Social Media is not just a draft and post medium that will get your brand the right attention. With so much content clutter out there, it pays to be smart about what you say and how you say it. In this context, the piece below from Entrepreneur provides a few good pointers. —SS

The Art and Science of Getting Content Shared on Social Media

When excellent content fails to attract the readership it deserves, likely there were lapses in marketing efforts either before and after it was published. There is no guaranteed way to send your content viral but a few, reliable techniques boost the odds your posts receive well-deserved attention from social media users.

Leverage influencers. You don’t need to be a social media star to see your blog posts widely shared. You can depend on others who’ve nurtured loyal followings to amplify your content across Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Before you hit ‘publish,’ make sure you’ve quoted a few experts who have shared their opinion on your topic. When the story goes live, notify those individuals about your mention of them. They will likely respond with a ‘like,’ tweet and share of the post that will reach many of their followers.

This is a classic win-win-win. You add credibility to your post by noting what an industry influential has said about the same topic, those experts lend their social media presence when they share your content and you develop great rapport with the individuals you quote.

For more tactical advice, here are four foolproof strategies for getting social media power users to share your content for you.

Turn off comments. Sonia Simone, co-founder and chief content officer of Copyblogger, recently decided to do away with comments on the Copyblogger blog. As surprisinging as it was to many readers, others embraced the change, believing it would lead to better content and conversations. So far, the experiment has proved successful.

Upon reaching the end of a post, the Copyblogger audience is encouraged to “take the conversation further” on Google Plus and Twitter. This has proved brilliant at getting readers talking about and sharing Copyblogger content. Judging by activity on Google Plus, the conversations could not get any better.

Engaged fans enthusiastically contribute thoughtful insights to the conversation and, more often than not, will then interact with you one-on-one.

Use language that clicks. The social media management app Buffer published a study that analyzed the most popular words used in viral headlines and evaluated winning headline strategies. Experiment with your headlines to see which words and phrases resonate with your unique audience. Soon, you’ll have a list of what drives social shares.

Research conducted at the University of Texas, Austin, found Facebook users manifest their regular selves both online and offline. Content that speaks directly to who your readers are encourages them to share your post with people they care about as a way of publicly sharing a bit of themselves.

 Source: Entrepreneur

If you haven’t checked out Puma’s Dance Dictionary you are missing something. Puma’s microsite allows you to enter your message and watch it come alive in a dance video that conveys what you want through dance moves. The video can be shared with friends and family through social media sites.

What an idea!

The 10,000 word dance dictionary created by Puma to promote its body fragrance brand, Sync, suggests that moving around is no sweat, no worries if you’ve sprayed it. Getting people to spray the video across social media does sound like a snazzy idea.

This is a glimpse of the exciting future. Check out the link below.

Old media? Dull and boring!

–SS 

10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 25 years… 100 years, no matter what your company’s age, it makes sense to let people know, it helps to leverage the opportunity to talk about yourself. And if you’ve been around long, you have got so much more to talk about. Milestone anniversaries are time-given opportunities for brand engagement with customers, partners and employees. Milk them while you can.

Ken Owens offers some interesting tips on how you can make the most of them.–SS

Your Company Anniversary – 7 Keys To Success

By Ken Owens

Your organization has an anniversary every year. The question is, are you using this opportunity to set yourself apart from your competition? Here are seven keys to creating a successful marketing program around your upcoming corporate anniversary.

Key One: Recognize the Marketing Value of Your Corporate or Brand Anniversary

Anniversary marketing is not about your past, nor is it “old hat” or out of date. On the contrary, it is one of the most effective marketing initiatives.

You recognize the companies and organizations that have recharged their marketing programs by focusing on their anniversaries. Companies like Ford (100) and Harley-Davidson (100) and Sports Illustrated (50) and the Principal Financial Group (125).

Many others have found the value of anniversaries that don’t round off to 25. Companies like Southwest Airlines (33), Yankee Candle (20), Old Navy (10) and Appleton Estate Jamaican Rum (155). In fact, nearly 45% of the companies we researched are celebrating “off year” company or brand anniversaries.

Recognize that your past is the strongest criterion people have to judge your future. So use your history of success to tell clients and customers about that future and, most importantly, tell them about your place in their future.

Key Two: Get Started Now

You may have heard that Harley-Davidson began planning its 100th anniversary celebration the day after its 95th anniversary!

