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Why social media marketing fails

 The Brand Science Institute from Germany has investigated 650 marketers from 52 brands in Europe.
Their findings why and how social media campaigns are organized leading to their failure are in this presentation:
Why Social Media Projects Fail?! – A European Perspective

Most people in Marketing or PR are clueless when it comes to social media as this is different game than creating an advertisement or a press release and buy media time to get exposure.
Social media is not about shouting messages but about interaction in order to get more exposure.

How to get viral content websites

 The goal of any website is to drive traffic.
Matthew Inman from The Oatmeal explains with visual examples in this video how he got different viral websites that attracts millions of people.

More traffic is not always better as it can be beyond your target audience, but traffic is always better as hardly any visitors.

How to get a video on your website using YouTube

 A question often asked is how to get a video on your website.
First you need to sign-up with one of the video hosting sites:
YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, viddler, blip.tv, mefeedia, Howcast before you can upload your video.
Most video file formats are supported - all you need to do is click on the upload button and browse to select your video file on your system (hard disk or USB key).
During upload take the time to describe the video and add the keywords for findability.

Once it has been uploaded and processed verify the quality of your video by watching it.
1. Look for the < embed > button and click on it.
The code to be embedded into your website will appear in a box - starting with
2. Copy the code (Ctrl +C)
3. Then go to your website source code or your content management system.
4. Select the page where you want the video and paste (Ctrl +V) the code into your website.
5. Save the changed page (and upload it to your web server if you don’t use a content management system).
That’s all.

Of course the size and layout on the page can be adjusted, but that’s a different story.



About.com is planning to move into B2B content market

 According to WebNewUser the popular consumer and successful website About.com is moving into business-to-business.
The number of industries that are being planned to be covered is impressive as this page shows and indicates the investment About.com is going to make in writers and editors in order to cover all these industries.

Is this a sign of the times ? Are there new opportunities in B2B marketing due to the change in use of the Internet as source for B2B purchases ?
If About.com should become popular with business people, companies in B2B have another partner to deal with for their press releases and product information.
The future will tell.

Google favors bad content over original content and links

 According to the blog posts of Richard Macmanus on ReadWriteWeb and Robin Wauters on TechCrunch about how content farms rule the search game as Google favors the bad content from content farms over original content and decreases the importance of links.
Content farms like About.com, Answers.com, Demand Media, TellMeHowTo.net, eHow, The Knot, ...

These content farms publish low quality or even dubious content, but have an high impact as they succeed in acquiring a high SERP (Search Engine Results Page) on Google. This is threatening the quality content as these appear lower in searches.

How will your original content survive in this swap of content farms ?

Content creation is too demanding - content curation is easier

 Content creation requires imagining, building and editing new content. Too much hard work and too demanding for most people.

Content curation is just continually finding, grouping, organizing and sharing the most relevant content on a specific issue or item online. Thus instead of creating you only have to copy and aggregate existing content and publish it in a different format.
And if you have some creativity you can add on your own point of view.

Instead of creating content the content curator just sort and sifts through the glut of content and organizes it in a way that is relevant to a certain audience or interest group. That’s less demanding than content creation.

The goal is the same: getting the attention, which has become the currency, of your audience or potential buyers.
The method to get there is different:
No new content to be created: just find, filter then copy paste and publish

Half of all advertising spend is wasted - Would this be applicable to content marketing too ?

 Half of all advertising spend is wasted - just need to know which half.
Advertising requires creativity for the content of the ad and money to buy ad space. Half of it is wasted: the problem is you won't know which half.
Additionally: ads run as long as your money last

Content marketing requires creativity and distribution of the content. Probably more than the half is wasted.
However you can produce much more content and distribute it many more times at the price of an add campaign.
The level of waste is probably much higher compared to advertising. In the case the content gets distributed, copied an replicated over the Internet or in traditional media the reach will be much farther and the reward will be much higher.

Although there will be much more waste for content marketing, the reward is likely to be greater. And good or original content will last very long on the Internet.

Content fashion exists too

 Several content marketing strategies exist:
The first one is by using keyword tools to find out the most searched keywords related to your offering or business. The problem you will encounter is that you need to write around these keywords which can make your texts difficult to read.
The total number of texts will be limited and you are optimizing for SEO – search engines.

The alternative is to write as many texts as possible and publish them on your website and anywhere possible on the Internet (article websites).
Instead of picking keywords you just write as you feel making the texts great to read.
Several of these articles can be variations on the same subject or around the same subject.
In this case you are optimizing for getting readers and attention casing clicks and traffic, which will get noticed by the search engines later.

As there is so much content available on the Internet the outcome of using popular keywords is not to be predicted. Hence publishing as much good readable texts on to the Internet is probably the better option as in the end you need to convert people into clicks or sales.


How scalable is your content ?

 If your business model doesn't scale then you are obliged to keep on adding resources to grow the company.
Eventually you will run out of resources and your company will stop growing.
The only way out is to productize your services.

If your content doesn't scale then you will need to add more content in order to keep your audience.
Adding content is hard cumbersome work and requires creativity, imagination and originality.

