Must Market

Adobe Content Rules For 2016
Here are Adobe's 5 content "rules" for 2016 and our reactions: 

Design for the Multiscreen Reality

Agree. Finding ways to have your content move like a pinball between devices will be key. The title image used here actually came from Adobe's mobile pitch of this piece. We went to Google, grabbed the URL, shared it here and then moved the mobile image we preferred over demonstrating today's "multiscreen reality". 

Don’t Fall Victim to #TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read)
Agree and disagree. Tell great stories is what we would say. Tell great stories supported by great graphics and map your multiscreen reality. What constitutes #TLDR? Is Moby Dick TLDR? Not so much because Melville knows how to tell a story. Oh, and there is, at least, one reader sure to read your entire post - Google's spider :). 

 Humor Makes Brands More Relatable

Agree with a caveat - what you think is funny may be infantile or worse for others. Stay in tune with your audience and use humor SPARINGLY since to overuse what you think is tyranny. 

In Our Relationships We Trust

Agree with a caveat here too. Adobe talks about brands we want to talk about people. We trust our friends and their friends. The ONLY way we know to spread trust today is to win the advocacy of your core audience. "Win the advocacy of" is HARD and you must ASK FOR HELP. Be humble, ask for help, listen and your circle of trust will grow. Be inauthentic, lie or not match walk to talk and your content will come back to bite you in bad ways. 

Don’t Show Up Uninvited

Disagree. The next generation live on phones and share, share and share some more. The use of our devices as connection machines is inevitable and won't be deterred by latent fears pumped by media or poorly understood posts.  Is asking for your customers' permission and being honest about what you and your website do with information essential - yes (and DUH). Don't think this know me help me genie goes back in the bottle anytime soon, however. 

+ 5 More From Curagami

Learn To Tag
Tags, keywords, short descriptions and snippets will be key in 2016 because of Adobe's Rule #1 - the need to have content ping and play on different devices.

Think Like A Photo Editor
If you find an arresting image USE IT. Image support for content cuts down on the Too Long To Read problem while providing hooks for sharing.

Make Sharing EASY
If you have Ambassadors, those special people helping you create friends of friends marketing, empower them with suggestions, curation of great work by fellow Ambassadors and great visuals. Making sharing your content easy in 2016 is MORE than adding social widgets. Don't forget to ASK QUESTIONS too. Asking questions even if you NEVER hear an answer says you are at least interested in listening (lol).

Be Present
Nothing will kill your online marketing faster in 2016 than canned responses, nofollow@ links, not thanking supporters and not being fully present and available. Want to win hearts, minds and loyalty with content in 2016? Then LISTEN, CURATE and REWARD (LCR). 

Leave Room & Reduce Space
Seems like a contradiction, but we mean your content should always anticpate engagement, ask for involvement and look to reward those who help. Reduce the space between YOU (creators of a site) and THEM (those using and contriuting to your conent) by creating sustainble commuity. LOVE your readers and customes and they will love you back. 

Please Note
I modified the Adobe graphics without permission demonstrating our 6th rule of content for 2016 - collaborate and build on. If Adobe's lawyers are reading this we hope they are in a forgiving mood and understand our desire was to curate and build onto a great post not steal, or at least not steal outright :). Marty 

 

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Medium Cool
Why do we need another blogging tool? Reasonable question. If Medium was simply and only another micro-blogging and content curation tool then the answer would be in the negative.

We don’t need another blogging tool no matter how cool, efficient and mobile-ready the new tool’s User Interface. That’s why Medium isn’t a micro-blogging tool. Medium is a community forming NOW and that has many benefits including:

* Grow with the network while not as crowded as Medium will become.

* Fill the hole between your blogs and social nets.

* Curate across your owned properties easily into one place.

* Create and curate mobile ready content.

Brands are under attack by 5 Ninja: clean slate, social media, death of old media, mobile & User Generated Content. How defeat attacking Ninja horde?

Successful content marketing engages over time. Engagement needs online community and a role shift from content creators to community curators and GAME creators.

