25 Awesome Social Media Tools (Your Brand Should Be Using) – When you’re managing your business on social media, it’s essential that you equip yourself with the right tools to do the job. Having the platforms and apps in place to effectively measure your ROI and maximize your social strategy will ramp up your results. This infographic from The Social Media Strategies Summit takes a closer look at 25 free and paid social media tools your brand should be using. MediaBistro
Explore Pinterest Boards with Bing – Back in April, Bing introduced the Pin to Pinterest feature, allowing visitors to pin and save results directly from Bing image search. This week they announce Image Collections for Bing image search, which brings together curated collections of images from around the web. Now, when you search for an image on Bing, you’ll notice related boards on Pinterest right alongside regular search results. Bing Blog
Sine Qua Non: Core Values and Content Strategy – The work of content strategists so often focuses on tactics, techniques, and tools that when it comes to creating a core content strategy, we find ourselves blocked. Blocked for lack of direction. Blocked because our organizations are blocked for lack of a guiding purpose. This presentation examines the building blocks of your organizational core values and purpose. Jonathon Coleman
Instagram Teases Its Ad Strategy – Ads will roll out in the relatively near future on a limited test basis. Instagram is also mindful of the potential adverse impact of ads on the user experience as users will remain in control and be able to hide ads they don’t like. Marketing Land & Instagram Blog
New Report: B2B Content Marketing 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends for North America – B2B marketers’ confidence in content marketing continues to grow, content marketing usage rates are up from last year; and, not surprisingly, marketers with a documented content strategy are having the greatest success. Discover the most effective tools for B2B marketers in the SlideShare. MarketingProfs
Google Drive Updated With New Tools and Subtle Touch of Color – The home to Google Docs, Drive, which allows users to store files in the cloud, received some subtle new touches across multiple pages on Tuesday to docs, sheets, slides, drawings, forms and app scripts. Mashable
Google Launches New Card-Based “Unified Design” Search Results For Mobile Devices – The design will offer “cleaner and simpler, optimized for touch, with results clustered on cards so you can focus on the answers you’re looking for says Google. Are you optimized for mobile? Search Engine Land
Google Acquires Flutter, Creator of Hand Gesture Recognition Technology – Flutter’s app works by allowing a user to use hand gestures with the built-in webcam on devices to control navigation for such apps as iTunes, Spotify, Windows Media Player, QuickTime, and Winamp. Flutter is quite popular; it reached the top five most popular apps in the Mac App Store in its first two weeks in multiple countries when it released. Search Engine Watch
10 Inspiring Uses of Mobile in Retail – Mobile is growing and forward-thinking retailers are looking at ways to use mobile to increase sales, bring customers into stores, or to enhance the experience when people are shopping. Here are some examples from around the world. eConsultancy
Google ‘(Not Provided)’ Keywords: 10 Ways to Get Organic Search Data – Google flipped a switch and made all Google searches secure, regardless of whether a searcher was logged into a Google account. Here’s an thorough explanation of why Google took these steps and a number of practical ways online marketers can much of that lost data. Search Engine Watch
Getting Past Google’s (Not Provided) With This Visual POV – Feeling ‘scroogled’ by Google? This SlideShare cuts through the ambiguity, gets to the core of what’s happened and provides advice on how to survive in the post 100% not provided world. Adam Dince
10 Questions to Ask When Creating a Social Media Marketing Plan – To attract and engage social-media fans and followers and, ideally convert them into customers, you’ll need to carefully map out a clear, effective social-media strategy. Lee weighs in along with other industry notables. Entrepreneur.com
Apple Passes Coca-Cola as Most Valuable Brand – Apple passed Coca-Cola to become the world’s most valuable brand, according to a new study. The survey found that Apple’s brand value rose 28 percent in the past year. That doesn’t mean that it will be smooth sailing for Apple. The focus for the future is clear: “Apple must succeed in slowing Samsung’s momentum and capture the booming Chinese mobile market.” Intebrand
Google Launches Visual Tool for Building HTML5 Ads, Web Sites – The free tool enables advertisers and agencies to build HTML5 creative rich media ads for default layouts in DoubleClick and AdMob, but they also can use the tools to create ads and publish them to any generic interactive environment. What “don’t” they do? Online Media Daily
2014 Marketing Automation Trends Report – Marketing automation is a hot topic as more B2B marketers are adopting the technology to generate more and better leads, improve marketing productivity and increase conversion rates. This SlideShare presentation offers current trends, challenges and success factors for marketing automation @HolgerSchulze
Six Visual Solutions to Complex Digital Marketing/Analytics Challenges – Starts digital at the highest strategic level, which leads us into content marketing, from there it is a quick hop over to the challenge of metrics and silos, followed by a recommendation to optimize for the global maxima, and ends with the last two visuals that cover social investment and social content strategy. Another brilliant post. Occam’s Razor
Facebook to Deliver More Relevant Ads in News Feed – Facebook says they’ll actually start paying attention to feedback on user ad preferences. They’re currently working on some updates to the ads algorithm to improve the relevance and quality of the ads people see as well as optimizing when and where ads will be shown. Facebook Newsroom
New study: Which Channels and Content Areas are Deemed Most Important for Content Marketing –Tried-and-true content distribution vehicles such as company websites and email campaigns are seen as the most essential for content marketing. Interestingly, 7 in 10 believe that it’s important to distribute content through public relations channels, while two-thirds concur with respect to using social media. MarketingCharts
90% of Content Marketers Suffer From ‘The Curse’ and How to Remedy It – When you’re inside the bottle, it’s hard to read the label. But that’s also when you risk pushing your own interests at the expense of your customers’ interests. You are uniquely unqualified to write about your business. Find out how to fix that. Bryan Eisenberg
TopRank Online Marketing Speaking Engagements for October 2013
MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum (Boston)
Friday, October 11th at 2:00 – 3:15pm
Power Panel! Content All Stars Share Their Secrets
Panel Discussion
Minnesota Blogger Conference (Minneapolis)
Saturday, October 12th at 3:30 – 5:00pm
The Future of Blogging
Panel Discussion
Social Brand Forum (Coralville, Iowa)
Thursday, October 24th at 3:30 – 4:15pm
Win More, Suck Less – How to Optimize Your Social, Search, & Content Marketing
Featured Speaker
PRSA International Conference (Philadelphia)
Tuesday, Oct. 29, 8:00 – 9:15 am
Attract, Engage and Convert: How PR Can Get Ahead With Content Marketing
Featured Speaker
From the Online Community
On “10 Embeddable Media Sources for Content Curation,” – Oreo Cookie Style,” Nick Kellet said, Thanks for including Listly that’s much appreciated. I’ve been analyzing the whole embedded media space a lot. Sound and documents are pretty big categories too:
- Soundcloud, Audioboo, BlogTalkRadio, Speaker, etc.
- Scribd, DocStoc, etc.
I made a graphic of the big categories. Here’s a link to my deck. This was what led to the content audits I did.
On “What Google’s Omission of Organic Keyword Data Means for Online Marketers,” Henley Wing said, What would be interesting if someone out there could develop some sort of tool that would take a web page, determine the basket of keywords it could rank for, and check the rankings for those keywords. It’d need to know how popular those keywords are as well to give you a rough estimate on which keywords is driving traffic to your site.
As for content ideation, I just launched a beta version of an app that shows you which topics/stories are trending for your industry in social media: BuzzSumo. I think your readers might find that a viable alternative to getting content ideas.
What’s Your Take?
Will you weather Google’s keyword data omission? Will Pinterest article pins give writers a larger voice or become home to a new generation of spam?
