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Tell a Brand Story Like GoPro: Be a Content Rockstar

0 Comments/in Content /by Linked Media Group

As the web morphs to a more visual medium creative storytelling is moving front and center as way for brands to build engagement and virality. GoPro is leading the way, which you would expect with a lifestyle product that records every conceivable type of physical activity anywhere and anytime.

GoPro has done a wonderful job with their “GoPro: Lions The New Endangered Species” featuring Kevin Richardson a South African Zookeeper and naturalist along the lines of Jane Goodal. Think: not just recording the story but jumping in and helping to make the story come to life!

Their cameras are the di rigeur equipment, from aging week-end warriors to awe-inspiring young athletes who are not only redefining the boundaries for athletic activities, but how they are recorded and shared! “User generated content” sounds staid in out of synch with today’s on the go, live it share it anytime/anywhere generations - content is everywhere and anything and its being blasted so fast across the social web it’s mind boggling!

This sheer volume of web content is making curation an essential skill for any brand that wants to ride this new wave of endless lifestyle loops.

GoPro Defining Modern Immersive Content Storytelling

All great content is curated for impact, brand resonance and piquing the interest of the viewer. This just under fifteen minute all GoPro filmed vignette does that: it grabs and keeps your attention not in a cheap “twerking selfie” image but showing how a human and animals have bonded in a shape-shifting way that redefines your expectations.

But, it’s not cheap theatrics, there’s an embedded story here that informs and engages the viewer in a meaningful way.

Something has resonated with the broad web community. This YouTube video has been viewed 5.7 million times, has 50K likes, generating a Huff Po article and USA Today and countless blog posts, Tweets, shares across the broad social web. It’s a meaningful story with just a touch of commercial “interruption” at the start (just a second or two) and at the end. GoPro wisely opted to minimize their brand’s embedded commercial - it’s tasteful and well done.

Not in your face, as some would expect for this younger skewing demographic brand.

Did GoPro consciously choose a video with an environmental theme to broaden their reach with a demographic that is environmentally aware? It’s difficult to know; but, if they did, it’s a masterful way to get their cameras and brand in front of an audience that up till now may only have minimal awareness of their brand.

Why this Long Form Content Rocks & What it Teaches us About Content Marketing

High quality story is the foundation of any long form content. This video grabs you within thirty seconds (“lions hugging a human”) and then keeps your attention blending jaw dropping shots of Kevin Richardson with lions and hyenas, with am embedded message about the environment.

There is minimal video production and authoring - part of the visual appeal is the natural look and feel of the video - it’s not slickly produced, with 20-something models lounging around and posing for the camera.

GoPro stayed out of the way of the content story. The “commercial” components are again subtle and minimal. No cheesy voice-over: “shot with a GoPro………”

The product (Go Pro’s Heroe2+) is part of the story. It’s used and embedded in the filming and takes product placement to a new level, while demonstrating (subtly) how sturdy the cameras are. Can your camera stand up to a lion chewing on it? Or, strapping the camera on to the back of a lion as GoPro did?

As a viewer, there’s an immediate connection with this story that draws you into the video - who doesn’t like animals, especially top of the food chain lions hugging a human and hyenas making Kevin Richardson part of the pack hierarchy.

It connects GoPro’s brand with legacy content arching back to Jacque Costeau - helping GoPro reach a demographic that doesn’t necessarily skew towards millennials, helping GoPro broaden their brand with boomers and environmentalists.

It’s curated content - the story, subject matter and filming process done via human or animal mounted cameras and one crew safe & sound in an enclosure all reflect an awareness of good content marketing precepts.

What Makes a Brand Stand Out Using the Power of Visual Storytelling

Your building authenticity with your community: visual’s impact drives relevance.
As technology “takes over our lives” visual strikes a chord within others. Sensory currency is “real” to the visitor.
Visuals drive cultural relevancy that engages the visitor in ways that text cannot equate with.
“Archetypes” have been around since the days of ancient cave man paintings and visuals are a powerful storytelling tools that feature “heroines” and “heroes” embedded in brand storytelling.
Visuals cut through the clutter and chatter that’s “smartphone” driven for many consumers and professionals.

