Too short for a blog post, too interesting to ignore, here are a few snippets on what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Content creator angst

I am finding it harder and harder to post on social media. I feel like it has become a performance. People are trying to out-vulnerable each other.

I just want to do good work. Spending one second of my life editing a Reel seems like a waste of a second that will never come back.

Perhaps this is why I like writing. Create. Let it sit. Make it sing. And it doesn’t disappear.

There’s no schtick to it.

Content you can create in your underwear. Now that’s livin’.

Content creator angst part deux

My friends and colleagues are constantly debating any system tweak that pleases the LinkedIn algorithm. The major theme is to post stuff that generates comments. LinkedIn wants conversations.

I generally do not write for comments, but sometimes I stumble into it.

A few weeks ago, I posted a photo of myself sleeping on a bench in the Amsterdam airport after canceled flights and a hotel foul-up. It received more than 82,000 views.

The following week, I posted a helpful, original article reflecting on Peter Drucker’s unique wisdom and how his “five questions” remain relevant to marketing today. This post, which took about four hours to write, received 2,000 views, or about 3% of the airport post.

This suggests that the key to engagement on LinkedIn is goofy personal photos. But before you follow this path of least resistance, keep asking yourself — for LinkedIn and ALL social media activity — “to what end?”

Engagement is largely a vanity metric. You can engage yourself broke. Marketing is about creating customers.

It’s all about the feeling

New research shows that 42% of teens say that talking about their feelings is important to them, and brands are responding. McDonald’s new “Draw How You Feel” Happy Meal boxes trade the classic red for a blank canvas. This ties into a broader trend of experiential and wellness-driven packaging.

Built around the finding that 85% of teenage girls aren’t meeting recommended physical activity guidelines, Nike and Spotify launched Make Moves to encourage girls to move to just one song a day, using music to make physical activity more joyful and emotionally accessible. A UK pilot with 700 girls showed a 20% improvement in confidence and a 19% decrease in regular feelings of anxiety.

Experiential marketing is such a huge opportunity and is largely overlooked.

More about experiences

My new book, How AI Changes Your Customers, details six ways AI is rewiring human psychology.

Chief among these is cognitive offloading, addiction, and a trend to form trusting emotional connections with chatbots.

But pay attention to the news. There’s a backlash trend emerging.

Young people are rediscovering the joy of gathering. I’ve recently seen articles about young people watching movies together, listening to vinyl albums straight through at parties, and a surge in the popularity of board games:

How can your company help bring people together like this and be part of this trend?

Keeping pace with AI

The AI world is changing so rapidly. I think there are three key strategies to keep up:

1. Schedule time to dabble every day. Most platforms have a free or trial version. Push the envelope and experiment.
2. Subscribe to at least one podcast, newsletter, or video series commenting on the latest updates and releases. I really love the Artificial Intelligence podcast hosted by Paul Roetzer.
3. Join a community of like-minded people who are experimenting and can teach you by association. One option for marketers is RISE. You can’t stay relevant on your own.

We need to find new channels

Here’s another reason why looking at alternatives like experiential marketing and word-of-mouth makes sense: Social media use appears to be in decline. A roud-up of research I’ve seen:

• A 2025 Deloitte consumer trends survey of more than 4,000 Brits found that nearly a quarter of all consumers had deleted a social media app in the previous 12 months (inclund one-third of Gen Z)
• Social media use has steadily declined since time spent on the platforms peaked in 2022, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries by the Financial Times and digital audience insights firm GWI. Globally, adults 16 and over spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms by the end of 2024, down almost 10% since 2022. The decline was particularly pronounced among teens and 20-somethings…
• Young people who are deleting their social media platforms cite the increasing pressures of being online as well as damage to their mental health as causes. Deloitte’s consumer survey found that nearly a quarter of respondents who deleted social apps reported that these apps had negatively affected their mental health and consumed too much of their time.

Implementing AI in your company

Long ago, I led a Fortune 100 company into the digital age.

The marketing world faced the same distractions — lots of sexy opportunities to make a splash on social media, with easy-to-measure “Likes.”

