Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...On the Web, people trade attention for good, useful content. So you need to have a plan that will help you develop, publish, and catalog content to make you more effective in attracting search and keeping people coming back to your source.

There are still companies that struggle with the idea of becoming content producers, and thus have not yet formulated a content strategy. It makes sense to have one because it helps you define why con­tent is use­ful and usable, good for the bottom line and for instilling a sense of purpose -- for customers and business alike. Some organizations are affected by the sprawling issue when it comes to content. Separate groups that develop their own and don't necessarily map to the business' overall direction is one example. Others have the opposite problem -- too few resources means not enough content to start generating the search and participation volumes they need....

What is thought leadership? It’s a question that I recently asked myself after reading about Michigan’s Lake Superior State University’s annual list of overused words and phrases that students deem worthy of banishment from the English language. Among the offenders in 2011 were some tried-and-true favorites (ginormous and man cave to name a couple), as well as relative newcomers to our daily vernacular like occupy (as in Zuccotti Park) and the new normal, a darling of Wall Street since the financial crisis.

All in all it’s not a bad list, but it seems to me that our friends at LSSU missed an obvious target. I’m talking about 17 letters that can be combined to form what has become a ubiquitous and, frankly, increasingly cliché term: thought leadership...