#TBT: Government Marketing in an Age of Social Media

I've started to do some "Throw Back Thursday" (#TBT) type updates of old posts. This is a fun concept from Instagram and Facebook, and I thought I'd try it here.

This is one of my first blog posts back in 2007. Pretty terrible, no headline, etc.

Clearly, the impact of social media has changed from those early days.

...I recently moderated a panel discussion at a AMA-DC event in downtown DC entitled "Government Marketing in an Age of Social Media". The panelists (Jay McCargo, Toni Lee Rudnicki and Mark Root) were in general agreement that there has been minimal impact of "social media" among government marketers. However, all three agreed that web 2.0 marketing techniques will become more acceptable in time among the government contracting community.

This article in GCN backs this theory up: Web 2.0: Second verse, different than the first

Digital Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2015

Another good read about the trends affecting marketers this year... Digital Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2015, Clickz

Matt Weiss, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Havas Worldwide  

If I have to suggest what digital marketers should focus on in 2015, I'd say one word: "ideas." First- and third-party data, personalization, omni-channel, multi-channel, collaboration, platform infrastructure, dark digital, connectivity, mobile, and on and on. 

The list of buzzwords and subject matter will no doubt relate to the rapid adoption of mobile and how we connect with consumers in an age of personalization. But I'd like to point to something entirely different, something that may or may not make headlines that are buzzworthy. One word: Ideas. Regardless of the who, what, why, or how of marketing, there will always be "ideas." Powerful. Motivating. Insightful. Brilliant. Expansive. 

Without a platform-level idea to drive unification across marketing activity, marketers are left with tactics, tricks, and one-offs. For me, 2015 will be the year of the idea-powering activity across paid, owned and earned channels. "Ideas" will motivate consumers to action and create a competitive durable advantage for those marketers who understand what lies at the center of a buzzword-driven marketplace.

Marketers Continue to Rate Email the Most Effective Digital Marketing Tactic

Link to content: http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/marketers-continue-to-rate-email-the-most-effective-digital-marketing-tactic-46295/

Top Social Channels Used by SMBs For Advertising and Promotion

Link: Top Social Channels Used by SMBs For Advertising and Promotion

The Complete List of Evergreen Content Ideas for Your Blog

Looking for an excellent and comprehensive overview of how to create evergreen content? Well, look no further.

The Complete List of Evergreen Content Ideas for Your Blog - buffer

Why evergreen content? Check out this chart...

More from the post:

The best way to guide this process, according to Hubspot, is to keep in mind this vital question: 

Will people still read this and think it’s interesting a year from now? That’s the goal of evergreen. Evergreen content must hold its relevancy over time or else it risks losing its value. 

The Big Question—will this content endure?—is thankfully something you can control, to a degree, by taking steps to ensure that your evergreen content is set up for success. Keep creating amazing content, and follow these guidelines to make the amazing timeless.  

 3 keys to creating evergreen content

1. Be the definitive source 
2. Write for beginners 
3. Narrow your topic

When Should I Post to Social Media?

Always a good question, right? Click below to read the whole infographic...

The best—and worst—times to post to social media - PR Daily

Becoming Twitter: A Beginner’s Guide To User Acquisition

Check out this article. It is an excellent overview of how to generate users.

Becoming Twitter: A Beginner’s Guide To User Acquisition- Nate Desmond

Before you can seriously pursue user acquisition, you need an amazing product. Specifically, you need to reach product-market fit. Oversimplified, more than 40% of surveyed customers should say they would be “very disappointed” without your product. Until you have achieved product-market fit, you only want to attract enough customers to test your product improvements. Extra customers just means more frustrated people.

A Little Snow Day Reading

Wow. We have been having a lot of snow were in DC this winter. Being a hardy midwesterner, I'm not supposed to notice these things, but...

The good thing about cold winter weather is that it is great for staying inside and reading all about technology, marketing and business. Here are five pieces I recommend you read...


10 Tips for Improving Your Mobile Advertising Campaign - Mashable

50 Top Tools for Social Media Monitoring, Analytics, and Management - Social Media Today

Want a Viral Reddit Post? This Data Scientist Says He Knows How- In The Capital

A Wonderfully Simple Heuristic to Recognize Charlatans - Farnam Street

Why marketers should keep sending you e-mails - McKinsey and Company

The best—and worst—times to post to social media

Some good info from Ragan...

http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/14644.aspx

Here's a look at three of them:

Facebook: Traffic is highest between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. ET.

