The Josh Gordon Group blog

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.

Hurricane Irene was bearing down on New York City, where I live, so I was clicking through the cable channels looking for news.

As younger TV viewers watch a program, many of them chat about it on social media. Is this a big deal? Watching this happen as the parent of a teenager, I'd say maybe not. But it is actually proving to be important for the economic health of the broadcast industry.

Brian Anthony Hernandez posting on Mashable runs the numbers on Lady Gaga's astonishing rise to the top of the web marketing stats:

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.

Failure to define content in specific terms is the biggest reason content marketing and social media programs fail. But to define the content of a program we first need to define content itself.

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.

Whatever you are doing for the next 15 minutes, will probably not be as useful as watching this video of Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.