I was more successful than almost any competitor in my space by staying strictly focused on one thing: Digital applications that could directly make us money or save us money.

And, like today, measurement with absolute attribution was difficult. But you know what great managers pay attention to?” Stories, like “hey, a customer just raved about how easy it is to do business with our new eCommerce system.”

I think this is still an effective implementation playbook: 1) Focus tightly on making money and saving money instead of vanity metrics; 2) Look for qualitative measures like comments and stories as a success indicator, at least at first.

Thanks for reading along with me today. I never take you for granted!

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

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Illustration courtesy MidJourney

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As a marketing educator, writer, and entrepreneur, I’m obsessed with understanding the impact of AI on marketing and sales.

On the latest episode of The Marketing Companion, I was fortunate enough to speak with Sandy Carter, who has a broad global view of the new realities.

Sandy, currently leading a high-growth tech unicorn and author of the new book AI First, Human Always (yes, I had the honor of writing the forward!), brings a rare blend of hands-on leadership and futurist perspective.

You can listen to this amazing show just by clicking here:

Click here to enjoy The Marketing Companion Episode 323

And here are a few of the highlights from our talk:

From Counting Clicks to Decoding Intention

For years, marketers have focused on measuring attention, including views, clicks, impressions, and dwell time. We optimized content and spent ad dollars based on where eyeballs went, striving to interrupt or insert ourselves into the customer’s stream of consciousness.

Thanks to AI, that entire playbook is already getting upended. As Sandy pointed out, with advanced predictive tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, customers are now going straight to an agent who can not only surface information but also predict their needs.

Here’s the revelation: AI moves us from being marketers of “attention” to marketers of “intention.” When someone asks an AI assistant for recommendations, they’re stating exactly what they want—think “Give me the best CRM for a startup with $X budget and these features”—and bypassing traditional marketing funnels entirely. The agent already knows how to filter, rank, and recommend based on actual needs, not just exposure or interrupted attention.

The New Gatekeepers: How (and Where) AI Picks Its Winners

Naturally, our conversation turned to the practical question on every marketer’s mind: How do you become one of the five “recommended” brands that AI agents surface? When attention alone is no longer enough to get you into the consideration set, what signals matter?

Sandy’s real-world experiments and research laid it out:

Wikipedia Is Back in Style: AI tools routinely use Wikipedia to validate and select which products or companies to recommend. If you haven’t yet built or maintained a Wikipedia page for your business (or yourself!), you’re likely invisible to these agents.

Social Proof via Reddit: Surprisingly, Reddit threads and subreddits have become an influential social signal for AI. If your brand is being discussed positively in relevant Reddit communities, you’re more likely to make the cut. But beware: unresolved issues or complaints, even from years ago, can hurt you if your brand doesn’t participate actively and transparently.

Rich, Fact-Based Content Wins: AI loves structured, fact-heavy lists and articles — “five reasons to choose X,” “top ten features of Y” — even more than traditional SEO tactics. This means your blog’s FAQ pages, listicles, and data-driven content don’t just help search engines, but are directly picked up by generative models when responding to user prompts.

Authority Still Matters: Recent research (as discussed in a past episode with Andy Crestodina) shows AI privileges brand mentions in non-sales content, press articles, and academic references — pushing the importance of classic PR and media strategy back to the top.

The message is clear: if your brand isn’t showing up in these AI “source” locations, your odds of even being considered are catastrophically reduced.

Brand: The Ultimate “Override” in the Prompt Era

Yet, despite the surge of AI-powered decision-making, our conversation reaffirmed one crucial truth: brand still matters more than ever. AI might present five options when a user states their intention — but which one do they pick?

Often, the tie-breaker remains human: a personal recommendation, a powerful story, a reputation for exceptional service. I shared the story of my own Paris trip, where a friend recommended a gluten-free bakery that didn’t make it onto AI’s list, but immediately became my top pick. That’s the “brand override, ” an emotional shortcut humans still use to filter, select, and even instruct AI agents. Sandy reinforced this with her own experiences and evidence that many enterprise buyers, even after narrowing down their options via AI, still seek out word-of-mouth or social proof before making a commitment.

