Last week we explored the first five of the Top 10 content marketing tips you need to know.  Today we’ll dive a little deeper, while acknowledging that this is a vast topic.  To keep up on content marketing trends I suggest you follow the Content Marketing Institute blog.

Here are the final five of the Top 10 content marketing tips you need to know:

6.  Listen to what your audience is complaining about.  The best content solves problems.  With this in mind, participate in communities with your peers, prospects and clients to note trends in what matters to them.  Sometimes these topics will be ones that they are excited about, but the hot button topics that they regularly complain about are the topics begging for your expertise, help and solutions …so give it to them.  They’ll love you for it!

7.  Consistently connect.  Delivering your content on a regular basis is crucial. You can have short blog posts as well as long ones, but post at least once a week if possible.  Post and comment on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and relevant blogs to your industry daily.   Regularly post on, and through, platforms like Foursquare, Instagram, Flikr, FoodSpotting, YouTube, etc.  Give people a reason to look forward to each time you’ll share new content, by being a resource that they want to follow.

8.  Make people feel special.  This is the key to a happy life and one of the best ways to ensure that people will care about you and your content – care about them first.  As Zig Zigler famously said, “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”

9.  Entertain before informing.  One of the cardinal rules of public speaking is to entertain 90% of the time and inform 10% of the time because no matter how great your information is, no one will listen to you if you don’t entertain them.  This doesn’t mean you have to be a dancing monkey with unending witty comments, but being interesting is what will attract people to interact with, and share, your content.  Think about the content you love and the people who make it.  They make you smile and laugh, don’t they?

10.  Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose.  Content is a dish best served over and over in different formats to multiple audiences to reach as many people as possible.   Once you put your hard work in to creating a live webinar you can also record it to be replayed, transcribe it into an eBook (as well as multiple blog posts, white papers and one-sheets), chop pieces of it into “how to” videos, grab nuggets of wisdom out for tweets and Facebook and Google+ posts, and the entire presentation can be loaded to SlideShare.  Aim to work once and then repurpose your content at least 5 different ways.

Content marketing should be a key ingredient in your social media and digital marketing recipe.  It takes a lot of time, but when it’s done correctly it can be the gift that keeps on giving.  Great content begets great benefits; people – even prospects and customers – will like you more, your employees will be happier to work for your company, more people will talk with you and about you, and even better, they’ll trust and care about you.

How do you become the recipient of such great rewards?  You start by remembering the following Top 10 content marketing tips every time your lightning fast fingers prepare to make a keystroke on that keyboard sitting in front of you right now.

Paste the following words of wisdom on the wall above your computer screen (or on the outside of your laptop to share them with the world) and let them light the way to your content marketing success:

1.  Don’t write a word, share pictures or post videos unless you want to.  In life there are “have to’s” and “want to’s”.  We run away screaming from “have to’s” and wild horses can’t keep us from doing our “want to’s”.  If you don’t want to write, if content creation doesn’t turn you on, if you don’t smile when you finish posting content, then you need to hire someone who does to do create your content.   Otherwise, you’ll create very little content, and what content you do create will carry that feeling of being an uninspired chore rather than an attractive passionate expression.

2.  Focus on giving.  You’ll notice that the content you love to consume has an element of the author giving you something.  It may be inside information, helpful tips, funny videos, infographics that help to explain a complex topic, pictures that make you smile, or stories that you relate to and care about.  The point is that we love content that makes us feel good, so as a content creator, that’s the best kind of content for you to focus on.

3.  Know your business goals.  Not doing this is the #1 problem with online marketing.  You need to develop informed goals for your company and create content to support those goals.

4.  Reach the right audience.  Content marketing is attraction marketing, so post content that will attract the people that matter the most to your business, who care about your expertise, and who will share it with their like-minded friends.

5.  Communicate with a friendly tone and flavor.  Don’t come off like a robot.  The basis of why social media works is that people want to connect and be validated.  That means they want to read, see and hear content that reaffirms that they are in the right place, doing the right things with the right people.  The tone of your content needs to be similar to how you communicate with your closest friends and dearest neighbors, not how you communicate with the customer service robot at your least favorite telecom company whom you feel no connection to.

Digest these ideas, leave comments on how these content marketing tips have worked for you, and come back for the final five tips next week!

This post was originally posted in the Smart Simple Social Blog.

In less than two years since it’s launch, Pinterest has blasted off to be one of the fastest growing social networks of all time.  At the end of 2011 the site was listed by Hitwise as one of the top 10 social networks when it had grown to 11.7 million monthly unique visitors.  This made Pinterest the fastest site in history to pass 10 million monthly unique visitors.  Since the first week of 2012, Pinterest has surpassed YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, Yahoo and Bing in driving referral traffic to retail websites.

