Content Strategy News & Articles

With another holiday shopping season upon us, maximizing product visibility in the e-Commerce market is one of retailers’ biggest hurdles. Keyword-rich product descriptions are important, but that alone won’t be enough to differentiate your product lists from your competition’s this holiday season.

Many companies are actively sharing content with their customers in an effort to better assert themselves as thought leaders in their industry. Sharing others' content is often referred to as content curation -- but Pawan Deshpande, CEO and founder of Curata, says that you won't hear companies describe it that way.

As a social media strategist I hear a lot of reasons why people hate social media. And while most people have begun to find familiarity in Facebook, it's always surprising to hear how many people still bemoan Twitter. Of course, the early users of Twitter did the microblogging network no favors by repeatedly tweeting out photos of food or reports about what they were doing “right now” (you know who you are). But even as we’ve been able to move past that and use it for a plethora of more useful things, Twitter is still very much misunderstood.

A dirty magnet is a link that attracts people to click on it promising to bring them somewhere that it won’t.

If links were married most of them would be getting divorced, because so many links don’t keep their promises. A broken promise is just as bad as a broken link: it gives you the wrong expectations; it brings you to the wrong place; it wastes your time; it frustrates and annoys.

A new app, Taggstar, vows to "bring your images to life" by being as interactive and shareable as possible, taking the customer experience to a whole new level.

Did you know you are bombarded by 5,000 messages a day? And that it takes seven to nine interactions with a brand before you even begin to recognize it? Because of this overwhelming onslaught, are you only seeking recommendations from those within your social networks?

In just a few weeks, Google will turn Feedburner’s API off. This comes months after the feed publisher’s Twitter and blog accounts were closed, its .jp domain was lost -- and more than a year after the API was formally depreciated. Why is this happening and what can you do to avoid disruption?

In Part 1 of this "UX How To" article I explained the families of roles within the user experience discipline; UX Specialists, UX Generalists and Hybrids. The Specialists, from research, strategy, design and front-end development, were covered in detail. Generalists and Hybrids float above and in-between. If UX is a discipline of science and art, Generalists are those who harness the talent within a business context. Hybrids are those who create possibility by successfully merging two thought patterns into one.

I have seen the question on Quora. I have seen the question on LinkedIn. I have seen the question on so many different online properties that I have lost count. The summarized question is: "How do I get started in learning about UX (User Experience)?". I have yet to see an answer that makes me believe that someone could take it and really move forward into learning the field and ultimately get a job. The biggest problem is that I don't find the question to be phrased in a way that a highly experienced UX professional can meaningfully answer without completely reframing the question.

Asking "How do I get started in learning UX?" or conversely "How do I become an expert at UX?" assumes there is a simplistic answer and belies a overly simplistic view of the wide range of disciplines that make up the genre of User Experience.

Search engine optimization (SEO) tactics often make it harder for customers to do what they need to do. 

Storytelling has become a critical component of content marketing. Never has this been more apparent than at Content Marketing World 2012, where many of the speakers are helping us develop our inner storyteller. However, the types of stories being told have become rather interesting. Deana Goldasich told us to make the customer the hero, while Jenny Magic encouraged us to make our competitor our arch enemy and the customer the damsel in distress. Why is it so important for us to make our customers, competitors and companies characters in our own stories?
 

I live, breathe and write about content marketing. I also attend a lot of conferences. This week I am at Content Marketing World 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. Because I sit through many keynotes and sessions, I have high expectations. I need to be engaged and learn new information regularly. This isn’t to say that I know everything there is to know about content marketing, but I have heard a lot of the same things. However, there is a difference between hearing the same old things, and hearing the same exciting things. Here are just a few of the exciting things being overheard at CMWorld. 

B2B marketing automation provider Pardot has upgraded its platform with features that it said makes sales initiatives easier. 

There are a lot of opinions about Microsoft Office SharePoint, some favorable and others less so, but no matter the camp you sit in, there is no denying it’s ubiquity in our organizations.

When we last left our band of intrepid explorers of employee experience, I had explained our "big tent" strategy of inclusion along with how the cupcake approach to product strategy would be used to counter inclusion's seemingly inseparable compatriot, longer timelines.  We had just successfully avoided the pitfalls of a consensus culture and were now looking forward to identifying and selecting a vendor for a strategy engagement.