MackCollier.com

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Users Don’t Trust Facebook, How Covid Has Changed Shopper Behavior

Welcome to the start of another great week! Thanks for reading, on Wednesday my Movies and Marketing post will feature the movie with the greatest product placement of all-time (what do you think it is?), and on Thursday I’ll do a special post recapping what happened here in the month of September after relaunching my blog. Happy to see the stats are looking pretty good, and I’ll dive into that more on Thursday.

Now, let’s jump into the news!

 

eMarketer had some interesting research into which social platforms are the most and least trusted. eMarketer states that it is measuring trust as “the confidence users have in a social media platform to protect their information and provide a safe environment for them to create and engage with content.”

LinkedIn and Pinterest ranked at the top in first and second, while Twitter and Facebook ranked at the bottom in seventh and ninth. I think there’s two issues at play here, the first is privacy concerns and how comfortable users are in letting these platforms handle their data. But that’s not the only area, because LinkedIn ranked first, even though the platform has had security breaches in the past. So the trust factor also incorporates the actual environment and user experience on these platforms. This is what really hurts Twitter and Facebook, in my opinion.  These sites simply have toxic environments. Users argue and insult each other constantly, and neither site has developed an effective or consistent way to monitor and police content. LinkedIn has much user interaction, but its far more professional and business-oriented in nature. Pinterest is focused heavily on the content (pins and boards), not the user interaction.

 

I’ve been a big fan of the work BazaarVoice does as well as its timely research studies ever since I spoke at its headquarters a few years ago and got to spend some time with the management team. I look forward to their research studies and they have a new one on how shopper behavior is changing as a result of covid. Among the key takeaways, shoppers are becoming more comfortable with the idea of doing more in-store shopping, but want to see stores taking greater measures to ensure safety for shoppers. Honestly, I think this could be the big area where we could see a lasting improvement for the health of shoppers. Let’s be honest, prior to this year, whenever you went to a grocery store, you grab a buggy that’s been touched by who knows how many strangers that same day and who knows what germs are on that buggy. If retailers simply make a better effort to clean their buggies and offer hand sanitizer at store entrances, those changes alone would greatly reduce the change of shoppers catching a cold or other germs while shopping. Very simple changes can and should be made by stores to help promote a more healthy environment for in-store shopping.

 

And for you Pinterest fans, Search Engine Journal has a rundown of a ton of new features the site has rolled out for creators.  And yes, I do spend some time on Pinterest, have actually spent quite a bit of time there the last few weeks.  It’s fun to poke around and look for inspiration and just focus on the content!

Hope you have a fantastic Monday, see you in 24 hours!

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Toolbox Saturday: Three Ways to Get Extra Value From Twitter

Every year in August, from Alabama to Ohio, there is something called ‘The 500-Mile Yard Sale’. People down a particular highway that runs from Alabama to Ohio will set up sales in their yards. I’ve always wanted to go to this as it sounds fabulous.

If you’ve ever been to yard sales, you know it’s a very hit-or-miss proposition. You can spend all morning going to sales and never finding anything of interest, then suddenly come across a yard sale that has everything you’ve been looking for.

Twitter, in the last few years, has become very similar to a yard sale. There’s still some good stuff, but there’s also a lot of useless crap that you have to wade through to find it.

There’s three ways I find the good stuff on Twitter:

1 – Twitter lists

2 – Twitter chats

3 – Twitter searches

 

1 – Twitter lists are a great way to keep up with a group of people that are organized by some common trait. Maybe they all live in a particular town, maybe they are all reporters covering a particular industry, maybe they are all fans of a particular hobby you enjoy. There’s some common thread that binds them, and makes it valuable for you to see their tweets.  Here’s a list of the Twitter Lists I have now:

As you can see my lists are private, and organized around cities, interests and business. I also like to keep a couple of lists of close friends so I can make sure I see what they are up to.  All designed to filter content on Twitter so that I don’t miss the ‘good stuff’.

2 – Twitter Chats are a wonderful way to connect with people that share a common interest. I still to this day think that Twitter chats are the best way to cultivate and grow a valuable Twitter network. Twitter chats are completely versatile, and cover literally every topic under the sun. If you want to use Twitter chats as a professional growth tool, just join chats around topics related to your industry or space and interact with your peers.  You will not only make professional contacts, you’ll learn a lot and stay up to date on what’s happening in that space or industry. You can also use Twitter chats as a way to connect with people that share a common hobby or interest. This is another way to meet and follow people that share similar interests to yours.  The one downside to Twitter chats is that they are typically only held for one hour at a time, once a week. So if you miss that hour, you miss the chat. For instance, I miss a lot of great chats because they occur from 10am-Noon during the week, when I am typically my busiest.

