Put simply, MOOCs are college courses offered online for free to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. The most famous provider of the MOOC is edX, a not-for-profit founded last year by Harvard and MIT.

Now, you don’t get college credit for taking a MOOC, but you do you get free access to some incredible courses. And to say that MOOCs have taken off like wildfire is an understatement: When MIT first offered its Circuits and Electronics course last year 155,000 people signed up (7,157 passed), and when Harvard launched its first three classes under the edX banner last fall more than 100,000 students signed up from all over the globe.

Students aren’t the only ones who are MOOC-crazy. The New York Times dubbed 2012 The Year of the MOOC, their columnist Thomas Friedman waded into the discussion last week with a somewhat contradictory op-ed (either 14,000 Koreans watching an American professor on stage is the future of education or the “sage on the stage” era of education is done, which is it?) and higher ed watchers everywhere are giving themselves asthma with breathless predictions of the end of college as we know it.

On the other end of the spectrum are people saying that, while higher ed needs to change—and certainly needs to harness the power of the Internet to help bring about that change—MOOCs are a fad in search of a business model: If you give away the product, how will the store stay in business?

So what’s a college president to do? Order her faculty to quickly create a MOOC so she can call herself an innovator and early adopter? Sit back and watch the market develop to see if MOOCs are indeed nothing more than a passing fancy? If she chooses the former, she runs the risk of saddling her institution with lots of classes that bring in no revenue. If she takes the latter path, she could end up like University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan, who briefly lost her job last year because her Board of Trustees thought she was moving too slowly in adopting a MOOC.

All of this reminds me of the frenzy that took place four or five years ago when companies scrambled to decide if they should start using social media. Remember those days? A few companies grabbed headlines for moving boldly forward and starting a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, even (gasp!) a blog. Others said the risks were too great and that they would stick with the tried (tired?) and true methods of communicating with their customers.

And where are we today? Most companies have added at least some social media to their communications and marketing arsenals, some are “sunsetting” social channels they set up years ago because they haven’t performed as they’d hoped (there are even tips for doing it wisely) and others have fully embraced social and reaped the benefits.

And what’s driving those decisions today? Strategy. Plain and simple. Now that the attention has waned a bit and social media are no longer the must-have shiny trinkets, marketers and communicators are making their decisions based on the strategic needs of their organization, rather than on what everyone is telling them they must have. Is Facebook right for our audience, or will LinkedIn be more effective? How will Twitter get more people into our store? Should we really start a Pinterest page for Gaskets, Rubber and Plastic Hoses (OK, maybe these guys weren’t thinking strategically)?

My guess is that this is what will happen with MOOCs as well. Right now the peer pressure is high; to MOOC or not to MOOC, that is the question. But in a few years the question won’t be quite so black and white. Business models will spring up around MOOCs that will allow them to bring in tuition-paying students while hewing to the high-minded ideal of knowledge without borders. MOOCs will thrive and MOOCs will fail (there’s already been at least one high-profile failure, one called The Fundamentals of Online Education, no less). Individual colleges and universities will look objectively at the opportunities this new phenomenon has to offer and decide if they want to pursue those opportunities based on the needs of their specific businesses.

In short, MOOCs will soon enough find their own level. The breathless will stop hyperventilating, Thomas Friedman will decamp from MOOC-town and higher ed will be left with one simple question: Couldn’t we have come up with a better acronym for something that’s changing our field forever?

OK, I’m glad I’ve got that off my chest; I feel better having told you. And I feel better still that it’s not a Hotmail address, or, God forbid, an AOL address. The shame of that would be simply unbearable.

Apparently I’m not the only one who feels this particularly modern type of embarrassment. As part of their excellent Digital Lives series, WBUR this week did a segment on netiquette and technology-related shame. The gist of the piece was that we’re now bound by digital rules so fast-changing, generation-specific and unknowable that we’re all committing some form of web faux pas, usually without knowing it.

It’s not really that surprising. There are new social networks and digital tools almost every day, each with their own purpose, audience and cache. The most obvious recent addition is Vine, Twitter’s new mini-video sharing app, and just this week I heard about Buffer, a social-scheduling app (if you’ve been using it for months please don’t mock me for being so far behind the times).

I have no idea if I should use either or both of these. Part of me wants to jump in and try them so I can act like I’m at the crest of the digital wave. But another part of me dreads the thought of having to create a new profile, remember another password and learn how to use another new tool.

So where does this leave us? Surely we can’t always try every new tool, even when it’s the flavor of the month (I jumped on the Summly bandwagon a few months ago only to jump off when I found it too cumbersome to use).

