On my part, after reading about the campaign on Joe Pulizzi’s blog, I eagerly sought out the videos, rewatched both commercials, and scoured the blogosphere for more coverage. By the end of the day I had not only further publicized the campaign via facebook and twitter; I had physically told at least three people about it. That’s right, actual word of mouth!

But while the blogosphere, twitterverse, and facebookalaxy (too much?) were all buzzing about Old Spice, one burning question plagued every marketer. Will this actually translate to sales? Well, ladies and gentleman, the numbers are in.

Since the campaign launched in February, Old Spice sales have been on the rise. Brandweek reported that Old Spice sales rose 55% over the past three months, and 107% in the last month alone (stats published by Nielsen). Though it can only officially be called a correlation, I think it’s safe to consider this campaign a triumph in social media marketing. Mashable’s Stan Schroeder went as far as calling it “the archetype of a successful social media campaign,” and that was before any sales figures were released.

Will anyone be able to replicate this lightning-in-a-bottle campaign? Probably not.  There is a huge novelty element to this strategy that can’t be undervalued.  Old Spice was the first brand to tap into its social network in such a direct and, let’s face it, hilarious way. How then, can Old Spice’s success apply to you and your company? How can you translate it into your own content marketing efforts? First of all: don’t copy it. A lot of people are going to try and copy this campaign, and the public will know exactly what you’re up to.

Old Spice Guy is just one man, albeit an incredibly handsome one. He couldn’t possibly address more than a small fraction of Old Spice’s ever-increasing followers on twitter. But the mere possibility that he might led thousands of web users to jump on board and tweet their little hearts out.  In the same vein as the Creators Project, which continues to draw in hundreds of facebook fans daily, Old Spice offered the mere possibility of something great. In this case, being personally addressed before millions of online viewers… by an incredibly handsome man in a bath towel.

That is a tactic you can use. Provide the possibility of something incredible, but keep it limited. Make a demand for it. If you don’t know where to start in terms of devising that inspired must-have reward, why not ask your customers? What do THEY want? Tap into them as a resource, and then implement their ideas so they know they’re being listened to. Whatever plan of action you take, it should single out customers/readers/etc as individuals that are uniquely valued. It can be done at random, or maybe as a reward for loyal followers.

And if you can think of an angle that is really appropriate for your customers, why not create something that they will actually enjoy? Your marketing content should provide useful information for your clients, but you can also have a bit of fun with it. If you’re not sure you can pull it off,  consider hiring writers to create the kind of smart, punchy content that just might get your social network buzzing. After all, who doesn’t need a bit of light, funny, engaging fluff now and again?

Nicola Fairhead is an ideaLaunch editorial intern with a ferocious appetite for writing, editing, and consuming content.  She has quickly become a content marketing evangelist.

Image courtesy of http://www.shoppingblog.com/blog/3291015

3 Key Ingredients of Effective Website Tip Centers

• Base Content on Keyword Research: Don’t rely on opinion to decide what type of information to include in your tip center. Conduct key word research to identify the terminology that is likely to attract the right people to your website. Choose the topics for your tips carefully, focusing on topics that people are actively searching for online and that will appeal to individuals who are likely to need what your company has to offer.
• Provide Value to Readers: Tips are only valuable if they provide useful information to members of your target audience. For example, if you determine that the phrase “social media” is an appropriate key phrase for your audience, don’t just define what social media is. Instead, give readers ideas for how they can utilize social media effectively or provide criteria for determining which social media sites they need to participate in. Focus on sharing other interesting tidbits that they can use.
• Project a Professional Image: The quality of the content published on your website – on every single page of it – will have an impact on how people perceive your company. Effective tip centers must feature content that is well-written, factual, grammatically correct, and free from spelling mistakes.

Mary Gormandy White is co-founder of Mobile Technical Institute, where she works with clients throughout the U.S. as a professional trainer, consultant, and speaker, focusing on topics related to HR, management, and public relations. She has extensive professional writing experience and is the author of 101 Human Resource Management Tips and 101 Successful PR Campaign Tips in the LifeTips book series.

Image from webreputationmanagement.net

Spice up your blog! I especially liked Zachary Sniderman’s “HOW TO: Add Multimedia to Your Blog” because he not only offers advice on what to add to your blog to make it more exciting – he also reveals HOW (very exciting if you’re as technologically-challenged as I am). His post provides technical tips on how to smoothly integrate pictures, audio, and video into your blog.

Tips: Offer them. Stop for a minute and think about the most valuable people in your life – the ones you go to when you’re really in need of a friend. Chances are, these people are not the friends with the coolest cars or swankiest apartments, but rather the friends you know you can rely on for solid advice. Doesn’t it seem like this relationship truism should apply to business relationships as well? I think it definitely does, and that’s why I love Mary White’s post on how offering advice through a tip center can improve your website (and your business).

Learn from the best. Sean Platt is right – Pixar’s films really are the best of the best. Toy Story. Ratatouille. A Bug’s Life. I haven’t been disappointed by a single one of them. Sean is also right in asserting that this should be the same goal of every marketing blog – to never disappoint. In “Make Your Readers Love You: 5 Lessons from Pixar,” he applies Pixar’s success to blogging, highlighting the importance of things like consistency, dedication, teamwork, and hiring excellent writers.

Content is for sales. It’s easy to get over-excited when creating content and start writing some things just for the fun of writing them. But content is not for you, silly writer! Joe Pulizzi’s post serves as a sometimes much-needed reminder that the whole point of content marketing is to drive sales. He offers some great ways to gauge if your content is truly serving this purpose, or if it needs some redirection.

The ideas don’t grow on trees. In this big to-do about what is going to happen to the publishing, magazine, and newspaper industries as tree-free publications are on the rise, Seth Godin’s post “But Who Will Speak for the Trees?” reminds us that paper is only a vehicle for ideas. Though it has been the vehicle of choice for centuries, the ideas are what actually matter. I concede that it is a little scary to think about good old paper books being completely displaced. But on the other hand, if there are new ways to get ideas across – maybe even better, more efficient ways – and save trees at the same time, shouldn’t we be excited about and supportive of these changes?

Marcella Vieraitis is a summer intern at ideaLaunch. She loves writing and editing, and is soaking up all there is to learn about the world of blogging, social media, and content marketing.

Step Back:

Assuming you already have a variety of social media presences on the web, figure out which ones bear the most fruit. Where are the conversations taking place? Which community has the most active users? These are your targets for finding new blood, people who are already taking part.

Sync Your Profiles:

By interlinking your profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube, et. al), you have a unified front. You can connect with a variety of people on a variety of platforms in this way, as well as access their information on those same platforms.

Share Your Needs:

Use your established platforms to put your needs out there. Those who respond aren’t simply trolling job boards or resume reservoirs for work, but actually taking part in your online conversations. These writers are more likely to already have a firm grasp on your audience (themselves) and will likely be able to write web content that fits your needs.

Lou Perseghin lives in Providence, RI and works for a non-profit managing volunteers, recruiting members and handling marketing efforts.

Image from backgroundalert.com

3 Benefits of Website Tip Centers

• Capture Readers with Appealing Format: Brief, catchy tips are the perfect format for website marketing content. That’s because Internet users have a notoriously short attention span and find themselves drawn to useful snippets of information. They’re much more likely to pay attention to brief tips related to topics that interest them than to lengthy articles on the same subject matter.
• Increase Website Stickiness: It’s one thing to attract visitors to your website, but another matter entirely to keep them there. Providing interesting tips is a great way to encourage website visitors to spend time on your website, especially when you use an internal linking strategy. If a visitor lands on an interesting tip that links to another, there’s a good chance that he or she will click through for more information again and again. Cross linked tips are a great way to increase page views per visit.
• Improve Conversion Rates: A tip center that is based on sound key phrase research is likely to drive targeted organic traffic to your website. When you are attracting the right people to visit your site using the relevant content, and that content is good, it’s only natural that conversion rates will increase.

Mary Gormandy White is co-founder of Mobile Technical Institute, where she works with clients throughout the U.S. as a professional trainer, consultant, and speaker, focusing on topics related to HR, management, and public relations. She has extensive professional writing experience and is the author of 101 Human Resource Management Tips and 101 Successful PR Campaign Tips in the LifeTips book series.