Even more fascinating: How do you become the default choice mentioned in AI user prompts? (“Book my trip on Delta,” “Research this with Salesforce,” etc.) This is the new holy grail — being so well-branded that you bypass the recommendation filter altogether.

Marketing to Machines (and Machine Influencers)

This doesn’t mean we can coast on reputation. We’re at the dawn of a future where, as Sandy observed, entire teams will be dedicated to “marketing to agents,” not just to human customers. Walmart is already experimenting with this, building strategies to influence the agents (and even humanoid delivery robots!) that are quickly becoming intermediaries for everyday purchasing decisions.

Imagine a robot delivering your pizza, choosing your drink, setting your table … Who is the true “chooser” in this experience: the human or the algorithmic assistant? Will P&G start marketing dishwasher soap to the pizza robot’s parent company, or keep marketing to households? The lines are already blurring.

The Next Generation: AI as Brand Builder (and Best Friend)

There’s another layer: The next generation of buyers — raised on Roblox, TikTok, and personalized AI companions — are already developing affinities through digital worlds. Sandy’s daughter knew to ask for Adidas after encountering it in-game, not through traditional ads or family habits. In many cases, the most influential “friend” or recommender may be an AI personality.

Let’s not underestimate the psychological shift underway. As AI companions move from functional assistants to social confidantes, their product recommendations carry new emotional weight. In fact, social AI companions already outpace ChatGPT in certain engagement metrics. That’s a transformational shift in the trust landscape—one that marketers must start preparing for now.

So, Where Do We Go from Here?

We’re moving from a world of *interrupt and persuade* to one of *predict and facilitate*, with AI agents as both gatekeepers and guides. As marketers, the urgent priorities are:

• Build and maintain accessible, accurate, and richly detailed references (Wikipedia, Reddit, media hits)
• Double-down on authority and co-occurrence in natural language (not just backlinks)
• Lean into transparent, conversational engagement with your audience and communities
• Embrace the necessity of “marketing to agents,” not just customers
• Never lose sight of the human: generate enough love, trust, and loyalty for your brand that customers ask for you by name — even when AI presents alternatives.

If there’s one lesson I took from our conversation, it’s that the era of “attention as currency” is giving way to intention, and the path from intention to purchase is no longer a straight line—nor is it exclusively under human control.

Stay sharp, stay engaged, and keep your brand both technologically visible and unmistakably human.

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Now, any business can build automated customer experiences, email marketing workflows, and landing pages that guide your customers to your main message. We are here to support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence to strengthen their customer relationships.

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My friend Tim Peter, the brilliant author of Digital Reset, had a provocative post on LinkedIn. He lamented that he was tired of following all the “marketing rules” and boldly posted a link within his content — an algorithmic no-no!

It was a small act of defiance that ignited a lot of emotion in the comment section. It seems that many marketers are tired of the constraints of social media rules that make us compromise with content.

I just wrote an entire book about breaking bad rules for good reasons (Audacious) so Tim’s post got me thinking — how do we approach this constant dance of give and take? Do we create to win the attention of our customers, or the attention of the search engines? Or … do we have to somehow please both?

What are the guidelines that let us know when to compromise with content?

I thought this would be a great topic for a podcast conversation with Jay Acunzo, who thinks deeply about such things. On a new episode of The Marketing Companion, we talked about:

• Knowing the tradeoffs and making a strategic decision about the path you’re on.
• How your business model might dictate your content compromises
• The misperception that a social media audience equals business success

… and much more.

To listen in, just click here:

Click here to enjoy The Marketing Companion Episode 317

Please support our sponsor, who brings you this fantastic episode.

Bravo for Brevo!

This episode is brought to you by Brevo (formerly Sendinblue). Brevo gives you the tools to attract, engage, and nurture customer relationships.

Now, any business can build automated customer experiences, email marketing workflows, and landing pages that guide your customer to your main message. We are here to support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence to strengthen their customer relationships.

Go to https://www.brevo.com/marketingcompanion to sign up for Brevo for free and use the code COMPANION to save 50% on your first three months of Brevo’s Starter & Business plan!

