The New State of Digital Marketing

There's a lot of potential with personalization in marketing, helping customers find information and content that fits their specific interests.

Another marketing trend that also relates to creating dynamic, rich websites and the information/data explosion, is content curation. Content marketing has been around for a long time, in the form of white-papers, branded research reports, and so on, however marketers are now starting to use content curation to build rich, timely sites/pages for prospects and customers.

Two interesting examples are CMO.com, an Adobe initiative, and IQ by Intel (iq.intel.com). These follow other successes in content curation, from TechMeme to Daring Fireball. Yes, John Gruber presents a lot of original content, but curated articles and quotes are major components of the Daring Fireball experience.

If you combine content curation with personalization, you end up with something that's very interesting. Content curation yields enough content to serve the needs of a diverse audience, while personalization ensures the content you serve is uniquely relevant and valuable to each visitor.

We're working on a content curation platform at Intigi.com. And this article has me thinking that we need to find ways to personalize the curated content for different types of traffic. Food for thought...

I'm biased but I loved this post, and glad to see some traction here. There's been some discussion of HTML5/relevancy giving way to an appified website experience, but I really appreciate considering how that changes the most basic job-profile of the digital marketer.

Social media marketing seems like the only thing that even resembles this job, where your audience is differentiated and requires a real-time, context-driven approach, though the tools that surround it are still quite young (and in the long-tail mostly relate to group collaboration).

If that's true, I wonder if the role of "social media manager" looks a lot like the future of all digital marketing?

Maximizing relevance is the thing that most sites fail at. You'll still need traditional marketing to attract eyeballs to a site (or service, product, etc.) but this is more about tailoring the product itself to the specific needs of that particular customer at a single point in time.

There will of course always be limits to this approach in that you cannot know what a customer wants, especially if the customer doesn't know that either. It's certainly easier to aim for retention since a customer has already demonstrated a desire for the product and a usage pattern.

When I visit a random website and they already know who I am, just call me Ted Kaczynski. I'll be in my cabin in the woods.

This article just seems like a lot of buzzwords and unrelated points.