Best time: Between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. ET

Worst time: 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. ET

Pinterest: Saturday morning is the best time to post.

Best time: 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. ET or 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET

Worst time: 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. ET

LinkedIn: Post before or after business hours.

Best time: 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. ET or 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. ET

Worst time: 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. ET

When is the Best Time to Post Social Media?

Another good article from PR Daily...

"The best—and worst—times to post to social media" - Kristin Piombino

Facebook: Traffic is highest between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. ET.
Best time: Between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. ET
Worst time: 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. ET

Pinterest: Saturday morning is the best time to post.
Best time: 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. ET or 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET
Worst time: 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. ET

LinkedIn: Post before or after business hours.
Best time: 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. ET or 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. ET
Worst time: 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. ET

Click through to massive infographic...

Tuesday Night Reads

Marketers struggle to measure events' ROI -B2B Magazine

The 6 Keys To Being Awesome At Everything - Business Insider

How IBM's Agencies Are Helping the Software Giant Target CMOs- AdAge

Why is it so hard to make a phone call in emergency situations? -BoingBoing

11 Beautiful Examples of Infographics -Dawgeared

By the way, this resume infographic is wicked cool. You should hire this guy...

Hump Day Reads

Keeping up with the latest, most valuable thought leadership content on the Internet is always difficult. Luckily, I've curated five articles that I think every marketer needs to read. What do you think?


22 Ways to Create Content and Beat Writer’s Block- Business 2 Community

A Better Way to Measure Your Ad Campaign- Harvard Business Review

The Great Eight: Trillion-Dollar Growth Trends to 2020 - Bain & Company

Content Repurposing Is the New Way of the World - Duck Tape Marketing

Avoid These Three Deadly Sins of Sales Messaging - MarketingProfs


As always, if you like to learn more about Honeycomb, have a chat about your marketing plans for 2013, visit our website, send me an email or just call me at 202-497-8333

Hump Day Reads

Wow,  what a busy week...here are few items that caught my eye...mostly, marketing and social media stuff, but a few other items to keep the brain fit.


Open Source Entrepreneurship- Steve Blank blog

5 Psychological Triggers to Increase Social Engagement- Social Media Today

Social Media Marketing Can Get Out of Sync with Consumers - eMarketer

Do You Question Social Media Culture? You Should - Nick Kellet

Deflecting the Assault on Social Media - MarketingProfs

10 Lessons From Digital Pioneers on How To Become a Digital Success - MarketingProfs

The Landscape Architect’s Guide to WASHINGTON, D.C. - American Society of Landscape Architects

D.C. Is Weird, in Charts - Washington City Paper

The Insourcing Boom - The Atlantic

Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say - Yahoo News


Content infographic courtesy of Eloqua. Full Size version here: http://blog.eloqua.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/The_Content_Grid_Eloqua_JESS31.jpg

Weekend Reading

Six articles I'm reading this weekend. Anything catch your eye, that you think I should read? Let me know...

1. 10 Lessons From Digital Pioneers on How To Become a Digital Success


2. Marketing Resources for Startups – Go from Zero to Traction in 90 days


3. Recession Forecasting Ensemble (RFE) and market timing


4. 30+ Ideas To Create Great Content For Your Customers


5. Write E-Mails That People Won't Ignore


6. How To Improve The ROI Of Your New Product Launch 

Oh, and today was the Nationals' first spring training game. Giddyup!

Top Five Marketing Posts for November

It's Movember! Although I am not growing out a mustache, I am, however, getting a great deal of amusement out of my friends attempts to grow theirs. You all know who you are...lol

As always, here are a few marketing related articles that I thought I would share with you...

(Oh, and congratulations to President Obama. Now, do the grand bargain with Congress, so we all can move on and get to work.)

8 Social Media Numbers that Will Rock Your Business, by Eric Schurenberg, Inc

Here is a good line: “Personal data is the oil of the digital age”


25 Best Blogs 2012, by Time

Great list! I added seven of these to my RSS reader.


Email Marketing: 6 tactics on combining content and email strategies, by David Kirkpatrick, MarketingProfs

They are:

1. Understand that content is a vital part of email marketing 
2. Make the blog the hub of all content 
3. Use internal resources to create content 
4. Mine incoming email for content 
5. Mine outgoing email for content 
6. Repurpose content

5 Lessons From the Best Example of Content Marketing Ever?, by Jay Baer, Convince and Convert

A very good case study on a McDonald's content marketing program.


