Nowness.com LED Surfer

Picture Perfect Partnerships

When brands band together, multidimensional stories emerge. Each brand needs to understand what it brings to the main story and to its more focused story. Strong partnerships create efficiencies. A brand gets more bang for the buck and garners a more engaged audience by letting consumers choose to see what they want to see behind the curtain.

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Unilever Brands "Brands for Life" How can they work better together?

Big Companies Can Cross-Pollinate Their Brands

Our concept of brandscaping encourages complementary brands to unite in order to amortize content creation costs and realize greater reach through multiple points of distribution. What about the companies that produce a varied assortment of products, like Unilever or P&G? … Continued

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NeimanMarcus NM@SXSW Image

What can a superhero chef, a makeup brand and a paint company bring to Comic-Con?

Big brands often pave the way in marketing and smaller companies try to ride the wave or emulate on a smaller scale. However, recently there have been examples of marketing initiatives executed on by big brands that are easy for a small brand to replicate and build upon. The Gap Styld.by campaign is a great example, as is Neiman Marcus’ outreach for a fashion photographer at SXSW. But, let’s try it with Comic-Con.

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Polar USA Blogger Strategy

Bloggers and brands can build valuable relationships

Blogger and brand relationships can be tricky to navigate. Oftentimes brands choose to sample products and donate items to bloggers for feedback, reviews, exposure — only to find that nothing comes of it or that the response was not favorable. Bloggers want to remain editorially sound, which means that brands looking to crate meaningful relationships with bloggers need to have a definitive strategy and dedicated resources who are focused, disciplined, and track against concrete goals. Recently I’ve seen a few examples of how blogger and brand relationships have evolved and become more meaningful initiatives.

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Colorful displays prevailed at 2012 Housewares Show

What’s Hot @Houseswares 2012

As a first-time attendee of the International Home + Housewares Show in Chicago, I was immediately enthralled by the breadth of offering from inventive manufacturers looking to build diverse product offerings at retail.

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The $52,000 Customer

I’ll be honest, it’s not always easy to convince VPs and CMOs that digital content marketing is much more effective than mass reach ad spends. It can be daunting to reverse the course of traditional thinking. However, if you’re armed with real-world examples, you’ll probably be more successful.

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Your Workforce is Your Social Media Policy

The democratization of knowledge is a real phenomenon — thanks to the internet. Your company should be playing on this field in a big way. You should be mining your entire workforce for content and promotion. Don’t close your employees off from social media, empower them to do social media right.

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So Much Content, So Little Time

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 18 years since Bruce Springsteen lamented that there were “57 channels and nothing on.” Back in 1992 when the song was released, such a huge cable lineup was unfathomable, and the frustration he experienced trying to navigate the sudden increase of content caused the Boss to write that he bought a .44 magnum to blow away his television– Elvis style.

Today, when you consider the explosion of content online, 57 channels seem as limiting as choosing between french fries or mashed potatoes. Consider the statistics offered by social media think tank, Socialnomics.

* You Tube hosts more than 100 million videos.
* Users post 153 articles to Wikipedia per hour.
* There are over 200 million blogs and more than 54% of bloggers post new content or tweet daily.
* Hulu went from 63 million streams to 373 million total streams in one year.
* Facebook users share more than 1.5 million pieces of content every day.

That’s a lot of content, too much to navigate on your own. So how will one navigate content online? The same way we do offline world– we’ll get referrals.

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The 40-Hour Content Marketing Challenge

We were recently asked how we would craft an online content strategy if we only had 40 hours a month to do it. It’s an interesting idea. The most important thing is identify, identify, identify.

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Do You Really Need a Gimmick?

If you’re creating great content, there’s no point in trying to trick people into consuming it. Distraction is one type of attention, while engagement is quite another.

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Brian Solis’s Conversation Confusion Prism

Let me start by saying something very important. We like Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas’s The Conversation Prism. It provides a very comprehensive view of the web content distribution world. It was developed to address a number of issues that … Continued

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Online Marketing Is for Everybody!

