Education 2.0 & 3.0

So you want to do content marketing – and in a big way. This isn’t going to be a tentative test. You’re making an aggressive, committed, all-in push to create and engage an audience for the long-term.

First of all – good for you! Content marketing is effective, and increasingly more effective than advertising. And as it gets harder and harder for advertising to work, we expect more companies to make serious, committed shifts like this.

But now that you know you’re serious, you’re going to need to hire people. This assumes, of course, that you’ve decided to keep this thing in-house rather than hire an agency.

I think that’s smart. Here’s why:

Good content marketing involves the entire company – sales, customer service, management, even accounting and development. An in-house team will always have better communication channels with those departments than an agency will. You’ll see each other in the elevator, at the Christmas party, and at any other company-wide function.

There’s no question of everyone being “on the team” with an in-house content program. This isn’t always so with agencies. There are sometimes lingering questions about what an agency’s priorities really are.

Great content marketing rises up from your company’s DNA. Your brand voice, your value proposition, your understanding of your customers… these are so core to your company that I worry about hiring an agency to define it for you.
With the agency thing settled, you now need to go build your team. The question becomes: What are your goals? What’s your budget? Those answers will inform how big of a team you’ll need and who you’ll hire first.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=press

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/curation-the-21st-century-way-to-learn-on-its-own-pace-and-to-organize-the-learning/

You don’t have to wait months or years to get high rankings in Google. Through Google News, you can instantly shoot up to page 1 of Google.

Now Google already gives you a set of guidelines, but here is what I found is effective:

1. You have to write news worthy content – if you are struggling to find news content you can go to Google Trends or any popular news site to see what’s hot.

2. Create a Google News Sitemap – through the Yoast SEO plugin you can create a sitemap. This way when you have news worthy content they will pick it up faster.

3. Your URL structure has to be unique – if you don’t have news related keywords within your URL you are less likely to rank. By having specific keywords you will shoot up to the top for news related queries.

In addition to that, follow the guidelines Google News gives and you will be fine.

In a platform world, publishers face tough decisions on where to place their resources. In August, The Economist faced this head on and axed its ailing Pinterest and Tumblr accounts while ramping up its commitment to LinkedIn.

The publisher had been experimenting on Pinterest for the past six months. But even with a social media team that had grown from two to 10 people, The Economist couldn’t make it click. “From day one, it was a struggle,” said Denise Law, community editor at The Economist. “We found it difficult to articulate what our raison d’être for Pinterest was. It’s not the place to share serious content; it’s more where people go to share ideas.”

For Pinterest, The Economist was posting pieces from 1843, its culture and lifestyle magazine, then called Intelligent Life. Articles from travel blog Gulliver’s Travels were also going there, as well as pieces from its archives and links to items from The Economist Store. But it was gaining no traction. When it cut the account, it had 5,000 followers. “Not enough to move the needle,” said Law, adding that its Tumblr account shared the same fate. Earlier this year, The Economist also culled a number of its Twitter accounts.here's

The Economist’s approach to social media is, according to the publisher, to promote quality over quantity. It’s taken that mission to LinkedIn, which it uses for brand awareness rather than to drive traffic. By tweaking its approach to publish a broader spectrum of content, The Economist saw its LinkedIn follower count grow from half a million last year to 2.4 million, and it continues to grow at a rate of 25,000 followers a week, according to Law....