Sep 142013
 
Online Ad Targeting -- A Conversation with Sean Callahan of Bizo

This week I had the chance to interview Sean Callahan, Marketing Director at the online marketing firm Bizo. Sean is another former journalist who has moved to the brand side, having worked at BtoB magazine and other Crain Communications properties before joining Bizo last year. Bizo is a leading provider of technology and data for […]

Sep 112013
 
Reports from Content Marketing World 2013

Content Marketing World 2013 concludes tonight in Cleveland, Ohio. The event is put on by the Content Marketing Institute and a reported 1,700 marketers attended, and got to hear William Shatner give the closing keynote tonight. If that doesn’t show content marketing is red hot, I don’t know what does! Eloqua’s All About Revenue blog […]

Sep 082013
 
Rear Spring Pad Replacement on My BMW E36 M3

This weekend I tackled a small but irritating issue with my E36 M3. For a while there had been a soft clunk whenever I went over a bump while turning right. Holiday time last year I replaced the sway bar end links, but this didn’t fully stop the noise. I eventually zeroed in on the […]

Sep 042013
 
How Not to Promote Your Company on LinkedIn

I spend a lot of time counseling clients on how to promote themselves appropriately through social media channels. There is a way to do it that educates, engages and (sometimes) even entertains. And then there is the way not to do it — by engaging in clumsy one-way promotion. I came across an example of […]

Aug 292013
 
Brand Journalism and Content Marketing

Earlier this week I caught up with an old friend Roger Hughlett. Roger and I have known each other for many years — here’s a story from 2009 about some changes he was driving as assistant managing editor at the Washington Business Journal. A lot has changed since then. Earlier this year Roger made the […]

Aug 262013
 
Italian Red Winners

I last wrote about Italian wine for my April WashingtonExec column.  Since then I’ve enjoyed some new Italian red winners that I talk about below. I wrote in April about how Italian wine can be hard to decipher. I hope the deconstructed label above is helpful next time you’re deciding on bringing an Italian wine […]

Aug 212013
 
Can Content Marketing Rescue Social Media Marketing?

I read a really good article today written by Mark Schaefer for Ragan on content marketing. It echoed a lot of things I stress to clients each day about content marketing done right. It also added a perspective I hadn’t considered — that content marketing done right might redeem the concept of social media marketing. […]

Aug 162013
 
Repairing an E39 M5 Wheel

This past weekend I completed a repair project for a rear wheel on my 2002 BMW M5. In this post from late July I explain how I bent and cracked the wheel. Initially I was thinking replacement rather than repair. I knew color matching was going to be a problem, due to the shadow chrome […]

Aug 142013
 
Google Wants All Natural SEO

I’ve been writing about helping clients with SEO for a long time. Organic SEO improvement is never the end goal of my client engagements (that’s sales integration), but rising rankings are a welcome benefit of consistently publishing quality content on a specific topic. Other than a logical use of keyword phrases and the use of […]

Aug 122013
 
The Demographics of U.S. Wine Consumption

This February I wrote a piece that looked at wine purchases in 2012 by age group. Last week Gallup came out with some new numbers on U.S. wine consumption. As is often the case with surveys, any conclusions depend on which numbers you choose to highlight. For the most part the trend is very positive. […]

Aug 072013
 
Can an Equation Measure Wine Value?

How do you get good value from the wine you buy? It’s a very natural question that many people have asked me. It’s also a very subjective question with no hard and fast answer. That said, the popularity of wine continues to increase, and so does the number of choices available to consumers. So despite […]

Aug 042013
 
Edelman Opines on Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is a major and often controversial trend in online publishing. Traditional revenue streams have been greatly reduced, and publishers are looking for ways to make publishing make money online. Last month the PR firm Edelman published a study and some suggested guidelines for sponsored content. Sponsored content differs from content marketing, which is […]