Insight archive
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Get a grip on your content
Every year I go through a spate of cleaning in late December—combing through paperwork and other detritus that’s piled up during the year. I like to purge the old before I start adding anything new. While busily working through the year’s accumulation a couple weeks ago, it occurred to me that this same practice should… Continue reading
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Negative reviews: Don’t bury your head in the sand
They’re out there—negative reviews of your company’s products or services. Although you might prefer to look the other way, responding to negative reviews can have a positive impact on your company’s perception among customers. In a recent Maritz Research and evolve24 study, 83 percent of Twitter complainants who received a reply liked or loved that… Continue reading
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5 questions to ask before building a tablet app
Regardless of what the pundits say about the future of tablet computers, they’ve already changed the mobile landscape. As reported in this article in The Guardian, analyst firm IDC estimates that by the end of this year, the number of tablet computers shipped will reach 62.5 million worldwide, an increase from its earlier prediction of… Continue reading
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5 signs you’ve made a good infographic
The infographic used to be a supplement to the story—a bar graph in an especially dry Economist article, a pie chart in a corporate white paper. Somewhere in the last couple of years, the once-humble infographic has mutated to become the story itself. Everywhere you look, websites are featuring infographics that are the info equivalent… Continue reading
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Is it time to take humor more seriously?
Have your customers laughed at with you today?
Advertisements come at us from every angle—on television, in print, even bordering our favorite websites. As consumers, we are exposed to hundreds of ads per day, many of them direct and informative, but fewer that are funny. If your goal is to
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Keep customers engaged past the purchase
Part of the marketer’s job is to help identify new customers and to keep existing customers engaged. However, many B2B companies are more focused on the former in an effort to generate sales leads, whereas B2C businesses do a better job of understanding their customers, according to a recent eMarketer article. Although there’s a bigger need… Continue reading
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Buy local, think social
From the increase in the number of local farmers’ markets in our cities and neighborhoods to supermarkets that promote locally grown produce, there is a change afoot.
Consumer thinking has shifted as a result of the downturn in the economy and our awareness of the diminishing American manufacturing base. As a country and as… Continue reading
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Want to improve your search ranking? Create content
Often touted as a science because of algorithms and such, SEO at times seems more like an art. You follow the rules or best practices of the day, but the effort doesn’t always yield the desired result—higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). So, you try another approach. In this way, SEO is… Continue reading
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5 tips to avoid B2B marketing hyperbole
When everything is state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line and everything in between, how do you stand out without giving in to the most excessive marketing hyperbole ever?
Welcome to the most informative B2B marketing hyperbole blog post of all time. Well, maybe not. But you get my point: Sometimes companies say things that sound compelling, but frankly aren’t… Continue reading
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7 ways to maintain authenticity in your corporate blog
A well-written blog should be personal, casual and authentic. Are those the adjectives you would typically use to describe a corporation? No? Me neither. And that’s exactly why a well-written corporate blog can be successful. Authenticity cuts through the, well, corporate-ness. It puts a human face on an otherwise impersonal entity to remind customers that… Continue reading
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Coupon marketing: Are you prepared for success?
I bought my first Groupon the other day. It was to a local sushi restaurant that had great reviews on Yelp, and I was looking forward to going. I checked the restaurant’s website for opening times and saw that it had a link to its Yelp reviews. I clicked on it and was shocked to… Continue reading
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TEDActive’s lesson: the value of curation
Last week, I attended the TEDActive conference, an event I call a “brain vacation” because it so thoroughly inspires ideas, provokes thought, facilitates community, and energizes attendees with brilliant, visionary speakers. I could write forever about the speakers who moved me (like Brooks and Roy and Spurlock and Kahn), or whose words and visions most… Continue reading
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Content curation: aggregation with a new name?
Content aggregation has been around as long as the Internet. Then it was the likes of AOL and Excite@Home; now it’s Google News, AllTop, and Reddit. But there’s another seemingly similar term that’s floating around with increasing frequency—content curation. The question that keeps popping up is this: Is curation the same as aggregation, just with… Continue reading
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