Digital Marketing, Media, PR Analysis And Insight – The Future Buzz

Instead of a blog post, I decided to create a quick presentation on how (and why) to create remarkable digital content. These ideas are likely not new to some of you, however I still felt the need to create something to serve as a primer on content marketing (specifically, social content). This should be helpful to those who are new, struggling to get results, or just looking for some inspiration.

Across the varieties of content that exist – from music and movies, to blogs and books, there is a constant. Inevitably the banal/common is popular, and the brilliant/offbeat lives in obscurity. Perhaps given life from those close to the industry or years later from wider audiences if the producers of that content are lucky.

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you noticed Google released their new social product buzz. Predictably, it was met with both positive and negative reactions from the industry.

I like Chris Brogan. I’ve even referenced him among social media power users I recommend this community connect with. With that said, I don’t agree with everything he says and have disagreed with him in the past. I’m going to disagree with him again today.

Something popular web publishers have latched onto – that differentiates from many (but not all) traditional reporters – is the power of understanding your audience.

I’m not talking a shallow understanding of the genres your audience is interested in. I’m talking about an innate understanding of the content archetypes readers react to, the motivations behind readers as individuals interacting with media, and the steps necessary to develop an interested, activated community.

As participation by companies and individuals explodes, social media is fast losing shiny new object syndrome. Even those who ignore the social web probably realize that at this point social media is not new.

The advantage of being early is probably gone for most industries. Yet, if you’ve got the right strategy which plays into the fact that many are now participating, you don’t need to be first. More people participating means more potential conversations, more potential subscribers, and more potential paths to set your brand on fire.

At Online Marketing blog, I explained why subscribers are a vital element of your site’s growth strategy. The reasons listed in that post include:

The embrace of content marketing by businesses and marketing agencies has exploded. Already most professionals and companies that seek to be found have blogs, the ultimate content marketing tool.

Yet most get content marketing or pull marketing (in its purist form) dead wrong and are destined for perpetual obscurity.

Developing popular content once in awhile is one thing, but how do you keep your blog as a whole in demand?

There isn’t a single winning answer – there are many strategies and methods which can be effective. Regardless of the path you choose, keeping your blog content in demand is vital to keep your community growing itself organically over time.

As the pace of content being added to the web increases, the value of aggregating the best of it goes up. If you’re a content producer of any variety, researching, collecting and then putting together the best material you can find is huge, especially if you’ve got an eye for top content in your niche.

For this post, I am not talking about scripting content, I am talking about manually collecting it and being a human aggregator of the best, editorially chosen material. I know that’s not the usual definition of aggregation on the web, but I think the actual, not buzzword definition of the word works to describe this strategy.