How we leverage the content we create is critical to any marketing strategy. If your strategy involves multi-channel media, you’ll be using a range of traditional and digital platforms to reach specific audiences. For influence and Google juice, one of the most powerful and persuasive tools is an opinion editorial.
Although we value the information shared in 140-character tweets and depend on “first knowledge” found in social media, the earned media value of 800 words of original content is still an extremely potent currency.
To illustrate how an opinion editorial can be used to tell a business story, follow the Ground Truth in Harrisburg infographic below. The capital city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has experienced a cloud of negativity stemming from the city’s fiscal paralysis. Local media, The Wall Street Journal, and even foreign TV stations have covered the distress in depth. The business community was challenged to tell its story to offset the negative branding effects.
Using an op-ed as their workhorse piece, three business men shared Ground Truth in Harrisburg and leveraged the story for positive regional and statewide mentions in print, blogs, a digital magazine, two radio shows, social media channels, and two in-person presentations—all from 800 words in print.
Scary Fact: Did you know that 56% of top brands did NOT respond to customer comments on their Facebook page in 2011? — A.T. Kearney
You say you want to get closer to customers, but your actions are different than your words.
I had a stint one summer in my early twenties as an Executive Assistant to a CEO. Most of my role involved “managing” the CEO’s inbox. That meant printing out every email.
This past week, I attended the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit, which was held in Madrid, Spain. As part of the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit, I led the Marketing Innovation Summit which brought together marketing professionals to network and discuss best practices. Of the 1,700 conference attendees, more than one thousand came from marketing backgrounds, providing a rich and in-depth conversation surrounding best practices for marketing effectiveness.
Big Data is a popular term today that references the huge volumes of business and consumer data being collected and stored by organizations, which cannot be effectively data mined due to the limitations of commonly used software tools that capture, manage, or process the data.
It’s a rather simple word to say, just four syllables. It’s an easily understood word on the surface – at least I think it is. Its meaning is quite apparent the moment you hear it. Yet so many CMO’s and marketers treat this 11-letter word as if it were a 4-letter word.
Some of you know me through my work in studying how social media and 
Badgeville, the gold standard for gamification, today announced a key integration that builds on its partnership with Yammer, the leading provider of enterprise social networks. With this integration, companies can enhance employee performance by leveraging Badgeville to reward high-value user behaviors across the enterprise, and showcase them in the Yammer Ticker, a real-time activity stream.
“We are committed to partnering with first-class business applications to create a powerful social layer across the enterprise, increasing visibility and insights in every corner of an organization,” said An Le, VP of Business Development, Yammer. “Badgeville’s behavior platform helps us deliver on that vision by rewarding employee performance and pulling those key milestones into Yammer where the whole company can discover them.”