Illustration courtesy ChatGPT

The post When to compromise with content appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I hope you’re enjoying the new format of the Marketing Companion as much as I am. Rotating through expert co-hosts allows me to expand the conversations and go deep into pressing marketing issues like how content works today.

The new episode will blow you away. The next companion is Jay Acunzo. Jay is well-known as a popular speaker, author (Break the Wheel), and podcaster (Unthinkable), but what I admire him most for is his craft-like approach to creating content. Nobody thinks more deeply about how content works in this world than Jay.

And that’s why this conversation is so exceptional.

Jay and I don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on where the world is going, which makes this episode particularly compelling and fun. Listen in and learn:

• How reach, resonance, and relevance are intertwined and evolving into something new in a post-SEO world,
• Why expertise is a commodity on the web … or is it?
• Does the famous idea of 1,000 True Fans really work? Is that a rational monetization strategy for creators? (Jay and I disagree on this).
• We blow up the notion of monetizing an audience into some practical and rational ideas.

This was so good. As soon as the episode dropped, I had to listen to it again. How does content work in the world today? This episode will take you in new directions. Just click below to listen in and don’t forget to subscribe to the show here!

Click on this link to listen to Episode 231

Other ways to enjoy our podcast

• Try this! “Alexa, play the latest episode of The Marketing Companion.”
• Click here to download the latest episode or subscribe on iTunes
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• Complete Marketing Companion Episode Guide

Resources mentioned in the show:

• Andrew Davis
• John Bonini
• Mark Schaefer’s post on resonance versus SEO

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Understanding your marketing video’s performance can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Vidyard’s online video marketing platform is a magnet for your needle. Host all your videos, measure their impact and integrate them into your email, content, and digital marketing strategies. This is the video CRM solution! All Marketing Companion fans can click here to try Vidyard today, for free.

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By Kiki Schirr, {grow} Contributing Columnist

To marketers, Reddit is a bit like a genie’s lamp. It’s a powerful tool and can drive huge waves of readers to a website. On the other hand, if your intentions in using Reddit aren’t pure, punishment can rain upon you in the form of user censure.

Whether you love Reddit or fear it, no marketer can ignore it.

From 2018, the Alexa.com ranking of Internet traffic has dropped the site from third in the United States to sixth. However, in this time adoption of Reddit’s mobile app has grown like wildfire. Reddit’s blog boasted 30% YoY growth in 2019 — bringing them to 430 million monthly active users. For reference, that’s about 100 million more visitors per month than Twitter.

If you’ve used Reddit before, you probably have seen their slang term: tl;dr. Tl;dr is an acronym for “too long; didn’t read,” that originated when users (known as the original poster or OP) started proceeding long explanations with a 1 sentence summary. Tl;drs helped Redditors decide if a post was worth the effort to read.

But, in the 15 years of Reddit’s tenure, technical innovation was bound to occur—and sure enough, intrepid Reddit users are creating summary bots to make tl;dr automatic.

The most ubiquitous bot, the one that runs through every link post by default, is called AutoTDLR. It runs on the SMMRY algorithm. SMMRY is a 7-step program to summarize and prioritize important sentences within text in order to shorten the overall piece.

By calling SMMRY’s API, AutoTLDR feeds the content of every link posted to Reddit through SMMRY to see if it deserves to be shortened. When the algorithm can shorten the article or post by 70%, the bot posts the result to the comments section of the OP’s link.

Should content strategists fear the uprising of summary bots?

First, just to clear all that jargon up: when someone shares your content on Reddit now, it is automatically summarized. Whether you like it or not, without any human action, the bones of your text will be posted to their page.

While this might seem bad to a marketer because it decreases traffic to a site by providing its content without a page view, this is actually a wonderful innovation for Reddit.

Redditors had always suspected that a large percentage of users were reading comments or otherwise interacting with articles without reading them. But in 2017, Reddit was shocked and dismayed when Notre Dame extrapolated that 73% of posts on Reddit have been upvoted or downvoted by users who never opened the content.

