At w00tonomy we don’t half bang about the importance of content, analysis and strategy. Well, we’re putting our money where our mouth is and launching a newspaper based on our combined expertise.

Stewart, our relentlessly self-promoting Content Marketing Director, has been holding forth on AllMediaScotland about the future of content. Apparently it’s all going to be fine.

In the meantime here’s the brilliant Muppet version of Bohemian Rhapsody. This isn’t here because it’s about content marketing but simply because it’s wonderful. But, hey, isn’t that the whole point of content marketing?

Blogging is dead. Maybe. According to some commentators.

But not really.

Back in 2007, Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion argued that Shiny Object Syndrome and the attention crash mean that people were focusing on social networking tools rather than traditional blogs.

Charles Arthur of the Grauniad has pitched in with a piece based on the decline in inbound links to the site’s technology section from blogs. After dramatically – and incorrectly – declaring that “blogging is dying”, he qualifies his statement by saying he’s talking about the “long tail of blogging” – meaning that while big, “serious” blogs are still going strong, the mass of small blogs by ordinary people is shrinking.

Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they’ve all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter. At least with Twitter, one can search for comments via backtweets.com – though it’s still quite rare for people to make a comment on a piece in a tweet; more usually it’s a “retweet”, echoing the headline.

Of course, it all comes down to what you actually mean by “blogging”. Does it mean producing a website using a blogging CMS or would a more appropriate definition be posting content online in a user-friendly way?

From the latter perspective, no part of blogging is dying. It’s just happening somewhere else. To paraphrase Clay Shirky “behaviour first, technology second”. What matters is what people are doing, not the tools they are using.

Because what’s happening is not down to a change in user behaviour. Vast numbers of people continue to post material online. But booming numners are doing so on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube rather than WordPress or Blogger. This does not mean the demise of blogging CMSs either. WordPress especially is evolving into a powerful publishing tool suitable for everything from a n00b blog to a complex commercial site. Crucially, blogging platforms offer plenty of tools to tie in social networking activity.

Thanks to these multiple platforms people are posting and engaging more than they ever have. And here’s an example of some wonderful content posted not on a blog but on YouTube. Enjoy.

Eager to cut through the hype engulfing Twittwe, some Tefal heads at Harvard Business School have done somerather clever  research into how the microblogging tool is actually used.

First of all, despite what you may have heard, it turns out that Twitter is not the most important invention since fire and, surprisingly, will not bring about universal happiness and peace among all the peoples of the Earth.

Sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it? But it depends what you are expecting from Twitter. As a two-way mass communication tool it fails but, in marketing and content-distribution terms, Twitter is incredibly valuable.

It’s huge: visitors to twitter.com grew 1,200% from Feb 2008 to Feb 2009 and Twitter has become the third largest social networking site in the US. Where Twitter excels is in narrowcasting relevant information to users who have expressed an interest in your content.

It’s not a mass communication tool but a way of connecting to specific interest groups.  And targeted content is the Holy Grail of online communication.

We love TED – the annual technology, entertainment and design conference that posts videos of its speakers so the world can share them. 

It’s well worth browsing through the talks on offer. (We highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce.) It’s also noticing the very cool functionality surrounding each video (social sharing, embedding, transcripts, “what to watch next”).

We were very taken with this talk from advertising bod and veteran climber Matthew Childs  (who also has a vague look of the Scottish Government’s web guru Willie Paul about him) taking lessons from the rockface and applying them to real life. And, yes, “don’t let go” is in there.

We were tickled to come across the site  How To Use Twitter For Marketing And PR. It’s entirely blank apart from one very large word:

DON’T

This plea for sanity is born out of the vast amount of Tweet spam that infects the microblogging tool.  If you haven’t encountered this, create an account and wait for the flood of “followers” who offer you tips on alleged marketing or – on a less sophisticated level – links to NSFW images.

Adding to the background noise by setting up a corporate Twitter feed won’t help. The way to use Twitter – and any social media – to spread a message is to target your audience, identify exisitng networks of interest make sure that your message is relevant to them.

As part of International Bring Your Luddite To Work Day we allowed our Content Marketing Director, Stewart Kirkpatrick, to redesign our site. 

Now, the boy can do words, pictures and what users like but, to be frank, couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag. In fact, getting him to make a cup of tea involves a map, a torch and painstaking discussions on the essential nature of the word “kettle”.

It does sound a bit of a risk entrusting the care of our corporate site to somebody challenged by the technical problems of turning on a light switch. But we had a secret weapon: WordPress.

WordPress is the free, open source, Web 2.0 content management system. It is so simple to use that if you can handle Microsoft Word documents (or not in the case of Stewart) then you can make WordPress work for you.

As well as offering simpicity it can also be as complex as you need. And this is where the rest of us weighed in with our technical expertise. This site uses a heavily customised version of the Atahualpa theme. To make it as sophisticated as we wanted it to be we’ve given it a cocktail of plugins that we have found to be particularly effective – though some  needed a tweak or two.  These range from SEO to mobile versions to video display and beyond.

As for how the new site looks, it’s less Stalinist than the previous version but remains true to web guru Clay Shriky’s dictum: “behaviour first, design second”.

Here’s a wonderful bit of viral marketing for BBC Radio 4’s prestigious Today programme. It’s not frightened to send up the brand in order to engage the interest of the audience and promote the product. In fact, the genius lies precisely within that conflict between the content of Rubber Republic’s spoof and the most uberserious news programme on the airwaves.

It’s precisely this kind of invention that is at the heart of content marketing.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee tells TED 2009 what the web of the future will look like.

For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together

At w00tonomy, we’re fascinated by the endless possibilities of blogging tools.  While we are able to carry out all singing, all dancing Rolls-Royce-and-caviar redesigns, we think they’re not right for all organisations.

In fact many would be better off building their websites on cost-effective open source blogging tools like Wordpress rather than spending tens of thousands of pounds on bespoke solutions. There is nothing particularly radical in this. The sites of both No 10 Downing Street and the Wales Office were built on Wordpress.

Wordpress is easy to use, flexible and comes with an awe-inspiring array of plugins that will keep your site ahead of the curve. The plugins are simple to install and, among many other things, allow you to optimise your site for search engines, link up all your social networking activity and boost traffic. Also, a Wordpress site does not need to look like a blog. It can have a professional design and all the functionality that makes it so powerful.

This site is built on Wordpress (though this is supposed to look like a blog) and we are performing a Wordpress migration for a client at the moment.

But it’s not just about saving money. Clients who go down this route can spend their money on making their messages more interesting to their target audiences – thus making that spend work harder. 

Our bearded Content Marketing Director, Stewart Kirkpatrick, was recently quoted in a Sunday Herald piece about blogging journalists on the importance of content in making a site work:

 ”Attracting an audience is not so easy. You need to make sure the content is frequently updated, that you’re saying something unique and reaching out to [others].”

(Stewart also recently wrote a piece for journalism.co.uk on the plight of Scotland’s papers and the need for them to improve their content and websites.)