In my opinion, the best bet is to keep your antennae up and evaluate new tools based on whether they actually help you do something. The reason I stopped using Summly was because I found Flipboard to be a much easier and more enjoyable way to find and share great content. And I only recently opened a Pinterest account; I held back because I couldn’t see how it would help me, but jumped in when I realized it would be a great way for me to collect and share infographics about things I find interesting.

Which brings me back to my Yahoo! email account, that old friend who’s stuck with me through all my digital dalliances.

For me, keeping and (gasp!) using that old-school email address does have its upside:

First, it’s saving me from having to migrate the thousands of emails that have amassed in my inbox over the last decade-plus or, worse, having to go through those emails and decide which ones to delete.

Second, Yahoo’s old-schoolness can sometimes be a positive. The other night I was sending an email form my Gmail account and while I was typing the email the text ad at the top of my inbox changed and started promoting the company that I was referencing in my email. I’m gonna be honest, that freaked me out a little. Now, I get on an intellectual level that these machines we spend so much of our lives on know way more about us than we want to admit, but when you see that curtain coming down in real time it’s a little unnerving.

So I’m going to keep my Yahoo! account, despite Google’s best efforts to shame me into doing the opposite. It may be old and it may be uncool, but we go way back, and I just can’t bring myself to ditch it for the latest thing…yet…

Seeing an opportunity, advertisers and media outlets alike swept in with content developed just for this moment, when they knew millions upon millions of people would be looking for something to fill the time so they wouldn’t have to listen to the CBS sports crew try to improvise.

Oreo and Tide get props for being and incredibly creative and fast on their feet, but there were others. And new media companies like Mashable and BuzzFeed, who are used to the pace at which the world moves today, were all over the place, not just during the blackout, but during the entire game; my phone was lighting up with Google+ updates from Mashable all night and BuzzFeed was awash in Twitter trend summaries and Illuminati speculation.

Mashable was creating and sharing content all night. We all responded by widely sharing everything they did.

The collective reaction proves what content marketers have been told for a while now: to make an impact, you have to be there with relevant content when there’s an audience ready to consume. Oreo had the great (but expensive) whisper fight commercial last night, but what’s bringing them the most attention this morning? A cheapo jpeg created and approved on the fly.

Now, admittedly, most of us don’t have social media mission control rooms filled with creatives and executives gathered for the sole purpose of capitalizing on a huge ad spend, but the principle remains the same: know your audience, seek opportunities to create content that’s interesting to them and provide it at just the right moment. What’s the right moment? Keep your eyes and ears open and you’ll know.

In the meantime, be prepared, be nimble and be smart. To the quick-draw content marketer goes the spoils.

• Visual storyteller who’s great with a video camera and SLR and can create or lead creation of infographics
• Totally savvy in social and content marketing so they know what do do with the visual assets they create
• Understands on a gut level that powerful storytelling is essential, but it has to serve business objectives
• Gets strategy as much as tactics

When I was done, he said, “You’re looking for a unicorn.”

My first thought was (thanks @ryanpaul38):

Don’t get me wrong, unicorns rule. But they are notoriously hard to find.

When I was writing the job description, I knew I was looking for someone unique, someone with a very “now” combination of skills. But I believe it’s a skill set that will be commonplace in a few years as our tools change, our ability to tell great stories and connect with audiences evolves and the ability to tie our work back to hard revenue figures gets easier.

We need people who get story structure and Salesforce. Hootsuite and HTML5. Grammar and Google Analytics.

But there are also other constants to look for when searching for great new employees. In his excellent “How to Spot the Five-Tool Superstar” post, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner outlines the talents he looks for when he hires. Note that none of them are tied to knowledge of specific tools or systems, but instead focus on the essential intangibles that make people successful: vision, product sensibility, business acumen, resourcefulness and leadership.

So where does this leave the modern job seeker? With a menu of skills and personality traits so complex and evolving that it’s impossible to ever be truly “qualified”? Or with endless opportunities for personal and professional evolution in a really exciting time to be a marketer/communicator? I tend to think it’s the latter.

Today, we all have to be unicorns.

Are you ready?

Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’o tap into our need to let athletes live lives we wish we could. Photo: NESN

From Pheidippides running all the way to Athens from Marathon only to drop dead after delivering news of a Greek victory, to Indianapolis Colts coach Chuck Pagano’s emotional battle with leukemia this season, sports have always been the source of powerful stories that inspire others. Yet as we saw on two separate occasions last week, our collective need to believe in the ability of athletes to overcome life’s most dire challenges can often—and easily—overwhelm common sense, an endless stream of evidence and even journalists’ normal instincts to check the facts.

