Puppies and Prosperity

Not often that you read an article that combines puppies and international economic development. Kudos to one of the Washington Post's bloggers for this one:

"Puppies: The new indicator of prosperity?" 

 Awesome puppy related chart...

and this one...

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. 

The Death of the PC?

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about the collapse of PC sales. Is this an economic indicator or is it evidence of a shift to tablets and other non-PCs??

Something to ponder...

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.