The Josh Gordon Group blog

Someone at Google is mad. Clearly they are tired of being gamed. Their job is to find and prioritize the best content on the web for their users. Their job is NOT to find, and prioritize the best optimized content for users. Google wins when it delivers the best content.

Of all the content that companies create for marketing, “user stories” confuse the most. The confusion comes from its extremely uneven performance at different marketing functions.

Content marketing is becoming a victim of its own success. As more organizations invest more in content development (Hey, everybody's got a web site!) the sheer volume of content being released goes way up. The more content that is created means that more of it will be similar and thus it becomes a commodity.

The series of "Panda" changes to the Google search algorithm that started in February 2011 have shaken up the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world. The stated goal of the changes is to reduce the ranking of sites that post a lot of reused content, and reward sites with original content.

How many company sponsored newsletters are regularly read? Since most are promotional content packaged in newsletter form, not many. These, "all about us" newsletters contain news about the marketer’s new products and new sales as well as stories about company personnel, testimonials, and user stories.

Early this year Google initiated its “Panda” algorithm change which affected the rank of millions of websites. In a February post on “The Official Google Blog” they explained their motivation:

The British PR company Edelman has been doing an international survey on the topic of "trust" for eleven years now. Because they are a communications company some of the questions always drift over into media topics. This year's study (2011) was no different. With 5,075 responses from 23 countries the study offers an international perspective often hard to find. One finding answers a questions many in the B to B world ask a lot these days: how do people now find out information about companies? This is an important question ask because as potential buyers begin searching for information, understanding where they are looking helps marketers know how to reach them at this critical time.

I just read an amazingly insightful post by Mark Ramsey (left) of Mark Ramsey Media in which he nails the process of making media more effective by making the content the media delivers more meaningful.

Your organizations salespeople can be a terrific source of customer feedback, so can a social media listening program. Do you need them both? Yes.