Joe Pulizzi over at the Content Marketing Institute has collected social media and content marketing predictions for 2012 from more than 75 marketing experts.

In reading through everyone’s ideas on where content marketing is headed this year, a number of themes emerge. Here are the 6 concepts that appeared again and again amongst the predictions.

1. Mobile: Phones and tablets will become where it’s all at.
2. Google+: Poised to become the fourth “Big Social”? Quite possible.
3. Video: Multimedia will explode.
4. Integration: Content marketing will become an inherent part of marketing, period.
5. Quality over quantity
6. Strategists: Content marketers, including content strategists and Chief Content Officers, will be in high demand.

You can read the full set of predictions and who they’re from in Joe’s slideshow below.

I love social media.

Let’s get that out there right now. Ten years ago, I was an avid participant in online networks and discussion groups, proselytizing to everyone who would listen on the professional benefits of online engagement.

I learned a ton from the people in these communities, made business contacts around the world, had fun, landed projects and contributed ideas and information where I could.

Those early networks (anyone remember Ryze?) morphed and solidified into what we now call social media, a ubiquitous part of today’s business environment, as basic a tool as websites or business cards used to be.

In recent years, social media’s power, usefulness and market penetration has grown exponentially, a trend I have embraced and participated in. So the question I’m about to raise doesn’t come from a social media pooh-pooher. Quite the opposite: I’m as much a proselytizer as ever.

But here’s the question:

When social media enables you to be ever-present and always on, what are the consequences of choosing to turn off for periods of time?

The question hits home for me. For the past 5 months, I’ve been juggling a full-time job (one that doesn’t allow for social media interaction) in addition to running a company. The demands on my time have been intense and in the little personal time I manage to carve out each week, I need to disconnect from work and technology entirely. My sanity and my marriage require it.

As a consequence, I’ve been tweeting very little, blogging not at all and visiting LinkedIn only rarely. To my dismay, my Klout score has dropped from a respectable low 50s to a decidedly average 20. It feels like what took years of careful effort to build is slipping away in a virtual instant.

My rational side tells me to be calm. “Jennifer,” it says, “relax. Klout is an interesting measurement but it’s certainly not an indication of the full scope of your skill set or network strength.”

Then my alarmist side chimes in. “Klout matters to the people in your industry! You’re jeopardizing your career prospects and your ability to secure engaging work!”

Klout isn’t important in every industry but I suspect people in the circles I work and hobnob in – marketing, media, publishing – will check my score, especially when considering whether to hire me.

I’m reminded of a book I read last year, Susan Maushart’s Winter of our Disconnect, a captivating chronicle of her family’s choice to disconnect from all screens and internet devices for a full six months.

I wonder, if you rely on social media and web connectedness for your job and you unplug for six months, would you find it a career-limiting move?

What if you’d like to take a sabbatical or parental leave? What if you’re on vacation for a month or are fighting through an extended illness?

How long can you be out of the social media loop before it begins to negatively affect what you’ve previously built? Do you have to choose between sustaining your career and taking a sanity-preserving time-out?

I’ve already seen what removing myself from the social media loop has done to my Klout score. I wasn’t monitoring it these past five months, so I’m not sure when it started to fall or how quickly it dropped.

My follower counts on Twitter have remained steady, and even grown a tiny bit, but I notice my engagement is down. I’m not exchanging tweets with people anymore and I’m being retweeted much less. I haven’t blogged in months so naturally my web traffic has dropped. I’d like all that to change.

As a New Year’s pledge, I’ve decided to work on rebuilding my Klout score. It will be an experiment in what it takes to raise my number and what consequences or benefits raising it will have.

I’ll still be aiming for balance, though. I’m not the sort of person who can be tied to my digital device during both work and personal time and be happy about it. I don’t like to tweet about what I’m baking, or upload pictures when I’m out with my friends, or check into Foursquare when I stop in for coffee.

My social media m.o. has always been mostly work, some play. There will be breaks: weekends off, week-long holidays, that sort of thing. I’ll track the effect those have on my Klout score, too.

In the meantime, I’d love to know what experiences you’ve had with Klout or with social media engagement in general. Have you taken extended breaks and found it’s had a negative effect on your profile? Is Klout important or not important in your industry? To your career?

If they don’t know who the writing talks to, they’ll lose interest or be unable to relate the content to their own situation.

There’s one surefire way to speak directly to your readers: Use the word you a lot. Forget generalizations about clients or users or employees.

Your readers don’t care about some faceless group of clients. They want to know how the information is relevant to them.

Instead of this:
An investment portfolio is designed to achieve each client’s unique goals.

Try this:
Your financial goals are the starting point for an investment portfolio built just for you.

Instead of this:
Employees should remember to store their personal belongings in a changeroom locker when starting their shift.

Try this:
Store your belongings in a changeroom locker at the start of your shift.

Instead of this:
Participants in the program will learn how to use WordPress to build their blogs.

Try this:
You’ll learn how to use WordPress to build your blog.

See the difference? You language is clearer, more direct, more intimate. And that means greater impact.