Takeaways for business brands. You may not have the content marketing resources of a GoPro. Regardless, tell a story with your content (text or video), be creative and takes risks and inform and engage when/where you can. Rinse and repeat: our agency mantra for content success reaching today’s always on distracted consumer.

LInkedIn Marketing Best Practices to Rock Your Personal Brand

2 Comments/in Strategic Marketing /by Linked Media Group

LinkedIn has over 200 million users as of February 2014, doubling in size the last calendar year, with 2 new members per second and an estimated 180M unique visitors per month.

It’s a no brainer to have a personal profile on LinkedIn; but, it has its associated costs (time on site) like any social media platform..Our no frills review- what works and what doesn’t based on my eight years and 13K connections on the platform.

Why you Want to be On LinkedIn with Personal Profile #nobrainer

For B2B brands LinkedIn traffic converts better, has more brand engagement, less bounce rates than any other social media platform. The traffic rocks!a
LinkedIn is in “expansion mode” and they have the financial and marketing resources to keep growing.
If you are looking for a job you want a profile on LinkedIn, Probably 30% of my connection requests are from recruiters. It’s an endless stream of requests underscoring how vibrant this platform is for careers opportunities.
Your LinkedIn profile is going to pop up in Google in a matter of days and “live” there forever.
There are over two million LinkedIn Groups, think of these as a smorgasbord of conversations. Some of these Groups have stellar managers and others (50-60% in my estimation) are the Wild West, with just a lot self-promotions. So, pick your Groups carefully. Pro tip: if joining a Group take the time to message the Administrator directly and make a concise business case for why and how you’ll add value to the Group.
Creating and managing a Group on LinkedIn can be a great way to build brand for yourself or your company: time intensive: 90-180 days on average to scale to some success.
It’s “free” and ad supported: you probably will be fine with a free account- the vast majority of LinkedIn users (85%) are not paying for the platform. More on Premium (Paid) Memberships below.
It’s a global platform, with over 50% of the community based outside of North America.
To a certain extent, not having a profile on LinkedIn is a faux pas today for just about anyone. Your personal branding will suffer accordingly and you can use your personal profile as an introduction in just about any marketing process or communication method you can think of.
This platform is still rocking and rolling (growing): new user every two seconds, over 300M users, reaches over 200 countries, 40% of user check it daily, 3 million business pages, 200 conversations per minute, 41% access via mobile, aiming for 3B users.

Average User’s Most Popular Features

Understanding who has viewed your profile, although some users block their profile visits so you can’t see who they are. In my experience about 20-30% block their profile with privacy settings and this can be easily turned on and off via your profile.
Discovering old friends, people or other professionals you may have worked with earlier in your careers. Yes, it’s sort of like Facebook and many people use these two platforms concurrently to find and connect with others.
Contributing to and belong to Groups; sourcing information, building relationships and/or self-promotion.
Direct messaging (approx 47%) others that you know.
Researching companies listed via Company Pages (plain vanilla assessment).
Background checks for busy professionals.
Competitive review: take snapshot of the company and export out to a Word doc but takes time for analysis: departments, job title, execs and more.

Creating a LInkedIn Personal Profile: Best Practices

Create a full Profile: Keyword driven Profile Summary, Past Jobs/with dates, Bio picture, Education, Non-Profit Work, Skills/Expertise, Add Presentations/White Papers - prepare to spend 8-10 hours on a robust profile and use LinkedIn’s completion percentage algorithm.
Don’t create a profile w/out a bio picture; it increases your connectivity by 11X - so many ignore this and also don’t put quality time into profile.
Pay it forward and provide Endorsements to others and others will reciprocate in kind - this is a part of LinkedIn’s social fabric (these show up in your profile).
Join some finite number of Groups (10-20) that you want to at least check out once or twice a week and also provide comments and/or share topical news via your Groups and be mindful of Admin’s “rules of the road” and group etiquette
Connect your WordPress Blog to your LinkedIn profile account during setup so blog posts are automatically shared on the platform.
Pro Tip: LinkedIn owns SlideShare; so, integrate any PowerPoint Presentations with your Profile.
Share your Content (Blog Posts, Valuable News) with Profile Status Updates 2-4 times per day; remember, content curation is important. Some Pros use TwitterFeed to share News from 3rd party sources.
For better or worse, LinkedIn’s Newsfeed is becoming image centric; so, don’t rely solely on textual updates - be creative with your images.
Remember your connections drive your newsfeed - demographic targeting is a good thing. Although some pros just look for high volume connectivity with minimal targeting.
Use LinkedIn’s publishing functionality as it can drive significant traffic, adds luster to your profile. Don’t forget to add a blurb at the bottom thank others for reading & commenting, and cross link all of your published content on each single piece of content, add links to web site and social profiles.
Update your Profile frequently: 3-5X per every 60 days at a minimum.
Pay attention to LinkedIn’s new profile analysis tools which show your levels of engagement: these are not robust but will give you some perspective.
LinkedIn’s “People You Know Tool” has been recently upgraded (integrating an algorithm with import features via email) - useful for building connections. And their Outlook Pllugin is cool too.
LinkedIn has a cool Mobile Phone App that has good basic functionality (picture below) and mobile growth is skyrocketing.
Linkedin has opened up their API (Application Programmer Interface) and there are a large number of plugins that work well - here is a great collection of the top ten via Mashable.