However if your content gets copied, re-used and spread over the Internet you will be reaching a very large audience.
The better your content scales the less content you need.
Scaling content can be quality, unique or interesting content that is remarkable enough to scale over the Internet.

How well does your content scale ?


Magical content on the iPad

 In this history of communication technologies Shinya shows that new technologies brings new excitement.



It's not so much about magic or the iPad but it's the timing that makes the show.

If you need to be remarked a popular item or device will help to get attention.
Presenting your content in a popular context sure helps to get noticed.

Still content marketing is becoming show business!


Why your content must be prominent enough to be published

 If your content is not prominent then there is no reason to publish it.

Average content can attract interested parties and generate traffic, but they will be disillusioned and discouraged to look any further into you content or offering.
So what's the benefit of publishing average content ?
Average content will only clutter your website.

Publishing mediocre content is to be avoided at all times as it will present a negative picture of a lesser quality website or company to the world.
The problem maybe not immediate but as Google, Bing and Yahoo never seem to forget content it might become a problem in the future. Either good and bad content can get copied and duplicated on the Internet beyond your control, the mediocre content can emerge again at a moment your website or company has gained importance. This will destruct or diminish what you would have been building up over many years.

Make sure your content is prominent enough to be published.
Moreover prominent content will be replicated on the Internet giving your company or website a further reach.


The downfall of the search engines due to social stream

 Since the early beginning of the Internet people has used search engines to search for information.
As people are getting used to the social stream of information that Facebook, LinkedIn and other social websites, searching of information is decreasing – or less growing.

The friends on social website collect, select and filter information and entertainment from the Internet and post it on the social website as they find it important.
These friends get their information from their social streams or searches.
Hence the information that eventually is presented in the social stream must be interesting and highly valuable due to:
- The many levels of filtering
- The friends that are trusted parties
(note: search engines are sponsored by advertising thus not to be trusted)

As the social stream of information has a high value and the convenience why should most people bother and make the effort to search themselves.
Hence there is less traffic on search engines than if people were to search themselves for the information or entertainment.

Information is becoming less of a destination that we seek online. Instead we are expecting it to come to us in a social stream.

The social websites with their social stream are leading to the downfall of the search engines.
No longer they will be the masters of the universe.


The content not fitting the brand image

 Even top brands can create a terrific marketing campaign with a video that explains and show the quality of the product: a Mercedes with a 4MATIC all-wheel-drive system: safe and capable of driving in any bad weather.



The story goes that the video gets banned by company management as couples having each an affair is not portraying the ideal Mercedes owners.
If the content doesn't match the brand image it should not be published.
Strangely Mercedes decided after all the production costs had incurred.

Although hot images and steaming video sell well, it is not suited for all companies.

Using popupbooster you can show your video only to the audience that fits the target group without the other visitors knowing you have a hot video to show.

Imitatio, variatio, aemulatio (imitation, variation, amplification)

Creating original content is hard to do.
Already in ancient times (Byzantium) someone wrote this down: Imitatio, variatio, aemulatio (imitation, variation, amplification):
- Imitation: start with the original - the plagiarism
- Variation: make a variation on the same matter but address it differently
- Amplification: amplify the goal is to exceed the original

History has shown us that new worthwhile content is hard to find and even harder to create as most content is an imitation with some variation that in some cases can exceed the original.

You could also turn around this phrase and state that you can copy or steal from another, add some variation in order to amplify the original with the goal to exceed the original.
As the original is already a plagiarism of a preceding piece of content, then why bother?

Google, Bing and Yahoo seem to bother about duplicate content. Maybe this due to the fact that digital content can be copied so easily.

Is it enough for humans to exceed the original content in order to be considered as original ?




Content is no longer king: context content is

 Just presenting and distributing content is not anymore sufficient enough to create interest and gain traction as there is so much content available.
Just presenting any content to anybody is unlikely to score or to generate interest.

What's needed is to present your content in the right context.
Show your content when it is appropriate - when interest can be generated.
Then you wil score.

The more content related to your business - the better

 The more content you can create for your business the better your marketing:
- Content for your website
- Content to publish on articles websites
- Content as press releases
- Content as comments on blogs
- Content for your microblog (Twitter or similar)

The more content Google, Bing and Yahoo the more pages and links get indexed giving more presence on the Internet. All your efforts will eventually result in more potential customers finding you.
This only works if the content is related to your business.


The content driven Internet

 The Internet has become more and more content driven.
Although only a limited number of people create content, the content is consumed by millions.
The lust for content will only increase.

As the content broadcast systems like TV, radio and printed content are fading due to their sequential distribution of content, the on demand Internet content will keep on gaining popularity.

Serving the website visitor

 All visitors that land on your website have a goal or a need as most people don't come accidentally.
The easier you make it for them to find the content, information or products searched, the higher the likelihood to:
- Keep them on your website (more page views) - Convert visitors to leads
- Retain your brand name
- Generate online sales

The better you serve your visitor, the better (online) business you will have.