Content Plays Critical Role Throughout Tech-Buying Cycle, by MarketingProfs

The One Article You Have to Read Today

OK, there may be more than one, but for my money this is it.


Content Plays Critical Role Throughout Tech-Buying Cycle, MarketingProfs

From the article:

When making a major technology or security solution purchase, information technology decision-makers (ITDMs) download an average of nine content assets throughout the buying cycle, according to a report by IDG.
ITDMs rely on various types of content as they advance through the buying cycle:

• Early in the purchase process, when determining business need and technical requirements, ITDMs rank content such as feature articles, technology news stories, how-to articles, and whitepapers as most important.

• Midway through the process, when ITDMs are evaluating products and selecting vendors, content such as reviews/recommendations and third-party research (e.g., IDC, Gartner) plays a more important role.

• In the latter part of the buying cycle, when ITDMs are focusing on getting internal buy-in and final approval, content such as assessment tools (e.g., ROI calculators), product demos, and demo literature becomes more important. 

Top Five Articles to Read in October

It is October now. Really. The fourth quarter. The last quarter of the year. What should you be reading? Here are a few items...


How To Meet Mark Zuckerberg, by Alyson Shontell, Business Insider

In case you didn't know, Business Insider has a ton of great articles. So, what is the secret to meeting the Zuck?

He likes to meet entrepreneurs and help them. He especially likes to meet entrepreneurs who are building cool things on Facebook's platform. Zuckerberg also referenced Runkeeper, Spotify and Airbnb as startups that were "killing it."

He explained:
"The way that I got to know Kevin [Systrom] is they started off building on top of our platform. They had just a great open graph integration that made it so you could take pictures with Instagram and share them to Facebook and it's really first class…One of the things that I like to do is, with all of our big developers, I just like to reach out and get to know them personally. Partially because I'm just really interested in entrepreneurship and helping other entrepreneurs, but also I just want to get to know the people who are doing great stuff on top of our platform."

Top 25 Websites for CEOs, by Mike Myatt, Forbes

A treasure trove of valuable websites. Do you know all of them?


Content Marketing 101: 8 steps to B2B success, by David Kirkpatrick, Marketing Sherpa Blog

They are

1. Define your goals – tie this to business strategy/objectives
2. Understand your audience – identify where audience concerns/pains/needs intersect with your expertise/solutions and what type of information they seek out/prefer
3. Map content to these findings
4. Audit existing content to identify gaps and/or content that can be used or needs updating
5. Create a content schedule/calendar to ensure you consistently produce content because it’s not a once-and-done exercise
6. Develop content (include your sales team and other customer-facing employees as they need to understand the story you plan to tell)
7. Distribute content
8. Measure the results

Twitter mulls a replacement for follower counts, by John Koetsier, Venture Beat

Quote:

Joking that he was on the board and shouldn’t say too much, (Evan) Williams indicated some kind of engagement score may be coming, and that Twitter’s recent strategic shifts to a more-restrictive Twitter API access policy enable better measurement of engagement. If, after all, every Twitter client for consumers is created by the company itself, Twitter could much more easily determine exactly which tweets were requested by users, and make some pretty good guesses about which ones were actually seen and read.

15 writing tips from a journalist turned PR pro, by Becky Gaylord, PR Daily

Some pretty valuable tips for organizing the writing process.

iPhone Day Reading List, plus Cool Gif!

Well, iPhone Day is here, and if you'd really just rather watch the show, here is the link. I can't upgrade mine for another six months, so I don't really care. Really.

In the meantime, a lot of really smart people have been writing some excellent pieces on marketing, content development, economics and business.

Here is what I recommend you read...


46 Federal Technology Experts to Follow on Twitter, by Jimmy Daly, FedTech

Start your federal government marketing strategy off with a good look at the names on this list...


Social Media in the C-Suite, by David Edelman

For all the buzz around social media, one aspect has been largely ignored: the need for top business executives, especially CEOs, to personally get into the social media game. A recent survey by BRANDfog (PDF – 4.2MB) points out that when C-Suite executives become active on social media, it can increase brand trust, loyalty and purchase intent. In fact, 82 percent of survey respondents stated that they were more likely to trust a company whose CEO and leadership team engage on social media. And isn’t trust the most critical component of building relationships with customers?

