Weekly Content Round-Up: Tips to Help Content Editors Create Better Content for SharePoint Pages

Welcome to my collection of articles on writing and the art of communication I read during the course of the week. This is apart from what I tweet @ottayan.

What does Facebook at Work tell us about the state of social in the enterprise?
Facebook at Work is the new kid on the enterprise social software block. But will the largest social media platform in the world with over 1.3-billion subscribers be able to replicate its success within businesses? Time will tell whether companies can trust Facebook with their proprietary data.

How social network addiction changes the brainIf you are a compulsive ‘liker’ on Facebook, or are forever trolling your ex-flames, it forms a pattern in your brain, almost similar to that of a drug addict, livescience.com claims.

But unlike drug users, Facebook addicts are sensitized to respond strongly to positive triggers associated with the site, said Ofir Turel, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton.

Facebook's earnings: Internet do-gooderism and ad gobbledygookUnless you are exceedingly interested in the intricacies of advertising technology, there’s almost nothing interesting about how Facebook makes money. Listening to a discussion of its financial results is a forced march through the muddy fields of organic impressions, increasing velocity of advertising efficiency, right-hand rails, and the like.

5 Content Marketing Ideas for February 2015In February 2015, content marketers can connect with potential customers around holidays like Valentine’s Day or Groundhog Day, via sites like SlideShare, or even with inspirational quotes.

What follows is a list of five content marketing ideas to try in February.

Facebook Vs. YouTube: Why It's Like Comparing Apples to OrangesYouTube and Facebook advocates alike have been up in arms over a recent study declaring that Facebook should now be considered the superior platform for acquiring video views.

The report analyzed 180,000 videos across 20,000 Facebook pages and asserted that content marketers were uploading videos directly to Facebook at the expense of YouTube. But do we know which marketers, and what videos? Presumably, millions of content creators will pounce on this new 'data' and begin uploading their videos to Facebook without much concern for metrics that matter like ad revenue, sales, comments, and other KPIs. But accepting this study (or any study) at face value without putting it into context is a mistake. In this article, we’ll look at why comparing Facebook to YouTube is unfair when they are very different models.

Tips to Help Content Editors Create Better Content for SharePoint Pages

Some tips for content authors and organizers who are creating content for SharePoint sites (or really, for pretty much any website).

Google vs. Facebook: Which Platform Should You Really Care About?Facebook and Google were directly competing to see which service was more effective at surfacing a story and driving action because of it.

Recently, Parse.ly investigated data from around 8 billion page views of approximately 200 news sites with the results that 38% of referrals were generated by Google and 26% by Facebook.

3 Content Marketing Practices You Should Be FollowingAs Senior Manager of Content and Social at LinkedIn, Jason Miller puts it, "It's not that we need more content; we need more relevant content."


How Marketers can make Use of InboxOne of the great things about the new email client introduced by Google is that it is more visual. In the Inbox by Google, the sender of an email is displayed by an icon rather than a plain text From: address as in Gmail. And, it works by authenticating with SPF and DKIM, having a verified Google+ business account and registering with Google for email markup.

As a marketer or business owner, this something you can do now to prepare for a widespread rollout of the Inbox, and by doing this, your company icon will also appear in the Grid View of Gmail Classic for those that have it enabled.

The content must be visual myth

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Weekly Content Round-Up: 80 Percent of Americans Enjoy Purchase-Based Recommendations in Email and other stories

Welcome to my collection of articles on writing and the art of communication I read during the course of the week. This is apart from what I tweet @ottayan.


How to make every email heard loud and clear

A poorly written support email reads like a slapped together instruction manual. Unless you want customers floundering about like a fish out of water assembling an IKEA TV stand, it pays to get the “flow” right.

