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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.
- Straight Talk with Nigel Hollis
- web ink now
- Conversation Agent
- Marketing Interactions
- Buzz Marketing for Technology
- ContentMarketingToday
- Copyblogger
- Web Strategy by Jeremiah
- Daily Fix
- Influential Marketing Blog
- Logic + Emotion
- CK’s blog
- Rexblog
- BeTuitive
- Consumer Generated Media
- Diva Marketing Blog
- The Origin of Brands
- The Viral Garden
- What’s Next
- Bernaise Source
- Drew’s Marketing Minute
- Made to Stick
- Writing White Papers
- Greg Verdino’s Marketing Blog
- Writing on the Web
- Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020
- AttentionMax
- Brand Autopsy
- Branding & Marketing
- Eat Media Blog
- Passion2Publish
- Think Tank – King Fish Media
- The Lonely Marketer
- Custom Publishing Council Blog
- ExperienceCurve
- Marketing Whims
- Seth’s Blog
- THINKing
- Inspire Action
- Pandemic Blog
- Relevant and Valued
- 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!
Thanks for this post. Extrememly interesting…and usefull.
I see many that I haven’t visited before– I’m off to check them out.
Drew,
Thanks…and congratulations.
John
Yet no PR blogs. Isn’t PR considered a marketing discipline? I am not sure I could consider this a valid list…
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
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
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!”
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