AutoTDLR bot improves Reddit by lowering the amount of users who never read beyond the headline of an article. So while you might miss the page visit, if your post is run through summary bots, the message might very well reach a larger audience than if it hadn’t.

How should content strategists respond to summary bots?

The first step to being responsive to AutoTDLR is to run your content through summary bots before publishing, every time. You can copy-paste the text into SMMRY.com and see how it would be summarized as 6 sentences, 7, 8, or more. I’d guess 6 would be the median number of sentences AutoTDLR generates on Reddit, so keep that in mind.

The first thing I noticed when I started running my past {grow} posts through SMMRY was that my obsessive habit of using 3 examples to support my statements was hurting me. The last of SMMRY’s five stated goals is to “remove excessive examples,” and it seems that I was repeatedly offending the algorithm with my writing style.

But experienced copywriters will adjust quickly. SMMRY prioritizes sentences by the number and variety of topic-related keywords prior to the ending punctuation. Marketers who are already used to writing with discreet keyword usage won’t have trouble taking the algorithm in stride.

Writing for Robots 101

If a particular important point hasn’t made the 6 chosen sentences of AutoTDLR’s summary, you can probably force it in with good editing.

First reread the piece to determine which single sentence is the most vital. Then reduce unnecessary words within that sentence. Transitions and stop words will hurt your sentence’s importance. Finally, try to make sure that there are a variety of keywords within that sentence.

Here’s a cheat code, though. You can sneak additional ideas into SMMRY’s concept of a single sentence by using punctuation other than a period. For example:

Why would you use punctuation other than a period? Gaming SMMRY’s algorithm! Because SMMRY has only been programmed to recognize the period as the end of a thought, this entire paragraph would be counted as only one sentence.

There are a few other best practices. Don’t have any information only represented within images or hyperlinks. Pictures are never included and links are not a priority. Also be aware of your use of lists as they can trigger SMMRY’s shears, too.

What are the greater implications of AI in content strategy?

AutoTDLR’s function is currently limited to Reddit. Therefore it is only a minor consideration for most marketers today. After all, Reddit’s 400 million monthly active users are only a fraction of Facebook’s 1.5 billion MAU. Unless your target audience uses Reddit, like tech users or fitness buffs do, you might have other sites prioritized.

However, you don’t need to be Michio Kaku or Ray Kurzweil to see the writing on the wall. Marketing AI in general and in particular auto summarization will become more common over time.

How will your marketing strategy respond?

You could provide a quick summary paragraph at the beginning of longer posts yourself. This executive summary would help establish the salient points in when readers were only skimming. One added benefit is that summaries will increase the frequency of your most important keywords.

Another strategy would be to use the inverted pyramid structure of newspaper journalists. First load the most important content at the top. Then be sure to sprinkle keywords throughout the rest of the piece.

To fight the robots, you must talk to humans

However, the most important thing to do when facing any rapid innovation is to talk with your customers directly.

You might already be surprised how your readers are engaging with your content. Some readers might only quickly skim through on mobile, others might autogenerate compilations of articles into e-reader files to ingest and annotate during commutes.

Summary bots and marketing AI are still fluid technologies. You will need to keep a thumb on your reader’s pulse to stay on top of trends.

Approach people that you see liking, commenting on, or sharing your articles, and before asking any personal questions be sure to thank them for their support. If they respond positively, that’s when it would be appropriate to ask if they would mind explaining how they are most likely to consume your content. Be sure to thank them again after they share their insight.

Kiki Schirr is a freelance marketer who enjoys absorbing new trends within the tech scene. Her favorite subreddit is r/ICanDrawThat, but she thinks new Redditors should also check out r/ShowerThoughts and r/AnimalsBeingDerps. She is most easily reached via Twitter.

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

The post Is your content marketing strategy vulnerable to summary bots? appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

At the end of each year I reflect on what I need to do more of or less of … what is working now and what will be working in the coming year.

