MackCollier.com

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Covid Vaccine Spikes Markets, Parler Taking Off

Happy Monday, y’all! Apologies for not posting since last Tuesday, I got too caught up in the election drama like we all did. Unfortunately, it looks like it may be a few more weeks before we get everything sorted. As I tweeted last week, the best thing we can do is turn OFF the media. It’s wonderful for your mental health!

 

Speaking of health, hugely important news from the pharmaceutical world is breaking this morning, as Pfizer has announced that its covid vaccine candidate has achieved 90% effectiveness in trials. The stock market just opened up well over a thousand points to an all-time high on the news.

 

Kids are spending a lot more time with electronic devices this year. This is another indication of how our behavior is changing as a result of spending more time at home due to covid. As parents, it will be a challenge to monitor the new habits our children are adopting in regards to use of electronic devices, and make sure they don’t overdo it.

 

If you haven’t yet heard of Parler, you probably will soon. Parler is the first competitor to Twitter to actually gain some decent traction with users since…gosh…probably Identi.ca, a decade or so ago. Parler is positioning itself as the ‘free speech’ alternative to Twitter. GAB tried this last year, and it really didn’t work that well for them. But Parler has roped in some big-name influencers in conservative media and that’s helping its popularity.  Personally, I love the conversation there, and the exchanges are basically free of the constant arguing and trolls that have taken over Twitter. I’m not a huge fan of the interface, Twitter’s mobile app is much more intuitive for me. But I will definitely be spending more time on Parler, you can find me there under the name MackCollier, same as my Twitter handle.

https://twitter.com/dbongino/status/1325630382088269825

 

That’s it for Monday, hope everyone has a wonderful week! Remember to tune the toxic people and information out of your life, and embrace the good people! See you tomorrow!

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Marketing and Movies: Top Gun

A few weeks ago I talked about how the movie Smokey and the Bandit had the greatest movie product placement of all time, Bandit’s jet black Firebird Trans-Am. The movie had an immediate impact on sales of the sporty Pontiac, and the car is still highly-prized by vintage car collectors to this day.

The car played an integral part of the movie Smokey and the Bandit, and did so in a way that wasn’t forced, that made sense to the audience and that actually made the car seem cool and desirable. While Smokey and the Bandit was at its heart a comedy-adventure movie, General Motors no doubt saw the movie as a 2 hour promotional video for the Pontiac Trans-Am. And a far better one than GM could have produced.

That brings us to 1986’s blockbuster movie Top Gun. The film’s protagonist is Pete Mitchell.a brilliant fighter pilot, who is constantly being disciplined for refusing to follow all of the ‘rules of engagement’ while flying. Pete is the son of Duke Mitchell, who was also an excellent fighter pilot, who flew in the Vietnam War. Pete has been told by the government that his dad disappeared behind enemy lines, and his family name has been engulfed in controversy as a result. In fact, we learn in the movie that Pete was denied entry into the US Naval Academy because of the actions of his father.

So understandably, Maverick flies with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, to not only live up to the flying skills of his father, but to prove himself to fellow pilots that doubt him based on the reputation of his dad. Maverick is eventually given the opportunity to join Top Gun, the premier school for teaching dogfighting skills to pilots. This school is for the elite of the elite, so it’s the perfect place for a pilot with a chip on his shoulder to prove himself. Maverick quickly positions himself as one of the top pilots in the school, but a tragic accident while training leaves him questioning if he should quit the school or not. Before deciding to leave, he visits one of his instructors, who tells him that he had actually flown with his dad in Vietnam, and that the story he had been told for years about his father was wrong. The instructor told Maverick that he and his father were hopelessly outmatched in an aerial combat exchange.  Maverick’s father had a chance to leave the fight and save his own life, but he stayed to save the lives of several teammates, before his plane was finally shot down.

The story itself is interesting enough, but what makes the film is the breathtaking flight sequences. It was actually a wonderful recruitment tool for the US Navy, who saw a massive spike in enrollment because of the movie. Saavy recruiters even set up booths in the lobby of movie theaters so they could talk to candidates as soon as they left the movie, no doubt excited about what they had just experienced.

And the Navy will likely see another spike in recruitment when the film’s sequel, Top Gun 2, is released next Summer. As you can see from this trailer, the flight scenes are absolutely incredible:

If you were to argue that the Top Gun films are simply a protracted recruitment video for the Navy, you wouldn’t be completely wrong. The Pentagon worked with the studio to make the original Top Gun movie and has worked with the studio on the sequel. Because the government knows that storytelling is a very effective marketing tool. We talked yesterday about using storytelling to make your blog writing more interesting, and it also works incredibly well for movies.