3 – Twitter searches are a great way to keep up with what’s being said and shared around particular topics or phrases. I use these to keep up on the latest news and articles around topics I am interested in, but I also use it to find new people to follow.

Here’s some searches I have saved:

As you can see, these searches are mostly people sharing links to articles they have written. But I’m searching for marketing terms, if you changed the term to something else you might get more conversational tweets versus promotional. Still, of these three tactics listed, I use this one the least often.

 

So there’s three ways you can extract more value from Twitter; Lists, Chats and Searches! Try these today and see if you don’t find Twitter more useful as a result!

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I Never Saw Jack Horkheimer in Circus World, But I Would Always Remember It If I Did

Toys form so many of my childhood memories, I’m sure they do for you as well. When I was a kid I loved going shopping with my parents because it meant that whether we went to a department or grocery store, I could probably find some toys to ogle over. And if I struck out and we only went to a grocery store, well they would at least have comic books, where I could look at the ads for toys.

But once, maybe twice a year, my family would go shopping in the ‘big city’. And in the big city, was this magical store called Circus World. When I went to a TG&Y or Walmart, at best I might find two or three isles of toys to drool over.  But Circus World was an ENTIRE STORE FULL OF TOYS! It was a magical place for an 8 or 9 year old to be. There was an entire isle of Star Wars toys, then one for Six Million Dollar Man toys. And for some reason they had a section for board games (gross!). Oh and Hot Wheels and and and…well I better calm down!

I will always remember Circus World because it was completely different. It was a unique experience that’s never left me.

Around this same time, I lived in a very rural area with very limited options for television viewing. We are talking like 3-4 channels picked up by antenna. This is waaaaay before the days of satellite or cable TV. One of my few options for television viewing was PBS, which I generally thought was meh, other than Seasame Street and then later The Electric Company.

But around 1980 or so, I discovered this very odd and very quirky (especially for public television) show that came on every night at 10pm. It was a short program, about 5-minutes long called Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler! Every week, Jack would tell us what was going to be happening when we looked up at the sky. Which stars would be brightest, which planets would be visible, everything.  I have always loved astronomy so the subject naturally interested even 9 year-old Mack, but the format was so different from the rest of the programming on PBS. It was short, just a few minutes so I could always stay interested. And it was fun, even ‘hip’. Well here, see for yourself:

I could not for the life of me tell you what shows came on before or after Star Hustler, but I will always remember ‘Greetings! Greetings, fellow star gazers!’

The point here is, we tend to remember things that are unique and unexpected. Until I discovered Circus World, my 9 year-old self had no idea that it was possible to have an entire store that ONLY sold toys! I thought toys were the 2-3 isles in TG&Y between sporting goods and housewares. My 9 year-old self thought programming on PBS was pretty boring, until I found Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler on late one night when I was probably staying up past my bedtime.

When marketing your products and services, think about how you can provide a unique experience for your customers that surprises and delights them. And if you do it right, you may even make a lifetime memory for your customers, which will mean a lifetime of word of mouth about your brand.

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What is a Customer Feedback Loop and Why Should it Be a Part of Your Brand Ambassador Program?

Customer feedback comes in many forms:

  • Surveys the company sends out
  • Calls to customer service
  • Social media responses or complaints from the customer
  • In-person feedback from customers in retail locations

Often, this feedback is used to solve a current issue the customer is having. But what if a customer’s feedback isn’t focused on an immediate need? What if the feedback is an overall criticism or appreciation for the brand? What if the feedback is focused on an ongoing situation the customer encounters when dealing with the brand, either good or bad?

Many brands focus on the ‘customer feedback’ portion of a customer feedback loop, but forget the ‘loop’ part. The idea is to acquire feedback from the customer, then consider that feedback and either act on it, or not. But either way, the customer should also receive feedback from the brand as to next steps.

So when it comes to facilitating a customer feedback loop. the two most important considerations are the most effective ways to collect feedback from the customer, then the most effective way to relay feedback from the brand, back to the customer. Thus, facilitating the ‘loop’ portion of a customer feedback loop.

