Marketing Musings

Weekly Roundup: 4/27/12

by
Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy/Marketing
Why It’s So Easy to Get Marketing All Wrong— This post gives some good reasons why marketing should be more involved at the content creation stage. The comments to this post are also very good.

Universal Concern that Creativity is Suffering at Work and School—Adobe released an interesting study about creativity. Of course they tied it into the release of their Creative Suite 6 programs, but I won’t hold that against them. There is still some interesting data here about creativity and creativity is vital to successful marketing.

Social Media
The Rise of Digital Influence—This nifty little “how-to” guide from the smart folks at the Altimeter Group looks at the interesting world of the influencer. The concept of the social media influencer is still largely misunderstood. This post helps to pull back the curtains a bit.

Continue reading →

A Pair of Lessons on Web Content from An Event Apart

by
Marketing Musings

A few weeks ago, I attended the web conference An Event Apart. Because my day-to-day role involves helping clients plan how to get content on the web, I went to pick up some new tips and hints. However, what I took away was that, while there are new opportunities and platforms for getting your content to your audience, the key is to not forget core principles. Mobile platforms are very trendy; the organizers added a day to the event to focus solely on mobile. But, it turns out, putting all of your resources in a shiny new box just for the sake of the shiny new box beckons trouble.

Lesson #1: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
So what’s a web designer/content strategist to do? The highlight of day one, Karen McGrane’s “Adaptive Content” session, focused on this issue. McGrane urges to first develop a content strategy around “writing for the chunk, not for the page.” This strategy involves breaking down content into a series of reusable chunks that can be repositioned into any layout, in any platform. A headline is always a headline. A lead is a lead, a sidebar a sidebar, and so on. By storing your content in chunks in the CMS, you can then create specific designs for specific platforms without having to lay out each piece of content multiple times. You’ll also want to set specific parameters around the length of each chunk of content—that 150 character short description may look good on a webpage, but might annoy a reader on a mobile device.

McGrane points to NPR as a good example of this theory. NPR uses and reuses the same content across their website, member stations’ sites, and a variety of mobile apps. Take a look at the deck presented last October by NPR’s Zach Brand, which shows where the “COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere” process came from. In it, you’ll see screen captures of the process by which a single piece of content is disseminated across multiple channels, as well as detailed schematics of their CMS API architecture (for the more technically-inclined content strategist).

Continue reading →

Nick Martin on the 2012 International CRP Community Event

by
Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

If you are tied into the global customer reference and evidence marketing community, then you know that a new industry conference is coming our way this May in Boston: The International CRP (Customer Reference Program) Community Event.

Projectline is a proud member of International CRP Community and very honored to be sponsoring the event this year. Along with many other industry leaders and practitioners, Projectline’s own Nick Martin will be speaking on the 2nd day of the conference on the growing connection between social media and search, and why content is the key to unlocking the value of both. You’ve never met Nick? Well, let us introduce him!

We hope to see you May 14-16, but if you can’t make it to Boston, follow @projectline, @CRKSN, and @NickBMartin for live tweets from the event or check out the Customer Reference Knowledge Sharing Network on LinkedIn.

Volunteering: The Reality Behind the Mantra

by
Marketing Musings

Claire Taylor is a member of the Projectline UK office.

The recent Corporate Philanthropy Day got me thinking about volunteering in the workplace—is it just a mantra that companies want their employees to buy in to? To my surprise, I found upon researching the subject that even in today’s tough economy, job-seekers are looking to prospective employers to offer more than just the usual benefits when attracting new hires. People are looking for ways to increase their own value, both as an employee and personally, and so companies that offer community programs rank higher up this list.

From my own perspective, it was important to find a role where employee volunteering is valued and encouraged. What’s great about Projectline is that they really want to make a difference. Employees are granted time off to volunteer and can choose causes close to their hearts. Having worked in a community affairs role for a previous employer, I’ll always remember how good it felt each time one of my community projects came to fruition—no matter how big or small.