Help your customers understand how your products or services are valuable and make their lives more meaningful. That’s great marketing at its heart. Top Gun inspired many Americans to join the Navy to be a part of something bigger than themselves. And hopefully fly cool planes as well. But it was all marketing.  The fact that it didn’t really feel like marketing is what makes it so effective.

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Marketing and Movies: The Dark Knight

The original Batman film from 1989 was a critical and commercial success. In particular, Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Batman nemesis The Joker, as well as director Tim Burton’s efforts were particularly praised. So when it was announced that the Batman series reboot would again feature The Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight, many fans were rightly skeptical of actor Heath Ledger’s ability to match the performance that Jack Nicholson had brought to the character two decades before.

Ledger proved up to the task, not only meeting but surpassing the work of the screen legend Nicholson. Ledger’s performance of The Joker was simply a masterwork, his work dominated the film and made you believe you were actually watching an insane serial killer. Ledger was that scary good:

As it turns out, the marketing for The Dark Knight was scary good as well. I wrote about one aspect of the film’s phenomenal marketing campaign in my book Think Like a Rock Star:

Sometimes the best marketing doesn’t ‘look’ like marketing at all. When Warner Bros. was promoting the movie The Dark Knight, it put together all the standard online and offline marketing promotions that you would expect to see for a summer blockbuster. But the marketing campaign for The Dark Knight also had an element of ‘fun’ to it. Warner Bros. created an elaborate online marketing campaign, one element of which required you to ‘decode’ online websites that tied into the movie. If you were the first person from your area to decipher the website, you would be given the address of a local bakery that was holding a cake for you to pick up under the name Robbin Banks (robbin’ banks, get it?). When you received the cake, the icing said ‘Call Me Now’ and included a phone number. If you dialed the number, the cake itself started ringing! Inside the cake there was a packet containing a cell phone and other items from the company Rent A Clown, apparently set up by Batman’s arch-enemy in the movie, The Joker! Campaigns such as this were great fun for fans of The Dark Knight, and helped create a lot of extra buzz around the film.

Here’s the cake that you received for solving the puzzle:

Keep in mind this was done in 2008, just as YouTube was starting to take off, so The Dark Knight was one of the first films to really leverage UGC to help virally promote the film online. Also note that such a campaign isn’t aimed at casual fans of the franchise, but rather at fans that were already invested in the film as soon as it was announced. These fans are more loyal to the film and loved the idea of ‘solving a riddle’ to figure out the online puzzle, then to get the reward of getting the cake AND the phone and materials inside. The marketing is giving an incentive to the winner of the puzzle to promote the film even further. If you won one of these cakes, you wanted to brag about it, you wanted to share with your friends on social media, which simply leads to more promotion of the film, for free!

If you somehow haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet, please watch it ASAP. Heath Ledger died during the filming of The Dark Knight and this film left the world with a complete understanding of what a brilliant talent he truly was.

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Marketing and Movies: Hearts In Atlantis

Hearts In Atlantis is a wonderful drama that, when you finish watching it you will likely say “Wait, that was based on a Stephen King book?” It was, and it features a wonderful performance by the always brilliant Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins plays Ted Brautigan, a man with psychic powers who is being chased by a governmental group that wants to use Ted’s powers. Ted frequently moves to stay one step ahead of the government or ‘low men’ as he calls them.

But as the movie opens, we are in the present day and the studio of Bobby Garfield. Bobby has just received a package from the attorney of his childhood friend ‘Sully’ Sullivan. Bobby, Sully and Carol Gerber were childhood friends, and when they were children, Sully had once promised Bobby that he would leave Bobby his baseball glove in his will. Bobby opens the package to find that baseball glove inside. He soon learns that Sully was killed in a car accident, and travels back to his hometown to attend the funeral. While there, he meets with Sully’s attorney, and mentions that he hadn’t seen Carol yet, and that he was very much looking forward to seeing her during his trip. The attorney then informs Bobby that Carol had actually died a few years earlier. Shocked, Bobby returns to his old childhood home, and the majority of the movie is shown as Bobby remembering what his life was like one summer with Sully and Carol, and then later, when Ted Brautigan came into their lives.