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/wurzle/659315/

The best internal linking strategy takes planning. If you blog a lot, build an editorial calendar to

map out your blog posts for the week, month, or even the year. You’ll spot lots of opportunities for internal linking. By planning post topics in advance, you won’t forget about relevant posts you wrote months ago, and you can breathe new life into them with an internal link. Here are some tips on internal linking strategies you might not have thought about.

1. Don’t tell the whole story. Don’t give away the farm in every post. Instead, use early posts to build basic concepts, and expand on those concept in later posts, linking back to key points. Think of those internal linkbacks like a book or movie sequel, which spends some time in the first chapter or the beginning of the movie re-telling the back story.
2. Share related stories. Adding a “related stories” widget to your blog provides the perfect opportunity for internal links. When you work from an editorial calendar, you’ll have a good idea of what posts will show up in that list.
3. Don’t be afraid of outbound links. Outbound links encourage linkbacks from the blogs you linked to but, more importantly, they can help your blog post go viral. You can count on the blogger you linked to sharing your post with his network—and his readers may share it with their networks, and so it goes. If you believe in “content karma,” you can build your bank account with outbound links. But even if you don’t subscribe to “paying it forward,” generous outbound links are an effective internal linking strategy.

Dawn Allcot is a full-time freelance writer and blogger. She frequently writes about technology, business, parenting and paintball.

Image from dexter.lib.mi.us

In the Wednesday-is-the-New-Weekend spirit, this Wednesday I decided to highlight posts about being proactive. When something isn’t going the way  you want it to, you have to do something about it. These bloggers all give great insights on how to make sure you are always thinking about how to create your own success instead of just riding out week after week, hoping for miracles.

Be original. Joe Pulizzi’s tip for content marketers is to “Create Your Own Content Category.” Instead struggling to compete for the same keyword categories, why not just make a new one? Joe gives examples of new terms that successful content marketers have created.

Be popular. I actually really don’t like popularity contests. They infuriate me. If the world worked my way, everyone would get exactly what they deserved based solely on effort and competence. But Dean Rieck makes the very valid point that that’s not the way the world works – so we shouldn’t pretend it is. In “The 7 Secrets of Running a Wildly Popular Blog,” Dean argues that, as a blog writer, you have to make a conscious effort to make your readers like you, and gives insight into how to go about the wooing.

Be picky. If you don’t like cupcakes, then even though Wednesday cupcake-nights were great for me, they will fail miserably at improving your week. The same goes for marketing strategies. In his post “Getting to scale: direct marketing vs. mass market thinking,” and points out that while mass marketing may work fabulously for huge, well-known companies (and therefore seem like the way to go), direct marketing may actually be the much better solution for smaller business-to-business companies. You be selective and take the time to think about what strategy will actually work for your particular business.

Don’t be lazy. Laziness is what gets us into slumps in the first place. I’ve spent a lot of posts talking about how great social media is for marketing. And it is great – as long as you don’t get lazy about it. Kipp Bodnar’s post, “7 Reasons Social Media  is Bad for Marketing,” reminds us that social media is a tool to be utilized, not a magic dust you can sprinkle on your marketing campaign. Kipp highlights some of the ways that social media could actually hurt your business if you get lazy and stop constantly assessing how you are using it.

Ask questions. The best way to be proactive about anything is to always be looking to find new solutions, new avenues for success. And the best way to find nuggets of wisdom? Ask for them!  Chris Brogan says to “Carry Questions Around with You” and always be ready to ask potential mentors about how you can improve your business.

Marcella Vieraitis is a summer intern at ideaLaunch. She loves writing and editing, and is soaking up all there is to learn about the world of blogging, social media, and content marketing.

With brick and mortar stores, it’s easy. If a customer comes in and makes a purchase, that’s a sale. While ultimately that’s still the goal, the process of getting to the sale is much more involved now than simply putting an ad in the Yellow Pages. With all the new ways to spread the word, how do you know you’re improving conversion rates from interest to sale and having an impact?

One of the best ways is to track your communication, ideally through an employee working in social media monitoring productivity. Metrics like how many questions have you received through your channels, how many positive/negative interactions have you had and how many thank you’s have you received are valuable, as is how those interactions have grown or changed over time. These twitter tactics and Facebook practices show that you care about your user/customer base.

As well, utilizing link, shortening services such as bit.ly or tinyurl allow you to track the number of clicks over time as well as the source of those links (and where they’ve been shared,) allowing you to track how your customers interact with each other.

So how does this translate to your business growth? It’s all about what people are saying, and if your business is a positive contributor to the social media world (marketing on twitter or Facebook) and considerate of the way your customers access you, word of mouth will take over on its own.

Lou Perseghin lives in Providence, RI and works for a non-profit managing volunteers, recruiting members and handling marketing efforts.

Image from sbsearchmarketing.com

Are you wondering what separates SEO content from other forms of marketing-oriented written communication? The key to creating effective SEO content lies with recognizing that the information published on your website has to be carefully constructed to appeal to both readers and search engines.

3 Tips for Effective SEO Content Marketing

• Include Key Phrases—SEO content should include key phrases that represent the types of terms used by the people who are searching for what your company has to offer. Including appropriate key phrases in marketing content is the best way to attract organic traffic to your website.
• Publish Only Quality Content—It’s essential to publish quality content on your website. When visitors find their way to your site, the quality of the information provided will have an impact on whether or not they want to learn more about your organization and, ultimately, if they’ll choose to do business with you. Look at it this way: key phrases may drive visitors to your website, but the quality of the content itself will determine if they choose to stay there for a while.
• Add New Content Regularly—It’s important to add new, professionally written SEO content to your website on a regular basis. This helps with search engine ranking because search engine algorithms tend to rank websites that are updated frequently higher than others. Additionally, frequent content additions can help capture new website visitors and encourage repeat visits.

Mary Gormandy White is co-founder of Mobile Technical Institute, where she works with clients throughout the U.S. as a professional trainer, consultant, and speaker, focusing on topics related to HR, management, and public relations. She has extensive professional writing experience and is the author of 101 Human Resource Management Tips and 101 Successful PR Campaign Tips in the LifeTips book series.

Image from bostonwebcreative.com

(Little did I know that years later this would become content for blogs.)

That’s who you had in mind when you started your business, isn’t it? But it’s amazing how that simple but essential concept—doing what’s best for the customer—can be lost, especially as a company grows. Are your business practices actually hampering your ability to serve your clients/customers/readers?  Are you so focused on impressing the board, your colleagues, or even yourself that you’ve lost sight of the end recipient? Seth Godin tackled this subject in a great and typically succinct blog post last month:

Every campaign that I’ve ever seen fail has failed for precisely the same reason: it pleases the wrong person. Think about it… it wouldn’t have launched if it hadn’t pleased the boss or the client, right? Pleasing the wrong person meant failure.

If you’re in marketing, will your marketing content dazzle your customers as much as your colleagues?  Think about the customer and how they will respond. If you’re designing a product, don’t get so caught up in ground-breaking innovation that doesn’t actually benefit the consumer in the slightest.  Joe Pulizzi also addressed this issue in June, asking “Whose Business Are You Developing?” Your services should be developing your customer’s business. That is your endpoint. Your own business will grow as a result of concentrated efforts to really help your client.

In theory, content marketing is all about serving the customer. It means giving your consumers something of value, particularly information, in order to pique interest and gain trust. But when drawing up ideas for your content, whether you’re hiring freelance writers or a marketing agency,  make sure your ideas are based on what your  customers will want to see.

It may sound idealistic and oversimplified, but the root of all commerce really is the consumer. Paying attention to the little guy and making sure that he is satisfied is what will ensure your success. Especially now, with so many tools available for each individual to broadcast their opinions to the world, it is even more important to make sure you keep your consumers in mind. What do they need? How will they respond to whatever changes you have implemented?

Nicola Fairhead is an ideaLaunch editorial intern with a ferocious appetite for writing, editing, and consuming content.  She has quickly become a content marketing evangelist.

Image courtesy of http://www.branchesoflancaster.co.uk/images/newimages/red%20%20tape.gif