While the term “content marketing” has gotten a ton of airtime over the last year in the PR and marketing space, we’ve found that many of our clients have yet to get started and those who have are struggling to get their campaigns off the ground. If your brand is in the same boat, it can seem overwhelming to continually create relevant content for your audience. But how do you make sure you’re reaching them in the right places and engaging them with useful information?

The new mantra at Edelman is that the paid ought to support the earned and owned content, to make it work harder and more intelligently than a classic media buy that stands on its own. According to Richard Edelman, publishing sites like Time and Associated Press are going to start supporting even more sponsored content on their sites. So now more than ever seems to be the time to start planning your strategy.

Here are a few things that we think you should consider prior to any content marketing campaign: Read it all..

Last year, Cision internally launched a new Vision and Values for our company. Much like a mission statement, there are five total: work passionately, value people, drive innovation, communicate openly, and be accountable. While I’m sure our HR team didn’t have Content Marketing in mind when they were dreamt up – keeping these five values in mind can contribute to a successful Content Marketing Strategy for any brand.

Work passionately

Consistently creating interesting content isn’t easy. Stay current with latest trends in your industry and make sure you are thinking outside of the box when it comes to creating new articles and information to share with your audience. Work diligently to build an internal team of creative minds to support each other when writer’s block sets in or if you’re looking for inspiration.

Value people

Think about your customers and followers before you create another piece of content. What are they looking for from your brand? Become a thought leader in your industry by creating or curating articles that your audience is going to want to consume and potentially share with their networks. Think less about promoting your brand and more about creating engaging content. Read it all..

Blogging isn’t easy. It takes great time and effort to create consistently interesting content that your fans and followers will want to consume and share on a regular basis. So, why is it important for your brand?

Photo courtesy of Search Engine People Blog

Relationship Building

There is no better way to make your customers and prospects invest in your brand than to share valuable content with them. Blogging is not just about self-promotion. It’s about becoming trusted resource in your industry; a place where people go regularly to hear about the latest trends and news in your space. Share and create interesting content and you’ll build a following that naturally begins to evangelize your brand. Nothing builds brand recognition better than promotion that comes from a party that has no vested interest in your company.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization has gone through a major overhaul in the past few years, but the one thing that has remained consistent is the importance of good content. The best way to get eyeballs to your blog? Curate and/or create interesting articles that your audience is going to want to share with their network. The more a piece of content is shared, the higher it will appear in the search engines for that topic and the more traffic it will drive to your site. Through thoughtful links that you’ve inserted into your content that link to relevant product pages on your website, you will naturally promote your products and services to potential prospects and customers who were already interested in your topic. Read it all..

Admittedly, the search engine giant’s social media site didn’t take off the way we initially thought it would, but with all of the upgrades that were made to the site in 2012, it’s a great time to reconsider creating a content marketing plan for Google+.

The Public Relations Community on Google+

New Rules of Engagement

Brands who were looking to connect with new fans on the site but were frustrated by Google+’s restrictions will be excited to learn Google+ Business Pages can now communicate with users outside of their circles. No longer will brands have to wait for someone to start following their business page in order to +1 that user’s content or comment on posts.

Effortless targeting

While the concept of Circles has been around since Google+ inception, the site doesn’t get enough credit for the brilliance of this functionality. What better way for PR and marketing pros to target their fans and followers properly than by creating circles by topic or industry?  Dell has done a great job of targeting small businesses with their Google+ page. Read it all..

I’ve been in the press release industry for over a decade. Yet surprisingly, I’ll be the first to admit that I thought the press release would have been a thing of the past by now.  Because the standard press release format is archaic and overused, companies that aren’t required by the SEC to distribute via a traditional wire have been looking for a new way to promote branded content. This demand has breathed new life into this medium. So, while the press release is definitely not dead, it has certainly evolved.

Image courtesy of kevin dooley via Flickr

Increasingly PR and Marketing teams are starting to work together (if they aren’t already one cohesive unit) to create great content that both customers and journalists are interested in consuming and potentially sharing. So, what’s the best way to get your content noticed?

Services like Social Publish are cropping up on the scene, allowing communicators to drive eyeballs to their branded content and multimedia assets that go along with that content, through social sharing, search engine optimization and a customized branded social media pressroom. Without having to meet the sometimes strict content policies of the wires, these services let brands tell their story in their own words, and share everything from events to whitepapers with both fans and influencers. Read it all..