Make Sure Your Publishing Content on the Platform

LinkedIn just opened up their Publisher Platform enabling any user to publish content on the site. Previously this was limited to a very select (under 500) group of “thought leaders.”

Why You Want to Publish

LinkedIn visibility is in part driven by the frequency of your profile updates - your “refreshing” your profile every time you publish.
Drives credibility within the community.
Enables you to leverage your content marketing costs. You can now upload a blog post that you think will represent your personal brand (be selective).
LinkedIn now let’s others follow you even if they are not connected with you, giving you the ability to build our more connections on the platform.
Gives you another content source you can reference via other platforms.
Be aware at present their is no ability to share your published content via “channels” - LinkedIn has an algorithm that selects Published Posts for this.

Baseline Content Publishing Guidelines

Share stellar content - we recommend only republishing high quality content.
Content length should be 500-1K Words
Use at least 2-3 images per Published Posts (this is now a visual platform)
Add a Title and Link out to all other Published Posts to drive incremental traffic
Headlines, bullets and underlines are as important here as they are for any content marketing processes (that links to one of our posts)
Add a “thank you” note (be sincere) note to the bottom of all posts and include links out to your Twitter and web site. Many don’t do either and miss a great opportunity to drive incremental traffic.
Cross promote via other platforms with a rinse and repeat cycle.
Comment back and thank people for commenting; this is standard social etiquette.

You get standard reporting via LinkedIn’s platform: here is a group of posts done and traffic for a 30 day period. Note is shows View, Likes and Comments

LinkedIn will also send you status updates on a weekly basis showing “engagement” on their platform with posts you have published

Free or Paid? Premium Version is More Robust but not a Significant Difference for Most Users

I recommend going with a paid LinkedIn Account - it’s well worth the extra $200-300. per year (approx depending on yoru plan) for the incremental exposure you now get with an customized profile. It’s a bargain when contrasted with advertising costs on other networks too.
You get much more Advanced Search and Filter capabilities with a Premium (paid) version (three pricing tiers) but in my experience the search function is not robust, you can only use one tag at a time for searching, which is inherently limiting.
Additionally, the overall Advanced search function is not much better than the standard search capability with a free account - you get more results; but, it’s impossible to really pare the results down. even with upgraded sophisticated filters provided with paid accounts.
With a paid account (top tier) you get 25 InMails to others per month - but this just a “cold call” email - is it cool? Yes, But, you can easily reach most of these people with a well worded invite. And, a “cold” email is still a cold email. An @atmessage may work better on Twitter in some cases.
You can see more profile views than with a free account; but, if these people have their profiles blocked your not getting much more bang for your buck/euro.

Platform Gotchas that Make us Pull our Hair Out!

LinkedIn Newsfeed now has an unending array of junk you have to wade through: brain teasers (really?!), new bio pictures, “congrats on the new job,” self-congratulatory pablum and of course ads (sponsored).
Like Twitter’s move to more image platform centric content, LinkedIn has done the same: your going to see some “Instagram like” images. You can “Hide” some of the dreck/accounts but your connection’s content cannot be filtered in any sophisticated way.
You cannot easily export your LInkedIn connections to an email provider; the functionality does not work well if you have more than 2K connections it’s going to take time and your going to get “we are working on this” back from customer service.
We were able to export a list of over 10K connections but we had to use the import in feature of an email newsletter provider: GetResponse (full disclosure: we use their services). We had challenges (business case or technology) with: Constant Contact, Vertical Response and MailChimnp. But, to be fair, this functionality is not part of LinkedIn’s overall TOS. We are being picky.
Real data mining on this platform, even with a Premium Membership is not possible; the back end functionality is just not robust. But, we would expect to see this functionality or something similar in the next 6-18 months.
The new “social” features to a certain extent are mirroring Facebook’s functionality: Likes and Comments which show up in your account summary. These are baby steps to turning LinkedIn into a mature social platform.
Connection invites are not what they seem: many skilled pros have a thinly disguised profile that hides the fact they are HR execs or recruiters. We have nothing against either; but, if you don’t click in to the profile your going to have a lot of connections that are meaningless.

Why we Love and Recommend this Platform

LinkedIn has done a stellar job with the product. It’s evolved the last ten plus years from a rather static, geeky site to become a powerful social media platform.
Traffic from LinkedIn converts better than any other social traffic for B2B brands. Twitter is a close second but typically LinkedIn traffic stays longer on a sites and engages with the brand better via pages visited, lead generation, actions take, etc.
LinkedIn’s move to enable publishing for all was a great idea and we expect their Comscore numbers and traffic will accelerate moving forward as millions of individuals and brands embrace LinkedIn’s publishing capabilities.
Every competitor (it’s a long list) of professional connectivity portals, sites, etc. pale in comparison to the ROI LinkedIn can deliver.
Whatever your industry you’ll find peers on this platform - it’s just a great place to build connections, engage with others, etc. It’s the very definition of what any good social platform should be.

Do we recommend and use the platform? Absolutely - agencies and social execs shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds them and regardless, our “warts and all” review should end on positive note underscoring how much we like and recommend this platform to our clients.

Successful Facebook Marketing for B2B Brands

0 Comments/in Facebook /by Linked Media Group

We tell B2B focused clients to ignore Facebook, other than setting up a basic business page and sharing blog posts, which in turn will drive “Bing” search results and ultimately Google. Here’s why:

Facebook is an Ad Platform disguised as a social network: success on Facebook is not going to happen unless you advertise.
Organic ‘fan reach” is dropping rapidly, as consumer newsfeeds are too crowded and Facebook is continuing to grow.
Some businesses are bailing on Facebook due to lack of real organic reach with consumers via status updates.
Facebook’s platform is designed for consumers not businesses! It’s painful to use for a business. See: round peg in square hole.
It takes 6-10 hours to set up a Business Page; what’s worse, requires an ongoing dose of Facebook Advertising to connect with and build a community of any size and downstream growth!
Expect to see huge swings in Reach and Engagement on the order of 50-75% - the biggest impact for these numbers is NOT sharing content and engaging– it’s advertising with Facebook. Remember it’s an an ad platform dressed up with a stream of unending selfies.
You thought Google Analytics might be a tad complicated or hard to use – wait till you see Facebook’s Insights; simple analysis is easy but deep dives into the data are not.
Facebook’s Edge Rank Algorithm is highly optimized for images (see: Instagram acquisition) – and you’re competing with every “selfie” geek in the world (consumers) uploading images.
Facebook has over 100K variables that impact a Newsfeed

Our Recommended Alternatives

Build your brand on Twitter – you’ll find a lot more businesses and execs on this platform. Google monitors “social signals” and indexes (finds and lists) most links shared on Twitter in 24-48 hours. #SEOSuccess

Create a Content Marketing Strategy – this can be as simple as 1-3 blog posts per week that are shared via Twitter and LinkedIn with a built in rinse and repeat cycle. Over the long haul content marketing does so much for a business.

Basic Content Marketing is: great for SEO (Google “sees” frequent updates), drives thought leadership, engages web site visitors, builds brand engagement (comments) & can be socially syndicated forever.

Setup a Business Page and Profiles for all staff on LinkedIn; join targeted Groups and post Blog content, answer questions, become a thought leader on this high-growth business focused platform.

Build a Newsletter list and use email marketing: it still drives stellar conversions for most businesses.