This is undoubtedly impressive, but what does this mean for your brand?  Should you be on Pinterest?

The short answer is yes.  Historically, most companies wait a little too long to dip their toes into a new social network to make sure that it’s going to last.  This leaves them playing catch up, and you don’t want to be late this party.  At the very least you should secure your brand username before a squatter does.

The longer answer is maybe.  There are a few key considerations with how to allocate business resources that should always be considered before committing them to developing social media communities:

1.  Is your audience hanging out on this social network?

2.  Is your audience actively participating on this social network?

3.  What are your business goals that will be tied to your activities on this social network?

4.  What is your overall social media marketing strategy and how well does Pinterest fit in?

5.  Are “Pinners” already spreading your brand around Pinterest?  Type the following URL into your browser and replace “yourdomain.com” with your own web site: http://pinterest.com/source/”yourdomain.com” to follow and identify “Pinners” and boards that your brand’s content is appearing on.

Lifestyle brands benefit the most from Pinterest.  Currently 97% of Pinterest’s 1 million+ Facebook fansare women.

The current Pinterest user base is 83% female; 30% of whom are 25-34 years old, and 25% of whom are 34-45 years old.  These women are well educated with over 60% having some college experience, 19% holding Bachelors degrees, and 6% holding Graduate degrees.  They are more likely to live in mid-west states with 35% living in households with incomes between $25,000-$49,999, 34% living in households with incomes between $50,000-$74,999, and 14% living in households with incomes between $75,000-$99,999.

Therefore, if this is your target audience and you aren’t on Pinterest, you should open a new tab on your browser and request an invite.  Yes, Pinterest has had the growth mentioned above as an invite-only website.

If this is not your target audience, consider how your products and services can become attractive and valuable to this active audience.  Think about the lifestyle benefits and attributes of what your company offers and how your customers use your products or services to enhance their lifestyles.  If you’re not sure where to start, there are dozens of resourceful articles that can steer you in the right direction.  It would be a shame to not connect with all of these people who are having fun, sharing pictures and videos, and driving traffic to retailers.

This article was originally published on Room 214 ‘s Capture the Conversation

It’s Valentine’s day.  You forgot to prepare.  You’ll be rushing out to grab one of the last boxes of chocolates and bouquets of flowers left in the grocery store.  Why put yourself through so much stress?

There’s a better solution to this years Valentines procrastination, send your love a sweet tweet that could be read by The Golden Voice – he’ll say it better than you or I ever could.  And besides, just for writing the tweet you’ll be supporting kraft in giving food donations to Feed America.

This marketing campaign for Kraft is a smart mini-copy of the Old Spice social media marketing campaign that everyone loved. The original twist that’s pretty cool is that Kraft employed a man who was recently homeless to help spread the love on Valentine’s Day.  The added charity piece of helping to feed hungry Americans and the fact that you can participate are cherries on top.

…but you should still grab that bouquet of flowers and stay out of the valentine’s dog house.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While many people are finding it challenging to make time to manage multiple social networks, many businesses are faced with even steeper challenges. Connecting with friends is one thing, while managing customer service, marketing, consumer experiences, research and development, community management and more through social media is a larger affair. Managing these issues at a corporate level is an even more monumental concern.

The latest report based on research done by the Altimeter Group , and authored by Jeremiah Owyang, reveals that a “fire, ready, aim” approach to social media is leaving many enterprise level companies in tenuous situations. Through a study of 144 enterprise-class corporations, 27 vendors in over 500 fields and 71 industry experts, brands and vendors, Altimeter discovered that global corporations are trying to manage an average of 178 business-related social media accounts.

This unsustainable trend, though it includes many abandoned accounts, is rapidly increasing while companies are adopting new social technologies. The genie is out of the social media bottle and he’s creating new technologies and tools at dizzying speeds.

This article was originally published in Huffington Post.

With how fast the Internet and digital marketing are evolving, it can sometimes be difficult for traditional marketing education to keep up, as shown on this site that lists common marketing degree programs that are still organized around traditional marketing themes. For the best information on how to succeed in digital marketing, often the best place to learn is on the internet itself or from experts who are actively involved online.

