Some companies might not look like they're in a content-related business at first. But in a world where every company is a media company, every business is content related. And that makes every passionate professional, marketer or otherwise, a content creator.

What my research and dealings with CMOs tells me is that the job is less and less about marketing, and more and more about corporate strategy and leadership. And that the challenges in front of you as a corporate officer, rather than the head of marketing, have more to do with understanding the customer than understanding CPMs and creative.

According to the results of a survey of women small business professionals, there are six mistakes businesses need to avoid when marketing to women. You know your brand should target women; here's how not to mess it up.

The big CMO dilemma today includes such questions such as: What about measurement of all these new platforms? What does it mean that Coke has 36 million Facebook followers? Mobile phones seem to be creating a rebirth of discounting; how can I avoid that? With all the data we have these days, I think we should be finding answers to some of these questions. But we're not.

The problem with digital marketing isn't a lack of data, it's a lack of imagination. These seven changes are already dramatically affecting what marketing is and should be. Adapting to the implications will allow the creation of a more future-proof you.

Here’s a summary of my 12 predictions for 2012 -- far from comprehensive, in no particular order, and ready-made for you to argue with. No doubt a whole lot more will happen, but these are the things I'll be looking for.

Five years after São Paulo banned billboards, have all the businesses in the city gone under? Hardly. In fact, most citizens and some advertising entities report being quite pleased with the now billboard-less environment.

What did we learn from the events of 2011 that might help us work smarter in the year ahead? Several things happened, but the lessons boil down to just one: Know what your brand stands for to your core customers and you’ll do the right thing.

Marketing has changed in profound ways. Not just the tools, though those have too. But I’m talking about the outdated stuff that was in your marketing textbooks in college and what you learned in your first few jobs if you’ve been in this business for more than 5 or 10 years -- with one big exception.

Communicating online allows companiesto “brand” themselves in ways that we’ve never even considered in the past. It’s a bit like earning a reputation, but different in that it’s not a good or bad thing -- it’s more that you’re associated with a particular expertise or genre.

There's no judgment here about who makes the better hamburgers, but rather an assessment of which has the better online marketing presence. McDonald's wins by using techniques any online marketer could emulate.

There are no formulas for success, but there are patterns. Rather than understanding the underlying patterns, though, and being driven by purpose and passion, leaders are trying to gain complete assurance by analyzing data.

Recent technology change, and the resulting changes in human social behaviors, is leading us to a complete disruption of the marketing industry as it has been established over the last 100 years. Everything you have learned about how to do effective 20th and early 21st century broadcast marketing will collapse into a black hole of irrelevance

Not familiar with Vucu? It stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous which is going to require a new set of skills .

What we call “branding” today is a corporate, cosmetic undertaking, detached from people’s personal character. It's an artifact of the industrial age that is holding back marketing thought and organizational action in this post-industrial time.

The frustration driving Occupy Wall Street and the widespread sympathy people feel for it could blossom into a broader anti-consumerism. Will that cause more people to become skeptical of advertising messages published by big brands?

If advertisers do not address leveraging social media to engage customers, and do so increasingly through mobile devices, and then figure out how to measure the value through attribution modeling--then 2012 is a lost opportunity. Dare I say: a “-1.”

But social networking does -- there’s a big difference. New Gallup research shows that we should instead focus on engaging our current and engaged customers instead. Duh. Why do we find it so hard to believe that being human works?

Google has been working on making everything automated, relying heavily on algorithms, which creates cracks through which things like illegal Canadian pharmacy ads can slip. That has helped them grow; however, it is this writer’s assertion that maybe bigger is not better, especially when it comes to the nuanced world of advertising.

The glowing light of physical-space advertising has become interactive and augmented. No longer is the media sphere largely separate from those observing it. Increasingly, we are seeing an augmented advertising that blurs the physical bodies in the crowd with the advertising medium itself.

If you tell your dinner guests their meal will be cooked by a celebrity chef and then instead serve them a high-sodium, chemical-laden entree and dessert, you have lied to them.

What data do we have that supports the premise that mobile marketing is the next big thing? Glad you asked. Here are 9 amazing facts and figures about mobile marketing that’ll help you wrap your head around why mobile is going to be bigger than radio, TV, and the personal computer -- combined.

There were three truisms I learned early in my email marketin career that have been floating around so long that they were almost taken as gospel. Two of them turned out to be dead wrong — and for the time being, at least, so is the third one.

Our research suggests that interactive media and technology marketing investments in 2016 will account for as much money as their TV advertising budgets do today, because interactive efforts now play a legitimate -- not experimental -- role in how businesses attract and retain customers. But marketing and advertising remain different things.