May 24, 2013 in Content Marketing, Marketing by Stephanie Fedler
ADVICE: Right Now, You Have Some Great Content Just Waiting to Be Used in Your Marketing

shutterstock_108799703Among the biggest challenges in content marketing is producing enough quality content for all the various channels we use to distribute information. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s annual report, 64 percent of B2B content marketers say they are challenged with producing enough content. For Internet marketing firms and corporate marketing departments alike, the key to solving this problem lies is in getting the most out of the content you already have through re-purposing.

Let’s say that this month you want to do a white paper, an ebook, a byline article, two press releases, two media pitches and a series of three blog posts. Got 10 ideas for those 10 pieces of content? Thought not. Instead, think about the three big ideas you want to focus on, then fashion the content plan to fit those ideas. Vital to that plan is re-purposing your content across your distribution channels.

Re-Purposing Works in Both Directions

That white paper establishing your tech company’s thought leadership in a particular vertical can become a series of blog posts. The suggestions made in the byline article can be turned into a press release you pre-pitch to trade media as part of your technology public relations efforts. Need content for social media sharing? Tell people about all that valuable new content you’re putting out.

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May 17, 2013 in Media Relations, Public Relations by Clay Zeigler
HEADS UP: Scott Baradell to Participate in Media Relations Panel at PRSA Southwest District Conference

Screen shot 2013-05-17 at 1.07.44 PMIdea Grove President Scott Baradell is among the speakers at next month’s 2013 PRSA Southwest District Conference, where he will participate with four other PR professionals in a panel discussion called Tackling Media Relations.

The panel will explore how dramatically newsrooms are changing and how PR practitioners must adapt their strategies to better meet the needs of journalists. Scott will talk about the importance of creating publication-ready content for use by media organizations, in the form of byline articles, infographics,  and more.  He will also discuss how a company can use a single content idea across both its inbound marketing and media relations programs.

Appearing with Scott on the Tackling Media Relations panel will be:

  • Alexis Patterson Hanes, associate director of Public Information for the Austin Community College District
  • Lauren Butler, vice president/group manager at Ketchum
  • Casey Norton, vice president of Media Relations at Weber Shandwick.
  • Sarah Marshall, senior vice president of Phillips & Company, who will moderate.

The conference is sponsored by the Austin chapter of the Public Relations Society of America and takes place June 5-7 at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown. The three-day event offers PR professionals everything from sessions on managing a crisis and making an impact to free yoga on the hotel’s roof.


 
May 10, 2013 in Public Relations, Technology PR by Stephanie Fedler
IDEA GROVE NEWS: Mike Drago Wins Way to Grove Award Recognizing Results for Clients

Screen shot 2013-05-10 at 8.57.23 AMWe have a winner! Mike Drago has won our Way to Grove Award, which recognizes members of the team who achieve notable and tangible results for clients.  Mike won for his work helping to oversee a thought leadership website that has grown a sizable community and greatly increased online visibility for the client’s technology offering.

ServiceVirtualization.com was launched in April 2012 by the Application Delivery business at CA Technologies. The site focuses on a field of emerging software solutions that enable faster, better and less-expensive application development. Idea Grove was called upon to develop and oversee content on the site’s blog, which Mike began editing in October 2012. He quickly grasped both the complex technology and the community of people with an interest in it.

The site now ranks second in native search for “service virtualization” behind the Wikipedia definition. Along with the improvement in online search visibility, the ServiceVirtualization.com community has grown to thousands of members, and Twitter feeds that support the blog have nearly 1,200 followers (@svcvirt and @virtualization6).

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April 18, 2013 in Content Marketing, Marketing, Media Relations, Public Relations by Mike Drago
RANT: Vague Language is the Scourge of Marketing and Public Relations

shutterstock_121137493“We the human capital of the United States, in order to facilitate a cutting-edge, best-of-breed convergence of revenue-generating entities, actualize Justice, insure scalable domestic Tranquility, provide for the interdependent interfacing of defensive capabilities, promote mutually beneficial functionality in the North American market space, and secure the Blessings of harmonized, re-engineered culture to ourselves and our Posterity, do conceptualize and cultivate this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Let us bow our heads and give thanks that Gouverneur Morris, the Founding Father credited with writing the preamble to the United States Constitution, was a far better writer than many of today’s marketers. Otherwise, millions upon millions of children would never have been able to memorize the preamble in grade school – much less understand it – and the Union might never had held together.

A Confession and a Theory

I have a confession: Vague language drives me bonkers. And ever since I made the jump to Internet marketing firms after a long career in newspapers, I have puzzled on this question: Why is so much business writing mind-numbingly obtuse? I developed an armchair theory. Vague language is high art in business because a negotiation is a courtship of adversaries, and ambiguity is necessary to avoid driving off the other party before you have time to draw him in. We marketers have simply gotten lazy and adopted it.

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