Create Presence and upload PowerPoint Presentations with SlideShare – it’s owned by LinkedIn and a paid Pro Account will drive much more targeted traffic than a
Facebook page.

Google+ has grown exponentially in the last 18 months - it’s great for SEO. Jury is still out on real demonstrable traffic via the channel.

Exec Summary for Consumer Facing Brands Building a Business Page

You should be using Facebook and we don’t want to equivocate on this point - advertising on Facebook is a great media buy with much lower costs than PPC or most ad networks.
Whether your a big brand or small business, the key metric for effective social media marketing on Facebook is creating great content and engaging with the community.
Your profile description should be complete and your web site URL should be showing right at the top so it’s visible to anyone who visits your page, not buried in your text.
Use Tabs to give visibility for your other social platforms and email newsletter signs ups such as Pinterest, GetResponse (email vendor), YouTube, Awebber; the list is endless - you can have up to twelve tabs with four showing at one time.
Your Cover Photo should be creative and your Profile picture can/should be your company logo at launch; change these later and rotate images you think add some sizzle to your page.
Use Advertising on Facebook to accelerate growth for your page. But, don’t rely solely on advertising to build a large community, as engagement rules this platform: Facebook’s Edge Rank Algorithm is tuned to measure how this community is engaging with you: comments, your comments back, virality (shares of your content) and how/when consumers are sharing your content with their friends. Think of ads as the icing on the cake with your content being the foundation.

It’s a fools game to buy “likes” on this platform. Don’t do it - these consumers (if they are in fact real) will never engage with your brand and if you do this at some point you’ll have to delete your business page and start over.
Nurture your community on Facebook and cross promote your other social media channels and remember to “rinse and repeat” your content, as only about 20% of your community will see your status updates at one time.
Hasthtags are the new short form currency of the content realm. Don’t forget to use the same hashtags on Facebook your brand is (hopefully!) using on Twitter and Pinterest. These should be a brand specific hashtag that you can “own” and a series of second tier hashtags. If you are GEO Targeting we love the TrendsMap platform which will give you a visual representation in locales for trending hashtags.
Use WishPond to drive consumer engagement - they are the market leader in contests, email campaigns and landing pages. Their customer service is excellent, services are low cost/high value.
Facebook has a built in content filtering capability for businesses: use your “like” pages to curate content you want to see and share. Many brands never even use this built in resource on a business page.

Key takeaways: if your business to business focused Twitter, LinkedIn and maybe G+ may be better channels. But, if your targeting consumers, don’t ignore Facebook. Just know advertising on Facebook is now a critical component to a successful Facebook presence.

Building a Meaningful Consumer Brand like Torie & Howard

0 Comments/in Social Media /by Linked Media Group

We love authentic brands, especially (full disclosure) those that take the time to reach out to us on Twiter and send us a Direct Message that is not another (ad nauseum) invite to connect on Facebook. Surprise! A DM that actually wasn’t a social solicitation but a request for our postal address for an inbound FedEx.

Our story starts with an introduction by Mark Strauss (@togomedia) made via Twitter which was followed up on with an @atmessage Tweet from Torie & Howard and then probably 6-8 mentions of our Tweets over a thirty day period.

Why We Have Brand Love for Torie & Howard

They took the time to follow up on an introduction via Twitter (can you believe it: a practical reason for Twitter Marketing! #weareshocked) with a Fed Ex of their mouthwatering (we fought over the product) organic hard candy.

We not in their market sweet spot - are Advertising geeks and our Twitter Follower base is a smorgasbord of agencies, small businesses, digital types - they may all have a “sweet tooth” but our connections are not consumers - but @torieandhowr invested time in social connectivity.

Their Twitter stream is more than just pitching product sales like some more mundane brands: it has personality, images, Tweets that educate and inform. Yes, they are promoting their brand but this promotion is under 15% which is what we counsel own clients to do.

Product packaging, web site and marketing materials reflect a consistent design - images, color scheme, logo and emphasis on “organic” is carried through via all design processes.

Torie & Howard are telling a brand story - this may sound like marketing fluff speak; but, it’s not. Their entrepreneurial spirit and attention to detail show through in their messaging, social stream, web site - building brand and winning customers.

