Condensed Content for Quick Consumption

Have you noticed that the technology we use to coordinate our days, hours and minutes is largely responsible for our lives being so chaotic? Sure, it helps us manage time more efficiently but any free time that is created is often filled in with more activities, not leisure. Weirdly, we like it that way.

Marketers have adjusted their delivery methods to our desire to be occupied at all times. Paid advertisements in social media feeds are great examples of this tactic. So are video screens at gas pumps. Twitter, which causes a lot of the competition for my attention, has seen its turf become so crowded that it recently unveiled Twitter Highlights, a feature Twitter says is, "an instant summary of the best Tweets from your timeline." It's like Twitter is surrendering to the fact that we users are so busy that we only have time for the cream of its crop.

Despite being so busy, we still like to call the shots when it comes to staying informed. But the rub is that we're too busy to call said shots. That's why we have an increasing appreciation for content, news and other information to be delivered to us in concentrated doses. I've noticed three big-time examples that help us achieve an acceptable information delivery flow that is considerate of our available consumption time.

INBOX

Google's attempt to make managing all of your email was introduced in late 2014. Not only can you access messages from various accounts with Inbox, it also prioritizes your emails so that you see what's important sooner.


THIS.

This. is a budding, invitation-only social media platform that allows users to share just one link per day with other users. That limitation really makes you think before sharing (and really cuts down on the cat pics!). Each day, the editors at This. send an email to subscribers that features the most shared links of the day.

THE DAILY RALLY

Sports fans that are crunched for time will appreciate the roundup of headlines that arrive each morning via email. Each delivery features a broad but short collection of links to articles and videos that recap sporting events from the previous day (and night). This is a very new venture staffed only by a pair of capable sisters. I’m already a fan and I hope they can maintain what has to be an exhausting pace.

WE HAVE LAUNCHED. Head over to thedailyrally.com to sign up! What a great day.
Posted by The Daily Rally on Monday, September 7, 2015

I expect to see more new content sources that conform to our information overload threshold. It will be interesting to see if and how existing sources adjust. Thanks for reading and please let me know your observations in the comment section!

Three Reasons Why Companies Need to Communicate

Corporate communications can take many forms and have just as many intended targets. Even though there are numerous reasons why some companies don't communicate - ranging from unfamiliarity with the ways to communicate to lacking manpower dedicated to delivering messages - there's no doubt about the importance that communications play in a company's success.

After a lot of thought, I've put together the following list that describes the top-3 reasons why companies need to communicate.

1) Put Your Information Where It Can Be Found

As I've stated many times on this blog, I feel the basic principal of marketing is getting your message of front of your targets. That notion has more weight than ever, given the way people prefer to find information for themselves in today's digital world. At the very least, make an explanation of your company's services available on a website. Tracks to that website should be laid in the form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), email blasts, social media posts and traditional advertising. People want learn more about what you offer. Put your info where it can be found.

2) Explain Yourself

Communicating what your company offers is just the first step. You can also benefit from telling your story or history and giving customers a way to identify with your company. Regular blog posts are great ways to explain how your services can be used in everyday situations. Think about this: the communications that helped curious people discover your company can work in tandem with future communications to help them learn additional benefits of your services.

3) Show That Your Company Wants to Work

The first two reasons why your company needs to communicate pertained to explaining that your company can do something. It's extremely important that your company also communicates that it wants to something. If a potential customer is wavering when deciding to use your service, telling them that you actually want to do the work that will make their life better, easier and more charmed will go a long way towards securing their patronage.

These three reasons could be great topics for individual blog posts - and I might just do that. Here's a question for you as I work on those...would it be fair to say that you could apply these three reasons why companies need to communicate to why personal brands need to communicate???

How to Embed a Video in an Email

Learning how to perform a new marketing task by trial and error has resulted in satisfaction quite often for me over the years. But there have also been times when I've been left disappointed, frustrated and even a little hopeless.

Such was the case very recently when I tried to embed a YouTube video in the body of an email. I use a great email marketing vendor called Emma at my job. It’s very simple to use and is the complete package – from design to analytics. Composing your email message with Emma is a lot like writing a new post on your blog.

I recently learned the hard way that you can’t simply copy and paste YouTube HTML code into the body of an email like you can for a blog post. I double-checked with Emma’s competitors and yep, they can’t do it either. There may be a way to get around this problem but as I've stated many times, I’m no guru. It could be that this restriction is limited to email marketing vendors but my research helped me realize that for analytical reasons, embedding video code into an email doesn't come highly suggested. Plus, there’s something about the code that doesn't agree with the email software – a guru could probably be more specific here.

So what did I do? I really wanted the recipients of my emails to view this video in a convenient way. I thought back to all the emails I receive on a daily basis that feature video players right there in the body of the email. It dawned on me that those video players aren't video players at all. They’re images of videos that are linked to a video page. In the back of my mind, I knew how this process worked. But it’s like my mind’s eye “sees” the video within the email.

The solution to my problem required the purchase of a video player graphic template from a site like ShutterStock and inserting a photo along with a “Play” icon. Now that I have this image, I can place it into the body of my email and Emma’s software allows me to link it to any page I desire.

An example of a video player image. 

I hope this post has helped you. Isn't it uncanny how solutions to problems that seem unsolvable often turn out to be so simple? I’d love to read about your similar “problems” in the comment section!