This is the next-to-last update in my Summer Lovin blog series!
When it comes to all this content stuff, I want you to feel confident. And being confident means knowing the lingo. Marketers love to throw around jargon, especially with all the tech tools commonplace in our offices. So, let’s walk through some of the most common terms you should know.
- IMPORTANT: A lot of content-related technology tools use similar terminology to that used by Google Analytics and email marketing tools. Be sure to see my previous jargon posts: email marketing jargon and google analytics jargon.
Terms presented in alphabetical order.
Author Rank: This is Google’s ability to track you, as a person — not a brand, as an author around the web. There’s some speculation that it improves your SEO to set this up – here is some more info on how to do that.
Content: Given we’ve just spent a month talking about this topic, I was curious what the lovely folks at Oxford dictionary had to say about it. They didn’t let me down; their definition: “Information made available via website or other electronic medium.” My point here is to mention that content is multimedia: it could be videos, audio podcast, images, blog posts like this one, infographics, white papers, spreadsheet templates, etc.
Content Management (or Content Management System): A content management system [CMS] is a tool that helps you publish content onto your website. The most popular content management system is WordPress (you’re looking at WordPress right now); but regardless of the tool, the system just makes it easy for you to input words, photos, videos, etc. and display them in a way that customers can access them, and also allows you to organize the content so your growing archive of content is easy to navigate (for both you and clients!).
Curation: Curation, or content curation, is creating content that is a round-up of other pieces of content; like an art gallery curator, a content curator pulls together other interesting topics alongside a theme or ethos. I’ve written about this extensively here.
EdgeRank: This is the algorithm that Facebook uses to decide what content to show in your news feed. It’s a complex topic worth a whole blog post on its own – and oh, here’s one just for you.
Inbound Marketing: Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing, which is simply marketing that attracts potential customers, as opposed to direct marketing, where you actually are the first person to make contact with the client. Content is inbound marketing, but there are other examples – for example, you could have a free cooking demonstration at the town square, hoping to attract some client attention, as opposed to cold calling or sending pamphlets to potential clients, which would be direct marketing.
Native Advertising: This is a term that I don’t really think is fully defined yet, but one way to look at it is that this is an advertisement that could only appear on the site it is on. For example, you couldn’t have a promoted tweet on Facebook. And you couldn’t have a promoted Facebook post on Google Plus. The ad is ‘native’ to the platform it was published on. In some cases, branded content / sponsored content is considered native (because the person that wrote it and how it was presented would be different on another site).
Newsjacking: In some circles considered a negative activity, newsjacking is jumping onto a breaking news story and using it to help promote your own brand. For example, let’s say they at the Oscars, someone falls on the stage because their shoe broke, and you make high heeled shoes. So perhaps you issue a press release or blog post promoting your “break proof, fall proof” shoe and make a big fuss and even offer to send the actress who fell a free pair. (This is a pretty innocuous example. When Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast last year, lots of brands posted tasteless sales and other promo tactics – as if people in harms way really needed a dose of consumerism!). If it wasn’t obvious by now, use carefully.
Responsive (sometimes also “mobile content”): All this means is that your content, whether it is photos or text or video, has been optimized so it is easy to read/use/enjoy by customers on a mobile phone. The term “responsive” specifically means that your website or other technology tools are able to know the size of the screen and adjust the display layout appropriately. (Tip: your website really needs to be ‘responsive.’ Ask your designer, or get in touch with me, if it isn’t yet.)
Storytelling (or Brand Storytelling): Simply put, this is another word for content marketing. I hope all your content is telling a story – people love good stories.
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