The Trouble with Harvard’s Email Culture

There are no official statistics that document how often the average Harvard student checks his or her inbox, but if three-quarters of U.S. employees surveyed by GFI Software reply within an hour of receiving an email, then the number on our campus is probably even higher. Even as I write this, despite the knowledge that my inbox has not been filled for weeks, I find my eyes drawn toward the tab that keeps it open. And it’s no secret that Harvard has an email-centric culture.

In many ways, it makes sense: It’s the fastest and easiest way to reach large groups of people, and it’s the go-to method for correspondence because it lets us avoid the intimacy of phone calls or face-to-face communication.

80 Percent of Americans Enjoy Purchase-Based Recommendations in Email

According to a recent study by digital marketing platform provider Listrak and market research company Harris Poll, 80% of Americans who read marketing emails find it helpful when retailers recommend products based on previous purchases. Likewise, 71% of promotional email readers value messages featuring items based on online browsing behaviors.

The study surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults but only focused on the 72% who read promotional emails. And it looks like these respondents enjoy experiencing personalization through other channels, as well. For instance, 69% of promotional email readers appreciate online retargeting ads that showcase products previously viewed on a brand's website. In addition, 67% of these respondents enjoy seeing product recommendations on a retailer's website while shopping.


Haruki Murakami gives readers further advice on writing, adultery and cats

Writing is like “chatting up a woman”, Japan’s superstar novelist Haruki Murakami has said: “You can get better with practice to a certain degree, but basically, you’re either born with it, or you’re not.”

C.R.E.A.M. – The One Thing That Would Have Saved My Client’s Website

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Business books describe this idea using the rather dry sounding “customer-centric philosophy,” but I find that undersells its importance. Instead, I borrowed a phrase from the Wu Tang Clan, C.R.E.A.M. – Customers Rule Everything Around Me.

Content Optimization with Web Analytics

For the majority of Fortune 1,000 websites, site content serves several goals in complex sales cycles. Often, content is meant to simultaneously acquire traffic, educate, persuade users about the superiority of an offering, and convert visitors to either e-commerce customers or qualified leads that are then nurtured by the content over several visits.

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We find that for complex sales cycles, the content needs to be graded on a wide variety of levels. We also find that most Web analytics platforms are not configured to have this level of content reporting out of the box. 

4 Ways to Boost Your Content Strategy

Is a content strategist agnostic towards art and story, or just more concerned about content logistics? And, at what point do you make sure what is being published is human-centered, strategically minded, useful?

A First-page Checklist

• It begins connecting the reader with the protagonist
• Something is happening. On a first page, this does NOT include a character musing about whatever.
• What happens is dramatized in an immediate scene with action and description plus, if it works, dialogue.
• What happens moves the story forward?
• What happens has consequences for the protagonist.
• The protagonist desires something.
• The protagonist does something.
• There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
• It happens in the NOW of the story.
• Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
• Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
• What happens raises a story question—what happens next? or why did that happen?

Making Sense of Owned Media

So what are the elements of an owned media strategy? Think content, community, and context.

Story of the Shopping Cart and the Secret to Spreading Ideas

What does the story of a shopping cart have to do with spreading ideas? A lot.

5 Tips for Writing Interesting Case Studies

Everything about case studies has probably made you run far away. They are often dry, generic, or pretty much just a high school pep rally (minus the cool letterman jackets) cheering on a company, product, or solution. But they don't have to be.  

Ian McEwan's Advice for Aspiring Writers

Ian McEwan works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999.

In this interview, he talks about the importance of reading. He says it will help writers become conscious of their writing.

Weekly Round-Up: First Draft, Writing Software, a Guide to Digital Marketing and EBooks as a Content Strategy

Welcome to my collection of articles on writing and the art of communication I read during the course of the week. This is apart from what I tweet @ottayan.


The First Draft Is Just a Beginning
You have written your research paper, your personal essay, and your book review – whatever your college class requires. You have provided good information in the needed number of words. You feel good because your work is finished. But, is it really done? It is just the beginning says the VOA Learning English Education Report.