Feedback solicited from and given to another customer is typically more valuable than customer feedback solicited from and given to the brand. The reason why is because customers trust other customers more than the average brand.

How Do You Integrate a Customer Feedback Loop Into Your Brand Ambassador Program?

Too many brand ambassador programs simply position its ambassadors as a new promotional channel. So before you think about integrating a customer feedback loop into your brand ambassador program, you need to shift your focus into all the different ways that your ambassadors can help your brand

  • As a promotional channel
  • As a customer service channel
  • As a customer feedback loop
  • As a way to educate other customers about and defend the brand

To only think of ambassadors as megaphones for your brand is incredibly short-sighted and honestly unfair to the talents that your ambassadors possess. So your brand needs to think about the value that can be created by your ambassadors if you empower them to solicit and collect feedback from current and potential customers. Think of it as free marketing research that your ambassadors can conduct on behalf of your brand.

So how could this work for your company? Let’s use a simple example. Let’s say your brand launches a brand ambassador program, and creates a smartphone app just for its ambassadors. This app would be a tool to empower ambassadors when they connect with other customers. It would include things product information and reviews in case the ambassador encounters a potential customer who is considering a purchase and needs more information. It could also include functionality that lets the ambassadors give detailed feedback not only on interactions with the brand online and offline, but also, feedback on customer interactions. Ambassadors could file reports on interactions they have with customers, offering suggestions on how the brand should respond, etc. The brand could then notify the ambassador that they received and processed their report.  It could even ‘escalate’ the report to contact the ambassador directly.

The process could look like this:

1 – Ambassador engages a customer either online or offline

2 – Ambassador records feedback from the customer

3 – Ambassador shares customer feedback with the brand

4 – Brand acts on the customer feedback and communicates steps taken to ambassadors

 

That’s it. And the great part is, this is new customer feedback that the brand otherwise would not have access to. This feedback can be incorporated into existing business processes to increase sales and reduce costs. So start thinking about how your ambassadors can perform additional roles for your brand past that of simply being a direct sales channel.

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Marketing and Movies: Interstellar

I’ve never been a big fan of science fiction movies. The simple reason why is, I can’t relate to most of them. Most science fiction movies have plots and special effects that are completely untethered to reality. I need to be able to look at what’s happening and think “Ok, I can see how that’s possible”. When I was a kid, I wasn’t a fan of Superman or Hulk, I loved Batman. Because I didn’t think it was possible to be a superpowered alien from another planet or a radioactive giant, but I could totally see being an obsessed millionaire who was a hand to hand combat expert, and who could buy any crime-fighting toy he needed. I could RELATE to being Batman, I couldn’t relate to being Superman or Hulk.

Interstellar is the second Christopher Nolan movie I’ve discussed in the Marketing and Movies series. One of the many things that Nolan excels at is taking complex and potentially confusing concepts and making them relatable and easier for the viewer to understand. A couple week ago, I talked about how Nolan helped the viewer understand what life was like for Leonard Shelby in dealing with short term memory loss by altering the structure of the movie Memento.

With interstellar, Nolan, for the most part, does a great job of taking potentially abstract ideas and making them easier for the viewer to understand by tying them to something that makes sense for us. There’s a couple of instances where Nolan does this. The general plot of the movie is that blight, a plant disease, is killing the world’s crops. The blight will wipe out one form of crop, so farmers will rotate and start growing a new crop, but eventually the blight adjusts and destroys that crop as well. The end result is that miles and miles of farmland is reduced to dirt. This results in frequent and massive dust storms that plague the farmers and their families. These types of dust storms were actually common in the early 20th century in the heartland.  Early on in the movie, we are shown interviews with people who had survived these storms. It turns out, these were actual interviews from people who survived the dust storms during the 1930s. Nolan used clips from Ken Burns’ 2012 series The Dust Bowl which were actual interviews from people who had lived through these storms. So Nolan is already giving us a way to relate to what these farmers are going through, even though we’ve never experienced similar dust storms.

