The content marketing gospel that everyone keeps under their beds has three entries under “media”:

1. Owned media: Your website, company social media pages, and email database
   • Strengths: You control everything.
   • Weaknesses: You mainly reach known prospects (or those who are anonymous but recently acquired through the other two kinds of media).

2. Paid media: You know: ads
   • Strengths: You can reach way out beyond your known universe.
   • Weaknesses: It costs money (bastards!).

3. Earned media: Also known as “other people” — the ones who share your stuff
   • Strengths: It’s free, it carries the personal recommendation of the sharer, and it reaches beyond your world.
   • Weaknesses: You really do have to earn it, the hard way (by producing epic content). Continue Reading

[Editor’s note: Happy Holidays! This week, the editorial team at Content Marketing Institute wanted to share some of the best content marketing blog posts we’ve seen from the CMI Online Training and Certification program’s roster of expert instructors. Today’s post originally appeared on Doug Kessler’s Velocity Partners blog on March 23, 2013. 

As we all move along the content marketing maturity curve together, the biggest companies are starting to hit a new problem: Lots and lots of different teams within your organization will be generating content for their own needs — without any coordination, orchestration, strategic validation, or quality control.

It’s the age-old challenge — local relevance vs. central control — but it’s a fairly new issue for us content people, and it’s an increasingly important one.Continue Reading

As content marketing grows more popular than Justin Bieber, there’s one question I keep hearing from those who are innately suspicious of fads (i.e., people like me):

“What’s so new about content marketing? It’s just what good marketers have always done.”

This is one of the content marketing backlash arguments that I’ve talked about here on CMI and on my company’s blog, but I think it’s worth drilling down into this one a bit further. Continue Reading

Joe Pulizzi recently wrote a blog post, 4 Truths About Content Marketing Agencies, that gave us agency types a good kicking.

Of course, Joe is right: Many “content marketing agencies” are just old-school marketing agencies with a shiny new label. And, tellingly, there wasn’t much squealing or protesting responses from the agency community. (I guess we all read it and thought, “You nailed it, Joe. Those pretenders are making us real guys look bad.“)Continue Reading

Mobile is one of those areas in which, annoyingly, B2C is way ahead of B2B. You can kind of understand why — the CMOs of Pizza Hut and Smirnoff and Pepsi would be fired by now if they hadn’t at least been groping their way towards a relationship with their mobile users (aka everyone).

In fact, Pizza Hut, Smirnoff, Pepsi and hundreds of other consumer brands have all made excellent starts in mobile. So what about the B2B mobile pioneers? It’s a desert out there.Continue Reading

As content marketing takes off in the B2B world, more and more brands will be building significant content libraries. That’s fantastic but it does create new challenges for the content marketer.

In the early days of content marketing, we were all focused on one piece at a time. Write an e-book, promote the e-book, repeat. Now that our content libraries are growing, we need to start thinking about library marketing, not just content marketing.Continue Reading