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One of our clients recognized for their Facebook post in content Marketing blog. See below for reasons why their Facebook post was noticed and tips on content marketing today.

B Squared Marketing Shares Its Wisdom While Making It Short and

Advertising Tip of the Week: Want to drive more traffic? Consider condensing a 3 to 4 month advertising budget to just 6 weeks and build a promotion around it.

I might be getting carried away. But, I loved this very brief bit of marketing advice when it showed up on my iPhone this afternoon.  I think it proves how brevity can be the soul of content marketing brilliance in a social media milieu.

B Squared is an established SW Florida Advertising that does great work and has won a ton of awards. I knew that, but I hadn’t thought of them for ages until I saw their Facebook post this afternoon.  I was so struck that I had to write something right now.

Six Reasons Why This Makes for Fabulous Content Marketing

1. It is short. Just 24 words and less than the 140 characters allowed by Twitter if you exclude ‘advertising tip the week.’ In fact, it would make a terrific tweet.
2. It is authentic. Clearly, B Squared is offering solid advice without a sneaky ulterior motive. It’s a device you could even act on yourself without outside help.
3. It is creative. They are suggesting something outside the box that might generate fast and measurable results.
4. It is repeatable. Because their advice is so short and so easy to understand, business owners and professionals are likely to share the information and to give credit to B Squared. (Well, it sure worked for me.)
5. It is unique. Although other advertising professionals might have thought of this, I have never seen it suggested before. And, it hints to me that this company might have a lot of other unique ideas worth learning about.
6. It is action-oriented. As a small business advertiser, it would certainly inspire me to take action either on my own–or, best of all, to contact B Squared to talk to them about how they might be able to help me market more effectively.

Not only is this a great example of content marketing, but B Squared also makes great use of Facebook where you can easily share this information inside Facebook or beyond.

My only advice: Shorten these distinct words of wisdom down to 140 characters so that you can tweet them after which they will be pulled into Facebook automatically.

Written by Newt Barrett Visit the original post at this link.

Many old forms of market research are going the way of the stone tablet, for some companies. Such an arduous way of doing business could never have supported growth in trade and e-commerce in the old world. In the same way our means of testing consumer groups through old surveys and brochures are rapidly becoming just as antiquated – who wants to wait for a report to be published on what a focus group has to say when all you have to do is hit a button, type in a few words and find out instantaneously how consumers feel about your business?

Welcome to the new world of social influence marketing. The old ways of conducting market research is becoming extinct while companies across the globe are creating opportunities to hear directly from their clients and consumers on what they want and how they feel. Surveys for market research can now be carried out via a few clicks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and through a business blog.

By using a Facebook business page, a company can post information in the form of a poll or survey and allow their “fans” to give instant feedback. Companies are gaining insight on:

• Consumers’ attitudes toward particular products
• Consumers emotions about the company
• Insight into how consumers using their products
• What their clients’ needs are
• What other services they would like to see in the market place, just to name a few.

It’s faster than waiting for a hard copy market study to come back, as reliable and as fast as real time allows. It’s the new “secret shopper” but with loads more information – and none of it is secret.

Think of the possibilities: You develop a product or a service and you want to gauge consumer response quickly. Sending people out to stores to interview customers will take too long and is costly, why not post the question on your Facebook page and ask your fan base to participate in the conversation?

Old forms of advertising, via print media, won’t work either; many consumers don’t have the time to sit down, fill out a questionnaire and send it back in, yet they will take the time while they are on their favorite social site to answer a few questions. You want quick results so you can tweak the product according to customer response, now it’s possible; get it in real time by utilizing the place consumers spend a good amount of their time.

Utilizing the power of Twitter and Facebook will garner you results in seconds.

• Post 140 words and find out what people think of you, your business, your products and your services in the time it takes to hit the “enter” key.
• It’s a survey, a focus group analysis times ten – market research on steroids.
• It’s everything you need to know from the people who support your business and the speedy turnaround of information allows you to make adjustments swiftly.
• That means quicker profits.

It’s a turbulent world – make social media your new constant. It’s reliable and has more muscle than any old form of marketing could ever possibly hold. It is, in effect, your new best business partner.

The term “information superhighway” entered our dialect in 1978 when then Sen. Al Gore introduced it at a 1978 meeting of computer industry gurus. From there the definition of the phrase has grown to encompass a network that directly links millions of people – a superhighway not made of pavement and roads crisscrossed by motor vehicles but a tangle of invisible waves of information traveling around us that bring together billions of individuals seeking to exchange information.

