Podcasts are going from strength to strength. There are currently more than 900,000 of them to choose from and more than 7 million people in the UK listen to them every week.

Podcasts are enjoying a boom. Although the format has been around for some time, it has taken off in the past few years.

What’s your favourite game? As long as it’s one of the Pokemon games, we’ll get along just fine. Gaming has been around for decades, and has been quickly picked up as a great addition to marketing, through gamification. Gamification is a concept that was touched upon in the 1910s, and formally introduced in the 1980s.

Writing isn’t easy. And that can be quite an issue if you need to produce attention-grabbing content on a regular basis. Sometimes it can be a struggle to find the right ideas. Other times your writing might not flow or perhaps doesn’t really come to life. Or maybe the content isn’t getting the attention you are striving for.

One of the main trends that’s been predicted for social media in 2019 is ephemeral content. It’s been steadily increasing in popularity for digital marketing and advertising campaigns, and seems to be present in some form on almost every major social platform. But what exactly is ephemeral content?

Millennial and Gen Z humour is weird. This is coming from someone born in 2000, who’s the proud owner of a niche meme page and a lover of surrealist humour.

The middle ground is often seen as something of a compromise option with negative connotations. But when it comes to content marketing it is something which should be embraced.

We are living in a content filled world. Research has shown that 211 million pieces of online content are created every minute. Yes, you read that right. To put that into more context, every 60 seconds 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, 7 million videos are watched on Snapchat and 347,222 Tweets are sent.

Content marketing has undergone a serious shift in the last few years. Modern customers are looking for new ways to engage with businesses - they’re less interested in flashy adverts and celebrity video endorsements, and more interested in seeing the realistic, human side of a business.

If you are looking to give your social media a chattier, more customer focused feel, a live social media question and answer session is often one of the first things to be recommended. When it works well, the format can create an enthusiastic debate among followers and potential customers and promote a positive message. But like all forms of communication it needs proper planning and preparation to ensure that it is successful.

From eBooks and whitepapers to blogs and even social media posts, writing is at the heart of the majority of content. But not all written content is created equal.

Whether you listen to them on your commute or while you’re making dinner it’s likely you will have listened to a podcast or at the very least heard of some popular ones. In our office we’re always recommending new ones (S-Town is the current favourite).

You might be wondering why we are suddenly using this content marketing blog to write about Word. After all, the programme has been around since 1989 on Windows.

It’s one of the iconic battles of the modern world. Long-form versus short-form content. In the one corner you have the lean, trendy upstart, fuelled by the rise of social media, alleged short attention spans and the desire for constant, quick, almost bite-sized updates.

It’s probably a good idea to get this out in the open right at the start. You have no idea who I am and you have never heard me speak. As you read this the voice in your head is your own voice—not mine. If you were listening to me say all this, instead of reading it, you’d get a different impression.

If print really is dead then someone clearly forgot to tell some of the world’s leading brands. You see, while some newspapers and magazines have clearly faltered under the threat from digital and social media, a number of brands have increasingly turned to the format as part of their content marketing strategies.

Content marketing has grown hugely in recent years. And it has meant content is everywhere. Blogs, whitepapers, eBooks and articles are added to the internet in vast quantities every day. For example, this blog you are reading, is one of two million posted to the internet every day.

Who are the most trusted people in your organisation? You might think the chief executive, someone on the board of directors, or some other senior leader. You would, however, be wrong. Research, which we will look at in more detail a little later in this blog, has shown that the most trusted people in your organisation are actually your employees.

Producing and delivering regular and consistently strong content can be a daunting challenge. It is not a simple process and it requires a fair amount of creativity. Of course, ideas can strike us at random moments.

For professional writers the hardest thing about creating content is not the writing itself. The toughest, and often most daunting part, is coming up with the ideas for what to write about in the first place. This is particularly true when you have the pressure of a constant schedule of content to produce.

One of my favourite quotes about writing comes from the American Author William Zinsser. He said: “If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.”

Picking up an award can have far-reaching benefits no matter how big or small an organisation might be. Winning, or even being a finalist, can increase credibility, offer improved networking opportunities, generate positive media coverage, boost staff morale and help attract new talent. But before you get to put on your glad rags and attend the ceremony there is the daunting awards submission stage to get through.

If you post enough content online it is almost inevitable that at some point you will face a negative reaction. Whether it's responses to blogs you have produced or social media posts, invariably you will face criticism.

Meeting at the Reading headquarters of Media First, James White and Mark Mars are in a buoyant, if pensive, mood. I’m here to interview the pair about the culmination of a frantic few months which sees the launch of their brand new business, Thirty Seven, a content marketing agency hoping to seriously shake up the communications world for the better.

You’ve probably already seen the scare stories about the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If you haven’t then you don’t need to do too much digging to find terrifying tales about these supposedly ‘draconian’ measures and speculation that it could become the next PPI scandal.

You probably don’t need us to tell you that the social media landscape changes at a breakneck pace. Platforms and their offerings constantly change in a bid to attract new users and money from advertisers. In fact, you could argue that the only constant is change itself.