From what I hear through the cubicle grapevine, one of last year’s summer interns had the fantastic idea to post a weekly “round-up” of the best blog posts of each week. I’ve decided to restart the intern tradition. Every Wednesday, I’ll round up my current top five posts of content marketing genius, and then give a little blurb on why I think they’re worth reading. Here are this week’s winning words of wisdom:

Rules are for robots. This is the basic logic behind Mike Volpe’s explaination of “Why a Social Media Policy is Stupid” in his HubSpot post. He questions why companies feel the need to make specific policies for social media practices when they have never had explicit rules for any other types of person-to-person communication. I think his point is worth considering. What kind of attitude do you want to form around your business’s use of social media? If it starts to become regarded as programmed and robotic,  you risk missing the whole point of social media marketing in the first place – utilizing connections between people.

No one is stopping you. According to Seth Godin, “Validation is Overrated.” It’s always nice to have some positive reinforcement now and again, but I think this encouragement is especially helpful in the realm of blogging and social media. Online forums have bestowed us with a new ability to speak directly and instantly to people who want to hear us, so why not fully utilize this freedom?

Get to the point. Time and time again I’ll start excitedly telling a story, really getting into it – word-for-word dialogue, hand motions – and then I’ll look up to take a breath and realize that no one is listening to me anymore. It is always so tempting to give as many details as possible when talking about something that really excites us. But this is not how to keep listeners. In his article “Simplify and Package the Sale,” Chris Brogan gives some useful tips on how engage your customers with simple, to-the-point information so that they stay as excited as you are about your product.

The cover matters. The old “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” adage doesn’t cut it when it comes to marketing content, especially online marketing content. Mary White reminds us that it doesn’t matter how good your content is if people don’t stick around long enough to read it, and she outlines some useful strategies for how to “Enhance Website Content with Visual Appeal.”

From the experts: “6 Challenges to Managing a Brand on the Social Web.” Mashable consulted six experts in the field of web marketing to put together this list of the biggest challenges you can face in trying to manage an online marketing campaign today. While it’s important to stay up-to-date with the constant feed of new ways you can utilize social media, it’s also important to stop for a minute and think about the roadblocks you may encounter once you dive in – and how you should best deal with them.

Marcella Vieraitis is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.

Tags: content marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Content Creation, Content Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.