The Content Buffet - By John White » content marketing

Is Sales Running the White Paper Project? 3 Cautions

John White — Thu, 03 May 2012 20:01:09 +0000

Some marketing teams let others in the organization run their own content projects. Here are three tips to keep them from getting out of hand.

If your organization is large enough to have a Web content manager or a content editor, you’re probably moving a lot of copy around. Maybe your content policy allows people outside of marketing – sales, finance, operations, technical support – to generate their own pieces and send them to an internal editor for review.

Good for you. Mostly.

I’m thinking in particular about Sales. A lot of ideas for content originate in Sales:

“We need a white paper to leave behind with prospects.”
“Trade show coming up. What kind of brochures and case studies are we handing out?”
“Are we going to blog about this technology? It gives us some visibility.”

They’re almost invariably good ideas, because salespeople are in front of the customer all the time, picking up on the themes of importance to them.

Let Sales run your content projects?

Don’t get me wrong: I like salespeople, and their naturally infectious enthusiasm. But good salespeople are chronically busy, they usually travel a lot, and that killer white paper idea they came up with is one of fifteen plates they’re spinning.

So, marketing managers, mind these three tips for managing Sales when they are the lead on content:

Don’t take your eye off the ball entirely. Ensure there’s some review/oversight from marketing. The white paper or customer success story should have a marketing – not salesy – feel to it, and you’re the cop. Salespeople tend to value product features and benefits, which poison the paper; it’s your job to push back and emphasize the reader’s problem.
Get all feedback in writing. Your marketing communications writer is the muscle in this project, and you should run interference for her. Since most salespeople are working conceptually rather than concretely, insist that they summarize their feedback in writing and not just orally; it will help the project move much more smoothly. They can supplement their written revisions with a phone call, but written feedback needs to be the primary channel.
Establish guidelines for the review cycle. “We’re working on a white paper around a similar problem,” salespeople will tell prospects and customers. “Would you like to have a sneak peek?” That’s an excellent way to engage a serious prospect or reward a good customer, but don’t take on the burden – much less leave it up to the writer – to vet and reconcile everybody’s comments and changes. Your salespeople should take care of that, then forward a single markup to the writer.

You can argue that letting Sales run their own projects – to the extent that they’re willing to do so – results in content that’s closer to what they have in mind. Of course, your job is to ensure fidelity between that and the company message. Sales doesn’t need to be Marketing to put out good content; it just needs to observe a few simple marketing tips like these.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: lissalou66

4 Tips for Contributed Articles

John White — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:06:53 +0000

Writing a contributed article, or byline: easy. Getting it to look in print the way you intended: not so easy. A few tips for marketing managers getting from A to Z.

It’s like a bucket brigade, really – the path between the marketing communications writer and the finally posted content. The bucket starts out full, but by the time it’s gone through a dozen or so hands, there’s quite a bit missing.

So the client’s marketing manager said, “We have the opportunity to contribute an article to a publication. Our PR firm set it up, and the editors like the pitch. Interview the product manager and write it up.”

The publication had some guidelines for writing, mostly about style rather than mechanics. It offered even fewer about what to expect once the article ran.

So we got to work: interview, drafts, contributor’s bio, images, carefully selected links, approvals, ready. That took about two weeks.

The marketing manager handed the finished copy (~1900 words) off to the PR agency, who passed it to the publication. It ran on the Web the next morning, and the eye is never so able to find problems as just a little after it’s too late.

Fixing problems with your contributed articles

Maybe some of our problems stemmed from working in Microsoft Word. Fortunately, it’s lingua franca for moving copy around during review cycles. Unfortunately, it’s not like HTML, and it’s really not like Drupal or WordPress or Joomla or any of the other content management systems online publications use.

Mostly, though, it’s a few questions we didn’t ask. We’re smarter now, and I want you to be that much smarter as well.

1. Images and sidebar

Problem: We included two images and a sidebar in a text box. Knowing how fussy people get about images, we shipped them as colossal, high-resolution JPEG files and let the publication crunch them down as much as they needed to. The images included captions (Figure 1, Figure 2) and the copy referred to them.

The problem was the sidebar, which the magazine had recommended we include. It supplemented a paragraph near the middle of the article, but the magazine dumped it at the bottom, just before the author bio. It was useless down there, but the moral of the story (which I had forgotten – my bad) is that sidebars don’t get along well with these pages.

Fix: Use a sidebar, but create it as an image near the text you want to emphasize.

2. Links

Problem: We embedded several hyperlinks in the article, mostly to webinars and pages on the client’s site. Not all publications like that, because you’re using their real estate to promote your content. In fact, the author bio contained four links; the publication scrubbed them all on the main page, but allowed them on a separate About the Author page.

Fix: Find out the publication’s policy on hyperlinks. They may have a limit of one link per 500 or so words, and they may have a policy that favors authoritative links (e.g., to Wikipedia or Reuters) over linking to your own assets. For that matter, include links to other content in the publication; they’ll probably like that even more than links to Wikipedia. Is there a more sincere form of journalistic flattery?

3. Numbered lists

Problem: It’s hard enough in MS Word to list four numbered items, then enter some non-numbered text, then resume the numbered list. It’s even harder on the Web.

Fix: Don’t clown around with this kind of formatting if your article is destined for the Web. It just annoys the people who have to tear it apart and disrupt the structure of your article. Or, hard-number the items into the text instead of using automatic numbering and list items (

4. URL

Problem: To the extent that a keyword-rich URL gives your content an SEO boost, it’s a nice thing to hope for. Unfortunately, the CMS assigned the article a lame URL: http://www.sys-con.com/node/2207848. Not much SEO juice from that, and no benefit to the publication, either.

Fix: Ask for a decent link. All they can say is “no.” The CMS should be able to accommodate this.

These four fixes should ensure that more of your water survives the bucket brigade.

What else have you found out about submitting contributed articles to Web publications? It’s a different world from paper-based press, isn’t it?

photo credit: mcoughlin

3 Tips on Creating Your eBook

Your Email Address Is Not Good Enough for Us.

John White — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:06 +0000

Low-brow email addressees need not apply? What’s up with that? Some content owners have started getting fussy about the addresses their prospects give.

My colleague, Merle Tenney, announced his upcoming presentation in a webinar some weeks back. It was sponsored by a content quality software company I’ll call Katzenjammer, just because I’ve been itching to use that as a pseudonym lately.

Merle says important things, and I want to hear them. I went to the registration form on the Katzenjammer site.

I sign up for several of these events each month, so it was with considerable surprise that I beheld the response after I clicked the Submit button:

Requiring an email address from a “non-free provider” struck me as a bit cheeky. I felt like Johnny Halladay singing “Quoi ma gueule ? Qu’est-ce qu’elle a ma gueule ?” So, what’s wrong with my email address? So what if it’s free?

The marketing managers at Katzenjammer have probably worked out that people who use a Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail or otherwise unpaid email address are not very serious prospects. If you have a free email address, you probably cannot afford Katzenjammer’s products, and if you can afford them and use a free email address anyway, then you’re probably still not a good prospect.

I suppose it works for them.

Free email users are lousy prospects

I thought it uncool of Katzenjammer to decline my email address so brusquely. Am I a lousy prospect for them? Sure, but if all you want are prospects with a high probability of conversion, why issue a cattle call for attendees? Many are called, but few are desirable, I guess.

Besides, Katzenjammer wasn’t the draw; Merle was. “Merle, we want you to headline our webinar, but we’re not going to allow people to register with a crummy email address, because it doesn’t serve our purposes.” Is that how they pitched it to him?

I guess Katzenjammer knows that most people flick in a throwaway address that they rarely check. On the one hand, I understand Katzenjammer’s thinking; on the other, if they provided only valuable content – like Merle’s webinar – and focused more on what’s in it for attendees than what’s in it for Katzenjammer, they wouldn’t have to worry about what they consider sub-standard email addresses.

Blame it on the email provider

Some weeks later I tried to sign up for a free webinar from MarketingProfs, that venerable fount of marketing wisdom. They too are tired of cheap email addresses, but they’re using a perfectly Teflon pretext and blaming their email provider:

MarketingProfs complains, “Sorry, your email address is being blocked by our email provider.” Of all the nerve.