I’m no linguist but it seems to me that up until a decade or so ago, the English language was still evolving so slowly that it was hardly noticeable, like a glacier creeping forward by an inch every year.

But then came the internet, and along with it, the language of chat rooms, texting and LOLcats.

Snark and sarcasm now factor heavily in our conversations to convey meanings that are opposite to what’s really being said.

We’re constantly naming new devices and apps that didn’t previously exist, and we press old verbs into new service to describe actions that would have been completely foreign to someone of 50 or 100 years ago. Tweeting, anyone?

Modern Code

Every so often I come across a sentence that’s entirely modern in its construction and meaning. Someone from the past would have no hope of understanding any bit of it; not one word or concept would be known to him.

I collected my first example of purely modern code about 10 years ago while listening to a sports journalist interview a hockey player in the changeroom after a game. The team had just won and there was music playing in the background. The journalist commented jokingly on the sound: “Cranking the Britney,” she said in the style of “Making the copies” from Saturday Night Live.

Cranking the Britney. Three simple words.

Anyone from 1999 would know you had turned up the volume on a Britney Spears tune. The sing-song delivery told you it was supposed to be funny.

But for some reason, I always picture going back in time and speaking those words to a perplexed 18th-century craftsman. He would scratch his head and wonder if a britney was anything like a jenny.

Here are some other phrases, pulled from actual tweets and emails, that would be impossible for anyone from the past to decipher:

• Loading epub file in Stanza and it borked my Touch.
• How do you hide your email from spambots on a WordPress blog that doesn’t allow Javascript?
• New Flip. w00t!
• Helllurrrrrrrrrrrrr, like, where’s the tweets?!

In many ways, I thrill to the changes that are occurring right now in the English language. A transformation is unfolding, day by day, before our eyes. But I also wonder how much of our language from today will survive. Will our new nouns, verbs, phrasings and acronyms integrate fully into everyday language and carry on in similar or mutated forms? Or will our FTW and tweeting and kthxbai fade away into musty, meaningless phrases to the citizens of 2050.

My guess is the latter. The English language, like technology, is evolving at an ever increasing pace. Just as our tech gadgets go quickly obselete, so too will our words of the day. If we were to travel forward to 2050 right now, I’d bet money we’d have a hard time understanding the English speakers.

What’s your take? What are your favourite only-understandable-in-the-21st-century phrases?

via @fritinancy

So, in the spirit of spring cleaning, I’m sweeping out my account and offering these web addresses for sale. Some are quirky, some are serious. Any one of them could be a bang-up domain name for the right business.

• ResearchYourMarket.com
• InfoProductAdvice.com
• InfopreneuringStrategies.com
• Zoolingual.com

If you’re interested in any of these domains, send me an email. I’m open to reasonable offers.

If the theme fits your product or service, go ahead and use it to write or edit some marketing copy. If you do, leave a comment with a link at the end of this post so we can see the theme in action.

Evolution

For example, a financial advisor using a navigation theme might talk about steering clients in the right direction, the path to success, or ways to prevent investments from going south.

The next time you’re tasked with writing some marketing copy, try this technique and see for yourself how it works.

First, prepare a cheat sheet of keywords related to the theme you’ve chosen. (I’ll sometimes prepare two or three sheets if I’m not sure which theme is strongest. The winning theme will emerge either during brainstorming or writing—it will feel the most natural.)

Then, starting with the name of the theme, quickly write down all the words that pop into your head. No editing allowed. If you get stuck, a thesaurus can help point you in new directions. You can also skim books and articles, and do Google searches on the topic, to find common keywords.

Once you have your cheat sheet completed, start your writing and refer to it regularly to help spark ideas and supply sharp phrasings.

A few more rules of thumb for successfully using themes:

• Stick to one theme in any given piece of content to create consistency and cohesion. Mixing themes creates confusion, which does more harm than having no theme at all.
• Use the theme words sparingly. Go overboard and your writing can feel clumsy and contrived.
• Pay attention to the connotations of your theme words. They can help subtly shape your message in positive ways. They can also work against you if you’re not careful.

In the next post, I’ll provide you with a ready-made cheat sheet for an evolution theme.

You don’t have to Google very far to find references to all manner of food porn, from bacon porn to cupcake porn. There’s shoe porn and book porn and gadget porn. There’s even poverty porn and economic disaster porn. Today, I saw the phrase ruin porn.

And here’s where I say stop. Just stop with the porn things. Surely there are other ways to describe things we glorify just a bit too much or that titillate us in an unhealthy manner.

Tying the word porn to everything from baked goods to earthquake photos is distasteful. And what of the spambots that surely must attach themselves to every blog or website that dares to use the term? (I’m cringing at what will happen when I publish this post.)

Perhaps the first time or two that porn was used outside of the adult entertainment industry it was a clever shorthand. Now it’s tired. Let it go.

Here’s an example:

She told me that I was the best writer that she’d ever worked with.

becomes

She told me I was the best writer she’d ever worked with.

Every so often, that is a necessary word but you might be surprised how often it can be removed. Re-read your sentence without that and see if it still makes sense. If it does, take that out. Your writing will be sharper for it. I find it also helps writing sound less stilted and more conversational.