Ben Straley is vice president of social technologies at Rio SEO, the software automation unit launched by Covario in 2012. Prior to this position, Ben was the CEO and co-founder of Meteor Solutions, a leading social media marketing and activation ad tech company that was recently acquired and integrated into Rio SEO.
Before launching Meteor Solutions, Ben co-founded Spring Creek Group, a global social media marketing agency that was acquired by IPG in 2011. Ben has more than 17 years of online marketing, digital advertising, and social media experience both with start-ups and global media brands, including Real Networks, Disney, and ESPN.
In addition to his current leadership role in support of Rio SEO’s social technologies and strategies, Ben is the lead instructor of Advanced Interactive Marketing in the University of Washington’s Continuing Education program. He has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and a BA with Distinction from Colorado College.
Effective content marketing should leverage tools and technologies that track and make actionable data relating to your audience (target vs. actual), content (forms and stories), and points of distribution (devices, sites, context).
Creating content you think is useful and relevant isn’t enough to make your content marketing program work. You need the energy and influence of the 1 percent of your audience capable of driving discovery of your content through the social filters.
The potential for Facebook’s new Graph Search feature is huge. It is going to take some time (several months at the earliest) to achieve critical mass, but brands and publishers can and should be doing a number of things right now to benefit.