I could be wrong about this. Maybe there are spam issues at work here. Maybe the script kiddies soak up all the available seats in the webinar and cause admin headaches. But if that were the problem, wouldn’t you use a simple Captcha?

On the other hand, if I want the webinar badly enough, isn’t it worth giving up my non-free address, then just unsubscribing if I don’t like whatever else they send me?

If it’s free, then you’re the product.

…says Chris Dancy, and he’s right.

There’s a tacit understanding that, if the webinar is free, then I’m the product. But if I pollute my value as the product by using a free email address, the deal is off now. What does that bode for deviously clever sites like GuerrillaMail.com, which obligingly give you an address for an hour, and even let you play a game while you wait for your reply?

Are you dissing prospects with free email addresses? Is it working out for you? How many hours have you spent tinkering with that, instead of just generating arrestingly valuable content?

Marketing Writer + All Your Mailing Lists = Groupie

John White — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:30:23 +0000

What do you use to prepare your marketing communications writers for a project? A creative brief? A phone call? Put them on your mailing lists and throw everything at them.

If your writers were groupies – your groupies – would you like them less?

If they’re delivering good content on time, then their groupie-hood should be the least of your worries.

“Put me on all your mailing lists.”

Have your marketing writers ever said that to you? If they did, would you know how to do it?

“How many email lists do you have?” one writer asked her client. “I want to subscribe to all of them.”

Now that’s a groupie.

Have you ever had a writer so voraciously interested in your company and its valuable content that she asked to subscribe to everything you put out, whether she wrote it or not?

“I don’t want to send you comments and suggestions on the content,” the writer explained, “I want to learn from it and do a better job of writing for you.”

Huh?

After you’d picked yourself up off the floor and regained your composure, you might start to mentally enumerate all of the channels and places in which somebody who really wanted to follow you, could follow you:

email lists
newsletters
blog and vlog
direct mail
podcasts
RSS feeds
Twitter followers
LinkedIn group
YouTube channel
Facebook page
Google +
Pinterest
reddit
StumbleUpon
all the blogs in which your managers routinely guest-post

(Note to future readers: Disregard channels that have long since become extinct. There was a time when all of these were popular.)

Do you know all of your channels?

Do you yourself track all of this content? Probably not, because the channels change so quickly.

So, while you’re scratching your writer’s itch to know everything possible about your company and its marketing content, you can secretly thank her for making you stop to count all of the ways you get your message out.

And don’t forget to tell your groupie that the list is likely to change tomorrow.

photo credit: Tawny Rockerazzi

Embedding a “Retweet This” Inside a PDF – More News

John White — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:40:12 +0000

Embedding a “Retweet This” inside a PDF is a neat hack. Recent Twitter changes have affected it, though – yet again. If your Old Twitter retweet links aren’t working, here’s a solution.

Have you embedded “Retweet This” in your PDFs? Perhaps you’d better go back and make sure that they’re still working. I’ve had to.

In June 2011, I posted “Embedding a ‘Retweet This’ Inside a PDF,” mostly so that I would remember how to do it. When I referred to the post last month for a retweet I suggested for a client’s PDF, I found that the link syntax doesn’t work anymore; browsers complain about a reset connection.

Retweet this – The new way

No doubt this will change again, but for now, the way to get this:

is by embedding this:

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Hiring a MarComm writer? Ask these 10
questions - http://eepurl.com/ieIv (via @johnwhitepaper)

Of course you know this means that you’ll have to root through any valuable PDFs you’ve published with “Retweet this” links and modify them for the new syntax. Set a flag for them in your content management system or start placing “retweet” in the document properties of the PDF (also known as metadata) so that you’ll know where to find them when Twitter’s API changes again.

Aren’t we all getting too old for this? How have you used “Retweet this” links in your content?

Embedding a “Retweet This” Inside a PDF

Free Yourself from Content Marketing? Some Businesses Manage To.

John White — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 14:00:25 +0000

Don’t you get tired of fretting about content marketing? Don’t you envy businesses that can somehow do without it?

I’ve spent a decade or more in content marketing, helping clients refine and tell their story with case studies, white papers, newsletter articles and Web content. I’ve been helping them demonstrate that they understand their customers’ problems and can be trusted to help solve them.

