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

Lists continue to be a popular format to publish content to the web, and with good reason.

As I wrote previously, lists:

• Are scan-able
• Provide easy to read and consume content
• Have the novelty factor
• Are many times “must-share” content
• Engage people
• Are at times humorous, entertaining or incredible
• Are a strong social web meme
• Get traffic

Massive, impersonal, one-to-many networks are never as valuable as intimate, engaged and interested communities. More is not better unless users are actually empowered and connected. Having hundreds of thousands or even millions of passive followers (something individuals now have, putting them at the numbers previously reserved for media and businesses) is not what you should seek to acquire and ignores the real value of building a network. I’d rather engage a group of 1,000 interested people over a passive following of 100,000 any day of the week. We would run circles around the larger group.

Have great ideas to share with the world? Want to improve your industry? Are you driven to become a thought leader? You can, but not if you mindlessly chase numbers for the sake of numbers. Build trust and engagement instead, as those are what actually matter. This will lead to more useful, interesting and altogether fulfilling results.

Some thoughts to keep in mind:

I experiment with many different ideas to create interesting content, drive traffic, earn links, rally communities and inspire people to action. It’s a lot of fun, and at the same time a fantastic way to learn. There is no limit to using open networks other than your creativity. And, quite possibly the best way to learn and find what works for you personally is by experimenting.

Smart companies, bloggers and marketers are…

Aware

Those that are aware of trends and stay at the edge are positioned to disrupt the market, never the other way around. Some are aware to the point they’re self-actualized and at a level they are able to think several steps ahead, like a good chess player. To get to this point, you have to be…

Many of you reading this already know who Matt Cutts is. For those who don’t, he is Google’s head of webspam. Simplified and in plain English, what that means is he helps make sure those Google results you receive for your queries are of high quality and spam-free.

But this post isn’t about webspam or SEO. What’s even more interesting to me as a communications professional is that in many ways, Matt represents the future of PR as a transparent, seamless process internally for sophisticated, industry-leading companies.

There’s a lot of great thinking from Steve Rubel, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis and others about the future of PR.

Everyone knows the story of Pavlov’s dog. A summary for those who slept through 7th grade science class:

The original and most famous example of classical conditioning involved the salivary conditioning of Pavlov’s dogs. During his research on the physiology of digestion in dogs, Pavlov noticed that, rather than simply salivating in the presence of meat powder (an innate response to food that he called the unconditioned response), the dogs began to salivate in the presence of the lab technician who normally fed them. From this observation he predicted that, if a particular stimulus in the dog’s surroundings were present when the dog was presented with meat powder, then this stimulus would become associated with food and cause salivation on its own. In his initial experiment, Pavlov used a metronome to call the dogs to their food and, after a few repetitions, the dogs started to salivate in response to the metronome. Thus, a neutral stimulus (metronome) became a conditioned stimulus (CS) as a result of consistent pairing with the unconditioned stimulus (US – meat powder in this example). Pavlov referred to this learned relationship as a conditional reflex (now called Conditioned Response).

Web traffic strategies is an ongoing series where I focus on one strategy at a time for building significant traffic to your web property, no matter what niche it may be in. This series is written for those who already understand basic tactics and are looking to take their site or blog to the next level.

Automation through technology is a beautiful thing from an efficiency and productivity standpoint. I’m a fan of automating low-level and/or repetitive tasks to free up time for cerebral and creative work. Unfortunately, there are also many things people choose to automate that can actually do more harm than good.

I frequently get pitched to cover businesses or other websites at this blog. Most of it isn’t a fit or just pure spam. As a marketing/PR professional by trade, I’m patient and take the time to help those who send me irrelevant pitches by pointing them to some tips for pitching bloggers.

There is an undercurrent of backlash brewing in our world. Backlash against the quickening pace of disposable content.

Things are concurrently getting louder and faster as we move closer to a true real-time web. And with it, there are those who churn out content because they feel like they must keep pace with every insignificant occurrence at the impossible velocity of real-time. While yes, the real-time web is useful and certainly has a function – what many treat it as is a disposable content environment.

And, while it’s fun to play around in, experiment, and draw subscribers to your own site – you must go counter to this if you want to develop a popular, yet sustainable web destination. Sustainable in the sense of not needing to be on the infinite treadmill to survive.