Links worth a click #5

There have been some really interesting reads online.

Here is my pick from the last week, we 24 June 2011.

SOCIAL MEDIA:  Mashable offered up an interesting ‘Behind the Scenes’ on 8 Innovative Social Media Campaigns. My personal favourite is The Voice because it is a new take on reality contest TV and was perfect for social media.

B2B: I particularly liked the advice on keeping your mind on ‘next action’ as a driver on what and how to present in Social Media B2B’s post on How to Create Great B2B Presentations

FACEBOOK: Australia’s finest, Jeff Bullas has pulled together an overview of 5 creative Facebook pages. I was initially surprised in scrolling through to find games, movies, cars and lingerie, but hey it is Facebook!

SEO COPY: The ever useful Marketing Profs site published a handy little guide on writing with SEO in mind. Their Five Tips for Writing Content That Keeps Pace With B2B Searches included titbits such as staying aware and staying relevant.

BLOGGING: If you need to get your CEO on board with your social media thinking, here is a useful post designed to get them involved in the blog side of things.

Now, a three way tie for content of the week:

EBOOKS: First off Hubspot’s How to Write and Launch an Ebook That Generates Leads. Staggeringly useful.

INFOGRAPHICS: Secondly, a must try: Infographics are all the rage right now if you have a dataset you want to present in an innovative way. Here are 5 tools to help turn data into infographics.

WEBSITES: Finally, from Econsultancy, and just to make most of you feel your age, just look at how some of the UK’s top e-commerce sites have changed in the past five years (or in some cases not changed).

Hope you see something you like. More next week.

Links worth a click #1

Links worth a click we 27 May, 2011.

It was an interesting week in digital. Here is my pick of the top stories.

GOOGLE WALLET heralded a new age of cashless transaction. Here is the Guardian’s take on it  and something from Google on how it works.

Staying with GOOGLE but going retro, here is a great guide from Mashable on getting started with Google Analytics.

For CONTENT MARKETERS trying to make some money, Seth Godin’s excellent new publishing initiative Project Domino put out a blog post which discussed the paradox of the paid PDF ebook.

FACEBOOK specific retail pages, or F-commerce, are on the rise. Here is an interesting Econsultancy review of the new Lyle & Scott Facebook
clothing store.

Brand Republic reported this week that brands have been ‘liked’ by 150m Facebook users per day.

There was a big TWITTER development this week which meant that for the first time people can see what you see. It’s going to show up all those guilty pleasures you follow and some you might not want people to know about!

Finally, Lamborghini are considering a new ‘everyday model’ so you should start saving now!

Image: Gearlive.com

My Twitter Week (w/e 13 March 2011)

Here’s some links worth a click from the last seven days:

Right off the bat, MarketingProfs reported on how YouTube topped Facebook & Twitter in User Satisfaction. Despite 7 in 10 users of Facebook returning to the site within 7 days, it seems more people share more content on YouTube.

Mark Shaeffer penned the excellent Six ideas to get your company blog out of the fog. In it he dissects the blog, looks at the data and comments on design, structure, content and promotion. A must read if you produce any kind of online content.

Over on Utalkmarketing, I stumbled on a post examining why marketers shouldn’t let email marketing drop off the radar. This backs nicely into stats I recall from last year about how social media can help create an audience but opt in email allows you to provide personalised content. There is still a place for email in the modern marketing mix.

The very readable SocialMediaB2B blog posted an interesting piece looking at how to make social media interesting more digestible and relevant for clients and managers with 6 Ways to Format B2B Social Media Reports.

Staying on the social media front, it always seems to be a challenge to locate good case studies. Here are five of the latest that involve social media from a PR perspective from Mashable.

The last one this week provided more proof Facebook isn’t everything with Econsultancy’s Top 50 brands in social.

More next week.

Best b2b social media tools: Blogs

Why blog?

With over 130m blogs in existence and rising, blogging is the cornerstone of any self respecting content marketing strategy – providing an interactive platform where ideas and opinions can be expressed, shared, countered and, above all, engaged with.

Blogging regularly on specific topics increases your search engine visibility, as you routinely include certain critical keywords in your content. This in turn builds your reputation on these topics and the blog will build an audience. If that doesn’t inspire, how about the fact that it is the easiest to self publishing and other than the time involved, it is free most of the time.

What to blog about?

The challenge to the b2b marketer is to develop a blog that offers relevant and insightful comment rather than corporate news and views. That’s what the web news stream is for. Instead, use your blog to create a personality for your business. Offer an opinion on the industry news of the day. Comment on business news at large. Survey your customers, assess trends, run polls and competitions and publish all the findings on your blog.

Blog posts which gain notable traction often discuss issues and problems, offer how to guides and approaches to issue resolution. Provide links to other articles, blogs and contents you’ve seen, liked and rated, positioning yourself as a true content provider.

How to get started?

Create a free blog at www.wordpress.com. Over time, this can be ported to the self-hosted www.wordpress.org, but it serves the needs of most bloggers as it has a number of bespoke design themes, requires no programming expertise, offers a range of interactive options and analytics, and allows you to start writing straight away.

Before you write anything, create a calendar. This will focus the mind. Think about a number of blog posts and start drafting them. But don’t publish anything. The idea is to create a pool of articles so you have content in reserve. Schedule a blog post fortnightly and post it at the same time of day so people over time become used to seeing it / receiving it. As your confidence grows, and resource allows, move to weekly, then perhaps twice weekly. Writing every day is incredibly demanding and should be avoided in the early months.

Writing and posting a blog article takes a little longer than you might think. The content itself might be straight forward but you need to consider the title, tags and a relevant image. I’d recommend keeping posts to 200 words. It’s a good approach to try to include some keywords that are used by your target readers in the title and copy.

If you need some direction, check out content and titles on high traffic blogs like Mashable and SocialMediaExaminer, who offer useful insights into the sorts of titles that encourage people to read.

Blogging demands integrated use of social media tools to drive traffic and provides a great objective to using a wider portfolio of tools. As posts go live, email the link to your database, your colleagues, post it to Twitter, relevant industry Linkedin groups and any other social and business networks you use. WordPress.com analytics can provide extraordinary data on where traffic comes from so this can be refined over time.

Check out my other posts on blogging…

Blogging in hindsight – lessons learnt from my own experience

Marketing Metrics 7: News and blogs – using news and blog functions to generate and distribute content

Stepping into the blog spotlight – read last, its about ramping up your exposure

Image credit Why?,

Top Tweets of the Week (17 Sept 2010)

As I get an enormous amount of useful information from people I follow on Twitter, every Friday I’m going to try and provide my Top 5 Tweets of the Week. Regular readers might view it as a bit of a kop out, but hey, it’s a Friday! There will still be 2-3 other great and insightful posts through the week.

As you’ve come to expect on this blog, Top Tweets will cover the areas of marketing, digital marketing, business and personal and professional development.

Monday: 29 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed Sourced from @CIMWorldwide: via @mashsocialmedia @mashable

Tuesday: Like reading b2b marketing blogs? Here are 344 to choose from Sourced from @GalenDY Proteus B2B

Wednesday: Seth’s Blog: Self-delusion and self-loathing Sourced from @ThisIsSethsBlog

Thursday: Interesting view on content curation – the quick way to blogging Sourced from @smexaminer

Thursday: Ten ways to re-energise your blog Sourced from @smb2b

And a special mention to @brookhouse for The Andrew L Daily from Tuesday  ▸ featuring Marketing Metrics 8: Email marketing as a feature story.

A great example of content curation and blogging in action! I’m looking at paper.li distribution as a result!

Hope they all inspire you as they have me.