I’m talking of course about Lance Armstrong, the heretofore impervious (and always imperious) cyclist who finally admitted that illegal doping was behind his incredible success, and Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame linebacker whose mind-boggling story about a dead girlfriend who was never really alive shows him to be either the most naive person on the planet or, as some reports claim, a shrewd manipulator of the media and public opinion.

Both of these stories have led to a lot of soul-searching by the media (which I always find entertaining; I secretly think the media loves to report on its own failures). In Lance Armstrong’s case many prominent reporters say they were duped by the athlete’s years of lies while many others were scared off by Armstrong’s habit of suing anyone and everyone who dared to look into his past. In Manti Te’o's case the media is falling back on the excuse that they merely relied on the work of reporters before them when looking for facts for their own stories. It was a game of telephone gone terribly wrong, especially given the complete lack of evidence of Te’o's “girlfriend’s” death (or even her birth, for that matter).

So what’s going on here? What is it about sports and athletes that makes us forget all reason and look past behavior that none of us would tolerate in our personal lives? Why do people like Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’o and so many others get our complete trust, even when the evidence suggests a different story altogether?

Personally, I think it’s because sports fans see athletes living their lives outside the rules that so many of us would love to shed. Who wouldn’t want to play a game for a living, and make fabulous sums of money doing it? Who wouldn’t want a clear winner and loser in a world filled with ambiguity? Who doesn’t love the idea of facing life’s great tragedies with millions of people cheering us on?

We give our athletes endless rope, then act horrified when they use it to hang others and harm themselves. We forgive endlessly and forget quickly. We love the stories they tell us because they say about what we might one day be able to accomplish if it wasn’t for the mortgage and the bills and the dead-end job…

So we’ll all act contrite and say that we won’t be duped by the likes of Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’o again. We’ll tell ourselves that we really know nothing of these people beyond what they allow us to see. And we’ll swear off inspirational stories about athletes like we swear off alcohol the morning after drinking too much.

This time it will be different. We promise.

By the way, have you heard about Ray Lewis, the inspirational leader of the Baltimore Ravens? He’s a true warrior, a pious man of God who has overcome a checkered past to become an inspiration to millions.

Forget all those other guys. He’s the real deal.

Now, we could debate who gets to be which Super Friend and what, exactly, would go on in a Content Marketing Hall of Justice (I imagine the Super Friends would spend a lot of time rushing around trying to help harried marketers prove the ROI of blog posts and creating simple dashboards that make mountains of data easy to understand).

But what we can’t debate is that the three people in that room know what makes content powerful and understand that companies can’t afford not to spend time, effort and (yes) money on creating that content.

Here are the three things I heard loud and clear all night from the Super Friends:

• Storytelling rules. Great stories help people understand your brand and your products in a totally different way than traditional marketing. But it only works if it’s created with the customer in mind. As Chris Brogan said, “Think about what the customer wants, not what you want.” And as Anne Handley asked, “What would your content look like if your customers signed your paycheck instead of your CEO?”
  

  It’s cool being with Jim Spencer and Chris Brogan in this photo, but it makes me painfully aware that I would likely have to be Robin in the Content Marketing Hall of Justice.

• Find your tribe. Francois Gossieaux talked a lot about storytelling as an ancient human activity that connects us to each other. He also talked about content marketing as a way for companies to really connect with their tribes—those customers who are most like them. Build your business around your passion, find your tribe, show them you care about the same things they do—and you’ve got a customer for life.
• CUTT to the chase. Among the clients Francois Gossieaux has worked with is a risk management company called Aon. They told him that when they develop content they always think of the acronym CUTT. Content should be Compelling, Useful, Timely and Transactional. To me, that sums up content marketing perfectly.

Since the event on Tuesday night I’ve had the chance to listen to an interesting podcast with another Super Friend, Sonia Simone from Copyblogger. (There must be a pink-haired Super Friend, right? Someone help me out here.) Sonia’s take—much like the takes of our original three Super Friends—was that great content has to come first in any content marketing effort.

That should be obvious since “content marketing” starts with “content,” but people often think SEO or paid search should be given greater weight than strong stories. As Simone said in the podcast, though, “You can make the search engine robots very, very happy, but if you’re not doing something for your audience it has absolutely no business purpose.”

Or as Chris Brogan put it, “Content marketing is weaponized storytelling.”

Don’t tell me he wasn’t destined to be a content marketing Super Friend.