That tells you that it’s never too soon to get started. Because the most important thing you can do to assure success is to start planning today. Don’t limit the scope of what you can accomplish waiting to put plans in place.

Also, make sure you develop and promote a “sense of urgency” within your company about your anniversary. That urgency is an important element in a successful anniversary and can carry over into other aspects of your organization.

Key Three – Know What You Want as a Return On Investment

At the end of a year of anniversary marketing, you will want to know what you accomplished, what was your Return On Investment (ROI). This is all about measurement.

Determine the measurements that matter and find out where you are now, at the beginning. Then ask yourself the question: What has to happen over the course of this year for us to declare this effort a success? What changes in attitudes and sales do we want to accomplish with our anniversary?
Then when you are done, and if necessary, during the course of the year, measure what you have accomplished and compare this with your measurements from the beginning. That is your ROI.

It is not enough to say, “We had these events for hundreds of customers and employees, and distributed thousands of brochures. And did you see our ad in the Wall Street Journal?” You must be able to measure your success.

Key Four – Involve Your Employees

When PSEG celebrated its 100th, the company asked its employees to vote on their choice for an anniversary logo. Other companies have asked for employee suggestions about how best to celebrate their anniversaries.

By asking, you are seeking to make your employees full partners in the planning and execution of your company anniversary. This is an unparalleled opportunity to build employee pride and passion and to turn your most treasured asset into true brand advocates.

Gallup recently reported that if your employees were “fully engaged,” your customers would be 70% more loyal, your turnover would drop by 70%, and your profits would jump by 40%. That’s a handsome payoff for creating a true company-employee partnership!

Key Five – Think Events and Sponsorships

You can win the hearts and minds of your constituents by using events and sponsorships that deliver your message in exciting and strongly personal ways.

Events communicate your organization in ways that matter to your audiences. They are key to reaching people and involving them. Events create bonds both emotional and practical and bring an excitement not available with traditional marketing methods.

Plan events of differing sizes at different locations and spread them throughout the year. Combine your celebration with scheduled existing events such as technical forums, consumer and trade shows. And create events that have general news media interest as well.

Polaris, a major manufacturer of snowmobiles, watercraft, ATVs, utility vehicles and Victory motorcycles, with annual sales of more than $1.6 billion, took over the state fairgrounds to celebrate their 50th. More than 25,000 riding enthusiasts and music fans showed up to help them celebrate.

Key Six – Celebrate all year long

Your anniversary marketing strategy should have a shelf life of at least a year. Don’t spend all your anniversary capital on a single event. Events and initiatives spread throughout the year, or even over 18 months, will keep interest in your company high within your various audiences, both internal and external.

Take a lead from the pages of Sports Illustrated. Partnering with Toyota, SI created a year long traveling celebration, the Toyota Presents Sports Illustrated’s 50th Anniversary Tour, a football field-size interactive site constructed state by state bringing Sports Illustrated to life for fans across the country.

Find innovative ways over the year to establish a true dialogue with your clients and customers and suppliers. Learn from them how you can help them grow and prosper, because they are the keys to your own success.

Red Hat, “The world’s most trusted provider of Linux and open source technology,” celebrated its 10th with a worldwide tour in which executives held forums and met one-on-one with customers in cities across the globe. Red Hat reported getting a greater sense of their users, their needs and wants, as well as now having more feeling and passion for their own work.

Key Seven – Get help to do it right

Accept that you can’t do it alone and get help.

A successful celebration combines many elements including planning, measurement, anniversary logo development, corporate history, public relations, event creation and management, website creation or redesign, and more.

Find someone who can assist you with the planning and strategy, but who also can implement those plans for you. Your anniversary is too important to leave to an overworked marketing department or an understaffed agency.

And make sure you get objective assistance from someone whose fee isn’t dependent upon how much you spend in certain categories, such as advertising or design or printing.

In a nutshell

The most important key to a successful company anniversary celebration is the first: Recognize that your corporate or brand anniversary has marketing value.

Ken Owens is president of Owens Marketing Group, and helps companies grow using the powerful marketing and branding tools of events and sports sponsorships, and aggressive public relations.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/512603

In the fast-changing consumer world, content is emerging as a new vehicle for building lasting brand perception. In this interesting piece featured in Guardian, UK the rise of brand content and the decline of independent journalism are clearly highlighted. Is this the future? You decide.–SS

THE INSIDIOUS POWER OF BRAND CONTENT

In advertising, brand content is the new black – the latest hope for an ailing industry

Dassault Systemes is one of the French industry’s greatest successes. Everyday, unbeknownst to most of us, we use products designed using DS software: cars, gadgets, buildings and even clothes. This €2bn (£1.6bn) company provides all the necessary tools for what has become known as Product Lifecycle Management: starting from the initial design, moving to the software that runs the manufacturing process, then to distribution logistics and, at the end of its life, disposing of the product.

