“Every point of refuge has its  price…” Don Henley & Glenn Frey

We live in a tech drenched, always on world – noise levels are unprecedented and it’s another “gold rush” era across all markets.

Your crossing a “Darwinian Digital Divide,” necessitating driving your biz with embedded technology attributes, recognizing social has a price for fame and fortune, standing up and publishing content that dazzles your audience.

If Your Brand is not Tech Savvy your Toast: Scott Brinker has been advocating the importance of technological sophistication via his Chief Martec blog for six plus years. During this period of time he’s kept track of the growth in marketing platforms, from a few hundred to over 2K today.  Staggering!

And it’s much more than marketing platforms coming at your business at warp speed, it’s the interdependence of applications, processes and services.

It’s rapidly becoming a two screen multidimensional world. Tech is everywhere.

Technical competence in your organization is a must. Recruit or outsource accordingly.

How to Stay Sane & Not Get Run Over by Tech 

• Make good decisions as you set up your Infrastructure: Hosting, Web Site Platform, Integrated Apps & Services - your better off going with a Dedicated Server as providers cram huge numbers of sites onto shared servers.
• Build your business in an iterative manner. Don’t go all in or whole hog with technology: start small and move in iterative phases until you are 100% bulletproof with your environment.
• Expect apps and services not to work “as advertised” and have your own agency or IT department carefully test what you are going to use.
• Hire for technical sophistication for key positions. They don’t need to write code; but updating Facebook or Twitter on a smartphone is not going to cut the proverbial mustard.

Social Media Marketing is not a Panacea: fortunes have been and will continue to be made as social sirens call out to you with the wonders of social media marketing.

The days of just standing up a presence on social channels and waiting for the masses to roll in is nothing more than a false line on the horizon.

Social media staying power requires sophisticated content curation, stellar community management and hard work.

Andy Warhol may have been More Prescient than we thought

You may get your fifteen minutes; but, thriving and growing your brand across the social web now requires excellence in tactical execution on an ongoing basis.

Social Media Gotchas You Need to Grasp Going In

• Rule #1: “you gotta feed the beast” – yesterday’s content is in the rear view mirror.
• You don’t own your content on social platforms: you’re homesteading and don’t forget this.
• Where and how will the chairs be filled once the music stops? Everything is subject to change in this M&A driven world.
• Expect the lines to get more blurred on social for “paid” vs. organic content.
• Every social channel you select and utilize requires integration with your back end analytics and CRM apps.
• Expect the continued media “celebrification” cycle of social media to increase moving forward.
• If you are not publishing content across the social web aggressively you are not going to get heard.

Content has always been the coin of the Realm: there’s a reason why Breaking Bad moved AMC from a wannabee to “player” status. As much as we all like Brian Cranston, Vince Gilliam and his team of writers should be pulling up to the bank in a tractor-trailer.

Forget the fancy reference points and one of the best reasons to binge watch a great show on a rainy day.

Great content can be defined by a few words; does it engage, inform and resonate with your audience?

How to Grab Your own Emmy in Today’s Content Drenched World

• Start slow: content marketing is a marathon
• Establish benchmark measurements at the outset.
• 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.
• Mix and match “snackable” short form (images, under 300 word blog post, videos) with long-form “evergreen” high value content.
• Content marketing is expensive “chunk” and repurpose content to leverage your costs.
• Recognize algorithms determine success or failure on some platforms.
• Your blog is not enough: it’s a publish or perish world.

Content Writing Tips from Battle Hardened Content Marketers

• Listening fuels all content development.
• Lists are a good thing: make em (30-50 questions your customers want to read about).
• Try to address all questions and forget search engines. Chasing search algorithms can drive you insane. Write for humans.
• Be findable: meaning, stick in keywords and think about long tail phrases. Our title for this post is a long tail keyword phrase with.
• Try to be honest with your content.
• Not all competitors are created equally and some times you need to write about them. Example: hire us vs. a big agency, we build a digital infrastructure around your biz.
• Try to be as clear and concise as possible. It’s a click and go world. Be succinct and use bullets.
• Don’t stop the creative process and keep the juices flowing any way you can. Tequila may not be a good idea though.
• Remember “silence sells” - white space, images and pauses help to sell your customers as much as great content.
• Critical to evaluate your content ROI.
• Make content a regular focus for someone on your staff.

Marketing success in today’s digital eco system will be determined by being a tech savvy business (embrace tech when/where it makes sense) and creating, sharing and publishing great content across the social web.