By Megan Totka
Before businesses began to really cash in on the power of social media, people were signing up for Twitter, Facebook and MySpace accounts in the privacy of their homes. These platforms allowed a new medium for self-expression, along with networking opportunities. Businesses began to see the advantages of connecting with their customers and started using social media, too. Just over five years into the social media boom, it is not uncommon to see individual accounts with hundreds, or even thousands, of followers or friends. While there is nothing wrong with being popular in online circles, an unexpected consequence has arisen for businesses: co-branded employees.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
Two content marketing all-stars, Katherine Fletcher and Darin Diehl, presented at Social Media Breakfast Ottawa on Wednesday on how businesses can use rich, interactive content to increase brand awareness, build communities and generate leads.
Katherine is the senior vice-president, senior partner and managing director of digital at High Road Communications, an interactive communications agency. She was also appointed in 2007 as a global chair for Fleishman-Hillard’s international digital practice group where she works with a small, global team of digital leaders to drive innovative digital communications with specialists worldwide.
Darin is the assistant vice-president of digital communications at Sun Life Financial Canada, and the leader of the team that developed BrighterLife.ca, a social media-powered, consumer-focused portal where Canadians can engage with the brand and each other about financial challenges and opportunities they face in their everyday lives.
Katherine and Darin developed and executed the content marketing program that would support the launch and ongoing success of BrighterLife.ca. On Wednesday, they explained the efforts that went on behind the scenes that helped it become an award-winning site. I also had the opportunity to chat with Katherine before the show to glean some more details about their content marketing program.
Read More
By Professor Dominique Turpin
I have some sad news: the Chief Marketing Officer is dead.
Fortunately, I’m talking about the CMO position rather than a particular person. But the decline of the CMO’s influence is an alarming trend in companies that claim to put the customer first but in reality continue to be product-driven.
CMOs are increasingly powerless and peripheral. The CEO sets the overall strategy, the R&D and innovation teams design the product, and the CFO determines pricing and departmental budgets. The CMO, meanwhile, reports to a chief executive who often has only partial knowledge of the customer. No wonder some CMOs are considering a career change.
The CMO position is dead for several reasons:
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are TechCrunch, The New York Times, VentureBeat, Bloomberg Businessweek and Boston Magazine.
Should your startup go freemium?
Over the last several months, there has been an intense debate about the viability of freemium business models. For some, freemium is a costly trap, a business model that sacrifices revenues and forces a startup to support freeloaders who will never become paying customers. For others, freemium is the future of business, the logical conclusion for a world in which the cost of bandwidth, storage, and information processing approaches zero. Both sides agree that the model is extremely powerful. As Rob Walling of HitTail notes in a recent Wall Street Journal article, freemium is like a Samurai sword: “unless you’re a master at using it, you can cut your arm off.”
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs recently released a report on the state of B2B content marketing in North America that declared, “B2B marketers are spending more, using more tactics, and distributing their content on more social networks than they have in years past,” but that they are also “more uncertain whether they are using various content marketing tactics effectively.”
The 2013 B2B content marketing benchmarks, budgets and trends survey was emailed to a sample of B2B marketers from among MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute members and subscribers. A total of 1,416 B2B marketers responded from North American companies in August this year, representing a full range of industries, functional areas, and company sizes. The majority of respondents were from advertising and marketing companies that have fewer than 10 employees.
The survey found that 91 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing, but most are challenged with producing enough content. This is different from previous years when the top challenge was producing engaging content.
Read More
By Megan Totka 