Hence a simple question: what could be the axis of communication for such a company? The performance of its latest release of CAD software? Its simulation capabilities?

No. Dassault Systemes opted to communicate on a science-fiction iceberg-related project. The pitch: a French engineer – the old-fashion type, a dreamer who barely speaks English – envisions capturing an iceberg from a Greenland glacier and tugging it down to the thirsty Canary Islands. The DS mission (should it choose to really accept it): devise all the relevant techniques for the job: minimise melting, maximise fuel-efficiency.

The result is a remarkable and quite entertaining documentary, a 56-minute high-tech festival of solutions for this daunting task’s numerous challenges. I watched it in HD on my iPad, in exchange for my email address (the one I’m dedicating to marketers). It’s a huge, multimillion-euro video production, with scores of the helicopters shots, superb views of Greenland and, of course, spectacular 3D imaging, the core DS business.

The budget is so high and the project so ambitious, that the documentary was co-produced by several large European TV channels such as France Televisions and the German ZDF. Quite frankly, it fits the standard of public TV – for such a genre.

But this is neither journalism nor National Geographic film-making. It’s a “brand content” operation.

In advertising, brand content is the new black. You can’t bump into an ad exec without hearing about it. It’s the new holy grail, the replacement for the other formats that failed and the latest hope for an ailing industry. But there are side effects.

Let’s have a closer look.

1) What defines Brand Content as opposed to traditional advertising?
In a good BC product, the brand can be almost absent. It’s the content that’s front and centre. In France, advertisers often quote a series made by the French Bank BNP-Paribas titled Mes Colocs (My roommates). The title says it all. Launched two years ago, it featured 20 shorts episodes, later supplemented by … 30 bonus ones, all broadcast on YouTube and DailyMotion.

Mes Colocs became such a success that two cable TV channels picked it up. The brand name does not appear – except in the opening credits. But, far from being a philanthropic operation, its performance was carefully monitored. BNP-Paribas’ goal was obvious: raising its awareness among young people. And it seems to have worked: the operation translated into a 1.6% increase in accounts opening and a rise of 6.5% in the number of loans granted to young adults (details in thispromotional parody produced by the agency.)

This dissociation between brand and content is essential. An historical French brand has been rightly celebrated for being the first to do brand content decades before the term was coined: Michelin with its eponymous guides provided a genuine service without promoting its tires (read Jean-Louis’ Monday Note Why Apple Should Follow Michelin.)

The following opposition can be drawn between traditional advertising and content-based message :

2) Why the hype ?
First of all, media is increasingly fragmented. Advertisers and marketers have a hard time targeting the right audience. BCt is a good way to let the audience build itself – for instance, through virality. It is much more subtle than relying on the heavily (and easily) corrupted blogosphere.

Second, most digital formats are faltering. Display advertising is spiraling down due to well-known factors: unlimited inventories, poor creativity, excessive discounts, bulk purchasing, cannibalisation by value killing ad networks, etc. Behavioral targeting is technically spectacular but people get irritated by invasive tracking techniques (see my previous take: Pro (Advertising) Choice.)

Three, marketers have matured. The caricatural advertorial grossly extolling a product is long gone. Today’s contents are much smarter; they provide information (real or a respectable imitation), and good entertainment. Everything is increasingly well-crafted. Why? Because – and that is reason #4 for growth in BC – there is a lot of available talent out there. As news media shrinks, advertising agencies find an abundance of writers, producers, film-makers all eager to work for much more money they could hope to get in their former jobs. Coming in with a fresh mindset, not (yet) brain-washed by marketing, they will do their job professionally, accepting “minor” constraints in exchange for great working conditions – no penny pinching when you do a web series for a global brand.

Five, compared to traditional advertising messages, brand content is cheap. As an example, see the making of a recent and highly conceptual Air France commercial shot in Morocco; the cost ran into seven figures. Now, imagine how many brand content products can be done with the same investment. Brand content allows an advertiser to place multiple bets at the same time.