Photo by carrotcreative via Creative Commons

Through the end of June this year, Twitter had already issued 3378 Copyright Takedown notices, 38% of which were eventually taken down from the site. In hopes of offering their users more transparency into copyright issues, Twitter announced a new policy in which the microblogging site will now be withholding tweets in question.

Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) outlines the specific requirements for formally reporting copyright infringement, as well as providing instructions on how an accused party can appeal a removal by submitting a compliant counter-notice.

Jeremy Kessel, Twitter’s legal policy manager took to the site on Saturday to announce the new policy.   His tweet said that the microblogging service now offers “more transparency in processing copyright reports by withholding Tweets.” In the past, the site would simply take down the tweet in question without warning or explanation. Read it all..

For PR & Marketing Professionals, Content Marketing is becoming a requirement of the job, not just a sometimes necessary evil. A recent study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and Marketing Profs, revealed that 9 out of 10 marketers are using Content Marketing. Along with the staggering rise of this new type of Marketing over the last few years, naturally come some growing pains. How are we going to keep creating great content that our fans and followers are willing to share? What’s the best place to promote our branded content? What’s the best tactic for the specific story we want to tell?

Photo courtesy of Cubosh

Over the past few months, I’ve read some great posts that offer solutions to many of the problems that plague Content Marketers as well as some creative tools to help your campaign take off online. Here are a few of the ones that stood out:

The 5 Elements of Content Marketing Explained  via The Content Strategist

In a new infographic, Synecore brakes down content marketing and its core entities.

These five elements include:

1. Blogs, which help businesses find new customers and build an online presence.
2. E-books and whitepapers, premium content that help generate leads by having those who download material fill out forms.
3. Webinars, to help marketers interact with their audiences, and webcasts (or podcasts) for broadcast or download at any time.
4. Videos, which Synecore claims “have shown that those who view video are much more likely to make a purchase than those who do not.”
5. E-mail marketing, which remains “the most popular form of content marketing.” It is a wallet-friendly and effective way to reach B2C and B2B readers. Read it all..

With just 48 days until the 2012 Presidential Election, there is a fight to the finish for the candidates to reach voters on social media sites. While some candidates are going as far as to pay influencers to follow them on Twitter,  the most influential social media campaigns revolve around how much engagement the candidates are actually having with their supporters online, not just number of fans and followers.

Photo courtesy of by Vectorportal

To the Left

While Obama may not have been able to predict the explosion of social media, he chose well when he hired Chris Hughes to create his campaign website. Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, left the social media giant in 2007 to run Obama’s social media campaign and many say helped Obama to win the presidency. However, a lot has changed since the 2008 election. “There was a lot of talk post-’08 about it being the social media election,” says Michael Slaby, chief integration and innovation officer for the Obama campaign. “But the reality is, Twitter launched during the last campaign and Facebook had less than 100 million users. We were at the very beginning of what it meant to be social.” Read it all..

The Content Marketing Institute’s annual tradeshow, Content Marketing World, begins today in Columbus, Ohio.  In honor of the event, we thought we’d share 4 stats from around the web to illustrate how content marketing has become an essential part of any PR and Marketing Plan.

by ShashiBellamkonda via Flickr Creative Commons

61% of people feel better about a company that delivers custom content and are more likely to buy from that company. Studies have shown that consumers find blog posts and white papers to be more convincing than press releases and traditional advertisements. Why not start promoting your blog posts and case studies to your fans and followers online?

Read it all..

Not much changes when it comes to the Olympics. There will always be athletes who spend their whole lives training to compete and prove themselves the very best of the best in their sport. There will always be three different types of medals given to the top 3 finishers. However, the one thing that has changed is the way we, as spectators, consume the results and engage with others around Olympic events on social mediums.

Photo courtesy of Nick J Webb via Creative Commons

Twitter’s impact on the Olympic Games this summer has been significant compared to the Winter Games just 2 short years ago and even more so compared to the last Summer Olympics held in Beijing in 2008. Dubbed the Twitter Games by some observers, the London Games have seen an unprecedented number of people take to social media sites (especially Twitter and Facebook) to express their opinions, share results and, in some cases, spoil the outcomes for those of us waiting to watch tape-delayed primetime coverage.

Here are some other interesting stats found across the web to show you just how much Social Media and Twitter in particular have impacted how people are following the London Games: Read it all..