Marketing Mangers: Make Up Your Own Job Title

What’s in a marketing manager’s job title? Did you invent your title? Which title would you pick, if you could? From PR Web comes a thought-provoking post, “Newest Member of Marketing Team Tasked with Creating Her Own Job Title.” Marketing new-hire Meg Strobel monitors DiamondNexus’ social media presence and creates new content for the company’s [...]

Your Marketing Writer Is Working on Other People’s Content. Find Out What It Is.

Your marketing writers are valuable nodes in your network. Thinking about them that way pays off in making your own content broader and richer. On Monday, you phone your marketing communications writer to kick off a white paper on mobile game pricing. On Thursday, a marketing manager with a different company asks your writer to [...]

4 Tips for Contributed Articles

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, [...]

3 Ways to Personalize Your “About Us” Page

Of all the pages on your organization’s site, About Us is probably the windiest. If you really want visitors to know something about you, be smarter than that. Do you ever look at the About Us pages of other organizations? Have you ever seen a good one? What if you put some real thought into [...]

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

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 [...]

Before You Load It into the Email Cannon, Read It!

When your marketing copy ends up in unintended places, make sure it doesn’t embarrass you. If it’s not good enough to be caught anywhere, it shouldn’t be your copy. I subscribe to Fierce Wireless. Every day, they send me a free newsletter with wireless industry news. Big names – Cisco, Ericsson, AT&T, Nokia – sponsor [...]

A Japanese Take on Content Marketing

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 [...]

“Why Should We Keep Putting Out White Papers?” Influence.

Veteran marketers may tend to become jaded about the value of white papers, but that’s unwise. For one thing, they’re still influential. For another, not everybody knows what they are. Eccolo Media has released its 2011 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report, covering 501 executives of US companies with influence on technology decisions. I want to mention [...]

White Paper Blues – When Execs Want to Help

You can’t fault an exec for wanting to get involved in creating your marketing content. But you should handle it delicately. “So I have good news and bad news,” the director of marketing started off. Just when I thought we were out of the tunnel on this campaign… “The good news is that we’ve shown [...]

I Fought the Law(yers) and The Law(yers) Won

Corporate blogging is not all it’s cracked up to be. Legal review of your marketing content takes some of the fun out of it. But for a good reason. I don’t care what Google’s stock price is. They build an enterprise and reputation their way, and we build it our way. We’re not letting employees [...]