4 Lame Excuses for Not Creating Content

Posted by Jon Thomas, 29 Aug 2012

Content marketing is all the rage, and brands of all shapes and sizes are focusing more time, effort and budget dollars on creating entertaining, useful and relevant content that audiences will want to share. Some brands, however, still stand at the water’s edge, not so sure an always-on commitment to social media and content creation is right for them. 

Even the most successful marketing efforts have their detractors and doubters, who hold tight to the traditional methods: interruption and overexposure of their brands. They cling to the past and continue to invest in telemarketing, direct mail and pricey television spots and billboards. Even the London Olympics, which were praised as the most tech-savvy and social-media-supported games ever, were heavily supplemented (or, rather, dominated) by traditional advertising.

While those methods have their place, it’s about time we set the record straight and started to challenge those who insist that content marketing isn’t yet an established brand communication strategy.

Here are some of the reasons brands are abstaining from content and why they’re on the wrong side of history.

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What Panda, Penguin and Social Media Really Mean for Brands

Posted by Jon Thomas, 24 Aug 2012

With additional reporting from Cyrus Karimi, Director of Audience Generation at Story Worldwide. 

An article recently published on Fast Company has caused a bit of a stir in the content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) communities. Written by Veronica Fielding, CEO of Digital Brand Expressions, it explains how the recent Panda and Penguin Google algorithm updates mean that social engagement rather than search engine trickery yields top results.

While her heart is in the right place (encouraging active, useful social engagement by brands), neither the algorithm updates nor Fielding’s interpretation of them reveals a direct correlation between social activity and SEO relevance. Though extremely important for an effective content marketing strategy, simply interacting with your fans on Facebook, sharing relevant tweets, and uploading useful videos won’t (in and of itself) boost your brand website’s SEO ranking.

Let’s take a look at what Panda, Penguin and social media really mean for brands.

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7 Ways to Increase Fan Engagement on Facebook Through Media

Posted by Jon Thomas, 18 Jul 2012

There’s no secret—all community managers want their Facebook communities to thrive. Comments and shares are the currency of social media. The question plaguing community managers every day is “How do I generate more engagement on my Facebook posts?”

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What Brands Can Learn from Louis C.K.’s Marketing Success

Posted by Mike Cannon, 03 Jul 2012

Comedians are inherently self-promoters. In fact we often refer to ourselves as whores. I should know, because I am one. Selling yourself is a tricky business, and even with the emerging technologies that the post-advertising age has afforded comedians—Twitter, YouTube, podcasting, and more—nearly all still follow the standard protocols of producing and selling their content and themselves to get ahead…except Louis C.K.

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Why Celebrity Ads Fail

Posted by Katie Edmondson, 20 Jun 2012

According to a new infographic from Crowdtap, “consumers trust recommendations from peers over all other forms of advertising.”

That’s right. Earned media—a suggestion from his neighbor, his college buddy or even his dentist’s cousin—will influence Mr. Consumer more than  a high-budget television, print or online banner ad. This is echoed by another recent study, this one by Nielsen, which also found that consumers trust online opinions (read: those of complete strangers) more than they trust any other form of editorial content, ads or sponsorships (and second only to recommendations from people they know). The full results below:

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Dish Network’s Hopper Fights the Future of Traditional Advertising

Posted by Jon Thomas, 30 May 2012

The commercials for Dish Network’s ad-skipping DVR, the Hopper, are quite memorable and humorous to a native of Massachusetts, like me. The actors have thick Boston accents, and they repeatedly pronounce the name of the device the way any good Red Sox fan would: “Hop-ah.”

It’s ironic, though, that the Hopper’s commercials are so memorable. The device’s primary function is to eliminate commercials altogether. The Hopper automatically records the entire prime-time lineups for ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. With a little user programming, however, many digital video recorders (DVRs) can do that. What sets the Hopper apart is that it enables playback completely sans commercials (versus fast-forwarding over them). Score another point for ad-slaying technology in the post-advertising age.

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The UFC’s Knockout Content-Marketing Punch

Posted by Jon Thomas, 21 May 2012

The year was 1993. I was sitting in my middle-school homeroom class when a friend revealed that he had brought in a VHS of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). We had watched plenty of martial arts movies—my favorite being Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Bloodsport—in which martial artists of various disciplines from around the world gathered in one place to find out which martial art was supreme. Finally, someone wanted to play this story out in real life. I borrowed the tape and watched it when I got home. I was captivated.

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Ten Brands Doing Post-Advertising Right: Spring Edition

Posted by Jon Thomas, 02 May 2012

Every once in a while, the editorial team at Post-Advertising is so impressed by a brand’s work that we share it with each other. Just the fact that we enjoyed the content so much that we were compelled to share it with the rest of our team proves that it’s worthy of a post-advertising nod.

But since we’ve focused this blog on topics that educate our readers, we’ve spent less time sharing the great work we’ve found with all of you. Last September we decided to feature 10 brands that impressed us with their content marketing and brand storytelling efforts. But as we see more brands embracing post-advertising, we realized that we should start doing our list more often.

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Path: The Anti-Social Network?

Posted by Eric Anderson, 19 Mar 2012

Let’s face it: You’ll let anyone follow you on Twitter or Google+. You don’t care if 100 or 100,000 people know what you ate for breakfast. And while Facebook is inherently a permission-based network, you found that girl you dated in 5^th grade and haven’t spoken to in 20 years and you friended her, right? It’s okay, though, because the social paradigm has shifted. 10 years ago a phone call to your neighbor who moved away when you were kids would be no less than creepy, but it’s common practice now.

In a world where influence and clout (or, Klout, I guess) is measured by reach, a social network that expressly limits the number of connections a user can have is almost audacious in this day of age. Or is it just what we need?

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Content Marketing is NOT the Hot New Trend

Posted by Jon Thomas, 15 Feb 2012

The term content marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in marketing lately. It didn’t appear in Google searches before late 2007 (see graph below), but now it’s stormed onto the scene helping turn brands into publishers. Several blogs are dedicated to the method (this being one of them), and the Content Marketing World conference attracted hundreds of marketers this summer.

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