Content marketing is the outgrowth of a number of long-terms trends in the communications business.  The ability of anyone to be a publisher.  The shrinkage of traditional media.  The questionable effectiveness of online advertising.  The changes in search. But ultimately it is about producing content that is exactly what your audience wants to read.  Exactly […]

The heydey of SEO is over! As a discipline it found a prominent place in the psyche of Web publishers because of the critical role the search engines played in driving traffic to Web sites, which in turn played a critical role in monetizing those sites. But SEO was a victim of its own success.  […]

Yesterday we published part one of this two-part post on capturing audience attention.  Today, author Ken Dowell offers thoughts on approaches that rely on utility and relevance, rather than diversion, to garner the attention of your organization’s constituents. Creating great content that will capture attention and truly engage audiences is a new imperative for communicators.   […]

Professional communicators have traditionally based a lot of their activity on capturing what I would call diverted eyeballs, putting content under the noses of an audience that only sees it because they were really looking for something else. Most advertising works like this.  You’re reading a story in a magazine and when you have to […]

Virtually every discussion of modern public relations and marketing practice will at some point refer to the importance of quality content.  It is the absolute baseline for brand publishing, content marketing, social media messaging and just about any other way that an organization communicates. The need for quality applies across the board whether the content […]

Google is believed to make something like 500 changes to their search algorithms a year.  In August and September there were 65 updates.  The widely discussed Panda update has been supplemented another 21 times and the more recent Penguin update has already had two follow-ups. (Related: Algo Hunters) All this is to improve the user […]

“EPIC 2015″ is a look into the not-very-distant (anymore) future of media and information. We are now in the aftermath of Web 2.0.  The promise of interoperability and information sharing has been realized.  It has raised enormous opportunities and some equally enormous concerns.  Here are some of the conflicts that will shape where we go […]

A couple of widely circulated online postings caught my eye recently.  One is the leak of AOL’s content strategy http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way.  The other is Google’s latest attempt to add a qualitative filter to search http://mashable.com/2011/02/14/google-personal-blocklist-chrome/. Seems the battle for eyeballs can go in one of two directions.  The traditional approach is to produce the best content […]

Social media is having the same impact on journalists in China that it is having in the rest of the world, changing the way they source stories, expanding and fragmenting the information available to them and raising questions about the future of traditional media. A recent survey conducted by PR Newswire China, the first of […]

Have you followed the “press release is dead” argument?  If you are in PR it is hard to avoid.  It has been blogged and tweeted about for years now. The more narrow your conception of the press release the more likely this argument is to resonate.  Certainly the printed words on paper variety is destined […]

Of all the announcements that have come from the major social media properties about new services in recent weeks, the one that really piqued my interest was the announcement from Bing and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/Bing) about how Facebook “friending” and “likes” would be incorporated in Bing search results.     It has become pretty common to […]