3) The risks. (Here comes the newsman’s point of view)
Brand content is the advertiser’s dream come true. The downfall of the print press has opened floodgates: publishers become less and less scrupulous in their blurring of the line between editorial and promotion – which is precisely what ad agencies always shoot for. Most women’s magazines, the luxury press, and now mainstream glossies allocate between 30% and 70% to such “tainted” editorial: nice “journalistic” treatment in exchange for favours on the advertising side. I’m not blaming publishers who do their best to save their business, I’m just stating the facts.

The consequence is obvious: readers are not informed as they should about products. Less and less so. (Although islands of integrity like Consumer Reports remain.) That is not good for the print media as it feeds the public’s distrust. While many publications lose what’s left of their credibility by being too cosy with their advertisers, brands are becoming increasingly savvy at producing quality contents that mimic traditional editorial.

As brands tend to become full-blown media, the public will get confused. Sooner or later, it will be difficult to distinguish between a genuine, editorially-driven prime-time TV show and another one sponsored by an advertiser. Call it the ever shrinking journalism.

frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk

Creating content to promote your brand is the done thing. What’s catching on now is its recreation. Add some interesting insights and perspectives to the content, and you’ve likely got a great engagement tool for your brand’s target audience. Check out this piece in Forbes on Content Curation. A pointer to where we are headed?!–SS

5 Ways to Use Content Curation for Marketing and Tools to Do It

Susan Gunelius

Content curation is the hottest topic among marketers these days, but few companies understand what content curation is and how it can help build a brand and a business.

In simplest terms, content curation is a form of content marketing where a publisher (in this case, a small business) editorially collects the best content related to a specific niche and targeted to a specific audience then enhances that content by adding personal opinions and expertise. That enhanced content delivers added value to the target audience who consumes it after it’s published.

There are three key terms in the above definition that make content curation different from the systemic aggregation and syndication of content and links that has been popular in the recent past — editorially-selected, enhanced, and added value. Well-executed content curation isn’t just a regurgitation of content that was already published but rather a personalized retelling of a story. The human element of content curation is what makes curated content compelling.

Therefore, when you develop a content curation plan for your business, prioritize the human element of your efforts and make sure you’re always adding value. Here are five ways to curate content as part of your content marketing strategy:

1. Curate Images and Video

Since Pinterest launched, image and video curation and sharing has become one of the most popular online activities. Create a Pinterest account and set up pinboards that help to tell your brand story. Curate images from across the web, repin other users’ pins, and enable audiences to experience your brand visually.

Apu Gupta, founder of Curalate.com, a tool that enables brands to measure and monitor their social curation presence on Pinterest, suggests three things businesses should do on Pinterest:

1. Be authentic. Invest in a brand back story and communicate it visually.
2. Be consistent. Curate content that relates to your brand story and personality.
3. Publish fresh and pinnable content. Remember that a lot of brand engagement on Pinterest happens because of a brand website, so encourage pinning, add a Pin It button on your website, and make it easy for people to pin your content.

2. Curate an Online Magazine

Use one of the free content curation tools that make it easy to create an online magazine related to your industry or topic of your choice. Be sure to curate content that your target audience will find value in, or they won’t read it. Tools like Storify, Paper.li, andScoop.it make it easy to editorially select content for your online magazine.

Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify, explains, “Great curation tells a story and takes you through an experience. You’re creating something better by putting the parts together. Curation is about humans. It’s about thinking of the audience and giving them something they want to see.”

3. Curate on Your Blog

There are numerous ways that you can curate content on your blog. Many of the top blogs curate content and publish individual posts about that content throughout the day. Each post includes additional commentary or expert analysis to add value to the original content.

For example, The Daily Beast began as a site that curated the best news content from across the web and enhanced it by allowing writers to inject their own thoughts. Other sites publish roundup posts that provide overviews of great content from across the web with links to read the complete story. Both methods of curating content on your business blog work very well.

You can find content to curate using tools like SocialMention and Google Alerts. Set up alerts for keywords related to your business, or monitor those keywords on Twitter using a tool like Monitter.com. To streamline the process, consider using a tool like CurationSoft, which enables you to curate content and republish it directly on your website or blog.

4. Curate for Email Marketing

Content curation can happen through email, too. Email newsletters provide a perfect opportunity to curate and share useful content with your audience. You can curate your own content or content from third parties and use that content in your email marketing campaigns.

