By Rex Hammock
By the time innovative, creative and insightful marketing trends become conventional marketing wisdom, they are no longer innovative, creative or insightful.
By Rex Hammock
Eight years ago—January 23, 2008, to be exact—I received an email congratulating my personal blog, RexBlog.com, for being ranked No. 13 on a list of the most prominent content marketing blogs of that era. In a later post that day, I thanked them for including me on the list, but I explained why I didn’t like the term content marketing. I still don’t. (However, I did say I’d use any term that potential clients prefer when googling for our services.)
Amara’s Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
—Roy Amara (1925–2007), Stanford Research Institute
By Rex Hammock
Just as conventional wisdom was writing off podcasting, it’s suddenly this year’s “it” media. Two weeks ago, The New York Times joined The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, NPR and other media companies to announce the creation of a team focused entirely on developing podcasts.
By Rex Hammock
As a company that works on client websites all day, we have an ironic confession to make: We don’t like our company website. Among other things, it breaks way too many of the beliefs we preach on the Idea Email.
By Rex Hammock
Developing a corporate content strategy should have nothing to do with figuring out how many blog posts (or pieces of content) you can include in next year’s marketing budget.
Developing a content strategy should be focused on being the oxygen that your customers and prospects must breathe to do their jobs and pursue their passions.
By Rex Hammock
No matter your beliefs regarding politics, investment strategy or marketing technology, the past few months have been a lesson in why it is impossible to understand Twitter. I’ll admit that I’ve been saying the same thing since the earliest days of the Twitter era.* On my personal blog, I once wrote more than 10,000 words over the course of a year on why understanding Twitter is impossible. (Yes, the post was partially satire to explain why it can’t be explained.)
Marketing with content can mean many different things these days. Recently, we’ve seen the term content marketing applied to the use of social media, video commercial campaigns posted on YouTube, various forms of search engine optimization, inbound marketing, and on and on. The common thread running through these uses is their focus on customer acquisition efforts: building email lists, generating leads, driving traffic, getting likes and followers.
By Rex Hammock
Perhaps it was the “Hello, Computer” voice-interface on “Star Trek.” Or maybe it was the 1987 Apple concept video about a futuristic device called the Knowledge Navigator in which a user and agent had a conversation via a tablet-like device.
If you’ve ever watched the National Geographic show, “Brain Games,” you’ve probably been amazed at how often our brains work differently than we assume they do. The show reveals the expression, “My brain is playing a trick on me,” is more often true than we could ever imagine. Indeed, in one episode, magician David Copperfield explains that a deep understanding of such natural brain tricks is the key to a magician’s craft.
Imagine if someone applied for a senior finance position at your company. “What are your credentials?” you ask. “I’m an Excel rock star,” they answer. “But you have no business background or training in accounting,” you respond. “But have you seen how great my charts look?”