Writing Software Creates Reports for Wall Street

Writing software, called Quill that was first put to work writing news reports has now found another career option: drafting reports for financial giants and U.S. intelligence agencies.


Workplace Writing- the Art of Delaying a Reader’s Comprehension

Interesting is not a criterion we need to concern ourselves with in the kind of writing we do in the workplace — the letters and emails, the memos and the reports, the assessments and announcements and analyses. Shouldn’t we try to make our writing interesting? 

What College Professors Can Learn From Alan Alda

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But the point of this exchange is to teach professors how to avoid them. Here in a windowless office in the basement of a red brick classroom building near Harvard Square, the faculty member, Mandy Savitz-Romer, has teamed up with the consultant Mary Tamer to translate academic jargon into comprehensible English. 

A Guide to Digital Marketing in the Form of a Tube Map

Hallam Internet’s Digital Marketing Tube Map shows the complexities of Internet Marketing and graphically represents Stations as individual campaigns or platforms and Stops as the areas that need to be considered in order for your online campaigns to be a success.

 Digital Trends 2015: India Gears Up For Digital Metamorphosis

In India, an upward trend in digital and mobile spends has been observed. A joint IAMAI and IMRB study says that the digital advertising market is poised to reach Rs 3,575 crore by March 2015. Read more on why the India digital marketing landscape is unique here.

How to Use Ebooks to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
Fat content such as white papers, videos, ebooks, infographics … [and] content that can be broken up and used as the fuel for multi-channel campaigns will become the focus of marketers everywhere.

Click Here To Boost Your Productivity On Twitter!

4 quotes that capture the basics of communication

Four quotes I revisit, when I find myself losing touch with the basics of communication. 

“Great communication depends on two simple skills—context, which attunes a leader to the same frequency as his or her audience, and delivery, which allows a leader to phrase messages in a language the audience can understand”.” – John Maxwell

“Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite”. ― C.S. Lewis

“Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style”. – Jonathan Swift

“If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack”. –Winston Churchill

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#PRFail of 2014, Botched Autocorrect and others

Welcome to my collection of informative and influential articles I read during the course of the week. This is apart from what I tweet @ottayan.

The Biggest PR Disasters of 2014

Brand new head-slapping, groan-inducing communication misfires of 2014 beginning with the #CosbyMeme to mangled hashtags that led to #PRFail. Get the full article here.

Botched autocorrects

Autocorrect originated with word processing programs of the 1980s, in which the language used was checked against a dictionary to make sure the spelling was correct. (According to a 2012 study in Britain, two-thirds of adults would not be able to spell “necessary” and one-third “definitely” without the help of the feature.) Back then the point was simple: to make typing faster and more accurate. To help you, you know, not look like an idiot. Read on.

The 10 Best Infographics To Inspire Your Content Marketing

Science says yes: we process visual imagery 60,000 times faster than text, and this is part of the reason that infographics are so appealing in the age of the short attention span. The article can be read here.

The importance of storytelling in PR

The ultimate goal of many press releases is to win audience attention and influence specific behaviors. Continuously creating content such as press releases that incorporates storytelling helps customers develop long-term loyalty and appreciation of a brand. When a story connects to a reader emotionally, it can inspire journalists to write about it or consumers to share it with their networks. Get the insight here.

Brilliant screenplays of 2014

A brilliant screenplay does not always translate into a brilliant movie, as it’s only one part of the cog, but admittedly an important part of the cog. Therefore, outstanding screenplays are valuable learning tools for an aspiring screenwriter. Read more at the TheScriptLab .

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Maybe Digital Marketing Isn’t For You

They want to tie paid, owned, earned, and shared efforts together to tell a better story, they want to blog, vlog and create viral videos, they want social PR, user-generated content, and a strong brand following. The problem is that most companies want it overnight and they aren’t prepared to spend the time, money or resources it takes to do it right. The Millennial CEO believes, there is no magic button to push and I agree.