Budget Strategy and ROI (Part 5 of 6) This series asks the tough questions about evolving marketing strategies and the benefits and returns you should expect and plan for. Who’s in charge here? When I speak to potential clients about … Continued

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Sowing the Seeds of Promotion

Your most targeted promotion will be directly through your personal network. Interpersonal content promotion is more likely to result in a conversation through comments or an e-mail exchange. You may even invite contacts to participate.

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Begetting the Love Child of Social Media and Custom Publishing

Today’s social media strategies are heavy on the social and light on the media. It’s mostly about getting on a site and getting followers. Or responding to every mention of your company. It’s only a fraction of the overall picture of what social media ought to be.

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An Organic Alternative to Cropdust Marketing

Budget Strategy and ROI (Part 2 of 6) This series asks the tough questions about evolving marketing strategies and the benefits and returns you should expect and plan for. If somebody told you that you could reach nearly every potential … Continued

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2010: A Marketing Budget Odyssey

Budget Strategy and ROI (Part 1 of 6) By Andrew Davis and Scott Loring This series asks the tough questions about evolving marketing strategies and the benefits and returns you should plan for and expect. Step right up and place … Continued

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Add Value on Twitter: The 4-1-1 Rule

Today, we’re focusing neither on the value of Twitter nor what you can do with it. Instead, let’s take a look at how you should be using it for maxium efficiency.

As Twitter is in the escalation phase, you shouldn’t be spending a lot of time thinking about it or using it. You should only be spending 15% of your time marketing on all escalation-phase platforms combined.

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TippingpointLabs.com: New Look, More Changes to Come

You’ve probably noticed that the TippingpointLabs.com interface has changed. This current deployment is part of our perpetual makeover. Please let us know what you think by commenting below. Design, navigation, user experience, feature enhancements, whatever tickles your fancy. Or comment on where the … Continued

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Microsoft Bing: WTF Kind of Launch Was That?!

Microsoft has spent a reported $100 million to launch their new ‘decision engine’ Bing. I can appreciate their desire to go big with this product launch, but in the process they really dropped the ball on some great opportunities (and some alternatives). Yes, I am talking about the basics of content marketing.

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Don’t Let Traffic Drive You

Eighty percent of you business is going to come from twenty percent of your customers. So concentrate on quality traffic. Don’t invest in attracting everybody to your site with SEM or affiliate marketing, invest in cultivating lower volumes with higher engagement.

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5 Ways Sellsumers Could Impact Your Business

Smart marketers should perk up and recognize another indicator of shifting consumer behavior. Empowered digital consumers are going around, not through, major brands. Sellsumers are highly engaged, savvy content creators changing the marketplace.

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Stand Out on Social Bookmarking Sites

This week in Content in Context, we’re exploring some ways to promote with social bookmarking sites. The larger the platform on which you are promoting your content, the noisier it can be. The goal is to reduce the noise and … Continued

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The Content Engine

Once you have a strategy nailed down, you need a content creation process or, as we call it, a Content Engine. The Content Engine equates to the actual tactics employed in carrying out your overall strategy — it’s the way you plan, coordinate and generate your content.

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Giving It Away

You have a marketing story to tell. You’ve created valuable content. You’ve repurposed it into various formats, and you’ve exercised the foresight to create quality assets that you can repurpose infinitely. Now give it away.

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What Makes Your Content Valuable?

Creating valuable content is vital in marketing online today. But when you’re putting all this content out there without substantial feedback, how do you know if it’s valuable?

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The 12omercial: 12seconds Formalizes An Ad Platform

Anyone who’s met me in the last six months has heard about 12seconds.tv. I’ve also been writing about it recently, here and here. I was intrigued on Friday when I heard that 12seconds debuted a new functionality designed to push video ads to Twitter and elsewhere. After checking out the functionality and watching some of the ads, I’m slightly disappointed.

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