Who would be your Content Marketing Super Friends, and what exactly would they be doing in the Hall of Justice?

Andrew Sullivan is taking his talents away from The Beast.

There were two pieces of interesting news in the last couple weeks that show how exciting it is to be a content producer today—and just how much the struggle continues to determine how content producers will get paid for their efforts.

The first was the announcement by blogging giant Andrew Sullivan that he is leaving the Daily Beast to start his own ad-free site where readers will be asked to pay for the content they consume (Sullivan is quick to point out that he’s not going behind a paywall; he’s simply giving people the option to pay what they think the content is worth. In his blog about the decision, Sullivan said he and his business partners determined they would have more freedom and could more easily effect positive change in the industry by striking out on their own.

We felt more and more that getting readers to pay a small amount for content was the only truly solid future for online journalism…the only completely clear and transparent way to do this, we concluded, was to become totally independent of other media entities and rely entirely on you for our salaries, health insurance, and legal, technological and accounting expenses.

Now, Sullivan’s case is unique. He has a rabid readership and has been in high demand since taking over as the editor of The New Republic in 1991. Gigs followed at TIME, Atlantic Monthly and The Sunday Times of London, as well as his own blog, The Dish.

But the fact that Sullivan thinks he can make a go of things by asking readers to pay $19.99 per year means that people might be willing to pay for great, unique content with a strong voice and editorial bent. Plus, you’ve got to love his vision of the web:

We believe in a bottom-up Internet, which allows a thousand flowers to bloom, rather than a corporate-dominated web where the promise of a free space becomes co-opted by large and powerful institutions and intrusive advertising algorithms.

The other piece of “news” was that The New York Times late in December released Snow Fall, an exhaustive piece of investigative journalism that doubles as an object lesson in how incredible modern storytelling can be—as long as there’s money to pay for its creation.

Through the full complement of current digital media—videos, photos, virtual recreations of the avalanche, even a looping gif showing the reader how skiing air bags work—Snow Fall follows the fates of 16 expert skiers caught in an avalanche in Washington’s Cascade Mountains.

It’s a dizzying and muscular display of what’s possible when a media giant goes all-in to tell a compelling human story. The credits for the story, which includes a mini-documentary with additional interviews, lists 17 names, including the author, John Branch—and that doesn’t include contributors from places like The Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research.

How did The Times pay for the piece? One way was through the use of a black-band advertisement that runs horizontally across the middle of each section about three-quarters of the way down each page.

The ads caused the usual stir among those who think free content anytime and all the time is their birthright, but I for one didn’t find it intrusive (I can’t tell you one product that was advertised—maybe I shouldn’t admit that).

I was instead glad that the article—with its slowly unfolding narrative and inventive use of technology (at one point a graphic showing the paths that various skiers took down the mountain unfurled as I read)—was mostly unencumbered by ads.

Given the success that The Times has had with its paywall I was also surprised that I wasn’t required to pay a small fee somewhere along the way to finish reading.

But this is where we are. An individual (Sullivan) strikes out on his own because he thinks it’s worth it to be unencumbered and he may be able to make more money, while one of the most successful media companies in the world—which has been very successful getting people to pay for its content—is offering an expensive multimedia extravaganza for free.

I think we’re still far away from having a single model that’s as clear and reliable as the old paid advertising model in newspapers and other print publications (in fact, if the music industry is any indication, we may never get there at all), but it’s great to see the industry trying so many ways to support development of great content and delivery methods that take advantage of the incredible digital storytelling tools at our disposal today.

For today, at least, great content is still open for business.

Since the college’s website is the number one tool for prospective students interested in one of our online advanced degree programs, digital advertising is a vital part of what we—and, thus, I—do here. Not knowing much about it is daunting and frustrating and sometimes scary. So what’s a digital strategist to do?

Start pushing that proverbial rock up the hill.

I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m not going to know everything I need to know about this topic in a short period of time. It’s complex, messy, often highly tactical and the rules are always changing. But what I can do is listen, seek sources of information and, most importantly, ask questions. I’m surrounded by people (staff and vendors) who know more about this topic than I do, so I’m always asking them to clarify, demystify, define acronyms and generally speak at the level of a neophyte. Sure, it doesn’t feel good to be the guy at the table with the least amount of knowledge on an important topic, but the alternative to not actively trying to learn is…what? Not learning about an important topic. And that’s not an option.

So I dig in and try to find ways to simplify the topic for myself, and try not to get overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. I found this awesome Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors that I’ve printed and put up on my wall. I’ve asked people to send me the sources of information they use to stay current on the topic. And I’m going to take one or two of these Search Marketing School courses from MarketingProfs.