In 2010 this complex, highly functional network takes on a much different personality. It is no longer merely billions of bytes of information zooming among computers worldwide but a smaller interpersonal network that provides an information resource in a large sphere among groups and in a smaller setting, among companies and employees.

Just as Twitter and Facebook have been used as social media marketing tools to connect ideas and information among large disconnected and fragmented groups of people, they can also be used to supply information among smaller, interrelated communities. In fact, today, executives use Twitter and Facebook to not only convey a message to consumers but to talk to their own employees. Twitter is the means through which CEO’s communicate and let people in their organization know what’s happening on a daily basis. Internal blogging is used as a two-way communication channel with employees to converse about events taking place the company, it is also a great tool to hear what employees are saying to each other and what could make them more productive.

This means of communication surpasses the internal newsletter as the new information source. It is faster, quicker and in real time – a fresh and immediate e-letter. Where you’d once wait weeks to have such information on your desk, today you wait minutes – seconds – which makes the e-letter’s contents much more relevant to a company’s operations. Employees want to know what’s happening in the company now and this instant supply of information can help in decision making and planning timely strategies. Social media marketing is not only the link that supports the connections among consumers and companies but the support that grounds and supplies news among people who work within the company.

This makes social media the new media for corporations worldwide – an informational superhighway informs employees which, in turn, brings results at the speed of light.

If BP can’t get anything done in the Gulf of Mexico, social media sure can.

Google “twitter oil spill” and up comes a TechCrunch article, “Central Command Turns to Twitter to Solve the Gulf Oil Spill” (followed by the words “Uh Oh,” relating to the fact that BP is looking for people with tech expertise via social media for ideas to stop the spill).

The article explains how a group of a dozen or so organizations including BP, the EPA, the U.S. Department of Interior, the Department of Defense, and OSHA have set up Deepwater Horizon Response to manage response operations. “In addition to a Web site for this effort,” the article notes, “there’s a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Flickr account and a YouTube account.” All of these combined efforts are giving people worldwide a ton of information about the spill. The Twitter page alone has 7,843 followers.

How does this relate to your business? Realizing that the chance is nill that you’ll have to pull a PR/social media blitz the scope of BP’s within the lifetime of your business, the incident nevertheless highlights the power of the Internet and social media to get information out to large groups of people. You can, in essence, move mountains, whether you need to inform about a disruption in your business, a problem you’ve encountered with a product or service or another notable breach that affects you and your customers.

Say something does happen to your company that demands a bit of finesse; what if a figurative “oil spill” occurred and you suddenly found that you had to rely on social media marketing to clean up the mess?

Your company and what it stands for are emblazoned into a brand name; if your brand becomes tarnished there’s no better way to blunt the PR damage than through a social media marketing campaign. Use these Internet tools to explain, to inform and to mitigate, if not on a global basis, then on a local level. Customers are customers, whether they span the globe or take out their garbage on the next street.

Social media is fast becoming synonymous with information resource. Used effectively it can help you pave the way to better relations with customers.

In this new world of networking you need to ask yourself an important question: Are you being anti-social?

Funny, that hyphenated word used to carry a whole different meaning, as in people who engaged in behavior that was outside the norm. Shunning social media doesn’t place you outside the boundaries of generally accepted behavior but it does place you outside in the cold and away from an effective form of business marketing.

Embracing social media marketing is like giving your business a facelift. Dropping fifty pounds and buying a new wardrobe. Painting the living room. It’s all the same – it gives you a new perspective and once that’s understood, the sky’s the limit when it comes to how far you can take your marketing plan.

Changing from an old to new mindset is not always easy. In the 1920s the automobile blew past the horse and buggy; in the 1950s, TV edged out radio and in the 1990s the Internet flexed its muscle and overpowered everything and with each rumble of thunder there came a resistance that consistently sought to harken back to the “good old days.”

But by the early 2000s, the old method of advertising and marketing became the leisure suit of the industry – a hackneyed and tired piece of clothing best left to old disco movies.

So in establishing the new you and, in essence, establishing a new format for your marketing campaign and embracing social media, you might find that you’re having trouble adapting to a new world order. You might, in effect, find that you’re anti-social. If you do keep these points in mind:

1. It’s not as painful as you might think. Social media marketing is a few clicks into a world of interconnected relationships that can bring power and prestige to your business.
2. Social media marketing, via Facebook and Twitter, enables you to target your audience. Thus, you can bring additional leverage to your business, something that old forms of advertising and marketing could never deliver.
3. Marketing via the internet allows you to connect daily, hourly, minute by minute, in real time with consumers. An instantaneous flow of possibilities is at your fingertips.

So throw off the old tweeds and loafers and get a new look via social media marketing. Wear it well and see how your business grows.