Online Marketing Blog

With SES Chicago over, we’re picking up our Wednesday guest posts again. This time with my friend David Meerman Scott, best-selling author of numerous books including The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Real-Time Marketing & PR and a new book called Newsjacking (Wiley) created specifically for the Amazon Kindle. David is someone who has always been a forward thinker and a few steps ahead of most marketers. This post gives some perspective and an example of newsjacking that opportunistic marketers are increasingly tapping in to due to availability of trend, buzz and social stream monitoring tools. 

With Google now indexing new content in real-time, there is a tremendous opportunity for clever people to rank at the top of the results for emerging keywords. One great way to accomplish this is to engage in what I call newsjacking.

[Note from Lee: Our Wednesday Guest Post Series from digital marketing experts has been very well received and today's post from my friend Heidi Cohen will not disappoint. Heidi is a long time and very popular Columnist at ClickZ and Content Marketing Institute, Adjunct Professor at NYU, an active marketing blogger as well as President of  Riverside Marketing Strategies. When it comes to internet marketing Heidi's  perspective resonates well with me and I appreciate her insight into the intersection of direct marketing, digital, content and social media a great deal.]

Does your content jump off the page and grab readers by the collar to get their attention? While no one sets out to create content marketing that’s a snooze, sometimes it misses its intended objective. If this is the case, you have to pump life into your content marketing to make it useful for your target audience.

[Note from Lee: The next in our series of Wednesday guest posts comes from no less than the Godfather of Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi. I’ve known Joe since he published his first book, Get Content Get Customers, and have been amazed at his relentless efforts to lead the charge towards better marketing.

What I like best about Joe is that he’s a “Walk the Talk” content marketer with Junta42, Chief Content Officer magazine and the largest annual content marketing event, Content Marketing World. Joe is also co-author of Get Content Get Customers and Managing Content Marketing plus he writes a content marketing blog.  For this post Joe focuses on what businesses need to know about smarter planning for content marketing into the coming year.

[Note from Lee: Social Business is everybody's business when it comes to modern internet marketing. IBM's social business efforts are really at the forefront of this trend. Ben Edwards is the VP of Digital Strategy at IBM and leads the strategy, design and development of IBM's marketing and communications in the digital realm. Ben joins us today to share his insights into the journey of not only embracing the social web for external marketing, but to adapt and adopt social media tools internally to empower socialized marketing.]

Companies of all shapes and sizes, in every industry, are increasingly adopting social media strategies and technologies for their marketing efforts, using Facebook to reach out to customers or YouTube to demonstrate new products. These are good first steps, but there is so much more that “social” has to offer. The era of social business is here and it is becoming clear just how transformative it will be for B2B marketers.

[Note from Lee: While I fervently pursue the home stretch of writing my own book "Optimize", I've asked a few friends to share their thoughts on topics such as Content Marketing, SEO and Social Media. This post comes from Rebecca Lieb, who I've known since her days at ClickZ, then Econsultancy and now she is digital advertising and media analyst at the Altimeter Group. Her new book, Content Marketing: How to Think Like a Publisher to Market Online and in Social Media comes out this week.]

Content workflow is the point at which content marketing gets tactical. It’s nuts-and-bolts process: content calendars, creation, approvals, style guides, templates, and tools.

Get this part right and you’ll be ready to run a newsroom.

[Note from Lee: TopRank Marketing has been working with PRWeb for nearly 5 years and their Director of Public Relations, Frank Strong (Now serving in Egypt  - stay safe!), couldn't say enough good things when they hired a new Social Media Community Manager, Stacey Acevero: Smart, passionate about the industry, highly motivated, sense of humor and a true fan of the brand, Stacey has embraced her role as the social media voice of PRWeb in many ways, from blogging to running #PRWebChat.

Many businesses are investing in their social media expertise by adding Social Media Strategist and Community Manager positions. To get an idea of what skills companies should look for,  I asked Stacey to share her first-hand insights with our readers.]

The One Job Your Company Really Needs

Note from Lee: I’ve known Michael Brito for about 5 years (he hired my agency TopRank Marketing when he was at HP) and I’ve followed his moves around Silicon Valley from Yahoo to Intel to his current role as SVP, Social Business Planning, Edelman Digital. Michael’s new book on Social Business (Included in our list of Optimized Online Marketing Books) is something I’ve been looking forward to and I asked if he’d share some tactical insights with our community. This post focuses on content and social media for companies operating globally.

Creating a social media content plan is easy if you own the customer experience in one country (well, not that easy). It’s a whole different story if that level of responsibility included countries in Latin America, Europe or Asia. When expanding into global markets, strictly from a content perspective, there are 3 important things to consider — the establishment of governance policy, a content library and community management.

Note from Lee: When I heard from Aaron Strout that he and Mike Schneider were writing a book, Location-Based Marketing for Dummies, I knew it would be a great resource. We often do book reviews here on Online Marketing Blog but Aaron and I decided on this format instead, focusing on specific tips and tactics you can use today.

Writing a book takes a lot of work, but with the work is done, it’s satisfying to look back and read all the content that got created. One downside to writing a physical book, however, is trapping all that content between two covers, especially for anyone that decides not to read the book. Rather than let that happen, we are unlocking 17 of the best tips from Location-Based Marketing from Dummies.

As a long time and trusted marketing agency, TopRank Online Marketing gets to work with some amazing B2B technology and SaaS companies. One of those companies is StrongMail.  Today Kristin Hersant, VP of Corporate Marketing joins an esteemed group of marketers and thought leaders ranging from Guy Kawasaki to David Meerman Scott interviewed here at Online Marketing Blog.

Kristin is a firecracker of smarts and energy towards online marketing. Her company StrongMail is the leader in an array of email marketing and social media marketing services. Read on to learn more about the future of Email Marketing and its intersection with Social Media:

Please share a bit about your marketing background and StrongMail. What types of companies do you serve?

Our digital marketing agency, TopRank Marketing, works with some very smart client marketers who have invaluable insights and perspectives. I’m happy to share the following sage advice from Jon Miller, VP Marketing and co-founder of Marketo, and author of Modern B2B Marketing blog on something important to all marketers: keeping the CEO on track with your marketing budget for next year.

Now is the time when marketing executives everywhere are going through the annual dance of building and then cutting their marketing budgets for the year.  The process typically looks like this:

1. The CEO asks each department to come up with a proposed budget for the next year
2. The CMO pulls together a budget based on his or her best calculation of what is actually needed to achieve next year’s goals

Note from Lee: This guest post comes to us from Andy Beal, CEO of social media monitoring tool Trackur and coauthor of Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online. Andy and I have known each other for many years and in fact, Andy was the first “famous” SEO blogger I had the opportunity to meet in person. He was gracious, helpful and very smart then and continues those traits today. He literally wrote the book on Online Reputation Management and I appreciate his willingness to share practical insights into the world of social media monitoring.

Social media monitoring. Reputation monitoring. Buzz monitoring. Call it what you want, but it’s all the rage. All the cool kids are doing it! However, friends don’t let friends monitor social media without first teaching them the six critical steps that most companies overlook.

Note from Lee: This guest post comes to us from Frank Strong, the director of Public Relations at Vocus & PRWeb, a client of TopRank Online Marketing.

When The Karate Kid was released in 1984, social media had yet to be conceived.  Even so, we can still learn a great deal from the way a character like Mr. Miyagi simplified what might otherwise be considered complex challenges.   He was a master, a student, a mentor and a friend – all characteristics that might have made Miyagi successful in social media.  To that end, I offer seven Miyagi insights we can apply to social media: