Content Marketing: Are You Part of the 38 Percent?

Just 38% of companies have a content marketing strategy. 

This headline gave me pause as I was catching up on my reading! 

Econsultancy, the London-based community of digital marketing and ecommerce professionals, recently produced their first ever-Content Marketing Report.  The report is based on a survey of more than 1,300 digital marketing professionals.  The upside to this survey is that 90% of those surveyed believe content marketing will become more important over the next twelve months.

What caught my attention though is this - just 38% currently have a defined strategy in place. 

I found the 38% to be surprising and agree with this quote from the survey:

I find it quite surprising that the vast majority of respondents use content marketing and see it as becoming more important in the next 12 months but only a minority already have a strategy in place for this area. Maybe that is a sign that the majority of users are simply ‘playing’ in this space or testing the waters. – Thomas Messett, Global Editor in Chief, Social Media at Nokia

Are you part of the 62%?

If you are part of the 62%, it may be time to start putting in place a defined content marketing strategy.  Why?  Recent studies show buyers are spending an increasing percentage of their time researching and collating information prior to sales intervention. 

You know this already.  I do not want to bore you with this being the 1,001th article making this point.  Evidence of this shift abounds everywhere.

What we need to focus on is another insight that came out of this survey.  Listen closely:

“64% of in-house marketers agree that content marketing is becoming its own discipline”.

In addition, the survey found that 55% of the respondents are working on a content marketing strategy.  A decision point for CMO’s is choosing to become part of the 55% working on a content marketing strategy.  For the very the reasons their competitors may be doing so already. 

Building an Internal Content Marketing Discipline

An emerging correlation is happening in the world of content marketing now.  To develop an effective content marketing strategy, a discipline of expertise is arising as a significant need.  I believe an expert discipline and strategy go hand in hand.  This is new for Chief Marketing Officers today.  It creates new questions:

·         What structure should be in place?

·         What new expertise should we acquire?

·         What are best practices?

·         What are new roles to put in place?

You see where this is going.  It is one thing to have a strategy.  Expertise and a discipline make strategy executable.  Conversely, expertise and a discipline help to create the best content marketing strategy. 

Five Building Blocks

To establish content marketing as a discipline and an in-house competency, what elements should you consider?  Let us look at five main building blocks:

1.       Buyer Insight: a clear understanding of buyer goals, buyer personas, buying processes, buying preferences, perceptions, and potential is essential.

2.       Publishers:  publishing is an art and science to provide informing and commercial insights. Joe Pulitzer of CMI and others recommend the role of a Chief Content Officer who acts as the corporate publisher.

3.       Editorial Teams: you will require an editorial plan and schedule.  Getting the right content to the right buyer at the right time is must-have level of expertise.

4.       Writers: journalistic skills to write compelling content is essential.  Sounds easy, takes good writing skills to do.

5.       Inbound Marketing Specialists:  specialty in campaigns and conversions keeps you informed on how well content marketing strategies are working.

Obviously, this is not your father’s marketing department.  The marketing capabilities of the future are on their way to reinvented structures.  Performing in ways, we could not have predicted just a few short years ago.  If you are thinking the five elements, I mentioned above, sounds like a news or publishing agency - you are right.  For most CMO’s, there is probably nothing in their job descriptions calling for the build out of an internal content marketing agency. 

Yet, to be successful with a content marketing strategy, this is the future imperative. 

The Future

In my previous article, I reviewed how content marketing was stuck at 36%.  The number represents how many companies believed their content marketing was effective from a survey conducted by theContent Marketing Institute.  The two perspectives do beg this question:

Is it true that of the 38% who currently have a content marketing strategy, only 36% of those who do, believes their content marketing strategies are effective?

This is a hypothesis of course and one I would like to explore.  This is where we can look at the future together.  I invite you to take a brief survey on content marketing’s future.  Here is what I will commit to you if you do so.  I will publish the results in a future article and offer insights.  My hunch is, in a few weeks, we both will learn a few things. 

Please go to this site to take the survey:  The Future of Content Marketing Survey

As we begin to look ahead, it is not too early to consider how to make content marketing an integral core capability.  What stands before us is a crossroads.  Do we believe that effective content marketing strategies require an expert discipline?  Alternatively, is it not necessary to put in the five main building blocks referenced above? 

I invite you to examine this together with me and take the survey.  The survey will remain open for 2-4 weeks.  Please do pass it along to your peers and help me crowdsource insights on this topic.   I really do want to know what you think!