Later in the film, a wordhole is discovered that NASA has previously sent two crafts into searching for potentially habitable planets if it becomes necessary to leave Earth. NASA sends a second craft into the wormhole to visit two planets which show promise. This is another spot in the film where Nolan could have lost me, if the two planets that the crew visited seemed completely unrelatable. Instead, Nolan made both planets similar enough to Earth that the viewer can relate to them. Both environments contain enough Earth-like elements that the viewer can look at Nolan’s vision of what these planets are like and think “Ok, that makes sense to me”.

There’s a key lesson in this for marketers. When you are attempting to promote your products or services to customers, you need to help them understand how what you sell will improve their lives. A very easy way to do this is to talk about your product or service in terms of what those customers are doing now, and how your product or service will help improve their efforts. For instance, let’s say your company sells a ‘copper infused’ cooking pan. Your pan costs 10% more than the average cooking pan on the market. If you sell your pan as simply being ‘the future of cooking’, customers will respond with ‘what does that even mean?’ And asking them to pay an additional 10% more for features they don’t see the value in, kills the product.

But if you promote how the cooking pan will improve the life of your customer, that helps them see the value. If you promote that the cooking pan reduces cooking time by 23%, thanks to being copper-infused, and is 15% easier to clean than the average cooking pan, that’s real benefits that customers can see the value in. That helps justify the 10% higher price tag. Promote these features to time-strapped parents trying to get their kids off to school in the morning AND with a hot breakfast, and you’ve got a winning combination.

The key is to understand your customers, and help them understand how your product benefits them and improves their lives. This is especially important when you are dealing with potential customers who aren’t familiar with your brand. You need to speak clearly to customers and help them understand the value of your product or service. And speak in terms and concepts that the customer can relate to.

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Diversity Just For the Sake of Diversity Doesn’t Help Anyone

Whether its the speaking lineup at a marketing conference, or the executive team at a company, you’ve seen instances were there has been calls for more diversity in that group. “We need more…” people based on their race or gender or some other criteria.

What is often missing from the diversity discussion is making sure that the people selected are qualified to perform the tasks.  Too often, simple choosing someone based on a pre-determined criteria is more important than choosing the most qualified person.

This approach does a dis-service to everyone. It rewards people for meeting a certain criteria, and punishes talented people.

Picking the most talented people to perform the job should always be the first consideration. Talent is more important than hitting a desired ‘diversity’ goal every single time.

The goal shouldn’t be to pick a more diverse team, the goal should be to pick the BEST team.  Now if you can pick the best team and also address diversity, then fine.  And to be fair, in certain cases having a more diverse team can actually be a better team by default.

For instance, let’s say a conference has decided that it wanted an equal split of 5 male speakers and 5 female speakers. What happens if all of the male speakers are qualified to speak, but only 2 of the female speakers are?  That means 30% of the speaker lineup will be subpar which means the quality of the conference will suffer.  And it could just as easily be the opposite; maybe only 2 of the male speakers were qualified to speak at the event but the organizers pushed for 5 male speakers, so they signed 3 more who were unqualified.

This is why you push for talent before diversity.  Now some will argue that having a more diverse team IS having the best team. In some scenarios this is absolutely true.  But often, simply making a team more diverse (based on whatever criteria you think that means) doesn’t make it better.

If you can make your team more diverse without sacrificing talent, then go for it. But you should never place diversity above talent. Hire for talent first, diversity second.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: TikTok Finds a Home, Visual Branding, Men Using Pinterest

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you are ready to have an amazing week! I want to thank everyone for reading and subscribing, since relaunching on August 31st, traffic is up 17% versus the previous 3-week period. Thank you! I’ll do a comprehensive update probably next week on what happened in the first month of the relaunch.

 

TikTok users may be able to keep the app on their phones a while longer.  President Trump has given his blessing to a deal between TikTok, Oracle and WalMart that would make TikTok a US-based company. However, there’s still some questions over how much, if any, ownership ByteDance would retain in TikTok. So this story may not be over…

 

Visual branding and storytelling is something that most of us overlook until we see an example of a company or organization doing it really well, then we see the potential. I love how the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens are infusing a ‘Poe-vibe’ into its graphics and visual images. It gives the Ravens a distinctive look and feel that totally makes sense and creates a lot of interesting possibilities for the design teams. How awesome are these examples?

