What to do when everyone has Thought Leadership Content?
The problem with thought leadership is that the term ‘Thought Leadership’ is overused, abused, and can harm your business. Let me explain…
In many cases people refer to it as ‘thought leadership content’, which in essence refers to the act of publishing material that tries to position you or your company as a thought leader.
I think that is a very limiting view, and incomplete as a thought leadership content strategy.
Lately I have been increasingly “fed-up” with the vast amount of ebooks and webinars thrown at me, with great sticky titles, and sometimes even great authors or speakers, but with low or mediocre quality in the end.
I think it is the fault of inbound marketing. No, let me rephrase that: It is the fault of everyone jumping on the inbound marketing band-wagon, and executing poorly. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with inbound marketing. It can work really well, but only if you understand- and execute it properly.
What are new tasks of salespeople in the digital world?
The digital evolution has changed how organizations conduct business. There’s a lot of change happening: customers now have new ways of communicating using social media, forums and product reviews. They gather real-time information on products and services, and engage with brands in real-time, using mobile phones and more.
The rise of real-time messaging applications like Snapchat, Vine, Instagram and others signal a new era where customers increasingly expect personal experiences and instant real-time interactions. Instant shipping of products in ever shorter times provide instant gratification to buyers that live in the moment of today.
More access to information also means buyers increasingly research products, even for low involvement products like FMCG, fashion, computer software, multimedia products or home decoration. More and more of the buying process is happening online, where buyers today need to be served more and more by the content that marketers provide them.
The abundance of online content and channels is shifting the power from the seller to the buyer. Today buyers are more informed then ever, in which they don’t need salespeople anymore to help them buy. Or, salespeople get invited to conversations much later these days because of online content, in which they are confronted with very educated customers.
What is the impact of all of these changes on the role of salespeople within the buying process? Read more 
Social Business Strategy – The Law of the Squeezing Social Media Networks
What happened in 2014 in the field of digital marketing can best be compared with the Law of Bernoulli.
This law is very simple to understand: put your foot on a water hose and turn on the tap. What happens next, in my imagination, is a bubble of water that appears in the hose, just like in the Tom & Jerry cartoons from my childhood. On one side of the bubble, the pressure is higher. And on the other side, at the far end, only a little bit of water comes out. Take your foot of the water hose, and “voilà”, there is again plenty of water. Agreed, Bernoulli’s law is more complex than that, but this is supposed to be Bernoulli’s law “for dummies”.
In 2014, we’ve seen that Facebook started putting both feet firmly on our social media water hoses. Where we used to enjoy delicious free organic reach for our content, with “Facebook Zero” that organic reach came to a standstill. If we want to reach our Facebook friends as a brand, an hose them down with our updates, we’ll have to pay “please-get-your-foot-of-the-water-hose”-money to Facebook.
What is less known is that not only Facebook is doing this. Other titans like Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn are taking steps in this direction.
Why do they do that? Obviously it comes down to money.
But it’s about more than just money … Read more
(Slideshare) How to plan & design your social business CULTURE ?
A couple of weeks ago I published a blog post with a “way-too-long-title”.
But what the heck, I still decided to call it “How have IBM, Adobe, and Dell become a Social Business? And what can a smaller company learn from them?”.
Sometimes you just need to do what you think you need to do, even when it’s not in line with digital marketing best practices. Read more
How have IBM, Adobe, and Dell become a Social Business? And what can a smaller company learn from them?
What can small and medium business (SMB) learn from giants such as IBM, Adobe and Dell about becoming a social business?
At first sight learning from these giants seems a crazy idea. SMB’s are different by every means. They have less budget, less employees, and certainly have different problems.
But surprisingly, when looking at how these large companies have become social businesses, there is a lot smaller companies can learn…
For this blog post I have:
- studied the social business strategies of IBM, Adobe and Dell in detail,
- mapped out a the best practices from these companies
- formulated some best practices feasible for SMBs.
Social Business has now become Inevitable and Unavoidable
When Facebook ended the “free love era”, they drastically scaled back the organic reach of brands. It seemed for many marketers as if history repeated itself.
For a few years they enjoyed the exposure the network brought. But today, if you want exposure, you’ll need to pay to play. For brands on Facebook, these are dark days. They can choose to spend more money to reach fans they had already accumulated in the past, but Facebook will likely decrease branded reach even further.
It isn’t long before other large social media networks will do the same.
What are brands to do when social media networks are choosing to reduce the freedom that brands can play on their networks?
The evolution of Facebook – signaling the era of Social 3.0
According to a new report from Simply Measured, the total engagement for the top 10 most-followed brands on Facebook has declined 40 percent year-over-year—even as brands have increased the amount of content they’re posting by 20.1 percent.
To understand a little bit on what’s happening, we need to go back a few years in the history of Facebook, and then look into the future of what is most probably going to happen. Read more
From Content Marketing to Meaningful Marketing: Crossing the Chasm
Crossing the Chasm is a marketing book by Geoffrey A. Moore that focuses on the specifics of marketing high tech products during the early start up period.
It provides a great analogy for companies aspiring to move their content marketing initiative beyond content marketing, through social business towards meaningful marketing.
In this blog post I’ll explain why I believe the path to meaningful marketing starts with content marketing, gradually becoming a social business, and then towards meaningful marketing.
The question is how do you move from content marketing, to social business, towards meaningful marketing ? Read more
Employer Branding using Real Customer Stories, Through Employee Peer-to-Peer Connectivity
Current employer branding implementations are incomplete.
Employer branding is much more than a slogan send through traditional stories to future employees.
If you want to attract the right candidate, usually hard to get candidates, you’ll have to do more than setting up branded job sites with “feel good” content. Read more
9 Key Change Management Essentials for Epic Content Marketing
What change is needed in an organization to be successful with content marketing?
Answering todays marketing challenges is a daunting task for most of us.
Not only is marketing increasingly becoming a digital environment, marketing itself is changing. Buyers demand value on top of existing products and services. They want you to inspire them, educate them, and entertain them.
Embracing a content marketing culture is the first step towards becoming a social business. It is the first step to creating marketing that people actually want.
It requires great, or small changes, depending on your current corporate culture:
- from outbound to inbound
- from self-centric to meaningful
- from classic to digital
- from art to science
Here are some of the key change management essential ingredients you need to take into account when changing a company towards a content marketing culture:
