Digital marketing insights.

If there’s one thing business owners universally fear, it’s an economic downturn. Although there are a few industries that benefit, or at least remain stable during a rough patch, even those tend to face increased pressure and competition in slower times.

Could you be crowded out of search listings – and your readers’ attention – by your own content?

In a perfect world, your social connections would be within arm’s reach of a smartphone, eagerly anticipating your next post or comment. And, anytime you wrote something brilliant or insightful, there would be multitudes of readers ready to jump in, comment, and add their own thoughts.

There is a lot of information and advice being thrown around when it comes to how marketers should handle social. That’s mostly a good thing, since we can all use more ideas and best practices about getting our messaging right.

I’m relatively outspoken on a lot of different topics, and one of them is the need for business owners and marketers to handle their own social engagement. Doing so allows them to keep their finger on the pulse of their industry, along with customer discussions and concerns and insights they just couldn't find 'not' being there.

Fill in the blank: “If I were just able to use a ______________ tool, my problems would be solved in an instant.”

Here at Kayak, we have a pretty open stance about ethics when it comes to sales and marketing – we prefer an inbound, attraction-based approach where prospects seek us out based on our being helpful and valued. We’re simply not in the habit of thrusting ourselves into the faces of prospects.

I had the great fortune of writing and posting some of my best articles around online marketing ideas over on Social Media Today last year as one of their Best Thinkers. In case you missed my articles there, here is a roundup of a few of my favs, in no particular order:

Is the most valuable part of your content, the discussion it generates? Can social comments add more authority and semantic search value than many marketers truly appreciate? These were among the questions on my mind when I sought advice from a handful of connections in GPlus (who just happen to also represent some of the top minds in Semantic Search).

Wouldn’t it be nice if every article was the source of tens of thousands of views, thousands of social shares, and a long list of engaging comments? What a wonderful bit of exposure that would be! Could it happen for you? It happened for me, and I think I know why.

Not long ago, I shared my opinion that marketers were being overly worried about duplicate content, specifically for sharing their articles and posts in a variety of places.

We all know by now that social media is an important part of building engagement, staying in touch with contacts, and for building our credibility. But can the mechanics of posting to multiple social destinations can get a little bit sticky?

I love LinkedIn Pulse – it’s a great forum for publishing and re-publishing content for a new or different audience that your other platforms. I’m all for anything that connects people on the Net with great content, and Pulse does that well.

Most marketers realize that announcing and sharing their posts on social media sites like Twitter, Google+, or Facebook is an important part of attracting interest. Doing so allows you to alert your connections that you have new content to check out, and could even help jumpstart a conversation with the people you want to get to know.

Creativity is a popular subject in the business world, and a crucial element to any online marketing campaign. It’s also notoriously difficult to define and identify. So it was very interesting to those of us in the content creation world when Adobe – the leader in creativity-enhancing software – released a study on the way it works in organizations around the globe.