Fortunately, there are a number of tools that make it easy to curate and publish content in email form. XYDO offers a useful tool for curating content for email marketing and boasts click-through rates up to 8 times higher than non-curated email newsletters. XYDO also integrates with MailChimp for email marketing as does Butterfly Publisher for MailChimp.

5. Curate Top Quality Content Consistently

Always curate quality content. Review the source and make sure that source is an appropriate match for your brand and business. As your efforts begin to drive results and your curation schedule gets busier, you might need to hire a freelancer or employee to handle the process for you.

There are also higher-priced tools that can help you reach the next level of content curation success. Curata is one such tool that offers advanced features, analytics, customization, email integration, team collaboration, and more. A free trial and demo are available, so you can give it a try before you commit to a contract.

Most importantly, remember to always curate quality content that consistently reflects your brand story, and you’ll be on the right path to building your brand and business through content curation.

Source: Forbes (http://www.forbes.com)

More than 80% of 329 senior executives polled in the US have seen tangible gains from social marketing. And content is the key differentiator here. Time to build content resources.–SS

Compounding The Return On Your Content

Forbes’ series on content marketing shows top corporations like General Mills, GE and Sears are using customised content to glue consumers to their brands. Reproduced below is Forbes’ interview with Sears’ Julia Fitzgerald.

Time for our desi businesses to jaago and smell the chai.–SS

Sears Explains Its Success In Content Marketing

Earlier this week we profiled digital marketing execs from General Millsand GE on how they’re running their organizations like publishers. For our third and final installment in this series on content marketing, we sat down with Julia Fitzgerald, Chief Digital Officer, Fitness, Sporting Goods & Toys at Sears Holdings and Gilad de Vries from best of breed content discovery platform, Outbrain.

Julia Fitzgerald, Chief Digital Officer, Sears Holdings

Brandon Gutman: How do you get people to discover your content?        

Julia Fitzgerald: At Sears Holdings Company we use various ways of connecting people with our content. For FitStudio, the Sears online fitness community, we use multiple fitness experts as our content creators. The expert contributors all reach various wellness communities and draw them to the FitStudio content. We leverage our online platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, and Shop Your Way, to promote the FitStudio content. We also use some of our more traditional Sears marketing assets to let our customers know about FitStudio. We do use some paid methods of distribution as well. Since we have such a rich library of fitness content, we leverage services that allow people to choose our content from multiple online portal links.

What is the ROI on your content marketing efforts? How do you measure success?

While FitStudio is a major content marketing initiative, it is one of several Sears multichannel programs. Depending on the program, we have various ROI related metrics. For some programs, we are measuring membership acquisition, engagement, page views, return visits, coupon redemption, or purchase. Most of these metrics feed into a lifetime value of an engaged customer equation that ultimately determines ROI.

Many people may not know that Sears is the largest seller of fitness-related products. Why did Sears decide create to create FitStudio and what is the value you get from the initiative? What part do you see the brand playing in the conversation of how to get in shape, fitness and how fitness should be a part of everyone’s lives?

We realized that when shoppers come to Sears looking for a piece of fitness equipment, what they really are looking for is a 15 pounds lighter, fitter, or healthier version of themselves. And while the equipment is often a key component to their goal, they also need information and motivation to keep on track with a healthier lifestyle. FitStudio was the perfect solution for Sears to provide – free of charge – expert advice from fitness professionals and nutritionalists. In addition to the advice, FitStudio is a social venue where people can connect with each other and the fitness experts for information and encouragement. While the Sears brand is successful at selling fitness equipment, we have challenged ourselves with FitStudio to extend the brand beyond the equipment and to stand for the motivation and know-how to get America in shape.

Content discovery platform, Outbrain, is working with many Fortune 500 organizations including the ones featured in this series. Therefore, we went to Gilad de Vries, VP Brands and Agencies at Outbrain, for his expert perspective.

Brandon Gutman: For brands like GE,General Mills and Sears that are already leading a substantial content marketing strategy, how is Outbrain taking them to the next level?  

Gilad de Vries: Brands that are heavily investing in content marketing understand that getting as many people as possible to engage with their content helps both with building brand awareness and brand affinity as well as plays a part in their SEO and social strategies. They know that creating a robust content marketing strategy goes beyond just posting the content on social channels or optimizing it for SEO, so they’re looking to expand the reach, which is why they turn to Outbrain for its efficient, performance-based (flexible CPC) buying model.

On the other hand, does it make sense for brands just beginning their content market strategy to partner with Outbrain? What should they be doing on their own to get started?

