In my previous post, Building the Social Media Marketing Foundation, I emphasized the importance of delivering valuable and useful content to your audience as a means of building a following and, consequently, increasing sales.

Chris Brogan, a ten-year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses, drives home the same principle in his guest post today at Talent Zoo.  He focuses on the five points of content marketing:

• It’s brief.
• It’s easy to share.
• It’s about the buyer, not the product.
• It’s useful.
• It isn’t the sales offer.  It’s the lead into a marketing funnel.

Chris writes, “A how to video on hanging up a picture sponsored by Black & Decker is content marketing.  A blog post about the five things we often forget when staying at a hotel sponsored by Priceline.com is content marketing.”  He adds, “We’re talking about useful information presented in a way that makes the receiver of that information feel they’ve been given a value.”

The point of content marketing is not, by any means, to make it a blatant sales pitch.  People are far more receptive to information that is given to them free of charge, and they will be more willing to respect the sponsors/vendors creating the informational piece if it doesn’t seem like a “buy our product” ploy.

• How Content Marketing Will Shake the Tree
• Don’t Be Content with Your Content
• Internet Content Marketing – A Revolution in Small Business Advertising

One of the many wonders of the ‘Net is that not only do you get direct messages from companies, but you also have easy access to the opinions of disgruntled customers.

Sites like IHateStarbucks.com, BoycottWalmart.org, and LoewsSucks.com have been created for consumers to voice their not-so-flattering opinions of major companies.  And, recently, the Wall Street Journal reported the results of a survey that details company responses to such so-called “bad” publicity.

Buy All Uncomplimentary Domain Names

Xerox has done this, nabbing xeroxstinks.com, xeroxcorporationsucks.com, and ihatexerox.net, among approximately twenty others.  In this way, they prevent angry consumers from registering the domain names themselves, thereby forcing them to voice their opinions elsewhere: on forums, in blogs, etc.  However, this sort of “strangulation” method seems almost the worst thing Xerox could do, as it reduces the possible outlets for expression and thus has the potential to just frustrate the consumers more.

Let the Consumers Do What They Want

Dell hasn’t made any attempts to grab the anti-Dell domain names, and does not have any plans to do so.  Currently a few of these domains do exist, like DellIsEvil.com, but as yet the sites are merely parked and full of links to – you guessed it – the Dell corporate site.  Dell knows of its floundering reputation amongst some consumers, but is allowing them the freedom of expressing their opinions should they choose to do so.

Turn the Angry Domain Name into a Useful Tool

AMC Theatres turned the Loewssucks.com site into an educational resource and added a customer satisfaction survey.  BankofAmericaSucks.com has been modified from a strict text-only, single-consumer complaint page to a forum that is now known as “The Official Bank of America Consumer Opinion Site.”  Companies that use “bash” domain names as a means of funneling complaints about their products or services are actually taken advantage of a tremendous marketing opportunity.  By allowing such freedom of expression within a tight, managed format, companies can use the comments that come in to improve themselves in a way that appeals to extremely targeted individuals: people who are actually purchasing their products and services.

Read more about companies combating angry consumers, and thanks to Elena for the tip!

• They Just Don’t Get It
• How to Handle ‘IHateYourCompany.com’

On a recommendation from one of my former coworkers, I read both The End of Marketing as We Know It [buy] and The End of Advertising as We Know It [buy] by the great Sergio Zyman, former Chief Marketing Officer at Coca-Cola and now Chairman and Founder of Zyman Group, a marketing services firm headquartered in Atlanta. Both books are fantastic, easy reads, with a number of valuable nuggets about the many changes that are occurring in the marketing and advertising industries. Below is a video in which Zyman discusses the components of a successful marketing campaign, and it’s worth a watch.

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Whether you’re in marketing, graphic design, or web development, at some point in your career you will run into the need to have an online portfolio. While a hard-copy version is still great for interviews – and make sure you have a swanky folder in which to hold the items – so much business is done over the ‘Net now that lacking an online portfolio can actually be detrimental to your career.

Thanks to a shout-out by DesignFlavr, I came across an article that details some of the biggest mistakes individuals make when designing their online portfolio layouts. Kyle Meyer of Astheria trudged through two hundred different portfolios and drew a number of conclusions from the layouts that he saw, from the altogether annoying background music that plays automatically upon entering the site to a lack of contact information to poor navigation. The result was a post entitled “My Last Portfolio Sucked, Yours Might Too.”

My online portfolio is guilty of utilizing thumbnails, I’ll admit, but I’m redesigning it as we speak so I’ll definitely keep some of these “what not to do” hints at the back of my mind. In the meantime, take a look at your own portfolio and then check out the article, and its follow-up, “Portfolios that Accomplish Goals,” available here.

• Build a Killer Online Portfolio in 9 Easy Steps
• Improving the Quality of Leads Through Your Online Portfolio
• Online Portfolio – Web Designer’s Number One Weapon