A lot of this reflection is spent on the time I spend creating content. It’s significant. I thought I would share for you my strategic view of the strategy behind the content streams going into 2016. Here’s a summary of where things are headed:

Written content

A few years ago, a fella name Jonathan Barrick started reading my blog. He eventually sought me out at a conference because he was a true fan of my blog. When he was made a marketing director for gShift, he decided to make that company a sponsor of my podcast The Marketing Companion. The company also sponsored my latest book The Content Code, and invited me to their hometown of Barrie for a paid speaking engagement a few weeks ago. Out of that speaking gig, I have been hired by two organizations for consulting.

The point of this story is … what is the value of my written content? Everything. It is the source of my authority and attracts fans who turn into customers like Jonathan.

In an era where many people are de-emphasizing written content, I deem that it is critically important, at least for me, and that is where I will continue to spend the bulk of my content-creating time in 2016 and beyond.

Podcasting

It was a big decision taking on a podcast. I didn’t want to do anything that would dilute the quality of the blog. But together with my partner Tom Webster, we have come up with a system for The Marketing Companion that is effective and successful.

The format of the show is designed to fit our busy schedules. We don’t have guests — too complicated. We only record twice a month — that’s what fits our busy schedule. Also, recording every other week keeps it fresh and fun. Any greater frequency would turn it into a chore. So our numbers are lower than other podcasts because we are not weekly but I think that raises the quality of the show.

This is an important point — I did not start a podcast in 2013 to chase the shiny new object. This was a serious and mindful decision. I did it only after spending many years building a core audience on the blog and finding a way that I would not let that audience down.

In terms of strategy, podcasting is important to me because 1) I made me learn to be a podcaster, which makes me a better teacher and consultant 2) I am more open and human on the podcast and I think that helps establish my personal brand 3) we are getting to the point where we can monetize and maybe make a little money from the thing 4) It helps me reach a new audience who may buy my books or hire me some day.

The harsh realty of podcasting is that the feedback and metrics are not very good but I sense that this growing audience may be even more loyal and passionate than my blog fans! Podcasting will continue to be an important part of my content eco-system.

Books

I have written five books in the last five years. There was no master plan to do this. I just had big questions I needed to answer like “how do I become powerful on the Internet?” (Return On Influence ) and “how do I succeed on Twitter” (The Tao of Twitter) that demanded something much bigger than a blog post.

Writing a book is the hardest work I do. I do not slap together bits of research and the odd blog post like some of the other books out there. I give birth to a book over the course of a year. It is a painful, exasperating, and draining process. Creating something great in 70,000 words requires sacrifice and discipline.

In 2016 I do not have plans to write an “epic” book because I do not have that big question in front of me that deserves that kind of work and commitment. However may write some smaller books that can help people on specific marketing and career issues.

Strategically, books have been important as a passive source of income and to provide big ideas that make me attractive as a keynote speaker. They will always play a role in the mix.

Video

I have not been big with video over the years but have been scheduling occasional “Office Hours” on Blab that puts me in front of the world. I truly love this format and I’ll be posting the finished discussions on the blog and YouTube more often.

What is the strategy with video? I believe video amplifies your personal brand more than any other platform. There is something special about seeing a face and hearing a voice. Hard to quantify but I will probably publish more video in 2016 than any other year so far.

Online webinars/training

This is probably my biggest opportunity. Many people are now offering online webinars and “mastermind” courses and I have not done that yet for a variety of reasons.

However, in 2016 I will be introducing a masters-level, accredited, online marketing course through Rutgers University. Not ready to say too much about it at this point but it will be the most complete and innovative program in the field. If you would like to know more about it, drop me a line at mschaefer700@gmail.com and when the course is announced I will let you know the details.

Newsletter

An email newsletter is sort of the glue that holds the content marketing plan together. It is your best source of “reliable reach” to your most passionate fans. In 2016 I intend to improve the quality and consistency of my email newsletter offering when I overhaul the website.

Distribution

It will come as no surprise to you that a growing amount of my time will be dedicated to content distribution in 2016. Content has no value unless it is seen and shared. I intend to be more formal about this in 2016 as well as to get some help with the growing task of content distribution. A big change for 2016 and beyond is where content gets published.

Other 

Slideshare — For the past two years I have been publishing high quality slide presentations that tell a story on a theme. These take a lot of work and the views of these productions have been declining. My theory is that Slideshare has become more popular and there is more competition for views than a year ago (Content Shock in action!) I will probably take this back a little in 2016.

