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Quick: Name a US passenger railroad that successfully transitioned to or purchased an airline in order to continue in the passenger transportation business.

Can't think of one?

That's because there weren't any.*

Passenger railroads during the 1950's and 60's, at least in the United States, were avid followers of the "Ostrich Strategy," based on the widely accepted myth that ostriches hide their heads in the sand to avoid predators.

These days, the Ostrich Strategy is on full display in the way that some companies deal with negative comments or sentiment on social media. Case in point: Stamps.com.

A month ago I posted a story right here on LinkedIn about a colleague of mine who had had a terrible experience trying to unsubscribe from Stamps.com. He'd NEVER used the service, but had a hard time quitting, much less getting any kind of a refund.

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There are many different types of content you can push to your website to build your Web traffic and community engagement – - but it's likely that you're skipping out on quite a few that are extremely easy to conduct. More so, these ones you pass over are costing you a ton of free traffic because they're known to be big hits within social media (aka. more shares).

Here are some of the ones you should be doing (not only just to change up your format but to capitalize on the free traffic):

The Interview Post

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Finding and hiring top talent is critical to a small company's growth and success, yet this is just one of many hats worn by small business leaders. So how does one find quality talent when it's a part-time job?

To help answer this question, we teamed up with RecruitLoop in San Francisco last week to discuss 'hiring hacks': efficient and effective tactics small companies can use to build an amazing team without an in-house recruiting manager. We were joined by a panel of seasoned professionals from a range of backgrounds:

• Christine Eckhaus, Founder/CEO at Greenstreak Consulting
• Dino Lamela, Lead Sales Recruiter at Box
• Jeff Miller, Founder/CEO at Wheelz
• Katie Hughes, Head of Talent at DFJ
  

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For years, Twitter has enabled advertisers to leverage hashtags to bolster their marketing campaigns. With hashtags on Twitter, advertisers can target users searching for specific keywords or following events that have an associated hashtag. Brands that use promoted hashtags or pay to join a conversation as part of a real time marketing campaign have the opportunity to get in front of a much wider audience than just their own followers and those who retweet their messages. The cost of reaching this much larger audience is also relatively low, as we've found the cost of leveraging hashtags on Twitter as part of B2B campaigns to be approximately 50 cents per engagement (click, follow, retweet or reply).

Now, Facebook is rolling out hashtags to its users, including brands and businesses. Users have already been using hashtags for quite some time, both ironically and as users and brands cross-promote from other channels. In fact, the implementation of hashtags on Facebook will likely make it easier for brands to cross-promote, as this is is now one less variable that brands will have to worry about between channels. For example, if a brand automatically posts a tweet with a hashtag to Facebook, that hashtag will now be clickable on Facebook.

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Just hours before his alleged disappearance from a Hong Kong hotel, Edward Snowden, an ex-CIA employee and NSA contractor working through Booz Allen Hamilton, outed himself as the whistleblower in the NSA PRISM scandal. In the 12-minute video interview posted on YouTube, Ed Snowden explained his reason for releasing the documents that revealed the PRISM program. Here is the transcript of that interview.

Edward Snowden:

My name is Ed Snowden. I'm 29 years old. I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.

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Content should be believable but also capture the reader's attention in the form of a story.

In the publishing world we see this as fiction and nonfiction; you have die-hard fans of each type but the masses will generally jump between the two because each provides a fun and valuable set of insights (or entertainment).

What I'd like to discuss with this post is the inherent need to go as deep as possible with your content creation to form it into a unique piece that's impossible to replicate; at the same time I want to explain why theory content can have its benefits even though it's generally perceived as "fluff" content.

Here's my take on the two ... see how it may apply to your content creation: