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

Daniel Hindin over at blog Spin Sucks recently answered a reader question from Kara Vanskike. The question was as follows:

“Our blog has been up and running for about a year and a half. We know it’s being read through analytics and in person comments, but we really struggle to get people to comment on the posts.”

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.

I’ve already explained my rationale why you should embrace the use and reuse of your content – authorized or not. There are benefits here on multiple fronts, especially since it’s something you’re not likely to contain. In a digital world it’s always more strategic to focus resources on that which you can control and ignore or try to leverage that which you cannot. This is a tough lesson the music and newspaper industries are going through today.

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.

I’m a fan of Rebecca Thorman, career/lifestyle blogger and PR pro for start-up Alice.com. Her thoughts are usually spot on. However her post last week: bloggers are not writers, gets enough wrong it’s worth dissecting.

(Note from Adam: this is a guest post from my blog designer – Michael Martin at Pro Blog Design. If you’re reading through email or RSS, you’ll walk to click through to the site to read today’s post and check out the new look.)

You’ve hopefully already noticed that The Future Buzz is looking a little bit different these days (And even more hopefully, you might even think it looks a little better these days!).

Peter Kim recently shared 5 thoughts on blogging after a break from posting. I found his comments worth dissecting – let’s have a look:

1. Once momentum is lost, it’s a lot easier for the blog to remain at rest.

This is true, and is the unfortunate reality most blogs succumb to. The companies or people behind a majority of blogs never last long enough to see results (consider only .06% of blogs have a Technorati ranking of 50 or higher, as just one KPI).

The annual state of the blogosphere report provided by Technorati always provides a ton of interesting information for bloggers, marketers and PR pros to use and reuse. My only issue with it is they make us read through pages upon pages of content to get at the good bits, and don’t provide a list of just the stats as a resource.