
Blogs are well-established as an effective means of content marketing, particularly if they are shared using other mechanisms. They provide a range of advantages to organizations who wish to provide more information about their products and services, or their approach to corporate culture or social responsibility. But multimedia capabilities of smartphones and simplifying of non-linear digital video editing has seen an explosion in the use of video. Video can show rather than tell and if the producer has access to good imagery, can be far more vibrant than a text-based blog offering. YouTube is now the #2 search engine and organizations need to develop a plan for integrating video into their content marketing.
There are disadvantages to video content marketing that should be taken into account. As sexy as a video may be, if it isn't found, it's irrelevant, and if its distribution isn't maximized, the cost/minute ROI ratio is high.

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- Written by: Norman Smit
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In the course of the hundreds of formation skydiving jumps I did and competing at two national championships, I learned a few lessons that I now apply professionally in business communications. For people who's only exposure to skydiving is the movie 'Point Break', it may come as a surprise that it's not like that at all. Don't expect to exit an aircraft and 'naturally' get it right. Skydivers proportionately spend a lot of time preparing for jumps to get them right - to stack the odds in favor of getting a complex 3D maneuver come together and work. Because screwing up has real and immediate consequences, skydivers have developed simple, easy-to-remember best practices that have given the sport a good track record for safety despite the inherent risk. These best practices translate effectively to crisis communications.
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Content marketing can be a very effective method to boost the visibility of an organization and strengthen business outcomes. In a world in which specialization is an increasing fact of life, the terms and phraseology that may be common to one group is often gibberish to others. 'Content marketing' is an example by itself. It's a term web, SEO and digital marketers will be familiar with but may mean nothing to people outside the communications and marketing field. It basically means using content posted to the web to grow an organization's visibility and rank with search engines like Google, Bing, etc. Acronyms are also often industry specific, so 'SEO' stands for 'Search Engine Optimization', which is getting web pages ranked as highly as possible by search engines. Content marketing uses the specialized language common to an industry sector or service niche and turns it into an asset for web marketing, showcasing an organization's strengths and capabilities and why clients should do business with them.
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"75% of PR agency owners don't know much about social media" That's a headline from a recent PR industry survey showing the extent to which social media is impacting some of the traditional ways of doing business. The survey highlights how 90% of Public Relations owners don't believe social media will replace traditional print and broadcast media, but simultaneously assert that 78% say it's important to offer social media services.
Pitching a campaign with a social media component tacked on doesn't work. It isn't culturally sustainable, and can create and expose brand and messaging dissonance with consumers and stakeholders. Tweets say this, practice says that. New media has consequences for organizations who are being caught flat-footed at the speed with which conversations can evolve and communications should be organized - to use a military phrase - to fight today's war, not the last one.
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- Written by: Norman Smit
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I review how Coherent Marketing, formarly known as Integrated Media Strategies, is doing on Search platforms on a regular basis and for the past few months, we have been holding steady with a #2 ranking on Google for 'integrated media', just behind Wikipedia. For a startup company less than a year old providing media and consulting services - not some buzzworthy Silicon Valley clone, it is a significant achievement.
It also shows that it is possible for smaller companies providing good services and who have a sound integrated marketing and communications plan to be able to compete against organizations with far larger budgets. But it does require some attention to what I call the basics:
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I originally created this help topic to assist members of the Experimental Aircraft Chapter whose site I created and manage. Many of the members are older and were insecure about creating content on a website. To foster engagement, HELP instructions demystifies the processes they use. After all, if they are capable of following the instructions when building a kit aircraft, they can do so when posting to a website.
This page provides information about how to post a link in text on a Joomla site page using the TinyMCE text editor.
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