The “T&H Promise” on their home page rings true and resonates with the visitor: touching on product quality, environmental impact and paying it forward by donating to autism speaks.

Their newsletter and social icons are “above the fold” and viewable to all, making it easy to connect and engage with their brand via Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Note: social channels are consumer facing and not B2B oriented: LinkedIn or G+ - marketing efforts are concentrated.

Perhaps the nicest touch of all is the simplest: just a handwritten note on a card - in this age of digital impersonalization sometimes the littlest things mean a lot - this card resonated with us!

Thanks Torie & Howard!

What’s Compelling Content & How to Create It

1 Comment/in Content /by Linked Media Group

Great content marketing can and should incorporate personality! Who sells more Sports Illustrated issues: Payton Manning or Kate Upton?

No contest it’s Kate. Not to be chauvinistic ladies, just trying to make a point. Peyton has the gravitas but Kate “delivers” a level of brand cachet at least in her fifteen minutes of fame. #justsaying

Visual is driving poor old text down the road.

That’s not always a good thing for how quality content is created, viewed and shared - images are moving front and center as content drivers.

Content Nirvana for brands in need of Inspiration and Buzz

Attractive content, visual or otherwise differentiates your brand, understand how to create and share compelling content: text, images, videos, infographics, blog posts, web site copy that grabs your targeted demographic.
Think brand selfies. Your content messaging has to be amplified to be read and “heard” in today’s smartphone driven world. Google: “com bubble” the noise level is back.
Your challenge brands is getting heard above the “selfie twerking din” that rules much of social media marketing, especially for businesses marketing to consumers.
Effective content marketing requires a rinse and repeat strategy.
Content best practices is morphing into two silos (you need both): smartphone snackable, image driven (think souffle), short form content and longer form content (1-5K Words); see the Huff Po for the former and the NY Times (somewhat) for the latter.
Major social media platforms that were once textual are shifting to image based: see LinkedIn’s almost “instagramish” feeds and Twitter’s new image focus in the stream and via their redesigned home page for accounts.
Hashtags are ubiquitous and represent new a new “short form” way to drive your brand. Look at the success AMC has had using hashtags to fuel social chatter both for shows and episodes: #breakingbad #littlekid #walkingdead
Personality defines your business brand. “You brought a Beatle home to meet your “Mum” but “you” wanted to spend the night with a member of the Stones.
Be brand melodic with a “Yesterday” muse or “Let’s Spend the Night Together” - #standforsomething
SEO is somewhat Dead in the Road (other than wonky on page work) and content shared across the social web is going to do a lot more for your brand vs. hiring someone offshore to do a lot of backlinking. Create an Editorial Calendar and blog away.

Seven Key Metrics for Smart Content Marketing

Stellar curated content still drives engagement: an editorial calendar is just a horizontal tool.
Mobile usage is driving 30-50% of content “consumption” (be mobile savvy) but “brand stories” may drive significantly more engagement: mix and match the size of your content (long or short form).
Content syndication is increasingly more important in today’s “technology drenched’ world: use rinse and repeat cycles to reach today’s distracted consumer and professional.
Personalty still drives content engagement for B2B and B2C brands and it’s becoming increasingly more important to use imagery that gets attention in the marketplace. Note: LinkedIn’s move to an image centric feed.
Content Measurement is Critical: have a finite grasp of these ROI drivers: Unique Visitors, Page Views, Return Visits, Time on Site, Bounce Rate, Engagement/Virality (ReTweets, Shares, Likes, Comments), Revenue or Lead Generation.
Mix and match “snackable” short form content (images, video, infographics) with “evergreen” high value content to drive brand engagement, incremental traffic and revenue.
Build in cross platform marketing on all top tier platforms: Tumblr, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook using plugin to automatically “push” content to other platforms or pure play content syndication cloud based services.
Less is more in some cases: remember 30-50% of traffic is via Smartphones and these prosumers have short attention spans.