For that matter, I’ve put out acres of my own content to build trust with my prospects.

For that matter, you have, too. We’ve published jillions of words to attract prospects and help move them down the sales funnel.

Doesn’t it get tiring sometimes? What if we didn’t have to work that hard at it?

Some businesses don’t need content marketing

I spent 24 years looking for a decent barber and finally found one in Bruce, the husband of one of my wife’s friends.

You want to hear the sum total of Bruce’s content marketing?

“Hi. This is Bruce. At 281-5026. Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you.”

Bruce’s shop has been reviewed twice on Yelp, but he isn’t named in the reviews and I doubt he even knows the reviews are there. He has no website, no blog, doesn’t know what a white paper is, has no use for case studies or a newsletter.

But he’s made a successful living cutting hair for ages, and he has a steady flow of new and returning customers.

Obviously, Bruce’s business depends on referrals and word of mouth, not on his ability to land high on the SERPs. In the world of business-to-consumer (B2C), sometimes you can get away with that.

Referrals and word of mouth are important to your business as well, but it’s only part of the mix. That’s why you, as marketing manager, spend your day pumping out audio, video and text to create conversations with prospects and preserve relationships with customers.

Bruce manages to create those conversations and preserve those relationships one-on-one, and the sum total of his marketing presence is a cell phone greeting.

Must be nice…

Of course, business-to-business (B2B) content marketing is a long way from B2C content marketing. But still, it must be nice to compress it into “leave a message at the tone.”

By the way, what do people hear when they phone your organization? What kind of relationships are you building while your callers are on hold or navigating your directory?

photo credit: aroid

“I Can’t See Myself in Your White Paper” – 2 Quick Fixes

John White — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:50:40 +0000

Your readers need to see themselves in the marketing content you publish. Otherwise, you’re a marketing manager just writing to hear yourself shout.

You know those year-end letters you receive around the holidays from your friends and family members? The ones filled with all the valuable content and important details that pop into your Uncle Willy’s head as he’s leafing through the calendar, looking for things to write about?

“…Felix fell off the stepladder while pruning the snail vines and twisted his ankle, so there went his bowling season…”

“…Kristin’s front tooth was loose for what seemed like ages until it finally fell out, and the Tooth Fairy brought her 5 dollars…”

“…and then Noodles, our Pekingese, got the mumps. I told the vet I’d never heard of a dog getting the mumps, and he said…”

“…our second trip to Branson with Alice and Bernie, but we never did find the other waffle…”

and on and on and on.

You know what? Like it or not, those year-end letters are content. Think about them the next time you publish a white paper, case study, newsletter, blog post or technical article.

“My white paper isn’t that dull.”

What makes you so sure of that?

Think about those year-end letters: what makes them so banal? Why do their recipients complain about them so consistently? Why would you rather drink battery acid than read Aunt Rose’s letter?

Because those people are writing right past you.

Your eyes glaze over as you move from one paragraph to the next. You’re hoping against hope that Cousin Bess will remember that live people of her own flesh and blood receive these things and actually form an audience. You want Grandma Perkins to wake up and realize that she has your attention for a few precious minutes and that she should take advantage of them to tell you something meaningful to you.

But alas, Maudie plods along from Florida vacation to lower back pain to school play, blissfully ignorant of the fact that readers are dying to see themselves in the letter.

Are you doing that to your readers in your marketing content? Are you writing right past them in your zeal to beat your messaging drum?

Put your readers into your white paper

Stop asking the question, “What do I want to write about?” It’s more important to ask, “What do my readers want to read about?”

When your readers can see themselves in your content, you score with them. They notice that you’re out to do more than just talk about yourself and they begin to trust you to give them valuable content.

James Chartrand posted on Copyblogger recently about “giving yourself a real person to write for.” The people who send you ghastly year-end letters are doing that, except that they themselves are that real person. Your marketing content needs to be for a real person in your audience.

Before you publish that white paper, case study, newsletter, blog post or technical article this week, run these two litmus tests on it:

Can your readers see themselves in the title? What did you call your paper: “An Exploration of Cloud-based Policy Management for the Public Sector” or “Five Things Government IT Managers Need to Know about Policies in the Cloud?” In which title are your target readers more likely to see themselves?
Can your readers immediately see whether the content is relevant to them? Are you going to make them read half the document before they can figure out what’s in it for them? Why don’t you summarize the main messages of the piece in a few bullets and put them in a box near the top? Help readers decide quickly whether it’s worth their time or not.