 

One of the themes I’ve stressed to marketers this year is to think critically about how their customers’ habits will change due to widespread covid-related lockdowns. A perfect example of this is how Pinterest usage among men is spiking. If you think about it, this makes complete sense. Men are spending more time at home, and as a result, they are seeing all the potential ‘weekend home improvement projects’ they could be doing. Sure enough, Pinterest is seeing that men are using its service as inspiration on tackling home improvement projects. This is why it pays to understand your customers and invest the time to learn how you can best help them as their behavior patterns change.

 

That’s your Monday Marketing Minute, hope you enjoyed it and have a great week! See you back here in 24 hours!

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Toolbox Saturday: How to Create a Posting Schedule For Your Blog

So let’s talk about how often you should post to your blog, and when you should post. This is one of the most important aspects of your blog and content strategy.

First, define what you are trying to accomplish with your blog. How often should you post to meet your objectives?

Who are you trying to reach?  Who are these people, what type of information would they want from your posts and when would they be most likely to read them?

How much time do you have to write posts? This area should come with the caveat that generally, the more often you write, the easier the process becomes. So if you start writing daily, after two months you might be able to write several posts in the same amount of time that it used to take you to write just one.

For me, when I decided to relaunch my blog at the first of the month, I wanted to use my blog in two main ways: As a channel to create thought leadership articles, but more importantly, to raise awareness for who I am and what services I provide.

Many companies that blog want to use their blog as a way to build awareness of their business. The cold, hard reality is that the best way to build awareness with a blog is to write as much useful content as possible. More content simply accelerates the building of awareness. So you want to write as much as you can. Now you see why I committed to writing 6 posts a week!

You may not have time to write 6 posts a week, you may have to hustle to make time to write one. So you want to figure out which days are the most important for you to publish new content. If you could only publish a new post one day a week, which day would you pick?  Which day would be the most likely for your audience to read your blog?

Rank the days in order of most valuable to least. If you really aren’t sure, think about who your audience is, and when they would have time to read your blog. If you are trying to reach a professional audience, you would likely want to pick times during their typical workday.  Probably in the morning an hour or two before lunch, then in the afternoon an hour or two after lunch.

Here’s a general schedule I use:  If I can only post once a week, I pick Wednesday.  If I can only post twice a week, I pick Tuesday and Thursday.  Three times a week?  Tuesday-Thursday.  Four times?  Monday-Thursday.  Five times a week?  Monday-Friday.

Now this is NOT a one-size-fits-all schedule. For instance, some business bloggers only post on Saturdays, with the theory being that Saturdays is when their audience is off work and more likely to have some leisure time to read blogs.

So when you are creating a posting schedule for your blog, go through these steps:

1 – Write down why you are blogging. Think about what you are trying to accomplish with your blog.

2 – Write down who your audience is. What do they do for a living? How will your blog content help them? When will they likely have time to read your blog?

3 – How much time do you have for creating blog content?  Your answer to the first question will play a big role in determining how much time you will need to spend writing to achieve your blogging goals.

4 – Once you know why you are blogging, who you are trying to reach with your content and how much time you have, decide when you will blog. Figure out how many days every week or month you will blog and keep that same schedule. For instance, if you will blog two days a week, pick the same two days every week. This helps train your readers to know when there will be new content on your blog.

5 – Re-evaluate regularly. Give your new schedule a month, and see what your results are. Did you have enough time to stick to your schedule? Do you see that you could blog more often? Are you hitting the metrics you need to hit?

6 – Stay with it. Blogging is like a big rock rolling down a hill, it takes a LOT of effort at first to get it moving, but once it starts rolling, it goes FAST! You likely won’t see a lot of momentum at first with your blogging, so you want to stick with it for a few weeks or even months. Eventually, you’ll start to see the needle move.  Over time, the growth will accelerate and it will likely take you less effort to get the same results.

 

Good luck!

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The Magic of Being Second and the Spontaneous Hillside Dance

Years ago I saw a video from an outdoor music festival. The video showed a crowd of fans sitting on a hillside enjoying the concert. After a few seconds, one guy stood up and started dancing. By himself. He continued dancing, awkwardly, by himself for a minute or so. A few people nearby watched him but for the most part he was ignored.

Then after about a minute, a nearby person stood up and ran over to him and started dancing, awkwardly, next to him. When this happened, everyone around them started looking around at each other like “what is happening?” After a few seconds, a third person jumped up to join them, then a fourth, then a fifth. Within a minute or so, the entire hillside was dancing, awkwardly, together and enjoying themselves.