It’s early in my new job (I’m only in the midst of week five), but I’m determined not to let that boulder roll over me. So I keep pushing.

What tips do you have for learning what you need to know in a new job? Any digital marketing tips you can share with me?

I’m all ears.

Here are a few ideas I’ve had:

1. Don’t go to every meeting you’re invited to. When you’re new, there’s a tendency for people to invite you to all sorts of meetings because they think they have to keep you busy and introduce you to everyone. Or—and this is more likely—there’s something they want you to do for them. Resist this as much as is feasible. The early days of a new job offer you a unique glimpse into the operations of your employer—what’s working, what’s not, where the pain points are and, most importantly, where the opportunities are. Spending every minute in meetings may ensure that you quickly get to know everyone and their specific needs, but it diminishes the opportunity to do big-picture thinking and see possibilities that you’ll have a harder time seeing in six months. To paraphrase an overused metaphor, focus on the forest; the trees can wait.
2. Avoid “drinking from the fire hose.” This is another overused metaphor in the workplace, especially for new employees. Certainly, your new job will be busy and there’s a lot to take in, but part of being strategic is knowing what to pay attention to. If you allow yourself to be deluged with information, it will quickly become impossible to make sense of anything.
3. Keep your external antennae up. I was out of work for a month before landing my new gig, which gave me the luxury of time to read a lot about the career-related things I’m interested in. I learned a lot about trends, found interesting people to follow and got a bigger-picture view than I would have if I’d been employed full-time. But even if you go directly from one job to the next, keep a toe in the waters of the things that interest you. It will help you bring fresh, timely ideas to your new job, which is ultimately one of the reasons they hired you.
4. Keep networking. Prior to looking for a new job and ultimately getting laid off, I was doing almost no networking. I won’t let that happen again. In the last 10 months, I’ve seen the power of networking (one stat says that 60 to 75% of new jobs are gotten that way). In fact, I’m not sure I would have found my new job had I not been actively finding new people to connect with. And it’s not just about new jobs. Networking helps you meet great new people, hear about exciting new ideas and make connections that will help you immeasurably in your current job as well.

Ultimately you’ll have to say goodbye to the honeymoon phase. Heck, a month from now I’ll probably be doing the opposite of everything I said above. But while everything is fresh and new, try to stay above the fray as much as possible. The thinking, observing and strategizing you do today will sustain you for months‚—maybe years—to come.

Well I’ve created a new acronym, this one for content marketing: ABP. No, that doesn’t stand for Au Bon Pain. It stands for Always Be Publishing. Never has it been more important for organizations that use the web to find, engage and keep customers to be publishers—and regular ones at that.

I’ve long believed in the power of blogs to enhance an organization’s reputation and get more people interested in buying a product or utilizing a service, but now there’s real data and compelling facts to back up my somewhat ardent infatuation.

A couple weeks ago, Boston content marketing company Hubspot published a great study that revealed the real power of publishing as marketing tool. Among the tasty nuggets in the report:

Companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5X more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all.

Think about that for a second. If, every other day, you or someone in your organization were to write an interesting, relevant, timely post about a topic of interest to your (potential) customers, your web traffic would increase significantly.

Increased web traffic doesn’t necessarily equal increased business, you say. To which Hubspot says:

You could say that inbound leads aren’t the same as new business, to which I’d say, “Now you’re just being stubborn. Maybe you’ll listen to the Googlebots.”

As I wrote about last month, Google has changed its algorithm so content with a lot of social shares comes up higher in searches than content that has been through the SEO song and dance. (Quote is from forbes.com’s excellent “The Death Of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, And Real Content.”)

Here’s how the author of the post, Ken Krogue, put it:

Google decided to change the weight of their emphasis from “backlinks” more towards social media likes, shares, tweets, reddits, and 1+. In the world of digital media the emphasis is on follows, comments, and views as well.

Taken together, the Hubspot study and the Forbes.com article make a compelling case for brands as regular publishers of content that people want to share with those in their networks.

What content do your (potential) customers want from you? I have no idea. But you do, or someone in your organization does. Write and publish something about an important strategic topic for your organization and see if it gets any traction. If it doesn’t, keep writing and publishing. If it does, look closely at what people responded to, what they commented on, what they shared…then do it again. And again.

Content marketing isn’t a silver bullet, but what makes it powerful, what makes it valuable is that it lets people know who you are, what you’re good at and—most importantly—how you can help them.

So get out there and remember: ABP!