Digital Marketing | Social Media | Online PR – The Future Buzz

I don’t care much for birthdays. Or holidays. Or traditions. I’m one of the few people in America who doesn’t watch the superbowl. My peers probably view me as a “bad friend” in that a birthday comes and I don’t treat them any differently than I would on a normal day.

And why should I? Why should any day be treated differently than another? Instead, I hold others in high regard daily and live each moment with the same positive outlook. Instead of perpetually looking forward to occasions which have no real significance other than that assigned by society, I’m awake in each moment.

To say I’m interested in marketing blogs would be an understatement. I’m irrationally commited to the niche as both a reader to several hundred blogs and contributor to a handful.

As someone who helped replace my position as digital strategist at Pierson Grant (my previous employer) I have been through the process of successfully finding/recommending digital marketing talent (congrats again Michael, I hear you’re doing a great job).

In 2008, I wrote the fact that paid blogging is a lose-lose situation. I stick with everything written in that post. Upon noticing a slew of new services – including those which allow companies to pay for Tweets (it’s laughable in-and-of itself that anyone is gullible enough to pay for that) I’ve been reflecting further on the idea of sponsored conversations.

If you read no further in this post, just consider this point: you can’t commoditize something as organic as a conversation. The second you do, the people having those conversations cease to be people and transform into shills. You might trick some users but it’s not authentic and there is zero trust involved. It’s manipulation, not conversation.

While the business digital divide – at least in the marketing and media industries – feels to be closing, there’s another rift less discussed: a divide between those with digital influence/share of voice and those without. And it’s a rift that grows wider daily.

Many businesses and individuals who embraced content marketing years ago are seeing strong returns and are way ahead of those starting today. I started pondering why this is and jotted down the following list:

You should probably try it. There’s a reason you’re unsure. Perhaps you’re unsure because it involves taking a chance or you don’t think it’s perfect. Yet the ideas – especially the creative variety – that you’re unsure about are probably the most interesting. They’re also probably interesting because they are imperfect.

Perfection isn’t as pleasing to us as imperfection because it’s not natural. This is where so many get the web wrong: ideas which are overly polished don’t resonate with people, they resonate with marketers.

Something strange has happened. It’s more than just your marketing being dated, although that happened too. There is a deeper shift that has occurred and few have caught up with it.

It’s that marketing itself was disrupted. We need something else. And what’s next is going to look more sociology-driven than something taken from a marketing best practices book.

Something interesting has happened with the advent of all people and companies becoming media. It is now possible to shift your PR from the infinite treadmill of push to the more reliable and greater returns of pull.

Catering to those with an interest in a specific niche is important, but this alone is not a guaranteed recipe for success. The other necessary ingredient is to cater to the influencer audience within that niche. It’s simple, effective and not a novel strategy. Although this concept seems rather basic to marketing, most either try to do this and fail or don’t consider it altogether.

Reaching influencers has been such a core element to so many of my successful campaigns over the years, I want to share both why this is important and how to be successful in doing so.

It’s that time of year again: Technorati has started to share content from their annual state of the blogosphere report. They have spared no expense this year: instead of polling bloggers in their network to get data (as was the case in the 2008 state of the blogosphere) they have engaged a research firm to add another layer of authority.