March 2012
I want you to make me a Facebook →
clientsfromhell.net
Client: I want you to make me a facebook.
Me: Do you mean a website facebook’s functionality?
Client: No, just a facebook. I’ve been told having a facebook will help my business.
Me: So you want me to make you a design for your facebook page?
Client: No! Not just a page! Make me a whole…
New whitepaper: Unleash the Power of Content Marketing Pt. 1
I’ve been doing a tonne of content marketing work with my clients lately. When it came to writing a whitepaper in support of our content marketing practice, I knew that I needed to start with strategy and considerations for operations. Not unlike social media marketing, integrated (i.e. kick-ass) content marketing is disruptive to the traditional structure of marketing and communications departments.
Check it out (free to download).
As I wrote for the SMG blog:
Truly a labor of love, when we sat down to write this whitepaper (it is jointly authored by Jordan Benedet, Michelle McCudden and myself), our vision was to provide a guidebook for marketers looking to execute content marketing programs inside their organizations. Drawing on the expertise we’ve gleaned working with our clients on content marketing programs, we quickly realized that we had enough for two (or more) whitepapers.
So, we’ve split them up. Part one covers Strategy and Considerations for Operations – this is our best counsel and advice for leaders and executives about how they can set their teams up for success in the execution of content marketing programs. Part one of Unleash the Power of Content Marketing covers:
- How to define your program
- Building the case for change
- How to structure operations
- Content marketing and the sales funnel
Please take a look at an excerpt from Part 1 of Unleash the Power of Content Marketing and if you like what you see, download the entire thing. We’re always interested in conversation, so we look forward to hearing back from you. How does this whitepaper match your experiences as you plan strategy and operations for content marketing?
Oh, and Part 2 of Unleash the Power of Content Marketing covers concrete steps for achieving excellence in execution of content marketing tactics. It is scheduled for release in a couple of weeks.
Play
Quitting the Paint Factory [longform.org] →
adamantine.wordpress.com
Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you’ll be safe, then. -Ovid, Remedia Amoris
I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.
When I was young, my parents read me Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn’t know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: “I was singing, if you please,” the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.” And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my bills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a windblown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain of my pee.
I was right.