Photography — I love Instagram but use it strictly for personal fun. In fact I hate it when people promote anything on Instagram.

Pinterest — I have dabbled in Pinterest but with my B2B services business, this has not been a priority. It is a tremendous platform but not my drug of choice.

Whew. Well that’s a lot of content planning, isn’t it? What’s on your mind for the coming year? How are you thinking about content strategically?

Illustration courtesy of Flickr CC and Boston Public Library

The post The strategy behind the content appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Stressed about creating content in a competitive world? Of course you are!

But creating content with impact doesn’t have to mean producing a PhD or whitepaper. You can create meaningful results sometimes simply commenting on a blog or re-purposing older content into new formats. Hey, you can do that in as little as 15 minutes a day!

I hope you enjoy this new FREE eBook guide with some ideas to help you create meaningful “micro-content” in as little as 15 minutes a day!

The post A Guide to Creating Content in Just 15 Minutes a Day appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I like to help new bloggers and I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago with a young woman who was exasperated over what seemed like a hopeless situation.

“How can I ever beat Hubspot?” she asked. “They have so many resources and put out so much great content. Why would anybody read my blog for content marketing advice?”

I can certainly understand her consternation. It can get downright depressing watching these big companies pump out post after post when all of us little guys are lucky to produce one great piece of content every week!

Let’s look at this problem and come up with a strategy to win.

First let me say that I admire HubSpot so this is not an anti-HubSpot post. They are a solid company with a great product and they are “walking the talk” by investing in content.

Having said that, you do not want to be Hubspot. You want to be you because you can win your niche on your terms. Here’s how.

Blow apart your expectations.

This is an important step. Forget about size. Forget about traffic. Forget about being HubSpot.

Focus on AUDIENCE.

Traffic is an ego metric that is not necessarily going to deliver business benefits. Would you rather have 10,000 readers a day who never come back or 10 passionate readers who engage with you and eventually buy from you? HubSpot is focused on building search traffic with Terminator like efficiency and they will win that game. But you can build your own meaningful audience who cares about YOU.

HubSpot is a machine, you’re not.

To stand out on the web, you need to be original. And to be original, you need to dig down deep and have the courage to show your personality and passion through your content,

There is only one you. You have no competition, including HubSpot. Be you and attract your own audience.

You can own your niche

To generate the thousands of posts HubSpot tosses into the blogosphere, it has to cover a pretty wide number of subjects. HubSpot is a generalist but the world also needs specialists and that is you.

Most pundits will tell you that you need to pick a specialized topic before you start creating content. I disagree. Let me ask you this: the job you’re doing now — is this exactly the job you thought you would be doing five years ago? The answer to that is almost always no. You carve your path in life by discovering your opportunities all along the way, Blogging works the same way.

So if you don’t know your niche yet, don’t let that stop you from creating content. Just start. It’s likely that your specialty and interests will evolve and perhaps even transform over time until you find your niche.

HubSpot has no soul

Every week I receive dozens of blog posts from HubSpot. They are all by different authors … people I have never heard of before. In fact, they have so many authors, the byline at the top of the post is almost invisible to me. I don’t even care who wrote it because it is a revolving door.

When I leave a comment on a HubSpot blog post, I don’t get a response. Why? Because comments probably don’t contribute to inbound leads as much as the original content becoming indexed by Google.

So, I have zero emotional attachment to HubSpot. They are a content machine.  I don’t know these people writing for HubSpot and they don’t want to know me either.

This is your opportunity

Think of the opportunity that YOU have here. People buy from people they know and trust. You can connect with me and I can connect with you because we can get to know each other … first in the comment section, then maybe through a call or email exchange. There is hardly a week that goes by that I don’t meet a {grow} blog reader in real life. And that’s when the real magic starts to happen!

By the way — the young blog reader who first asked the question about HubSpot? I got to know her through her blog comments on {grow}. We had a phone call so I could help her with a problem. Now she’s working for me. That’s the way building a real audience works. And that’s how YOU can beat HubSpot at their own game.

