If content is king — meet the royal court!

Picture_2 Whether we are talking "old" marketing or "new" one thing hasn’t changed.  If you aren’t relevant, you won’t survive the scrutiny of an audience that is time starved and attention span short.

To make this point, Junta42 has released their Top 42 Marketing Content blogs.  They define content marketing as:

"Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action."

As you can imagine, I’m honored that my blog was included, as well as Daily Fix where I also get to show my pretty face.

Truth be told…there are lots of lists out there.  And it’s always nice to be included.  But, I figure the value in them is that they introduce us to thinkers and writers we might not have met before.  So, with that caveat — if you want to learn more about content marketing, take a lesson from these masters.

  1. Straight Talk with Nigel Hollis
  2. web ink now
  3. Conversation Agent
  4. Marketing Interactions
  5. Buzz Marketing for Technology
  6. ContentMarketingToday
  7. Copyblogger
  8. Web Strategy by Jeremiah
  9. Daily Fix
  10. Influential Marketing Blog
  11. Logic + Emotion
  12. CK’s blog
  13. Rexblog
  14. BeTuitive
  15. Consumer Generated Media
  16. Diva Marketing Blog
  17. The Origin of Brands
  18. The Viral Garden
  19. What’s Next
  20. Bernaise Source
  21. Drew’s Marketing Minute
  22. Made to Stick
  23. Writing White Papers
  24. Greg Verdino’s Marketing Blog
  25. Writing on the Web
  26. Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020
  27. AttentionMax
  28. Brand Autopsy
  29. Branding & Marketing
  30. Eat Media Blog
  31. Passion2Publish
  32. Think Tank – King Fish Media
  33. The Lonely Marketer
  34. Custom Publishing Council Blog
  35. ExperienceCurve
  36. Marketing Whims
  37. Seth’s Blog
  38. THINKing
  39. Inspire Action
  40. Pandemic Blog
  41. Relevant and Valued
  42. The A-Ha! Blog

Many of these are on my must read list, but I discovered some new blogs as well. Even if you just add a couple to your feed reader, you’re going to be glad you did!

8 comments on “If content is king — meet the royal court!

  1. Véronique says:

    Thanks for this post. Extrememly interesting…and usefull.

  2. I see many that I haven’t visited before– I’m off to check them out.

  3. John Rosen says:

    Drew,

    Thanks…and congratulations.

    John

  4. Yet no PR blogs. Isn’t PR considered a marketing discipline? I am not sure I could consider this a valid list…

  5. Geoff,

    Fortunately, the exclusion of PR blogs, which I agree, would be an appropriate and good thing, does not diminish the quality of the blogs they did choose to recognize.

    You’d have to reach out to the people at Junta42 to find out why PR blogs either were not included or didn’t make the top 42.

    I’ll shoot them an e-mail and ask them to come back and add their 2 cents.

    Drew

  6. Geoff…thanks for the question.

    I guess of couple of points to answering.

    1. We did have a nominating process, and as you could see, not many PR blogs were nominated.

    2. The other blogs on the list were recommendations made by our research team, members, and others in the content marketing community.

    3. We’d be more than happy to include more PR blogs, and you are correct, it is a marketing discipline. PR is an important part of any company’s marketing strategy.

    That said, the general definition of PR is NOT content marketing. Content marketing is the creation of your own expert content, and the marketing and distribution of that content…and has nothing to do with getting stories placed or written for traditional or outside media outlets. Content marketing should also be completely transparent (you always know the IBM piece if coming from IBM…not a PR person working to place the story with a WSJ editor).

    More PR companies are starting to get into doing more custom publishing and content marketing, but from my experience, they are not moving as fast as advertising agencies, traditional publishers or interactive agencies (or even direct marketers).

    If you know of any PR blogs that really cover the art and science of creating great business content, please pass them over to us at add[at]junta42.com.

    Hope that helps, and thanks for the question.

    Best
    Joe

  7. Hi Drew,

    So glad to join you in the Royal Court! You’re right, it’s great for getting us all out and around to shake virtual hands, so consider this a firm “how do you do?”

    And regarding the PR comments, I know Joe has outlined a clear definition of “Content Marketing,” but I’d go the other way and say PR does fall within Content Marketing.

    In the IBM example he cited, the PR firm’s true Content Marketing target audience is the WSJ. Yes, the PR firm wants to see the story go live for WSJ readers, but that’s almost irrelevant to the situation. If the WSJ doesn’t see the value in the content, they won’t use it.

    “Content marketing is the creation of your own expert content” (IBM created the content) “and the marketing and distribution of that content” (and hired a PR firm to market and distribute that content).

    On the other hand, this feels like it violates the spirit of Content Marketing, if not the letter of it.

    –AV
    “A-Ha Yourself!”

  8. Hey AV,

    I think Joe agrees with you…they’d like more PR blogs included. We just need to nominate some of them that we think are especially good.

    Drew

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