One of the over-arching themes of the movie is the magic of being a child during the summer. So many of us seem to have that one magical summer of our youth where we made special friends, had our ‘summer love’ or just enjoyed being a carefree child enjoying a magical time in our lives. The movie does a great job of making us nostalgic for the summers of our youth. I’ll talk about this more in a minute. When Ted arrives on the scene, he is living next door to Bobby and his mom. Ted soon offers to pay Bobby $1 a week to read the newspaper to him, claiming his eyesight is failing him. Bobby shrewdly suspects that there’s more to the offer, and asks Ted to tell him what the REAL job is. Ted then explains that what he really wants Bobby to do is keep an eye out around town for the government group or ‘low men’ that are chasing him. One of Ted’s psychic abilities includes being able to ‘sense’ when his pursuers are closing in on him. Ted can also read minds, and when Bobby’s mom suddenly arrives home and yells for him, Bobby flinches, but Ted quickly grabs his hand and tells him “She can’t tell what you are thinking. You think she can, and that’s her power over you.”

All three of the childhood friends grow a quick affection for Ted, especially Bobby. Bobby’s father died when he was very young, and one of the subplots of the movie is Bobby recalling his love of his father. And in this scene, we find out that Bobby’s father and Ted were once at the same football game sharing another love, that of former Chicago Bears great Bronco Nagurski:

Nostalgia in marketing is very powerful, and I think it’s even more impactful in volatile times like this when we want to return to a time when things were more…pleasant. More peaceful, more normal. Nostalgia often involves us returning to our youth, and note that Ted made his story far more interesting to Bobby by involving his dad in the telling of the story.

Whenever I talk about creating content that builds awareness, I mention that you (as the content creator) need to remember that you are trying to connect with an audience that doesn’t know who you are. So you create content that focuses on what’s important and relevant to the customer. In the above scene, what if Ted had told Bobby a story about “Jim Thorpe, the greatest football player that ever lived.” Bobby’s first reaction might have been “Well he wasn’t as good as Bronco Nagurski, my dad LOVED Bronco Nagurski!” Bobby likely doesn’t know who Thorpe was, but he knows who Bronco Nagurski was, cause his dad loved him. Ted reaches Bobby by telling a story about a football player that his dad loved.

Nostalgia in marketing can be very powerful. Anytime you can tie your marketing messages to something else that your customer loves and remembers fondly, it’s a good thing. And if you haven’t, do check out Hearts In Atlantis, a wonderful movie. This quote from Ted may tell you where the movie gets it title from “Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you’re living in someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been?”

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Personalization Drives Revenue, Nike’s Founding Marketing Principles, WOM is Still King

Happy Columbus Day and Happy Monday! I hope everyone has a fantabulous week! I wanted to share a few marketing and business stories that caught my eye over the last few days:

My goodness, but my friend Kelly Hungerford finds so many great business and marketing articles. She’s a must-follow on Twitter. This study she shares found that businesses that personalize the marketing communications they deliver to customers see increased revenue from those customers. The study also found that the more customized the personalization, the higher the percentage of companies that realized increased revenue. So a more robust and customized personalization strategy works better, but of course will cost more. So there’s the fine line to walk between cost and benefit.

 

I love this list of the marketing principles from the first head of marketing for Nike, circa 1980. In particular, I love the first two rules:

1 – Our business is change

2 – We’re on offense. All the time.

This speaks to a leaders’ mindset. Nike is saying upfront that its marketing will be proactive, not reactive. It will set market trends rather than respond to them. I love that.

https://twitter.com/MohapatraHemant/status/1314818580198817792

 

Word of mouth is still the King when it comes to recommendations. A recent study from Bluecore found that Word of Month, Online Ads and Influencers were the top three drivers of recommendations. I did think this quote from the article was interesting: “However, when sorting by age, the results indicate that younger consumers are notably more impacted by the top three channels than older consumers. Comparing those younger than age 45 to those who are older, differences can be seen in the influence attributed to online ads (55% vs 30%), email (47% vs. 40%) and word of mouth (71% vs 59%).”  This suggests that as customers age, they are perhaps less receptive to recommendations from digital or younger sources, and more open to sources that they have had a longer exposure to?  Maybe, it’s interesting to ponder.

 

That’s it for this week, I hope yours is wonderful! Thanks for reading, see you back here in 24 hours!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Driving Customer Loyalty, Consumers Trust Ads Alongside Content

Happy Monday, y’all! Ready for another great week, if you missed it check out my blogging recap for September, traffic up 21%!