Social Marketing: Connect and Be Inquisitive Says Lisa Grimm

What are the most important social media marketing skills that graduating college students need to understand?

Lisa Grimm

I’m asking three questions of some leaders in the field of social marketing and this is what I learned. This is No. 23 in the series (see the links below for other posts in the series).

Today: Lisa Grimm, Senior Manager, Social Strategy at Imagination, for whom she works onsite at General Mills leading social presence, social strategy development and brand/product integration for Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Eat Better America and Tablespoon. She can be found on Twitter as: @lulugrimm

A passion for connecting people and being curious are keys to social marketing success, says Grimm. 

"If you're inquisitive and passionate about how mass communication tools can connect people, you should make a fine social marketer," she says. 

"Innate curiosity, passion for people, a strong foundational knowledge of mass communication and wicked interpersonal, written and verbal communication skills are integral skills in social marketing," she adds.

"Social media is about connection and today brands/businesses have the opportunity to 'connect' with consumers/customers online the same way (and in the same networks) people are connecting with their friends and families.  

"This 'opportunity' should be respected and treated with great care," Grimm says. 

"And I believe it is those who seek to understand what matters to their audience, how to create meaningful and relevant content that evolves and sustains relationships are those who succeed in social marketing."

What separates a successful social marketer from the others?

"Those who question and challenge convention," Grimm says. "Additionally, those who have generated results rather than talking about how to get them."  

And, just how important is social marketing as part of the marketing mix?

"It's essential, as is strategic planning, PR, advertising (print and digital), content (collateral, print and digital) and measurement," Grimm says.

"At a minimum, the social web provides a great barometer for the climate of a brand and its competitors," she says.

"So if nothing else you can gain great intel from social listening that informs strategic communication development.

"Beyond this, social media provides the opportunity to have direct relationships with consumers and an unprecedented rate of word of mouth, which can be extremely positive or negative," Grimm says.

"Never before has this existed and the opportunities are endless."

So, what do you think? How important is social marketing in the future of marketing and what MUST graduating students know?

How to Manage Your Personal Brand on Budget

Did you know that there is 1 billon names searched in Google every day? There is no denying that managing your online presence is critical whether that’s for job hunting or building up your business credibility—what people find when they search for you can change their perception of who you are.

So what if someone has your same name and a bad reputation? Or what happens if those college drinking photos surface?

Well, now there is a way to control your Google search results that you can afford. BrandYourself was started after one of the co-founders, Pete Kistler, couldn’t land an internship because there was another guy with the same name from the same area who happened to be a drug dealer. So, naturally companies made the wrong assumption and wouldn’t hire him. Pete decided he would pay a reputation management firm a few thousand dollars to fix the problem. But his friend and fellow Syracuse University classmate, Patrick Ambron, a SEO expert, came up with a solution—BrandYourself.

Control Your Search Results

The start-up company allows you to create a profile and promote good links about yourself and push down bad links back a few pages on Google and the best part? It’s free. But if you really want to ramp up your search results you can pay for the premium version starting only at $9.99 a month. And what comes with that upgrade? Information on the people who’ve searched you and how they found you—what could be more valuable?

The biggest benefit BrandYourself offers is the fact that you don’t have to learn SEO to control your Google search results. It’s a Do-It Yourself platform. After you sign up it will walk you through the process of getting your LinkedIn profile or website to the top of your search results. It will tell you the exact actions you can take to increase the visibility of the links you want people to see and hide the ones you don’t want people to see. It also scores your profile and keeps track of your progress so if new links are added about you (or someone with the same name) you’ll be notified.

What are your Google search results saying about you? Check out this infographic from BrandYourself that shows what people are finding when they search you.

 

The Social Media Online Newsroom

Social media. Content marketing. Brand journalism. You are probably familiar with these ideas within the communications industry. I’d like to add one more to the list – online newsroom. By creating a stand-alone, news-centric website dedicated to what is happening within your organization, inside your partners and suppliers organizations, and around your industry as a whole, you can accomplish many things.

First, you establish a digital archive of press, communications, and marketing materials for your organization – giving reporters, bloggers, enthusiasts, and researchers 24x7 access to the essence of your brand, the window into your company’s vision.