Content ROI Variables

Clickthrough traffic
Social Engagement
Brand development (softer measurement)
Lead generation via Sales Funnel
Shared and Repurposed elsewhere (viral, mentioned, commented, followed liked, retweeted)
Clickthrough revenue generation

contentlifecycle Content is No Longer Static

Content is anything and anywhere: Text, Images, Video, Audio, Comments, Reviews
Social conversations about your Brand have to be monitored.
Platforms Choices are many and evolving quickly: Web Site, Blogs, Wikis, discussion groups, SllideShare, Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, Vine, YouTube
Social Platforms have unique technical challenges and the features and functions change quickly.
Celebrities and others are constantly pushing the “limits” of content being shared - that’s not a good thing from a pure content perspective.
Your competing with billions of pages of content and the volume is increasing.
Businesses are aggressively deploying a product marketing strategy that encompasses no frills brands along side their traditional branded products: getting real world and “mental” shelf space is challenging.
All brands are by necessity of changes in the digital landscape forced to become publishers on some scale.

Key Takeways for Content Marketers

Recognize your customer is untethered from your brand; one in five shoppers never left their couches in the most recent holiday shopping seasn. Your goods and service may be somewhat anonymous to them or the purchases decision was made even prior to visiting your web site.
Understand who your customer is in start-up language that’s known as a brand persona. In the ancient days it was referred to as a customer demographic, although some geeks will disagree with our labeling
Niche in when/where you can to make your brand or business stand out
Use an editorial calendar to impart some discipline and focus across all you marketing efforts. Get a sample editorial calendar here (no reg just download).
Read more and steal knowledge when/where you can find it.
Be a confident brand but not arrogant. We all want answers from smart people.
Push boundaries when/where you can. We can’t tell you what these are: ask your customer.
Recognize we are moving into an autonomous and automatic buying cycle for most consumers: that’s not all bad, it levels the playing field for many smaller brands. You can move faster than many bigger competitors, which is a distinct advantage in a market that has commerce market moving faster than any on record.
Getting discovered in this new digital age is core anchor for your marketing processes: “live” and “be” where your customers are with a targeted social strategy, content marketing efforts, paid media, newsletter marketing, lead gen on any/all targeted social platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.
We live in a tech drenched world and technical expertise is a must for savvy content marketers encompassing: platforms, syndication, measurement, lead gen integration, landing page functionality and connectivity.
Lines are blurring between organic content created in house and “native advertising content - noise levels are unprecedented for content marketers.

Our Executive Summary: attractive/sexy content differentiates your brand, you gotta amplify your content to be heard, create snackable (short form) and long form content, use hashtags across all content, incorporate some personality with your content marketing strategy. Remember: #sexsells - you heard it here first right? #tonugueincheek

The Only Web Site Strategy You’ll Ever Need

0 Comments/in Strategic Marketing /by Linked Media Group

The high-speed embrace of social media platforms by businesses big and small causes some to take their eye of the ball when it comes to their web sites. Use these guidelines to ensure your site resonates with visitors.

Successful Social Strategy Requires Mythic Content & Serious Effort

0 Comments/in Social Media /by Linked Media Group

Many small businesses and even corp behemoths have no idea that social media marketing platforms are not cost free, requiring curated content updates to drive engagement, monitoring the platforms, measuring social ROI and engagement.

A well done LinkedIn profile will take 4-6 hours to create and optimize and should be update on a regular basis. Read more →

Content Marketing and Social Now Drive SEO

0 Comments/in Search Engine Optimization /by Linked Media Group

SEO is the process of making your web site more accessible to search engines. Google’s algorithmic updates the last 3-5 years (“panda” “penguin” “hummingbird”) have changed the SEO marketing permanently.

It’s s a myth to think you can and should be manipulating search engines with back links, page keyword stuffing, duplicate content development, etc. That’s like mass mailing CDs as AOL did in the early days of the modern web.

Today SEO rankings are a combination of creating and sharing great content coupled with basic on page SEO best practices we’ve outlined below.

How to Adjust your SEO Strategy

Think of Twitter as Google’s new SEO discovery engine – use Twitter to tell Google what new content has been added to your site, with hyperlinks embedded in your Tweets to the blog post or page.
Build your site on WordPress with these page attributes to drive SEO: Title and Descriptions consistent with your copy. Use the Yoast plugin.
Make sure your page construction HTML “score” is correct – use the W3C Validator to check your code by pasting in a URL and checking.
Write shareable copy; by “shareable” we mean with excellent, well writte copy that educates and informs your audience and use the ShareThis WordPress plugin so visitors can easily share your content across their social accounts.
Don’t have a slow web site! Google penalizes sites with a negative ranking of 25% - checkout Pingdom’s site to understand your critical load times for a page. You want to be less than 2.5 seconds of load time per page.