The Biggest Mistakes Companies Make With Mobile Marketing, And 3 Strategies That Actually Work, by Aaron Shapiro, Fast Company

...the problem most companies are facing in mobile today isn’t simply a lack of appreciation for the realities of demand in the app market. Applications, just like any digital initiative, must be grounded in clear strategies that harmonize specific business needs and user interests, while reflecting a pragmatic view of the marketplace. Most marketers are making the same mistakes in mobile that they’ve made on the web for years--expecting consumers to dedicate time and attention to their brand messaging without providing any valuable service or fulfilling any consumer need. Aside from the potential short-term PR boost and the value of educating employees with limited backgrounds in digital and mobile, building a branded app for the sake of having an app is a waste of time and money for everyone involved.

And what are those strategies that work: Mobile as Marketing, Mobile as Service Enhancement and Mobile as a Business.


The Rules of Social Media, by Fast Company

Fast Company readers submit their own rules of the road...some of these are pretty awesome- "Don't try to be clever, be clever."


Need More Links and Social Shares? Try Making More Enemies, by Sonia Simone, CopyBlogger

Part six in their “Content Connections” series. All good advice...


In Case You Blinked: $23B+ in M&A Deals in Baltimore/Washington Region in Two Months, by CityBizList

In case you thought the economy around here was terrible.

Oh, yeah! and a cool cat gif! Because, why not...

Reading List- June 20

Here are some of the better articles and posts I've read in the past few days...

What the Rise of Content Marketing Means for Your Business by Chris Horton, Social Media Today

5 Essentials for Marketing In An Upswing (Hopefully) Economy by Terry Welty, DemandGen report

Those five basic premises of essential marketing outlined in my original article not only still apply today, but I believe they are even more important guidelines than ever. For marketing professionals trying to steer their company forward in a hesitant, but upward slanting business climate, there’s no better marketing advice I can give than to stick to the following tried-and-true, “go-back-to-basics” approach:
1. Know your company’s real value
2. Know your customer
3. Keep your salespeople well informed, well educated, and well armed
4. Stay consistently visible
5. Keep it simple

The Marketers Reading List by Jay Ehret, The Marketing Blog (This is a great list- read all of these!)

Seven Mobile Marketing Best-Practices by Igor Faletski, Marketing Profs

1. Simple beats pretty
2. Be brief
3. Mobile is highly local
4. Mobile search is focused and timely
5. Make it easy to share the love
6. Mobile searchers make mistakes
7. Optimize your UX for mobile

Read anything interesting lately? Send me the link at jeff@honeycomb-consulting.com

Reading List - June 7

Here are the articles and posts I've been reading...quite a hodgepodge. Read anything interesting lately? Send me the link at jeff@honeycomb-consulting.com

B-to-g marketers leverage social media to build relationships with federal employees - Direct Marketing News


The 5 Pillars of Social Media Strategy by Brian Solis, on the Networking Exchange Blog

Top 50 #Mobile Twitter Influencers by Jen Cohen on SAP's mobile blog

The 8 Keys to Successful Branding - Why 'Mad Men' and Whisky Are Not Going To Cut It by Matt Symonds, Forbes


Why the surge in obesity? - Consider the Evidence

Summary- the obesity epidemic started in 1980. The only variable changed around the same time is Calories in the Food Supply. Everything else that can plausibly explain the nation's weight gain- levels of exercise, hours spent TV watching, sedentary jobs, daily commutes in cars- aren't correlated with the change in adult obesity rates around 1980. Basically, everyone in America started eating more, a lot more, around 1980.

St. Bernanke's Fight Against the Deflation Dragon By Lance Roberts of Streettalk Live

Excuse me for geeking out on the economics front for a moment, but this is an excellent article on, what I think is a very much overlooked part of our troubles, the collapse of the velocity of money, which has happened despite the huge increase in the supply of money. Something for all you tea partiers to chew on...

Plus, for all you 99%-ers, check out this chart:

Kind of hard to blame rising inequality on recent events, when this is a trend that started in the late 1970's. Which is also when people started eating too much and getting fat. Coincidence? Correlation?

Why working-class people vote conservative - Jonathan Haidt, The Guardian

And check out the middle finger on the gentleman's book cover. LOL

All Men Can’t Jump - David Stipp, Slate

Quote:

There's no denying it—our kind started substituting brains for brawn long ago, and it shows: We can't begin to compete with animals when it comes to the raw ingredients of athletic prowess. Yet being the absurdly self-enthralled species we are, we crowd into arenas and stadiums to marvel at our pathetic physical abilities as if they were something special. But there is one exception to our general paltriness: We're the right honorable kings and queens of the planet when it comes to long-distance running.