Second, with search engines accounting for such a large part of referring traffic to websites, an online newsroom gives you another outlet for people to find you. By including direct links to your organization’s other website efforts such as the corporate site, E-commerce sites, Facebook and Twitter accounts, you help build relevancy and can increase your ranking in the search engines.

Finally, by creating an online newsroom, you open up all of your valuable communications content (news stories, videos, images, subject matter experts, corporate history, investor relations financial information, and events) to the world of social media. In one of our recent social media research reports, we found that there are an increasing number of people that are relying on social media to find and share news. By infusing social media into your online newsroom, you are able to engage directly with your potential customers, existing customers, as well as analysts, investors and the press. Social media can become the distribution platform for your online newsroom.

With an online newsroom, you can centralize your communications efforts, making it easy for anyone interested in learning more about your products and your organization to do so. Social media can provide a platform to extend your distribution efforts and allow you to reach new audiences directly. The social media online newsroom gives you the ultimate opportunity to present your organization’s story to all audiences, cost-effectively and efficiently.

Below are some tips for creating a better online newsroom:

1. Create news stories and features for people other than just journalists. Investors, analysts, partners, potential customers, existing customers, and brand loyalists all are interested in stories about your organization.
2. Provide immediate contact with a corporate spokesperson at trade shows or big events. Use iCHAT or create a chat format on Twitter highlighting your event.
3. Ensure that you setup an analytics package (such as Google Analytics) to provide you with statistics on traffic, content, and other valuable insights about your website.
4. Test your online newsroom on a multitude of browsers (Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and mobile devices to ensure compatibility and legibility to a wide audience.
5. Create a gallery of official corporate and product logos as well as detailed product shots.
6. Establish a dedicated news Twitter account for your news and use it to publish information automatically from your online newsroom; monitor this account frequently to address any questions people may have.
7. Create accounts with social media news aggregation sites such as StumbleUpon and Reddit to increase exposure of your news content.
8. Make sure to include email address, phone number, and corporate social accounts of all media contacts.
9. Offer translated releases available to foreign countries as part of your online newsroom.

Content Marketing: Are You Part of the 38 Percent?

Just 38% of companies have a content marketing strategy. 

This headline gave me pause as I was catching up on my reading! 

Econsultancy, the London-based community of digital marketing and ecommerce professionals, recently produced their first ever-Content Marketing Report.  The report is based on a survey of more than 1,300 digital marketing professionals.  The upside to this survey is that 90% of those surveyed believe content marketing will become more important over the next twelve months.

What caught my attention though is this - just 38% currently have a defined strategy in place. 

I found the 38% to be surprising and agree with this quote from the survey:

I find it quite surprising that the vast majority of respondents use content marketing and see it as becoming more important in the next 12 months but only a minority already have a strategy in place for this area. Maybe that is a sign that the majority of users are simply ‘playing’ in this space or testing the waters. – Thomas Messett, Global Editor in Chief, Social Media at Nokia

Are you part of the 62%?

If you are part of the 62%, it may be time to start putting in place a defined content marketing strategy.  Why?  Recent studies show buyers are spending an increasing percentage of their time researching and collating information prior to sales intervention. 

You know this already.  I do not want to bore you with this being the 1,001th article making this point.  Evidence of this shift abounds everywhere.

What we need to focus on is another insight that came out of this survey.  Listen closely:

“64% of in-house marketers agree that content marketing is becoming its own discipline”.

In addition, the survey found that 55% of the respondents are working on a content marketing strategy.  A decision point for CMO’s is choosing to become part of the 55% working on a content marketing strategy.  For the very the reasons their competitors may be doing so already. 

Building an Internal Content Marketing Discipline

An emerging correlation is happening in the world of content marketing now.  To develop an effective content marketing strategy, a discipline of expertise is arising as a significant need.  I believe an expert discipline and strategy go hand in hand.  This is new for Chief Marketing Officers today.  It creates new questions:

·         What structure should be in place?

·         What new expertise should we acquire?

·         What are best practices?

·         What are new roles to put in place?

You see where this is going.  It is one thing to have a strategy.  Expertise and a discipline make strategy executable.  Conversely, expertise and a discipline help to create the best content marketing strategy. 

Five Building Blocks

To establish content marketing as a discipline and an in-house competency, what elements should you consider?  Let us look at five main building blocks:

1.       Buyer Insight: a clear understanding of buyer goals, buyer personas, buying processes, buying preferences, perceptions, and potential is essential.

