The jury is still out on how the iPad and other tablets will impact what has been a struggling magazine industry the last few years, but Wired editor Chris Anderson has a positive outlook on the potential of the tablet to change the industry. Why is Anderson so confident in the opportunities tablets will create for magazines and content marketers? He shared the following insights at the American Association of Advertising Agencies' Transformation Conference in San Francisco last week:

If you are a marketer, you depend on effective content to reach and serve customers. However, we're now experiencing a tsunami of change in the ways such content can be created and distributed. Change may be good, but it can be filled with risk and confusion.

Creating great content is just the part of a content strategy -- once you've got it, you need to effectively market it. If nobody knows your content exists, then all of your hard work will be for naught. This article from Wild Pitch Marketing suggests five great outlets to use to garner attention for your content, including:

• Social media. "Networking and word of mouth is the most powerful promotional strategy to get the attention you need for your content."


• Search engine marketing. "...Optimize your content to produce better visibility in the search engines so that more people can discover your content..."


• Blogging. The ease of sharing blogged content (via syndication and widgets) allows others to help you distribute your content.

Head over to Wild Pitch Marketing to learn more about how to get your content noticed.

After 30 years of thinking about content, creating it or working with other content creators, Rex Hammock knows quite a bit about helping business people communicate better with their customers. In fact, our resident content marketing expert is in the middle of a new series, Content That Works, in which he outlines some practical ways to create engaging content that people actually look forward to reading and experiencing.

If you think marketing is about crafting showy, syrupy stories about your brand for a consumer audience, think again. Marketing is about finding the true stories that make your brand unique and using them to engage employees and consumers, blogs Brett Virmalo of digital agency Tippingpoint Labs. Ready to ramp up your marketing? Virmalo suggests focusing on these five areas.

•Product design and development. To market a product, build your messaging around the problem that your team set out to solve when they developed it.

•The post-purchase experience. Don't spam your customers with the next product you want them to purchase. Figure out what they are buying and how you can help them use it, so you can provide them valuable, relevant content.

•Customer support.When a customer has a problem or complaint, focus on how you can help them solve it as quickly and as painlessly as possible instead of explaining what went wrong.

•Product reviews. Are you engaging in online ratings and review spaces like Yelp, GetSatisfaction and the like? If not, you should be. Seize any opportunity to set the record straight when an unfair review is posted.

•Employees and CEOs. Think of every employee as a brand ambassador and encourage them to promote your brand through their social networks. Give CEOs a platform to blog or Tweet about your brand or position them as experts who are willing to speak at conferences, to reporters, ect.

A new study reveals that small businesses are increasingly incorporating social media into their marketing strategies. In fact, usage of social media among small businesses has doubled over the last year: 24 percent of small businesses with fewer than 100 employees use social media versus 12 percent last year, according to the latest Small Business Success Index study performed by Network Solutions and the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.

The study found that the most common social media methods among small businesses is creating a Facebook or LinkedIn page (75 percent). Only 39 percent of small businesses have a blog, and 26 percent use Twitter to share information about their area of expertise.

The study also provided insight into why small business owners are hesitant about using social media to market their businesses. Biggest barriers include longer-than- expected marketing results and the fear that social media channels give customers an opportunity to publicly criticize their business.

We hear it all the time: Companies who treat their websites as "brochure" sites and then wonder why they don’t have more visitors. According to this content marketing post from Talk Back Media, "your site should be like a salesperson working around the clock to boost your business"—and a brochure site will simply not cut it. The goal is to create content on an ongoing basis that continues to tell the story of your product or service. It doesn’t matter what form the content takes—it can be through blogs, white papers, case studies or people pages—it just has to be vibrant, relevant and regularly updated. This discipline not only makes your site more attractive to search engines, but also to site visitors. They’ll have an incentive to come back to the site more often if they know the content will be different every time and of interest to them because you have set yourself up as an expert and a trusted source.