Even if you still need work on pulling your readers in, these quick fixes will give them a break.

And if you’re in doubt about your marketing content, just keep Cousin Ralph’s year-end letter near your keyboard. Every marketing manager needs an occasional reminder of what not to do.

photo credit: legends2k

Your Content is So Good that I Can’t Tell How You Make Money

John White — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:30:15 +0000

Make your marketing content so valuable and so good that readers can’t tell how you make money. Here are three examples of a new kind of valuable content.

What if you removed every trace of self-serving-ness from your marketing content? What if you filled your blog, white papers, newsletters and technical articles with content that completely benefited your readers, with no apparent benefit to you?

Would your boss let you publish it?

Thanks for the content. What’s in it for you?

I happened onto a blog a couple of months ago run by Joe Hage, an expert in medical device marketing. It includes interviews with industry analysts, reviews of social media tools, announcements about conferences, medical device compliance information, and ideas gleaned from other online marketing experts.

I had read his posts for about five minutes when the question popped into my head:

How does this guy make money?

The content was that good, and it was almost completely devoid of apparent self-promotion.

Of course, after a few more minutes, I fell off of the blog and onto his site. His About, Services and Contact pages made it pretty clear how he makes money, but this follows the natural order of valuable content: Let your readers consistently enjoy the full value of what you publish, and when they one day feel an itch, they know whom to call to scratch it.

Other examples:

Copyblogger – The pre-eminent site for content marketing. Daily posts from Copyblogger staff and contributors embody clear thinking about online marketing, and the site itself embodies very strong content marketing. Follow it for a while and see whether you can tell how they make money: Consulting? Software for WordPress? Instructional products?
The Grateful Dead – David Meerman Scott has co-authored an entire book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. He often cites the way in which the band encouraged fans to tape and photograph their concerts, then trade tapes and photos with other fans. With fans enjoying this much value, plenty of them were surely asking how the band made money; when fans felt the itch, they scratched it by paying for concert tickets.
Obsolete TV Support Group video – This Fortune 500 company has an important point to make in this video, but they camouflage it quite artistically behind an entertaining skit. Watch it, and see if you don’t find yourself asking, “Which company made this, and what does it have to do with how they make money?”

A new definition of “valuable content”

This is different from divulging all the secrets of your success. It’s easy to find experts on the Web who are giving away everything you need to know to be as successful as they are. Their content does completely benefit you, but it’s mostly advice. People will keep coming back for good stories and good information, but advice can get tiresome.

It’s a new definition of “valuable content”: Content that benefits your readers, with no apparent benefit to you.

It’s like the content that religions and governments provide, except that you actually want it, and you’re not suspicious of it.

Do you think you could do it? How would your readers react?

photo credit: Beck Tench

Six Reasons You Can’t Get Your Content Marketing to Work

John White — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:11:55 +0000

Excuses, reasons, challenges, obstacles…call them what you will, they’re mosquitoes at your Content Buffet that hamper marketing efforts.

Marketing managers: If you’re trying to understand content marketing, you need to follow these three sources:

Marketing Charts – thought-provoking data and useful factoids served up daily
Content Marketing Institute – most of what you need to know about the mechanics of using valuable content in your marketing
MarketingProfs - webinars, forums, lessons and list-posts for anybody with the word “marketing” in his/her title

These three FREE resources sometimes converge to give you gems like this:

In other words:

Six reasons you can’t get your content marketing to work

Which of these do you need to fix in your organization?

1. Producing engaging content – 42%

You put content out, but its boring. Nobody comments on it, nobody is quoting or re-using it, it’s not helping you in the search engines, and it’s not moving the sales-needle. Whether it’s blog posts, case studies, white papers, podcasts or video, it’s just not adding up to an engaging story. It probably isn’t valuable (meaning “valuable to your prospects,” not “valuable to you”).

Try this: Have your marketing communication writers write for a real human being, not for a demographic or market segment. And since nobody cares about your products, have them write about your customers’ problems instead.