 

Interesting data from XM Institute on how customer loyalty is impacted by CX. In short, they found that a very good customer experience greatly impacts how likely that customer is to purchase from and recommend a company. “The vast majority of consumers surveyed who rated their experiences with 319 companies tracked as very good indicated that they would purchase more from the company (94%) or would recommend the company (94%). Some 9 in 10 (89%) would trust the company after very good CX performance, while more than three-quarters (77%) would forgive a bad experience after such an experience. On the other hand, just 13% of those studied who reported a very bad experience with a company would recommend it.”

 

 

More than a third of consumers say their trust in brands grows after seeing its content alongside news. Additionally, the study from IAB found that 84% of consumer said their trust in brands grew or was unaffected when viewing this content. The larger question I would have is how is trust in the regular news content affected by seeing ads inserted alongside the news content? Personally, I tend to view sites as less credible if they are constantly mixing in ads alongside news.

 

Great recap of shopping trends for the Holiday season from Adobe and Avantis. I agree that shoppers are desperate for a return to normalcy, but also will be looking for deals and want an order online/pickup in stores option. Covid is absolutely changing shopper and consumer behavior, and smart companies are tracking these changes and adapting their service, support and offerings.

There’s your Monday Marketing Minute, hope your week is off to a fantabulous start, see you tomorrow!

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Marketing and Movies: Smokey and the Bandit

1977 was a great year for blockbuster movies. Saturday Night Fever, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and of course, Star Wars: A New Hope. Another top-grossing movie in 1977 was Smokey and the Bandit. Smokey and the Bandit had an all-star cast; Burt Reynolds, Sally Fields and Jackie Gleason. The movie centers on a Coors Beer run that two buddies (Bandit and Cledus) have to make in 28 hours, from Georgia to Texas, and back to Georgia.

But the scene-stealer in this movie wasn’t an actor, it was an automobile. The logistics of making a round trip from Georgia to Texas in 28 hours meant that Cledus (who would drive the truck hauling the beer) would have to drive faster than the speed limit to make the trip on time. Obviously, that meant Cledus needed a way to evade the police.

That’s where the Bandit came in. The Bandit drove a 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am. The Bandit would draw all the attention from the police to him, clearing a path for Cledus to drive unencumbered. Bandit is the perfect driver for a flashy and fast sports car designed to draw attention. In one scene Sally Fields’ character Carrie asks Bandit what he does:

Bandit: “I go from place to place, and do what I do best.’

Carrie: “What’s that?”

Bandit: “Show off.”

As you can see, Bandit’s Firebird Trans-Am was one of the stars of the movie. And its presence had an immediate impact on Trans-Am sales. “We could have our whole front line full with Trans Ams. It was a big car for us,” said Art Douglas, 61, of Jim  Douglas Auto Sales on Baldwin Avenue in Pontiac, which his father founded in 1975. “The movie made the car popular, really more with non-car people. I mean, that car was hot.” “When it all comes together with the actor, the car, the script and that moment in pop culture? For an automaker that’s better than advertising,” McElroy said. “When you hit that magic, and a car becomes a star, wow, it can really help sales.”

Most product placements, whether its in a movie or television series, really aren’t that effective. Typically, the placement is for a product that’s in the background and really contributes nothing to the plot or story of the film or show. Smokey and the Bandit was completely different in that the Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am MADE the story. Without that automobile, there’s no plot. The Trans-Am made the story, and made it better, and made it cooler. This is what great product placements always do, the product plays a role, that isn’t forced, and makes the scene or larger show better.

Yesterday when I talked about the three types of content you could create for your customers, one of those types was ‘inspirational’ content. If you think about it, the Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am was inspirational content. It showed us how cool it could be to own and drive a car like that. Note the above quote from the gentleman that owned a car lot when the movie came out, he said that the Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am was a big hit with ‘non-car people’. In other words, people that didn’t really care about cars, cared about THAT car, because it had the ‘cool’ factor. Many of Apple’s products have that ‘cool’ factor due to impressive design and slick marketing.

So if your company wants to use product placements, or even if you want to sponsor digital content, think about how the placement or sponsorship can MAKE THE USER EXPERIENCE BETTER. This should always be the goal for your product placement or sponsorship. If it gets in the way, it gets ignored. But if it makes the scene, then it becomes ‘cool’ and desirable.

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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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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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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.