Use PlexiSearch (click on search insights) to understand how keywords are rated and ranked by Google and Bing – back links are passé – “social” really drives SEO rankings.
Monitor comments via your web site and/or use Disqus for on-baord commenting to make the job easier: site popularity will drive spammers; know this going in.
If need be, outsource a portion of your content marketing to help you brand get more lift in the marketplace; this blog post will give you a sense of content marketing costs.

If consumer facing brand and/or you have sufficient marketing budget make sure your updating Facebook on a regular basis; this will drive Bing search results which are picked up by Google.
Be proactive with Google: makes sure your Google Webmaster Tools account is working with Google analytics and monitor Google’s “read” of your site.
Create relevant “intelligent” URLs that have keywords and informative text embedded in the URL string. This helps to drive more traffic by letting a viewer doing a search quickly get a sense for what your page is about.
Make sure your Google Analytics account is working properly and Webmaster Tools is connected.

A critical takeaway for savvy SEO Marketing is understanding SEO is just one critical part of your overall marketing mix and should be integrated with other strategic marketing initiatives: content, ads (don’t forget about re-targeting), social media, email, offline and commenting on other sites.

Effective SEO 30K Foot Edition for busy Execs

Don’t obsess about SEO! It’s an important part of your overall marketing strategy but it is not as important today as it was 3-5 years ago.
Do an informal or formal SEO audit depending on your marketing staff and/or budget
Create great content with embedded keyword phrases. Their are a ton of keyword research tools: Wordtracker is one of the best and we’ve been using them for over ten years.
Share and syndicate your content across the social web. Consumers and other businesses are ignoring search and increasingly relying on content accesses ed via social and/or smartphone apps, search is being bypassed.
Three key metrics your brand should be aware of today are: Search, Social and Mobile.
Great web site design is still critical to driving search engine rankings: visitors should be able to easily access your web site and engage with your brand. Pay attention to time on site, bounce rates and the number of pages accessed via your site.
Data is exploding with 10X growth with 44 Gigabytes of information online by 2020 - critical to create great content that helps your brand stand out from the crowd, with associated SEO rankings.
All brands today are becoming publishers chasing a digital audience that is increasingly fragmented.

Responsive web site design has a significant impact on SEO and your overall marketing efforts: 30-50% of your web site traffic is accessing it via Mobile and Tablet.

Content Marketing Best Practices that Drive SEO Marketing and More

Start slow: content marketing is a marathon process that is inherently iterative: you learn as you go.
Establish benchmark measurements at the outset: social engagement, revenue, email subscription, eBook download.
Keep moving forward: don’t get bogged down in the proverbial trenches.
Align content marketing with other strategies.
Involve your entire organization whether it’s five or fifty people: great content ideas come in all shapes and sizes: sales, customer service and/or exec staff.
Great content marketers “newsjack” and “borrow” from others. Content curation (great research) is critical to success.
Mix and match snackable short form (images, under 300 word blog post, videos) with long-form “evergreen” high value content.
“Chunk” and repurpose and syndicate content to leverage costs. An image curated and sourced for your web site should be featured on your pinterest board, shared on Twitter and recycled via multiple blog posts.
Great images help to make your brand stand out, which is increasingly important with today’s crowded markets.
Used an Editorial Calendar (this link will take you to our blog post with an embedded Editorial Calendar sample): it imparts discipline to your ongoing content marketing and can be integrated with a site like Trello to drive collaboration via teams of people.

SEO marketing is still a critical part of your overall marketing strategy: but, much of the old school strategies are no longer relevant! Smart marketers and brands realize an integrated marketing strategy drives SEO rankings.

Creating a Meaningful Content Strategy

0 Comments/in Content /by Linked Media Group

In today’s always on smartphone driven world a content marketing strategy is now the critical differentiator for making your business stand out!

What is it? A content marketing strategy is not a simple solution or action. It’s a method and a mindset, focusing on producing and sharing meaningful content: web site pages, blog posts, images, infographics, and videos across the social web.

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Creating a Meaningful Content Strategy

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