B2B Memes

OCTOBER 28, 2011

There’s been a minor buzz this week in B2B circles about recent survey results suggesting that paper magazines and newsletters remain extremely important to business professionals. I have nothing but admiration for the company and its staff. So anything I say here is not intended as a criticism of the company.

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B2B Memes

OCTOBER 4, 2010

The big publishers of the future may no longer be the news organisations of old but companies that want to sell you stuff: shoes, gadgets, holidays. Companies that have a story to tell and the money to get it told.&#. In other words, the brand journalism trend is real. It’s just not clear yet what stage we’re in.

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B2B Memes

JANUARY 27, 2011

Likewise, commodity content is essential to publishing, especially B2B publishing and content marketing. Yes, there are unique and exciting developments to cover in any B2B industry, but most B2B media are built on a platform of commodity content. Far from it. Their output is essential to modern life.

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B2B Memes

SEPTEMBER 22, 2010

As part of a webinar for B2B editors on September 23, 2010, I’m speaking on “Managing Your Career in the Social Media Era.” (The The webinar, “ Enhancing Your Career in the B2B Press ,” is sponsored by the American Society of Business Press Editors.). Future of news: Insider Dave Morgan touts new media. That is no longer true.”.

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B2B Memes

OCTOBER 8, 2010

For B2B journalists and editors, the transition to the social-media era can be daunting, especially if they rely on their employers to lead the way. As an ASBPE-Medill survey of B2B editors showed last April, traditional publishing companies have offered little new-media training or guidance. Be media neutral. Be a brand.

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B2B Memes

DECEMBER 16, 2010

If not yet a B2B meme , recommending the use of journalists for content marketing is at the very least a growing trend. But are B2B brands ready for tough questions? As companies like Nestle and Dell have learned, educated buyers empowered by social media will ask tough questions. As I’ve worried before , maybe not.

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B2B Memes

SEPTEMBER 9, 2010

While these B2B publishers have a highly evolved understanding of their markets, their inability to sacrifice the “ cash cow in the coal mine ” keeps them mired in the past. Logically, then, the most exciting and successful advances in B2B media should come from those with an understanding of B2B markets but without the old-media burdens.

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B2B Memes

MARCH 8, 2010

In the B2B publisher’s dream world, the transition to online media would come as a natural evolution from print. Until traditional B2B publishers accept and adapt to this reality, they will remain stuck in the past. Don’t wait around for your company to follow this or similar advice. Editors, a word to the wise.

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B2B Memes

NOVEMBER 29, 2011

A couple of years ago when I started B2B Memes it was my plan to focus exclusively on trade publishing. But as I looked around the blogosphere/Twitterverse, it didn’t take long to realize that the most enthusiastic and informed discussions about B2B communications involved not publishing, but marketing. Use your head.

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B2B Memes

JANUARY 10, 2011

As Paul Conley has argued , the result is an “excellence craze”: “In B2B, where I make my living, it seems like every company in every tiny niche of every industry has become a content creator. There are a thousand voices competing for very small audiences.

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B2B Memes

MAY 11, 2010

Three weeks ago, in my last post on this blog, I asked the question, “ Is B2B Ready for Corporate Journalism? Recently, for example, an esteemed B2B journalist I know said that content marketing is not new: “we used to call that PR.&# But it’s also due to a public relations problem.

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B2B Memes

SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

For B2B journalists, the most promising options appear to be either small-scale startups where they share both the risks and rewards, or content marketing groups within those companies formerly known as advertisers. The future of online trade journalism may not lie with large independent publishers.

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B2B Memes

OCTOBER 19, 2011

Companies, governments, organizations and individuals are constantly putting more data online: Text, videos, audio files, animations, statistics, news reports, chatter on social networks. What B2B Can Learn from Jeff Jarvis. What B2B Can Learn from Jeff Jarvis, Part 3. You must become its master.

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B2B Memes

APRIL 12, 2011

In one of the earliest posts on this blog I complained about the lack of social-media awareness and interactivity in most B2B webcasts. It’s no doubt priced at a level that puts it out of reach for smaller companies, but it may well set a standard for integration and ease of use that will spread to other platforms.

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B2B Memes

MAY 9, 2012

Robot reporters are cornering the market on facts, as companies like Narrative Science and Automated Insights perfect the science of teaching software to turn data into news stories. Is B2B Ready for Corporate Journalism? The problem with traditional news is that traditional journalists are increasingly unnecessary to produce it.

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B2B Memes

APRIL 1, 2010

For B2B companies embracing their new role as publishers, the content marketing community has produced a huge archive of valuable advice. The following three questions, based on your relationship to your content, your audience, and to the people and companies you cover, should get you started. Your company owns the content.

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B2B Memes

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

As editorial director of a B2B publisher, both before and after the advent of the Web, I often dealt with unauthorized use of our content. We used to make a decent sum of money from reprints of our articles, mostly for companies that we covered. The Wall Street Journal , he said, only charged him something like $10.

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B2B Memes

OCTOBER 19, 2010

What set off this latest skirmish was an article in the Guardian by Roy Greenslade (lately a fecund source of inspiration for B2B Memes ) concerning UK editor and blogger Marc Reeves. As a representative of your company, you’re telling customers that you couldn’t care less about their business. But, really, it’s lame.