2.       Publishers:  publishing is an art and science to provide informing and commercial insights. Joe Pulitzer of CMI and others recommend the role of a Chief Content Officer who acts as the corporate publisher.

3.       Editorial Teams: you will require an editorial plan and schedule.  Getting the right content to the right buyer at the right time is must-have level of expertise.

4.       Writers: journalistic skills to write compelling content is essential.  Sounds easy, takes good writing skills to do.

5.       Inbound Marketing Specialists:  specialty in campaigns and conversions keeps you informed on how well content marketing strategies are working.

Obviously, this is not your father’s marketing department.  The marketing capabilities of the future are on their way to reinvented structures.  Performing in ways, we could not have predicted just a few short years ago.  If you are thinking the five elements, I mentioned above, sounds like a news or publishing agency - you are right.  For most CMO’s, there is probably nothing in their job descriptions calling for the build out of an internal content marketing agency. 

Yet, to be successful with a content marketing strategy, this is the future imperative. 

The Future

In my previous article, I reviewed how content marketing was stuck at 36%.  The number represents how many companies believed their content marketing was effective from a survey conducted by theContent Marketing Institute.  The two perspectives do beg this question:

Is it true that of the 38% who currently have a content marketing strategy, only 36% of those who do, believes their content marketing strategies are effective?

This is a hypothesis of course and one I would like to explore.  This is where we can look at the future together.  I invite you to take a brief survey on content marketing’s future.  Here is what I will commit to you if you do so.  I will publish the results in a future article and offer insights.  My hunch is, in a few weeks, we both will learn a few things. 

Please go to this site to take the survey:  The Future of Content Marketing Survey

As we begin to look ahead, it is not too early to consider how to make content marketing an integral core capability.  What stands before us is a crossroads.  Do we believe that effective content marketing strategies require an expert discipline?  Alternatively, is it not necessary to put in the five main building blocks referenced above? 

I invite you to examine this together with me and take the survey.  The survey will remain open for 2-4 weeks.  Please do pass it along to your peers and help me crowdsource insights on this topic.   I really do want to know what you think!

Content Marketing: Are You Part of the 38 Percent?

Just 38% of companies have a content marketing strategy. 

This headline gave me pause as I was catching up on my reading! 

Econsultancy, the London-based community of digital marketing and ecommerce professionals, recently produced their first ever-Content Marketing Report.  The report is based on a survey of more than 1,300 digital marketing professionals.  The upside to this survey is that 90% of those surveyed believe content marketing will become more important over the next twelve months.

What caught my attention though is this - just 38% currently have a defined strategy in place. 

I found the 38% to be surprising and agree with this quote from the survey:

I find it quite surprising that the vast majority of respondents use content marketing and see it as becoming more important in the next 12 months but only a minority already have a strategy in place for this area. Maybe that is a sign that the majority of users are simply ‘playing’ in this space or testing the waters. – Thomas Messett, Global Editor in Chief, Social Media at Nokia

Are you part of the 62%?

If you are part of the 62%, it may be time to start putting in place a defined content marketing strategy.  Why?  Recent studies show buyers are spending an increasing percentage of their time researching and collating information prior to sales intervention. 

You know this already.  I do not want to bore you with this being the 1,001th article making this point.  Evidence of this shift abounds everywhere.

What we need to focus on is another insight that came out of this survey.  Listen closely:

“64% of in-house marketers agree that content marketing is becoming its own discipline”.

In addition, the survey found that 55% of the respondents are working on a content marketing strategy.  A decision point for CMO’s is choosing to become part of the 55% working on a content marketing strategy.  For the very the reasons their competitors may be doing so already. 

Building an Internal Content Marketing Discipline

An emerging correlation is happening in the world of content marketing now.  To develop an effective content marketing strategy, a discipline of expertise is arising as a significant need.  I believe an expert discipline and strategy go hand in hand.  This is new for Chief Marketing Officers today.  It creates new questions:

·         What structure should be in place?

·         What new expertise should we acquire?

·         What are best practices?

·         What are new roles to put in place?

You see where this is going.  It is one thing to have a strategy.  Expertise and a discipline make strategy executable.  Conversely, expertise and a discipline help to create the best content marketing strategy. 

Five Building Blocks

To establish content marketing as a discipline and an in-house competency, what elements should you consider?  Let us look at five main building blocks:

1.       Buyer Insight: a clear understanding of buyer goals, buyer personas, buying processes, buying preferences, perceptions, and potential is essential.

