Blog

At a B2B panel discussion yesterday at the Midwest Digital Marketing Conference (#MDMC) our venerable moderator, Steve Bauer of FleishmanHillard asked what the biggest problem was facing social marketing in the B2B space. My fellow panelists — Marisa Lather (a St. Louis-based consultant),  Jeff Leonard from Wells Fargo and Nick Weber from Monsanto — answered first […]

I’ll admit I’m not a technician. What I mean by that is I don’t know how to write code. I’m an observer and user of technology. I can imagine new and exciting things for technology to do. But I cannot, myself, build technology. So when Facebook has its big F8 developer’s conference each year, there’s […]

In a 2008 panel discussion about influencer marketing and public relations I was asked how I would respond if a blogger asked me to pay them to use the story I was pitching for my client. My response then was I would tell them to go to hell. Certainly, that was a melodramatic way to underline a point […]

There’s a hard truth content marketers are facing in the industry today. For all our poking and prodding, evangelizing and convincing about the benefits to brands and businesses of social … For all our promises about how content marketing drives engagement, attracts new customers, builds trust and the like … we have to come to terms with […]

What do you think of when I say “mobile?” What about “mobile marketing?” That’s the problem. We think of mobile as a device. Whether an iPhone or an Android or even some sort of tablet, these things come to mind and we’ve conditioned ourselves to think of mobile as a type of object. But to […]

Yesterday’s call to action to tell me what you wanted me to share yielded some impressive topics for me to ponder. I guess that goes to show you that if you ever go to the blog topic well and find it dry, all you have to do is ask. I’ve got a dozen or so […]

Once upon a time, my old blog was the No. 1 rated marketing blog in the world. Granted, Social Media Explorer was  ranked by a handful of arbitrary metrics that could be (though in my case weren’t) manipulated. But for about three weeks in October of 2010, those metrics favored me for some reason. As […]

I often hate Jay Baer. Anyone who has met him, or knows that he and I are friends, is probably shocked by that. Jay is not a hate-able guy. He’s one of the more genuine, affable, generous people on the planet. He’s a true star in an industry of star wannabes and seems to have […]

One of the hardest elements of strong content strategy to produce with any level of consistency and at a reasonable cost is strong photography. Lefty is trying to change that challenge for brands by offering a simple mechanism to reach out and license Instagram images for use online or off. Just login to the site […]

It’s not hard for a good content marketing effort to get my attention. If it’s clever, funny or disruptive in some way, I typically notice. Workfront’s new CHAOS campaign is all three of those. But the ballsy, marketing by promoting the opposite of what you’re selling, is what really stands out. Before we go further, […]

There’s another social content curation and sharing app out there called DrumUp (http://drumup.io). Like Buffer, LockerDome, Edgar and others, it allows you to proactively post or reactively share content recommended to you by keywords to offer. The setup is super simple – I connected via my Twitter account, entered some keywords and was up and […]

Influencer identification is probably the most important public relations activity brands engage in these days. Mapping and understanding who it is that can move and motivate your potential customers is imperative since consumers no longer rely mostly on mainstream news sources and, thus, the press release has become moot. To succeed in “media” outreach in […]