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B2B Memes

MAY 6, 2011

In my days overseeing a large editorial group for a B2B publisher, my counterpart in sales was fond of telling me that advertisers found our editors arrogant. Within a publishing company, there is high tolerance for irksome editors. The trait is not genetic, but occupational. They weren’t, and he knew it. Don’t let that stop you.

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B2B Memes

JUNE 28, 2010

In a comment today on a recent B2B Memes blog post, “ Content Marketing’s PR Problem ,” a reader by the dubious name of Ant Miles raises an interesting point about content marketing and journalism. to position the company as a trusted information source for the future, to earn the respect of the audience through truthful content.”.

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B2B Memes

AUGUST 12, 2011

After reading Owens’s post, I wondered how many B2B editors have experienced such a moment of Twitter enlightenment. Tweets or retweets that link to or contain content from sources other than the editor’s company. Social Media and Ethics: An Interview with B2B Editor Maureen Alley. Curatorial. Conversational.

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B2B Memes

JULY 3, 2012

In a Harvard Business Review blog post discussed last week by Mark Schaefer , authors Jeffrey Rayport and Tuck Rickards asserted that most big companies are too far behind the digital curve. But what interests me is the four-part test they use to assess companies. That’s no surprise. Its leadership has deep digital experience.

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B2B Memes

JULY 4, 2012

The real issue was not that the company used fake bylines on its stories, but that it used bylines at all. Journatic screwed up because the company wanted to have it both ways: to embrace new-media principles while trying to disguise them. Instead of looking forward, it looked backward.

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B2B Memes

DECEMBER 15, 2011

His doubts were not, as some readers thought, about the benefits to non-publishing companies of treating content more journalistically. Rather, he was questioning whether most companies were really prepared to be more journalistic, to accept journalistic values. Is there really no place for journalistic values in most companies?

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B2B Memes

OCTOBER 6, 2011

Two of those companies, Narrative Science and Automated Insights , are developing programs that churn through computerized data about sports and other topics and spit out news stories. The fact that trade publisher Hanley Wood is one of the companies working with Narrative Science is, to me at least, encouraging.

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B2B Memes

FEBRUARY 14, 2012

Until recently, the only practical alternative for aspiring authors was vanity publishing: paying a company a large sum of money to produce their book, with little or no marketing or sales assistance. These distinctions were once a reliable measure of quality.

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B2B Memes

MARCH 2, 2011

In an article on Min Online this week, Judy Franks of The Marketing Democracy suggests that traditional media companies are faltering because they don’t value content. Though at first it might seem odd to say that businesses built on content don’t value it, she has a point.

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B2B Memes

JUNE 30, 2011

It’s reasonable for a company to say, “Look, if you tweet using one of our corporate or branded Twitter accounts, remember you’re speaking for us too.” In effect, it drains the life out of both. But Scripps talks not about corporate or branded accounts, but about professional ones.

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B2B Memes

JULY 20, 2011

While the Borders manager was convinced of the superiority of his company’s approach to bookselling, he wasn’t brash. The manager was not the sort of conflicted corporate bookseller portrayed by Tom Hanks in “ You’ve Got Mail ,&# a sensitive, soulful sort with a bloody-minded determination to smash his small competitors.

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B2B Memes

AUGUST 10, 2012

As he goes on to say, the “idea that a company—as a brand and marketer—can be an expert content creator and reach an audience by disintermediating reporters is confusing, threatening and scary to an entire profession that had its way for a century.”.

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B2B Memes

AUGUST 10, 2012

As he goes on to say, the “idea that a company—as a brand and marketer—can be an expert content creator and reach an audience by disintermediating reporters is confusing, threatening and scary to an entire profession that had its way for a century.”.

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B2B Memes

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

It seems to me that this is the biggest challenge for traditional publishers in adapting to new media is to rethink the value of their publications as destinations. ” Is that the way to go digital?

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B2B Memes

JANUARY 29, 2011

There’s little editing, no quality control — it’d be understandable if this was user-generated content, but the junk is coming from major media companies, ones with paid content producers. Increasingly the Internet is a gigantic content farm. They’re throwing any crap they can online to get those treasured pageviews.”.

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B2B Memes

JANUARY 24, 2011

The discussion last week about which department within a publishing company should “control” social media indicates how much rethinking remains to be done. In fact, those channels themselves are gradually being transformed by social media from single, unified wholes into a bundle of constantly shifting and realigning voices.

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B2B Memes

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Earlier this week, for instance, Bob Scheier wrote about a company that has automated content production: “StatSheet of Durham, N.C. To see how content—by which I mean the basic facts and ideas of discourse—has become a commodity, you don’t have to look far.

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B2B Memes

NOVEMBER 4, 2011

MUD day 4: If you’re a B2B journalist or a journalistically inclined content marketer, you should be faithfully following Steve Buttry’s blog. As Buttry says, the idea of a press release is that you can freely crib from it—the company that sent it to you will be perfectly happy if you do.

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B2B Memes

MAY 31, 2013

How the transition plays out will vary with the circumstances of each company, of course, but the main hurdle is the same for all legacy publishers—the all-consuming demands of the print process. It is a question I will be thinking and writing about in coming days here on B2B Memes. Let me try to explain. I, for one, am trying.

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