The New New Marketing
There was a time before the web when "digital marketing" was somethign you did with your fingers. Then everything changed. Change came fast and furious thanks to Moore's Law - Integrated circuit POWER goes up exponentially even as costs plummet.

Once our digital world got to a certain point, let's call that point X, acceleration accelerates. Mobile throws gasoline on the social fire and gets answered by social media marketing with rocket fuel on the fire.

The resulting explosion in a kingdom called BRANDING in a land far, far away once upon a time...

Read the Curagami Story and worry less :). M

Learn the ideal length of Facebook posts, tweets, blog posts, Google+ headlines, title tags, paragraphs, and so much more.

Beginning of the End - Marty Note
This  Marketing Land report confirms Mark Schaeffer's Content Shock and highlights a few of our favorite rants including:

Burn Your Website THINKING Down
 http://www.curagami.com/burn-down-your-website-3-more-reasons/

and Tactical web marketing, that time when it was possible to beat the crowd and gain competitive advantage is gone too. When your website is simply another marketing tactic and not connected to the bone and sinew of your company, brand or spirit then you will end up talking to yourself about yourself. 

Websites are focused on US (we lucky few web marketers) more often than not. Good luck with that going forward. Tomorrow's website will be focused on THEM (customers) with more ways to connect, engage, empower, and inspire than we can imagine.  

Content marketing is over time to start thinking about and creating whatever is next.  Oh, and content curation will be a big part what's next we are convinced since curation combines creation, support and tribalism. 

http://www.curagami.com/burn-down-your-website-3-more-reasons/

What is a listicle? It is a post arranged in a list format, and each point is supported with a relevant (and quirky) image or GIF to keep readers engaged. So if you find a post titled something like ‘15 Things Every Woman Should Do Before She Turns 25’, you are looking at a listicle.

Just like America’s fascination with twerking, many people had predicted that the booming popularity of listicles was just a passing fad. Contrary to the prophecy, use of listicles have expanded so much so that they are now being touted as the “new face of content marketing”.

Successful content marketing engages over time. Engagement needs online community and a role shift from content creators to community curators and GAME creators.

Streaming Downton Abbey via Roku and Amazon Prime this weekend struck a nerve. As the web continues to destroy middlemen and gatekeepers concepts like “CBS” and “Time Warner Cable” are in play. Watching Amazon move from webpage arbitrage to web services platform to streaming video seller got me thinking about tips every content marketer should steal …

We Are All Media Companies Now
Working on how to create community with our new tool (http://www.crowdfunde.com) has me realizing sometimes you write things that don't SUCK and whose meaning becomes more clear as we move forward in time. 

Red Bull's Branding Lessons: We Are All Media Companies Now is reading that way. Evergreen content? Not quite yet. We need to think and write some more, but glad to see shares continue to increase as that means we've touch a nerve.

Social shares increasing over time also means as new people come in they find the piece valuable and that is an indication the content's sell by date is still off in the future. I'm thinking on a Red Bull II. If you have suggestions for similar GET IT social or content marketing companies please share in comments or email to martin(at)crowdfunde.com.

Much appreciated and glad to provide attributions and links back once Red Bull Redux is written. Red Bull On. Marty  

If you are going to create #contentmarketing these days it better be EPIC. There is way too much noise. Only Epic Content will do. Here are 5 Easy Steps To Create Epic Content Marketing:

* Get your C-level executives to BELIEVE.
* Think Mobile First.
* Work with customers and creating a "commons".
* COPE (Create Once Publish Everywhere).
* Write a Content Marketing Mission Statement.

Set the stage with those easy steps and EPIC is possible, epic content marketing is probable IF your commitment is strong, you learn fast and you don't mind failing a little. Remember the content you write is NOT about you.

Epic content marketing is always about CUSTOMERS. Answering questions, solving pain points and finding innovative ways to be "of service" are all great ideas for your EPIC content marketing.

When it comes to social media, there are two platforms that are no longer optional: Facebook and Google Plus. Yes, Twitter is cool and Pinterest is fun, but they can’t do for your real estate business what Facebook and Google Plus can -- at least not yet.