2. Producing enough content – 20%

How much content is enough? If you’re serious about getting onto the first search engine results page (SERP), you need to put out valuable content with masterful use of relevant keywords about five times per week. Hey, what marketing manager can’t do that, especially with legal reviews of the content?

Try this: Cross-examine yourself. If you land on page one, will you necessarily attract qualified prospects and the kinds of customers you want to have? Or will you attract tire-kickers, time-wasters and people who wannabe you? If you can’t generate enough content to get above the noise in your keyword-space, then generate enough to look credible to prospects who find you through other means. That’s a different “enough,” but it’s an important “enough.”

3. Budget to produce content – 18%

This goes hand in hand with #2. You ask the VP of marketing or engineering for budget to write a white paper, or to hire a marketing writer for a series of case studies or blog posts, and she tells you “no dice.” It happens a lot in a soft economy.

Try this: Find content other people are already producing about you and ride those waves. Here’s the Yelp listing (B2C) for a nearby restaurant with hundreds of reviews; that represents acres of valuable (because user-generated) content that nobody needed budget to create. Here’s the Facebook page (B2B) of Johnson Controls, with a mixture of free content they want and free content they don’t want. They may not have a white paper budget, but they can use this as a starting point for producing content.

4. Lack of executive buy-in – 12%

Yes, some execs still haven’t gotten the memo, or don’t yet consider it dangerous that their competitors are consistently generating valuable content. Content marketing can be a tough sell, especially if you have to justify return on investment (ROI).

Try this: You may not be able to get attention around producing new content, but nobody in his right mind would ignore things – both good and bad – that other people are saying about your products and services. If you can’t sweet-talk your execs with terms like “content marketing,” then shake them up a bit with “reputation management.”

5. Producing a variety of content – 7%

Limited resources, unlimited possibilities: video, podcasts, white papers, case studies, eBooks, newsletter articles, blog posts and more. But especially on a small team, it’s hard to produce every kind of content you want and do it consistently and well. Or, maybe you’re accustomed to just one or two kinds and haven’t tried any others.

Try this: Do a six-month rotation, generating two types of content per shift. At the end of a couple of years, you’ll know which types are the best match for your organization.

6. Budget to license content – 1%

Instead of generating your own content, you decide to shore up your website with somebody else’s content. Or, maybe you want to license a report with independent (favorable) information about your products. That’s not so much “content marketing” as it is “someone-else’s-content marketing.” Fortunately, not many of you face this predicament.

Try this: Build your own brand with your own content instead. And get your customers to rave about you so that you don’t have to pay industry analysts to do it.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Sign up for his Content Buffet Newsletter and get the free eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Toronto History

A Japanese Take on Content Marketing

John White — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:11:23 +0000

Marketing communication managers grow long-lived bodies of content like white papers, case studies and blog posts. What if time didn’t matter in content marketing?

Consider a Japanese approach to content marketing in which the content disappears after about a day. What can you learn from that?

American content marketer extraordinaire David Meerman Scott wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, which is now available in Japanese and enjoying brisk sales.

Scott has partnered with Shigesato Itoi on the localization and publication of the book, and saluted the real-time nature of the content on Itoi’s site, Hobonichi. In an interview with Itoi, Scott comments:

A particularly interesting aspect is that daily content is available for only 24 hours, and then disappears. There is no archive of the daily information. This unusual content strategy is exactly the opposite of what SEO experts would tell you to do and therefore, because it is unique, is a very Grateful Dead approach.

Whether you’re Japanese or not, transitory content feels more like a conversation with your readers. As Itoi says,

Maybe it’s because it allows me to discuss the same theme over and over again. It’s natural: don’t we do that every day? Perhaps I wanted to replicate this behavior.

It’s not important to show people what you and your organization were thinking six months ago, or even last week. The important thing is to take what you’re thinking TODAY and turn it into engaging content. That would be easy, except that today becomes yesterday (then last Tuesday, then last month, then last quarter…) awfully fast.

This Japanese take on content marketing spans both this Content Buffet blog and my Localization Project Management blog, which focuses on international product marketing. Isn’t it surprising how people in other parts of the world think about and relate to content? What if it’s only in the West that time matters to content marketing?