Volunteering now plays an important role in the recruitment process, too. And many companies believe that providing employees with the right opportunities to engage in community programs means that they can attract, recruit, and retain the best talent. An old college friend of mine who now works in HR for a multinational pharmaceutical company was recently discussing the merits of volunteering in the recruitment process, in that it can positively differentiate job-seekers, particularly given that graduates and young people don’t usually have years of work experience to fall back on. It’s definitely a plus and gives employers insight into who can take the initiative when it comes to their work/life priorities and how that attitude translates into the workplace.

Continue reading →

Weekly Roundup: 4/20/12

by
Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy
Content Curators Are The New Superheroes Of The Web—With more and more content being produced each day, it is becoming increasingly important to filter it to save time . Content curation is a way to highlight the best of the best.

Optimize This! 10 Q&As on Customer-Centric Marketing with Lee Odden—I categorized this under content strategy, but it could probably fit anywhere in this post. So much ground is covered here around modern marketing concepts. Definitely worth the read.

Social Media
Top 10 Twitter Spelling Mistakes—We’ve all done it—made spelling mistakes on Twitter, that is. But these mistakes are particularly glaring, earning them a coveted spot in the Top 10.

Continue reading →

Six Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Pinterest

by
Marketing Musings

Pinterest. Ask someone about this and they’ll either look at you like you’re mashing random words together or tell you it’s the greatest thing to hit the social media scene.

The reason it’s such a huge success? The online bulletin board, launched in 2010, is a photo-based site that allows users to make visual bookmarks of products or sites they like and connect with other users who have similar interests.

When you combine the simple concept with an eye-catching visual display, it is no wonder that Pinterest ranks #5 in unique visitors on social media sites, with an astronomical 17 million in one day (source: Business Insider) and is seeing about one billion total page views each month (up 50 percent month over month, according to Business Insider)! That’s incredible, given that Pinterest saw 7.21 million unique visitors to the site in the entire month of December 2011 (an increase of 429 percent since September 2011, according to Compete.com).

Great, so Pinterest drives a LOT of traffic, and I now have another way to suck hours of my day. But how does this affect my business, you ask?

Although there are millions of users already pinning away on Pinterest, few businesses have yet to join the bandwagon. For those that have, they are seeing massive benefits—increased visibility, product awareness, and site traffic, to name a few. Here are six creative ways your business can benefit from Pinterest.

1. Feature your products and/or services
Pinterest is abounding with rapidly multiplying product recommendations and gift ideas. The board functionality easily allows you to sort and feature varying products or services– whether it’s the latest Louis Vuitton bag or the latest case study published highlighting your marketing consulting success stories, there’s a board for you. Once you’ve built up your followers, you’ll have an instant pool of eyes for all the great content you’ll be sharing!

Continue reading →

Earth Day 2012: Put Your Roots Down

by
Marketing Musings

Did you know that April 15-21 is National Volunteer Week? We’d love to hear about your volunteer experiences this week and the ways you and your organization give back to the community throughout the year. Drop us a line at the end of this post, or catch up with us on Twitter.

In 1992, the animated film FernGully based its storyline around the deforestation of rainforests and the destruction of its habitats. Despite the fact that (spoiler alert!) the rainforests are saved by a nation of fairies and a loony fruit bat played by Robin Williams, the message of conservation was—and still is—rather poignant. Couple this film experience with the weekly cartoon adventures of Captain Planet and the Planeteers, and it’s evident that from a young age, I had a heightened awareness of the natural world around me.

With each episode, Captain Planet’s parting words of “the power is yours!” encouraged viewers to put their thoughts into action. His message was heard—20 years later, sustainability has become the name of the game. From nonprofit startups to large corporations, whether we are trying to measure our carbon footprints or simply figure out if that to-go container is compostable, we are more eco-aware than ever before.

Projectline volunteers love joining EarthCorps for its Duwamish Waterway habitat restoration project.

Continue reading →