To get started we recommend that brand managers really think about what kind of content would entertain or inform their audience the most. What will be so interesting for them that they will actually want to share it. Great examples include Colgate’s oral care advice, P&G’s pet care information orrecommendations for mobile apps from Verizon Wireless.

It’s OK to start small. It makes sense to get people to discover your content as soon as you start to develop it, so you get important audience insights like what they really enjoy, where they come from, how long they stay, how they respond to different calls to action alongside the content, etc. Armed with these insights, marketers can continue to develop content that will resonate. In addition, it’s important to mention that most content marketing strategies also take advantage of earned media. So assuming the brand does PR, there’s usually more to work with from a content perspective than the brand initially thinks.

Source: Forbes

Have you noted the rise of the ‘Other Murthy’? iGate is the new toast of the media—at least of one large publication, if not all.

Promotion through features in print is nothing new. The Page 3 supplements in dailies are known to offer edit square centimetres for a price. Structured relationships between media and corporates for in-edit promotions have been around for a bit. However, I found the expansive coverage of a particular corporate entity by a leading business daily difficult to ignore. A tech supplement laboured the message that iGate is a great company to work for. I failed to notice any prominent “this is a sponsored article” tag. And if I didn’t, many others wouldn’t. Honestly, I didn’t care to read the fine print, or even look for it.

The development may have receded into faint memory in some time, and would not have prompted me to put print on page, but for a full page article on the company’s leader in another supplement today. My first thought was: “Wow! What does it take to get this done?”

As the import sank in, rationality emerged. What do you expect? Most of traditional media is scrambling to survive. Nobody is making big money. On the contrary, it is hand-to-mouth or, worse still, a dole-driven existence.

The uncomfortable development for me as a former journalist drives me to speculate on the future. I see two themes developing. The first, being a steady growth in content-driven brand promotion through traditional media. A phenomenon I strongly believe is the future for brand engagement in an increasingly more “social” world. And the second theme, is the rise of a new, “independent media”, and the demise of independence in traditional media. I see the new voice emerging in the digital world—print costs too much to afford the truth. Independent news will be developed by tightly-run outfits with committed writers. These writers will acquire a following not seen in the past, and may wield, in time, much influence.

Be this, if it will. The time is ripe for brands to enter the now open media gates with well crafted content. Advertising will continue to persist as an important promotion medium, despite the clutter, but smart content will offer the edge. Cease the opportunity!—SS

Web is the marketers’ new turf. A recent survey points to the web spinning marketers away from traditional media. We knew the end of stodgy media was nigh. This report just adds numbers to the contention.

Hello, worldwide branding. Hello, web content. —SS

2 0 1 2 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING INDUSTRY REPORT

By Michael E Stelzner

The study surveyed a total of 3,813 marketers across small, mid-sized and large businesses in the US, Canada, UK and Australia.

KEY FINDINGS

Gaining Ground

VIDEO PROMOTIONS +

A significant 76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2012.

SOCIAL MEDIA +

A significant 83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.

E-MAIL MARKETING +

More than 3 in 5 marketers (61%) plan on increasing their email marketing efforts in the near future.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION +

Most marketers (68%) indicated they were planning on increasing their search engine optimization efforts.

 PRESS RELEASES +

79% of marketers plan on either keeping the same levels or increasing their use of press releases, with 42% planning an increase. Large firms are much more likely to use press releases (nearly 90%).

Losing Sheen

 PRINT ADS –

A significant 53% of marketers either have no plans to use or will decrease their use of print ads.

TELEVISION ADS –

Only 6% of marketers plan on increasing television ads. Of businesses with 100-499 employees or more, 11% plan on increasing their use of television ads.

DIRECT MAIL –

Only 14% of large businesses with 1,000 or more employees plan on increasing use of direct mail. Of those large businesses, 31% will decrease their use of direct mail and 20% won’t even use it.

Source: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/

The world is finally waking up to the power of content. ‘Brand Journalism’ is an interesting way to describe the new field of brand communication. The traditional promotion rule books are set to be rewritten as we script the future.

In this piece, Matt Nelson, director of social media strategy at Tribal DDB, says why he believes this is an era of immense creative opportunities.–SS

FORGET “MAD MEN”–NOW IS THE GOLDEN ERA FOR ADVERTISING

BY EXPERT BLOGGER MATT NELSON | 03-21-2012 | 12:30 PM