Sujan Patel lays out some interesting marketing stats for us including a few that might surprise/frustrate you.  You keep hearing how important it is to have a documented content strategy right?  Yeah well fewer, that’s the opposite of more, fewer marketers have one than last year.  57% of B2B marketers are using print and offline promotions over content marketing, even though only 31% think it works.  You’ve got to admire the commitment to failure don’t you?  65% have a lot of trouble defining what content is and isn’t effective.  60% of marketers don’t know how to make engaging content, that explains a lot of what you see.  One more.  Marketers are mostly using social content, case studies and blogs as tactics.  The most effective tactics however are in-person events, webinars and webcasts, and case studies.  What, they got case studies right.

 

What do you think of when I say “Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance?”  No one would blame you for thinking about the nasty.  But it’s actually a model used to test the emotional reaction to content.  Fractl used it to test Reddit images and found the top 10 triggered emotions that cause content to get shared.  And they’re all positive feelies!  The top 3 are Happiness, Surprise, and Admiration.  But Andrea Lehr reports studies show it’s actually the right combo of valence, arousal, and dominance that make things go viral.  Valence is the positivity or negativity of an emotion.  Arousal ranges from excitement to relaxation.  Dominance goes from submission to being in control.  The bottom line is if you can surprise people, you’re in good shape, no matter what the levels of arousal or dominance.  So, try to make something we don’t see coming.

 

Are you a freelancer?  Are you going to charge me by the hour to research and answer that question?  Shubhomita Bose with Small Business Trends says you guys are in big demand, especially if you’re a developer or content marketer.  Upwork Skills Index listed the fastest growing skill set demands and they are UX design, ASP development, Shopify development, English proofreading and SEO writing.  That SEO writing, video editing and lead generation are the top content marketing freelance needs.  But those who know future technologies, including VR and Augmented Reality will do fine as well.  Upwork’s Stephane Kasriel says, “This information can be leveraged by smart professionals who continue to educate themselves to capitalize on market demands.”  That’s just in case you don’t win America’s Got Talent.

 

What do people want in the way of content?  Entertainment and information, right?  So on the information side we might want to look at where, how and why people like to get their news.  Pew Research Center says people aren’t ignorant, 70% follow national and local news somewhat or very closely.  81% get at least some news digitally; sites, apps or social.  People mainly count on news orgs for news, imagine that.  But don’t underestimate the importance of friends and family.  In fact, when it comes to trust, they trust family and friends as much as the news orgs, which 74% think are biased one way or the other.  62% get some news from social, but they’re a lot more skeptical about that as a news source.  Okay here’s the part where you brands should pay special attention.  Once they find an information source they like, 76% go back to it over and over.  And if they get news a few times in a week from somewhere, almost 3/4 remember where they got it.

 

Time to engage in America’s favorite game show, “Make Millennials Happy!”  Unless you’re one of them, they’re more important than you.  And if you, as a marketer, are trying to please them, Michael Svatek of Rivet Works has some insight.  They get distracted easily.  From 2000 to 2015, the human attention span dropped 33% to 8 seconds.  So make the content easy to assess and easy to move on to the next story.  Millennials get over 5,000 marketing messages a day, so they’re working hard to not see ads, even good ones.  Just 1% says a clever ad influences them.  And you better be authentic because that’s more important than the content you make.  If you come across as real and sincere, they MIGHT share personal info with you, and you need that badly because they like personalized stuff.  And they want to co-create with you.

 

Ever hear of the Federal Trade Commission?  You might want to read up on them because they’re the ones that set a lot of the rules we marketers have to follow.  But Jonathan Crowl reports the sorta good news is they traditionally haven’t had much of a clue how to handle branded content or native advertising.  They’re studying it again, especially issues with location tracking and privacy language.  Their latest rules made publishers be super explicit labeling native advertising, and a lot of people thought it would hurt the tactic.  It really didn’t.  Dedicated Media found out people spend as much time with branded content as with regular content.  Jonathan’s suggestion is why wait around for the FTC?  You already know consumers don’t like to be lied to or tricked, you know labeling native advertising won’t hurt it, so find out what your customers want you to do and do that.

 

As a public service, The Content Marketing Quickie is going to keep you out of jail.  Well, maybe not jail, but we at least want to help you avoid a huge fine and a public relations disaster.  A blog is a very demanding thing, a beast that needs to be fed.  And part of what it needs is images.  These aren’t always easy to find, and they can be expensive.  So what some corporate bloggers do is, well, steal.  They might not even know they’re stealing.  Douglas Karr tells the tale of a client that used a photo marked royalty-free from a Google Image Search, then got a bill for $3,000 for using it.  He lists copyright infringement as one of the big 3 legal gotchas bloggers run into.  The other two are defamation (turns out you can’t legally hurt reputations using false statements, even though the media does it multiple times per day), and CAN-SPAM violations involving commercial emails.  That could get you a $16,000 fine, and I’m betting you don’t have it on you.

 

Look at 2016 fly by, zoom!  We’re already halfway through it.  Nothing stays the same.  It was just a couple of months ago we weren’t even hearing the words Pokemon Go.  Social media marketing definitely never stays the same, so Lee Odden called to our attention things we should be paying attention to.  1. Facebook’s dominance isn’t going anywhere, so plan for it.  2. Video’s dominance isn’t going anywhere.  Facebook’s Nicola Mendelsohn says in 5 years, Facebook will probably be all video.  3. You’ll get more social advertising products and options cause it’s pay to play.  4. Social chat bots will boom to satisfy real-time engagement.  And 5. Social automation will help you get the right content to the right people at the right time, all integrated with a marketing dashboard for reporting.

 

Time to make some people famous.  Well, in their industry anyway.  The Content Marketing Institute announced the finalists for the top 4 Content Marketing Award trophies, which will be announced at Content Marketing World in Cleveland September 8.  So if you were there for the Republican convention, stick around a couple of months.  Your Content Marketer of the Year finalists are Dan Briscoe and Skyler Moss at Hyland’s, Tobias Lee of Thomson Reuters, Dusty DiMercurio at Autodesk, Margaret Magnarelli in marketing at Monster (wow that’s a lot of M’s), and Amanda Todorovich with the Cleveland Clinic.  Joe Pulizzi says they got 1,300 entries overall and it was clear marketers are starting to really “get” content marketing.

 

India’s a big place.  Ever try to walk across it?  Really big.  And because Facebook has 142M users there and those users are totally wild about watching videos, they’re piloting the feature there that lets them save videos to watch offline.  Saritha Rai says this is especially useful, at least in theory, in places like India where internet connectivity is eh.  Downloading stuff is expensive, but Medianama.com’s Nikhil Pahwa says 40% of data on phones is video viewing anyway.  They like Bollywood song sequences.  I’m not being racist, that’s what they said, and a big reason why YouTube started the save feature there in 2014.  Don’t live in India but also want some news about Facebook video?  Okay.  Michael Crider of Android Police says they added video saving to the Android app.

 

That’s it.  Let me inform or amuse you @mikestiles