Every marketing professional in the tech industry, every tech evangelist, even every developer with a reddit addiction knows that in this business content is fundamental. Marketing begins and ends with…
When it comes to creating quality content assets for high-tech companies at scale, we have noticed the following paradox in the marketplace:
Of course there are exceptional individuals who are both knowledgeable and good writers but, let’s face it, they are few and far between—and, if you find one, worth his weight in gold.
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By Tina Ornstein, IOD Senior Editor Over the last five years or so, I have written dozens of business plans for early-stage companies and have personally raised money in the…
By Liz Heflin, IOD Editor In the 1937 film Shall We Dance, there’s a famous scene with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sitting on a park bench quibbling over the…
Two questions I get asked quite often are: How did you get to be where you are with your blogging? You’re not a native English speaker, nor a trained writer....…
By Tina Ornstein, IOD Editor
Blogging on technical topics for a knowledgeable audience is a little bit like tightrope walking — it requires incredible balancing skills and one false step sends you plummeting into oblivion. In other words, if you don’t find the right balance between technical expertise and audience engagement, then your blog will be ignored (which is the equivalent of oblivion in the content world.)
At IOD, we have developed and perfected our own secret sauce for helping our customers reach their target audiences. Our methodology is based on one simple mantra: “writers are not experts and experts are not writers.” Thus a successful technical blog, (i.e., a blog that gets traction with its target audience) requires the collaboration of an expert and a content person — either a writer or a proactive editor.
Although chefs tend to guard their secret sauces carefully, we at IOD believe in transparency and are happy to share with you the key ingredients of ours.
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By Tina Ornstein, IOD Editor
You have to hand it to him—Bill Gates once again positioned himself as a visionary when he postulated in 1996, when the internet was still in its infancy, that content would be king. What kind of content? Here’s what he wrote:
If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines.
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By Jen Maidenberg, VP, Editorial, IOD
In the time since I started a varied career that has always included some element of writing, the definition of “editor” has never been consistent. It changes depending on the publication or company I am working for, and has dramatically altered over the last 15 years as “features” have become “blogs” have become “content.”
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By Ofir Nachmani, Founder and CEO, IOD
Look: Upwork can be quite useful if you have a very specific, well-defined project. But for content creation, Upwork failed me—big time.
I came to this conclusion via personal, hands-on experience. About a year ago, I invested huge efforts to use several Upwork freelancers to create some in-depth articles for a database-related brand. Although I managed to squeeze out two articles, it cost me thousands of dollars and endless hours of my time.
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By Trevor Pott
Obfuscation is a longstanding tradition in marketing. While outright lies are generally avoided by reputable organizations today, half-truths and careful omission of facts are still considered normal. In the world of tech marketing, at least, a default approach of obfuscation to marketing can be catastrophic.
The internet exists. People can and do engage in research. Nerds are particularly good at it. For those who lack research skills, we’re entering an era in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) digital assistants are good enough to detect a marketing team’s obfuscation.
If Amazon’s Alexa, or Apple’s Siri get to the point that they can debunk a claim, or at least add context to one, how long before someone writes a browser plugin for the same thing in real time for every page we view?
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For more information about IOD, our services, or opportunities to write for us, drop us a line below.
