A guest article on CMO.com from Curata about their recent B2B marketing trends survey that highlights the prevalent use of content marketing online, and the growing success of curation a strategy.  One interesting finding from the article:

Forty-three percent of content curators are measuring their content curation programs, and 32 percent of those curators have been successfully curating for more than two years.

In the context of social media marketing and engagement, it has conjoined elements of communication in ways that (to most) came unforeseen.

Interesting crowed-sourcing campaign combined with popular B2C curation tool Pinterest to create a unique opportunity for Walmart shoppers.

"Today, sustainability is sustainable at Walmart. The outside world recognizes our leadership and our ability to get things done," Walmart CEO Mike Duke has said. That's why Walmart launched The Green Room in January as a forum for NGOs, suppliers and consumers to learn and share sustainability-focused efforts.

In content marketing, the eternal dilemma is where to draw the line between being self-promotional and informational.  This article explores where that lines is:

For some marketers, that’s enough. Everyone else has a trickier dilemma to face, managing the ratio and presentation of promotional information in the context of value-creating information.

Combined with the opportunity to integrate audience profiling data from first party and third party sources, programmatic media enables brands to buy against known converting audiences across both leading publishers and the far-flung corners of the Internet in a centrally controlled fashion.

According to eConsultancy, just 38% of companies have a content marketing strategy, while 90% of the respondents said it will become important over the next 12 months. It’s hard to think of a reason companies wouldn’t be at least considering online content marketing -- but here are three possibilities.

Tumblr has finally given brands and marketers what they've long been asking for: An analytics dashboard.

A brand is built, over time, by third-party validation communicated through third-party content. What other people said about Volvo created the meaning of that brand--the advertising Volvo did just reinforced that meaning. As marketers, we try to convince customers and prospects to generate content about our brands.

Interesting perspective on content marketing and it's commodization:

It hit me then that in their mad rush to drive content marketing value for their brands, marketers run the risk of turning content marketing into the new Merlot. I’m old enough to remember when California Merlot first got hot, thanks to the passion and craftsmanship of vintners who put patience and experience into creating big-but-balanced wines that authentically reflected their land and heritage. Great Merlots are still out there--but good luck finding one among the sea of cheap knock-offs that give Concord grape juice a bad name.

Great corellations between content marketing and updating your resume. This blog post includes tips on how to use content marketing techniques in your resume.

I’m sure the editors of CMI didn’t intend to address resumes as content marketing when they wrote: “Go back and read the content marketing definition one more time, but this time remove the relevant and valuable. That's the difference between content marketing and the other informational garbage you get from companies trying to sell you ‘stuff.’” It’s also the difference between a garbage resume and intelligent content that gets you hired.

Content marketing is not a short-term campaign, it’s a long-term strategy to attract, convert, and retain customers.

Many B2B marketers have still struggled to find their footing in the social media marketing game. This article breaks down how you can be successful on the six most popular social networks: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr seem to have different user engagement patterns, in terms of the times of day users of each social network use each service most heavily. That suggests a brand can optimize readership or viewership by matching posting times to those existing patterns.

Not every white paper is going to reinvent your company. But if you want thought-leadership content capable of intriguing your target audience and activating your brand, it has to be provocative or insightful enough to make you stop and think. Read through this post again and think about the level of effort and commitment that requires.

In the same way that the mass-market culture of the 1950s created the need for brands, today's social-technical culture is forcing brands to employ a new model for interacting with the public. A model based not in the slow-drip Chinese water torture of traditional advertising, but in the kind of focused dialogue that public relations specializes in.

It's clear that the future of advertising is public relations.

Marketing consultant Ryan Caligiuri argues in “Be An Educator, Not An Egotist," while Nick Corcodilos argues in “How Can I Change Careers?” that brands should concentrate on the needs of the reader or viewer. It's good advice.

What is a “Chief Marketing Technologist,” and why might a brand need a person with that title?

Getting a Millennial to "Like" your Facebook Page is just the first step in the relationship. However, unless you make that relationship work, most won't come back to your page. In fact, 69 percent will fail to return, without an on-going stream of information, samples and offers. In similar fashion, content curation has to be a process, not an "event."

Marketers are used to having to prove digital advertising’s worth, but findings from Econsultancy and Google Analytics suggest the majority of marketers worldwide failed to use attribution models that properly depict the influence of each ad format and marketing channel on the consumer’s purchase path. The problem occurs whenever revenue attribution or lead generation is attributed to one channel, when multiple channels are at work.

"Storytelling" as a thought leadership or content marketing or content curation activity is not easy. Aside from issues related to the narrative form, there are organizational issues and processes brands frequently must grapple with. Geting and keeping the support of top management, and producing steady amounts of fresh content are among the issues. Another mental and organizational hurdle is the need to take a journalistic approach and cover all aspects of a story. This includes delving into broader topics, and it even may require curating content and views from competitors. In content marketing, the practice of including dissenting opinions and perspectives is essential to engender loyalty and trust. “Your competitors and their opinions are only a Google search away, so the objective is to bring differing perspectives into the fold and talk about them transparently," Pawan Deshpande, CEO of HiveFire says. Don’t be afraid to curate content from your ...