2.       Publishers:  publishing is an art and science to provide informing and commercial insights. Joe Pulitzer of CMI and others recommend the role of a Chief Content Officer who acts as the corporate publisher.

3.       Editorial Teams: you will require an editorial plan and schedule.  Getting the right content to the right buyer at the right time is must-have level of expertise.

4.       Writers: journalistic skills to write compelling content is essential.  Sounds easy, takes good writing skills to do.

5.       Inbound Marketing Specialists:  specialty in campaigns and conversions keeps you informed on how well content marketing strategies are working.

Obviously, this is not your father’s marketing department.  The marketing capabilities of the future are on their way to reinvented structures.  Performing in ways, we could not have predicted just a few short years ago.  If you are thinking the five elements, I mentioned above, sounds like a news or publishing agency - you are right.  For most CMO’s, there is probably nothing in their job descriptions calling for the build out of an internal content marketing agency. 

Yet, to be successful with a content marketing strategy, this is the future imperative. 

The Future

In my previous article, I reviewed how content marketing was stuck at 36%.  The number represents how many companies believed their content marketing was effective from a survey conducted by theContent Marketing Institute.  The two perspectives do beg this question:

Is it true that of the 38% who currently have a content marketing strategy, only 36% of those who do, believes their content marketing strategies are effective?

This is a hypothesis of course and one I would like to explore.  This is where we can look at the future together.  I invite you to take a brief survey on content marketing’s future.  Here is what I will commit to you if you do so.  I will publish the results in a future article and offer insights.  My hunch is, in a few weeks, we both will learn a few things. 

Please go to this site to take the survey:  The Future of Content Marketing Survey

As we begin to look ahead, it is not too early to consider how to make content marketing an integral core capability.  What stands before us is a crossroads.  Do we believe that effective content marketing strategies require an expert discipline?  Alternatively, is it not necessary to put in the five main building blocks referenced above? 

I invite you to examine this together with me and take the survey.  The survey will remain open for 2-4 weeks.  Please do pass it along to your peers and help me crowdsource insights on this topic.   I really do want to know what you think!

Are We Heading to a Post-Blogging World?

I have an old friend from grad school whom I haven't really seen much since then - although these days we are connected, inevitably, via Facebook.

An author and university professor now, my friend teaches undergraduates somewhere in the middle of the country. Lately on Facebook she has been sharing long form posts about her life and passion as a teacher, reader, and writer. She muses on writer's block. On John Updike, whom we were lucky enough to meet, as students way back when. (She wrote about that, too). On what to expect from an MFA Creative Writing program. On the technicalities of being a good writer (or at least trying to be one). On developing crushes for authors of great books.

What's interesting to me is that my friend Stephanie's writing on these matters - serious, funny, personal, informative - is a form of blogging, but it does not actually appear on a blog, per se. Instead, it appears on what once might have been called a blog but today is so much more than that: The Huffington Post.

Stephanie could have chosen to start her own blog. It would have been easy to do on one of the usual suspects: Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, etc. But she didn't. Rather, she became one of the numerous professional and amateur subject experts lately to start publishing their writings ("user generated content") on a branded media platform, like HuffPo, or Forbes, or the Yahoo! Contributor Network - or even here on Social Media Today, for that matter.

Whenever she has something to say, she still sits before a web-hosted, HTML-enabled text editor to do her writing. But Stephanie traded a series of concerns for just one. Instead of wondering what to call her blog, whether to customize the URL, how it should look and feel, how to optimize for visibility in search engines, when to upgrade widgets, where to host her files, and (most importantly) how to build an audience of readers for her posts, Stephanie has just one question: what should I write today? The Huffington Post takes care of the rest, including the question of audience.

I see this as a growing trend. Daily I read posts on all matters, in all fields, written by "guest contributors" who, in some fashion, after a simple process, have been given the keys to what is ostensibly a blog - it just happens to be on a larger media platform, where "brand" is already established and readers (often lots of them) await.

In many respects, I see this not just as a trend but the future of blogging. I suspect that the companies who provide such platforms see it as part of the future of media ("citizen-expert journalists, empowered by technology") - and definitely they see it as a way to generate much more content than they might with just an in-house staff of reporters and editors. Why else would Forbes offer blogs?

I certainly see it as the future of blogging for those many service professionals who understand the value of using written work to showcase talent, expertise, and experience in front of a target audience.

