Today I presented to the Executive Education program at the Newhouse School on the topic of content production, which we love here at OSG. Why is a content production strategy important and how can it benefit your existing communications and marketing programs? Content Production and Your Communications Program. Content Production Presentations brand journalism content marketing content strategy social writing web contentBelow are the slides to the presentation (I’m happy to clarify anything). Some of the main areas covered: What is “content”? MORE >>

In short, content production has become and will continue to be a major piece of the marketing mix for B2B marketers. Among B2B marketers largest challenges in content production are creating content that engages prospects (41% of respondents reported this as their largest challenge), and creating enough  content (20% stated this as their largest challenge). Content production is being outsourced more this year than last. Business to Business content production B2B content marketing Marketing MarketingProfsMore budget is being spent on content marketing. MORE >>

“What if a customer posts something negative about our company or product? Does the engineer worry that too much information about her product will be revealed publicly? Does the executive believe that the demographic of social media users is all wrong for your product line? Gather screenshots of customer comments about your company, your competitors, or the pain that your products solve on various social networking platforms. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn. You’re not alone. How many of these objections sound familiar? We can’t let that happen.&#. MORE >>

Racing itself has changed in terms of product relevance, and we’ve needed to change with it. What are the tools that we have to employ, and what are the changes we’ve made to push our product to a younger audience. Conrad: Sometimes it’s hard to directly correlate these things, at the end of the day we want to sell our products. If you look at some of these changes in our brand marketing, all these pieces coming together to generate new fans, explore digital and social, increase product relevance, ad-track better. How do we deal with legal? MORE >>

For example, a Facebook Fan Page is great to nurture a community of customers and keep them updated with product news while Elance is a community of freelancers with all sorts of skills where the ‘right person for the job’ can be found. Rating systems are another way to use collective intelligence to find out how much consumers like a certain product for instance. Thinking of a business strategy without social media has become antiquated, unless you travel at least 20 years back in time. Today, a business is no longer sustainable without an effective social media agenda. MORE >>