This spontaneous hillside dance wasn’t triggered by the first guy that got up. It was triggered by the SECOND person. When there was just one guy dancing, it was easy to dismiss them as simply being that weird awkward-dancing guy. But when the second person joined, then they were a group. Suddenly it became much easier to join them if you wanted to. Then when a few people started joining, the dynamic flipped from being weird to being cool.

I was remembering this spontaneous hillside dance yesterday when I re-watched Simon Sinek’s brilliant TED talk on the power of why. You have likely seen this talk, but even if you have, it’s worth another view:

If you think about how most companies can tell you what they do but struggle to talk about why they do it, it seems to be rooted in this desire we all have to promote ourselves or talk about ourselves. This is what’s important to me.

But the ‘why’ gets to the heart of why your idea can hold importance for OTHER PEOPLE. That’s where the magic happens. When other people see the value in your idea, they become invested shareholders of that idea. They help nuture it, they help grow it. They share it with likeminded people and invite them to nuture and care for it as well.

When you think about companies, who they are and what they do and WHY they do it, can you more easily describe the WHY or the WHAT?

I can describe the WHY for Red Bull, but only the WHAT for Monster Energy Drinks.

I can describe the WHY for Patagonia, but only the WHAT for Columbia Sportswear.

I can describe the WHY for Pedigree, but only the WHAT for Alpo.

 

But at the heart of all this, we are talking about what’s important to the customer, and putting that first, and putting ourselves second. As Sinek has said “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.”

Which goes against human nature. We want to tell others how they can help US first, and after they do, we then ask “Ok how can we help you?” But the magic lies in putting yourself in second place and putting the person whose money or attention or time you want, putting them first.

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We Are the News Now

This morning I saw this tweet about the fall of newspapers in the US:

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1306529824383668225

This graph apparently includes digital as well as print, which is key. Note that growth across all metrics seemed to stall out around 2000, and around 2005-2006, everything started going downhill very quickly.

I think there are two key contributors to this decline. First, remember that in 2005 or so is when blogs started becoming popular. I started blogging in 2005 and there was already a decent community of bloggers out there. I don’t think usage was mainstream yet, but you could tell that it was heading in that direction. I also remember in those early blogging years how journalists looked down on blogs, how they said anyone could blog, but you had to be a professional to be a journalist! Over the years as blogs became more influential, journalists began to source bloggers more often, and many media sites added their own ‘blogs’ to gain a semblance of credibility. Times had definitely changed.

But another factor happening at the same time is worth noting. As blogs and social media use exploded, it meant more viewpoints and more discussion of the news. It also meant more discussion of the coverage given to news stories by journalists. We began to notice that a lot of the news was, quite frankly, biased. Some of it was outright dishonest. We see this today and it’s only getting worse:

https://twitter.com/LD25_GOP/status/1306224239783981057

The reality is, mainstream media sources such as newspapers are struggling in great part because most of us simply do not trust the information they publish. That’s why we are increasingly turning to other sources for our information. I believe this distrust of mainstream media is also bleeding over into social media platforms. For instance there is a popular saying on Twitter that ‘Twitter is not real life’, to speak to how users and media reference opinions that are popular among the Twitter user community, but disconnected from what the larger population thinks or feels.

I think all of this is working to the advantage of those of us who are leveraging blogs as a publishing platform. I also think every company should think of themselves as a publisher. In fact, it might be more useful to think of it in terms of being your Publishing Strategy instead of your Social Media or Digital Strategy. By creating and publishing a steady flow of content, you not only help educate current and potential customers about what your company does and what its values are, but you help differentiate yourself from competitors.

But perhaps most importantly of all, publishing regular content gives you a voice and the ability to reach others. On August 31st, I relaunched this blog, and began publishing 6 new posts a week. I’m two weeks into this new publishing schedule. My traffic is already up over 30% in just two weeks. Granted, we still talking small numbers, less than 100 visitors a day, but that still shows the power of creating content to drive awareness and generate interest.

Do this experiment; Think of your company as being a publisher. What would you talk about? What messages would you want to communicate to your customers? What would you want them to know about you? What areas would you cover? You could even view the publishing as creating sections of a newspaper. You could have a business section, a news section, a leisure section, an editorial section, etc.

We are all the news now. Make sure your company is sharing its voice, don’t settle for opting out of the conversation happening around and about your company. Take an active role in it.