Here’s a short article on a very successful pordcast initiative that I sent MarketingSherpa and they published it in their annual Marketing Wisdom report for 2010. This year’s report features 70 real-life stories and lessons from marketers who weathered last year’s brutal economy. You may download the full Marketing Wisdom 2010 report here.

Last year, Covisio ran an extremely successful podcasting program for one of our clients. Our main goal was to generate podcasting content that was valuable to our client’s target audience. If we were successful with that, we knew we would get better brand awareness, increase online reputation, demonstrate thought leadership, boost web traffic, and, ultimately, facilitate the sales process. So here’s a few things we did differently:

1. All podcast participants were industry experts (non-affiliated with our client) that shared their insights on key industry topics.

2. No promotional pitches for our client were allowed in the podcasts; rather the focus was on hot-button industry topics.

3. Each podcast was structured in a way that could provide the most value to the audience (in terms of topic, insights, length, etc.)

4. The podcasts were hosted in an open WordPress/Podpress platform allowing for social sharing, bookmarking, tagging, rating, etc. No registration forms were required to access the podcasts.

5. The podcasting program was tightly integrated into our clients marketing mix and featured on their web site, their e-newsletter, their blog, their social network presences, and so on.

6. Production costs were kept low primarily because the content itself ended up being extremely valuable.

In social media marketing, if you provide value to your community, you will get value back!

If you would like to visit the site of the award-winning podcasting program (that’s still being very very successful), it’s Xyleme Voices.

Technorati Tags:: Marketing Wisdom, MarketingSherpa, Podcasts

MarketingProfs B2B Forum just finished up.  Very well organized event, great network of colleagues as always, excellent keynotes, some good insights overall, but, honestly, I feel I only got some tangible value out of maybe half the presentations I attended (so, clearly, I did not choose wisely what sessions to go to).  My feedback for that: would it be possible for MarketingProfs to tag sessions with a bit more info so as to help people like me on what to attend (an example would be to call out the level of the sessions so as to be able to better know what to expect)?
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Technorati Tags:: B2B forum, B2B marketing, lead generation, lead management automation, MarketingProfs, social media marketing

A few months ago I read a nice post by Adam Cohen on when social media is right for your business and when not; it was entertaining and conversational as well as quite truthful. So, based on my own experiences in social media marketing, I wanted to post a few notions that I think are still largely misrepresented in a number of organizations.
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Technorati Tags:: SEO, Social Media, social media marketing, twitter

With the amount of hype and plethora of information on social media monitoring, the selection of a social media monitoring tool can seem like a daunting task. It doesn’t have to be, as long as it’s understood that there is absolutely no silver bullet here and the tool is only a part of your social media strategy.

Having been through this selection process in a number of client projects, here are few steps to (hopefully) make it a bit easier to follow:
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Technorati Tags:: listening campaign, Social Media Monitoring, social media tools

This year Covisio had the opportunity to run a number of social media listening campaigns for our clients worldwide (please note that our clients are primarily in the high technology sector). As we are rapidly approaching the end of the year, I wanted to share a few real-world cases that we came across and I think are quite useful to show what can happen (or not happen) in social media monitoring programs.

So here are our most telling stories:
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Technorati Tags:: listening campaign, ROI, Social Media Monitoring, social media strategy, technology marketing, twitter

MarketingProfs Digital Mixer 2009 just wrapped up. Great event overall, some sessions more insightful than others, no vendor pitches in the presentations, lots of powerful taglines (see #mpdm on Twitter), very good insights. Here’s my set of bulleted notes (note: B2B focus).
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Technorati Tags:: B2B marketing, Digital Mixer, lead generation, marketing ROI, MarketingProfs, social media marketing, Social Media Monitoring

Not too long ago I followed a nice discussion on Ken Burbary’s blog about social media monitoring tools. Ken had come along some noticeable inconsistencies in the results reported by two leading social media platforms, namely Radian6 and Alterian/Techrigy SM2. Since we have been working here at Covisio with both of these tools for a while now, I agreed to post a few numbers based on our own experience from a real-world listening campaign that we are currently running for one of our clients in the enterprise software space.
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Technorati Tags:: Alterian, listening campaign, Radian6, Social Media Monitoring, social media tools, Techrigy SM2

Last month, Matt Dickman on Techno//Marketer kicked off a great conversation on the need to treat content as commerce. In the post, he outlined a few key steps to succeeding with content-driven sites:

1. Create a clear interface for your users.
2. Rank your site’s content in the order it is valuable to the business and weigh that with the value to the consumer.
3. Visualize your traffic to see where it is going and shift it to the content you value.
4. Track and adopt over time.

What intrigued me here was the ensuing discussion on how to actually assign value to that content. Matt argues that the values can be arbitrary (with some level of executive agreement/approval) as long as the process is helping to more effectively manage the site. Others argued that there was little value in made-up figures. The only consensus seemed to be that this would be a very good, but very difficult exercise. In other words: a nonstarter.
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Technorati Tags:: Content Marketing, content ROI, content value

I was speaking to one of my clients about a potential podcast series as part of their social media initiative. He informs me that he knows of a great vendor who produces podcasts – and, at $3,000 a pop, they are a total bargain. My first thought: are podcasts lux items now?
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Technorati Tags:: marketing content, Podcasts, ROI, web 2.0

Following up to my discussion on the value (or lack thereof) of email marketing in today’s environment from an earlier blog posting, here are the six things you definitely need to have thought through before launching an email campaign.
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Technorati Tags:: Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy, technology marketing