question: “Should...

In this post-Panda world, shallow content written for keywords rather than people won’t just leave you with a website no one wants to read but could actually cause a decline in your rankings.  You won’t just see a decline for those pages with poor content but for your entire site! Proper...

“How do we know it works?” “Can we prove that we’ll affect the bottom line?” Aren’t these the client questions you receive most often about social media? When my clients ask them, I explain that social media is about building relationships with customers. All the different tools — Twitter, Facebook,...

A decade ago when I worked for Penton Media, Google was a hot topic.  To partner or not?  Do we open up our web content to Google’s spiders? It seems a silly discussion today, but it was big business then.  Publishers and editors were of the mindset that Google was somehow stealing their content...

I’d like to see a show of hands: How many of you have Google Analytics installed on your websites? Most of you? Great! How many of you have at least one “goal” set up within your account to track your conversions? Ok, I probably just lost about half of you. Final question: How many of you have a monetary...

Thanks to my good friend Mike Azzara for the following guest post on a VERY important issue. Suddenly, everybody wants to talk about paid, earned and owned media – PEO. The reason PEO is so top of mind is that the roles of each media type, and their relationships to one another, are radically changing...

Is your marketing organization on the fence about using content marketing? If so, consider recent research from Cone Inc., which shows that across formats consumers are increasingly going online to find content that will help them make purchase decisions. While Cone Inc.’s research highlights that consumers...

Whether you are new to content marketing or have been practicing it for a while, here’s a great new resource for you: The Grande Guide to B2B Content Marketing from Eloqua. If you aren’t familiar with Eloqua’s series of Grande Guides, they are intended to be consumed in the time it...

Zombies have taught us a lot about surviving in the world: Always check the backseat, beware of public restrooms, wear seatbelts and, most importantly, keep up with your cardio. But what can they teach us about content marketing? It turns out, a lot. If you want to thrive in the content marketing world,...

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...

One of the best ways to market to consumers is with educational content. In the business to consumer (B2C) market, there is a lot of information that can be shared with customers and prospects. One option for sharing those resources is to create a portal — an organized place for consumers to find information...