Why? Because, for one thing, having a blog is in no way the same thing as having an audience. Time and again in my field (the legal profession; I am not a lawyer but my company serves them), I see marketers confuse the two. And they're not alone, so I think it bears repeating: having a blog is not the same thing as having an audience.

The version of "blogging" offered these days by branded media platforms - again, the likes of Forbes, HuffPo, Yahoo! Voices (formerly Associated Content), Social Media Today, and others - comes with a built-in audience and, more often than not, built-in trust and credibility. Would you be reading this if it wasn't hosted on Social Media Today?

(I have seen Yahoo! contributor content on the site's homepage, in Yahoo!'s featured news section. That is about as close to a fire hydrant as any one blogger might get.)

The confusion between blogging (an easy form of publishing) and audience (actual readers) dates back to one of the early false promises of self-publishing on the web: "If you build it they will come." True for some; not true for most. Was that way in 1995; still that way today.

Consider: for any given search you conduct today, really only ten websites out of hundreds of thousands if not millions are noticed by you. That leaves a rather large raft load of websites for whom the visitors did not, and will not, come.

Back in the early days, self-publishing still held promise and excitement, but a personal web page/online journal (one precursor to blogs) required HTML skills and FTP. It was a pain. Better web geeks than me can hold forth on the finer details of the rise of blogging, but in short: the text editor as hosted tool solved those problems. Suddenly, it became so much easier to write something and - in the click of a button, without even a thought about HTML coding - publish it. FTP be damned.

Fast forward to today and that's pretty much how it still stands. We write something. We click the Publish button. We don't code in HTML, we don't FTP our files. It has never been easier to self-publish, whether you are kid writing about school lunch, or a lawyer writing about Dodd-Frank. Besides the abundance of information available today, perhaps the biggest difference between then an now is this: the marketers have noticed. That's not a bad thing if value is being created. "Content is King."

But the problem of audience still remains. Yes, apparently Google favors a site that updates frequently, with meaningful content that provides value to readers. But there are a lot of sites that update frequently with meaningful content that provides value to readers. Good luck with that.

Interestingly, the problem of audience appears to exist for everyone. Including media outlets. It fascinates me that Yahoo! bought Associated Content, that HuffPo and Forbes allow you to start blogging under their rubric in your field of expertise, that CNN launched a citizen journalist service called iReport. It fascinates me that Social Media Today offers content communities in so many other fields, too, beyond social media: entrepreneurship, climate change and energy policy, healthcare, corporate responsibility. It makes sense. It's a natural step in the evolution of the Web's self-publishing promise, which has always required three distinct things: the means to publish (technology), something to say (content), and visibility (an audience).

I see more and more individuals, usually professionals who understand the power and reach of good content, establish a presence through the written word on branded platforms. (Used to be called "guest columnist" back before it scaled as well as it does today.)

In my own profession, I hear clients (law firms) more and more often say: it doesn't matter how we publish our blogs, what really matters is where we publish them. That's a big shift in thinking for a field that tends to be behind the curve in most matters of tech adoption.

My point is simply this: as the big media players compete for readers and audience, we all stand to benefit.

Publishing your work on a branded media platform solves the next problem, the more important problem - which is not "how to publish?" but "how to be read?"

Plenty of folks will disagree with this point of view. To be expected. Some might say that blogs aren't publishing platforms at all, but rather online venues to build relationships (by quoting people you admire and allowing for comments and conversations, linking in blogrolls etc.). Fine, but - ignoring for the moment how inane most comments seem to be - Forbes, HuffPo, and all the rest allow for commenting in their platforms as well. And besides, Social has, to my mind, replaced the bulk of conversations that in the late 1990s and early 2000s took place in blog comments. Your social network is the new blogroll; conversations now take place on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

For those who insist that our own branded sites still matter the most, that our web presence resembles a hub and spoke and most efforts should be in the hub … I'd like to know why?

At a time when your activities on other websites can shine a spotlight on your expertise quickly, brightly, andcredibly, why continue to measure ROI by traffic to your website? Are you selling ads?

On this site, you know my name, the name of my company (with a link back to my website in my bio), and how to reach me on Twitter and LinkedIn should you want to keep talking. Isn't that enough?

If you agree that the audience you are trying to reach does not ultimately care about you or your brand - and that content is one of the best ways to connect with them on their terms, about the things they docare about - surely the best thing, the only thing, to do is this: go where your audience gathers?

What say you?