5 ways to spot a crap Content Marketing agency

Content Marketing is this season’s buzz word. Like ‘Social Media’ was a few years back and ‘Web 2.0’ a few years before that… Content Marketing is apparently all the rage now.
Only there’s a big problem with that.

To try and fill the gap between client expectations and delivery of these, a bunch of agencies have recently cropped up offering: Content strategy, Content Marketing, In-bound marketing and the rest. You know the ones… they email you all the time (well, they fill up my ‘Promotions’ tab in Google Mail – which I now treat like a second inbox for spam) and make it seem like they are a reputable company and not just a bunch of people jumping on the latest digital bandwagon.

Yes, there will be the odd one out there who has actually done what they say and possibly for some brands you may have actually heard of. But a lot of them have either just re-purposed their existing Search Engine Optimisation efforts or may have worked out how to do the basics in Google Analytics (e.g. look at in-bound source URLs, print out a PDF of landing page bounce rates, etc.).
So here’s my tips on the ways you can spot a crap content marketing agency:

1. They send you an email such as “understand blogging basics” or “free website content review” when they've not even looked at your site
2. They don’t actually have any content creation and copy writing skills (they typically only offer to suggest blog posts or to analyse what you've already written)
3. They have spelling or consistency mistakes across their website (an obvious sign of poor content quality) 
4. Despite claiming to have been doing “Content Marketing for years” their own twitter feed and blog posts go back less than 12 months.
   (And watch out for the tell-tale sign of sudden flurries of blog posts all written around the same time, and then large gaps where they haven't been bothered)
5. They make wonderful sweeping statements like “you need to increase brand engagement” with no indication of how you actually do this, let alone measure it.

So. Did I miss any points? Let me know. 

The rubbish that spammers write

It is easy to criticise people who send spam emails. They are probably written in a hurry and by people who don't have English as their mother tongue.

But there is also a part of me that likes to read them and to get a little amusement at the same time. I therefore thought I would share some snippets of real emails that I have been sent in the past... so you could smile as well. These aren't all just examples of bad grammar; some are factually incorrect and others just plain absurd.

We provides Guaranteed first page ranking in Google.
You have to say this with a pirate accent. But more importantly... any agency that offers to guarantee you a first page listing on Google is either lying or using black hat SEO techniques.

We use 100% white hat stuff.
Made out of stuffed white hats one assumes. Aside from the unprofessional approach, any SEO agency that isn't prepared to share a little more of their methodology might well have something to hide.

Hello Dear, How are you doing
I'm fine, thanks for asking. Being over familiar in email correspondence to someone you don't know is just as bad as being too stuffy and stiff to those you do.

This is not A spam please
ReAlly? Nothing says "this is spam" like an email subject line saying it is not.

So come on, has anyone else got any funny / cringe-worth examples?

Twitter usage - how to be more professional

I've recently written an article giving some top tips for Twitter users. You can view the article here:
http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com/business_advice.php?AID=8590&Title=Top+Tips+On+Tweeting

Its quite surprising for me to see so many regular users of Twitter still doing some pretty basic or incorrect stuff and not making the most of their precious 140 characters. There's some obvious question to ask, for example:

• Why don't people shorten their URL's to make the most effective use of their posts (and to measure click throughs)
• Why are hashtags not used more regularly?
• Why aren't more posts repeated if they are important?
• Why do so many postings still have spelling mistakes in them?

Just because Twitter is an informal social media channel, it doesn't have to be used unprofessionally.