I did a quick Q&A with author and marketing pro Aaron Goldman after the Pivot Guild launch event held on Sept 22, 2011 at Boulder Digital Arts. Get Aaron’s take on the most important thing a business owner can do to be successful with digital marketing strategy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To define our panel at Blogworld,  the other Blogging in the Age of Social Media panelists (Dave Taylor, Doyle Albee, Jeannine Crooks, Joshua Dorkin) and I wrote a post together on the panel title.  Here’s a short excerpt:

Ah, the good old days. Blogs were a world unto themselves and if we bloggers did anything related to social media it was purely to post URLs and hope that it’d help drive some traffic our way. With the continued rise of Facebook and addition of the surprisingly slick Google Plus combined with Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg and so many other social sites, however, a smart blogger’s gotta know how to manage the social nets, not just a blog.

Whether you look at personal blogging, business blogging, micro-blogging or how they overlap and support each other, blogs have become essential sources of self-expression, thought leadership, information, news, entertainment and community building in our social media age.  While 73.5% of the blogging population is under 35 and connecting on personal levels, companies that blog receive 55% more web traffic and 77% more leads than companies that don’t.

Though social media has become a catch all phrase meaning various things to various people, the heart of social media is that individuals have become the media, and blogs are where their stories live to provide the sound bites for Twitter and Facebook content.  As social media platforms continue to proliferate, the content that makes them interesting and builds their followings are often tied back to blogs.  Imagine Twitter streams, Google searches and Facebook feeds without links to blogs to serve up content that helps readers to dig deeper, connect further and laugh harder.

Read the full article here.

It wouldn’t be a prudent business decision to build any core aspect of your business on a platform you have no control over, right?  Yet in today’s world, having a Facebook Fan Page for your company is essential, and unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you don’t control anything Facebook does with it’s platform.

How will you feel if you have to abandon your Facebook Page one day after years of work to build up your followers, engage your community and have a strong presence on the #2 most visited destination on the internet?

Along with the many upsides to having an active Facebook Fan Page come some crucial downsides.  The reality is that having a Facebook Fan Page is both an indispensable marketing and customer service tool while simultaneously being the equivalent of building a gigantic castle on the beach that could be swept out with the tide without any notice. For example, company’s are currently  losing their Facebook Fan Pages after someone else gains admin privileges and deletes them as an admin to their own page.  This is a major issue, but like losing all of your unsaved changes to a 15 page Word document, your only recourse to this unfortunate event happening to you is to start again from scratch.

I believe in knowing what we can’t control, but focusing on what we can control.  Let’s cross our fingers that you won’t have to deal with your Fan Page being deleted or Facebook imploding anytime soon.  Instead, check out the Top Five ways to build your Facebook Fan Page to make sure you’ve got your bases covered:

1.  After you have 25 fans you should grab the custom username for your business page.

2.  Choose your Fan Page name carefully.  After you have over 100 fans you cannot change the company name on your fan page, so if you owned a business named “Buzz Coffee Shop” and later changed the name to “Buzz Cafe”, you would have to shut down the Facebook Fan Page for “Buzz Coffee Shop” and create a brand new page (with zero fans) for “Buzz Cafe”.

3.  Understanding Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm will help you to create content that is more likely to be seen by your fans.

4.  Create a custom welcome page to greatly increase your conversion rate of visitors who become fans.

5.  Build your community on your Facebook Fan Page by consistently using the Photos, Questions, Twitter, Networked Blogs and other customizable tabs to create a variety of interesting content to share with your fans.

This was too good not to share – So, we’re sharing…

This animated vid is re-purposed from a post on Social Media Timesby Megan O’Neill:  “Animated Video Points Out The Ridiculousness Of Hiring A Social Media Intern”

We couldn’t agree more with Megan. Don’t send a rookie in to do the work of a pro and expect to get the same results. Sometimes, you get what you pay for.  Just sayin’.

This article was originally published on Hip Chameleon

Image via Servitokss

There are three main aspects to social marketing that make it more than broadcasting information.  Strategy, tactical execution and integration to existing marketing systems (online and offline) are all necessary.  Behind these three aspects is a truth that is sometimes still overlooked – executing on tactics is not strategy, it’s a lack of strategy.

To prevent falling into the trap of thinking that randomly communicating, or only reactively replying, on social media platforms is an effective social media marketing strategy, ask yourself these 5 questions:

1. What are your Top 3 business goals?

2. What are you doing today to reach those goals through social media marketing?

3. Are you structuring your online conversations, finding people, and following people based on strategies designed to help you to reach your goals?

4. What can you add to your social media marketing strategy to reach your goals better and faster?

5. How does your core messaging affect your social media communications?

We all know that there are many nuanced layers to effective business communications whether they are shared through social media, email marketing or any other marketing platform.  But getting in touch with your answers to the questions above and then communicating through a filter of ‘what’s in it for them?’ and ‘how can I make them feel special’ is a simple start to shining brighter than your competition.