Right?

Illustration courtesy Mary Huang

The post How to beat Hubspot at its own game appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

At the recent Social Slam conference, there was a ton of inspiring content from some of the greatest marketing minds around. And yet to me, the sentence from the day-long conference that has lingered in my mind came from the least-known speaker of the day.  She is not a marketer. She is not a social media expert. In fact, Social Slam was the first social media conference she had ever attended.

I invited Dr. Alice Ackerman, a pediatrician and college educator from Virginia Tech University, to relate her inspiring story of how she was connecting to her community through social media. She told the audience of her introduction to the social web through The Tao of Twitter and of her struggles to get approval to blog from the university medical community. She persevered and eventually got the go-ahead, but finding an audience for her blog posts was another matter.

Much of her first blogging efforts were aimed at educating the community on the importance of childhood vaccinations. But she had some doubt as to whether she was making an impact.  She displayed a chart displaying the lowly results of her blogging efforts.  For more than a year, her posts limped along.  In fact, she averaged 4.5 readers a day.

And then something magical happened when she received this tweet:

Dr. Ackerman is the person who changed my mind once I read her blog and her links. I had no idea that info existed.

And it was at this point that Dr. Ackerman delivered the line at the conference that received a thunderous applause from all the hard-working bloggers in attendance:

“Yes, I only had 4.5 readers a day on my blog … but I had an impact on one of them.”

I thought this was a profound lesson on many levels.

• “Citizen Influencers” are using the power of online publishing tools to make a difference in unexpected ways
• You never know when your words are making an impact
• Tenacity, commitment, and patience make the difference in social media success

I think this is an inspiring message for any blogger out there. What do you think? Are you making a difference in big and small ways?

The post The profound power of five blog readers appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I recently did some volunteer work for a national charity and provided counsel on their social media strategy. The PR Agency started the meeting by listing all of the “messaging” being developed to support a major fund-raising push in 2012. The list looked something like this:

• Press releases
• Podcast
• Promotional video
• Slideshow
• Photos and videos from local events
• Clips from local TV stations

They’re off to a good start because there is the potential for a lot of interesting content here. But ultimately the effort will fail as merely a blip on the radar because nobody in the organization is working on the network strategy. Developing content for the social web is a waste of time if it just sits there like a bump on a Heinz dill pickle. It has to go some place if it is to attract attention and eventually compel people to do something.

To ignite a social strategy, you must ignite your content.

So to be successful, you must aggressively develop the “human pathways” that will carry your content to the world … not just write press releases that you HOPE will be buried on a community events calendar somewhere. And the larger — and more engaged — the network, the better the chances for success, so get started NOW!

Here is an action plan I provided to this charity that would result in long-term success … and it can ONLY be long-term success because it takes TIME and CONSISTENT EFFORT to build a relevant and engaged network that will share your stuff!

1) Identify all the passionate advocates of the charity. They are a powerful and critical first step in building an engaged network.

2) Explain to them why you need their help and the benefits of helping — you’re connecting many small networks to create an enormous network.

3) Teach them how to proactively and aggressively build a targeted network and a social media presence so that you have hundreds of “beacons” for your brand.

4) Give this group tips on how to effectively share, connect, and network on their favorite social platforms.

5) Assign a central resource to “corral” real, passionate stories, videos, photos from the field to share across the ENTIRE network. Unleash the content! This will provide a constant drip-drip-drip of interesting content every week.

6) Make the content easy to share. Have easy-to-find social sharing options. Use Linked Within (like I do at the bottom of each post) to highlight similar stories of interest (this increases my page views by about 8 percent). Highlight other content of interest on the site.

7) Institute free, simple monitoring tools like Google Alerts and saved Twitter searches to measure the effort and identify the most successful networks and content. “Buzz” is a leading indicator of donations. If the buzz is going, up, up, up, the donations will eventually follow.

I care about this cause so I’m going to try to shepherd this as best I can. Hopefully it will work. Does this make sense to you? What other advice would you give this worthy cause?

The post For social media success, write, then IGNITE. Here’s how. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.