Time for a reality check. A big problem for companies using social or mobile technologies for marketing is they forget that the social piece needs to square with reality, said Georgy Cohen, a consultant and the former web content and strategy manager at Tufts University.

Too often companies will make noise on a social channel but don’t have the goods to back it up.

For example, a company can pitch their product to customers using Foursquare, a mobile application that lets people “check-in” with their location. But if they aren’t offering some kind of value, like a coupon, customers will probably not be impressed. Or, a company may display a QR code on a product or collateral material, but the code leads to a boring Web page with no added value. The end result: no compelling reason to buy the product. What’s worse, the customer may feel they just wasted their time.

So, make sure the social piece extends a real marketing plan, otherwise customers will discover what author Gertrude Stein once said: “There is no there there.”

Or as Cohen put it, “Don’t bother being awesome on Twitter if you are not awesome in real life.”

Pass the butter.“Content marketing is like butter,” said, Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute. “It makes everything you eat taste better but you wouldn’t necessarily eat it by itself.”

In a presentation, Pulizzi said marketers are often stumped to come up with a content strategy to support marketing efforts. “Stop with the [technology] tools,” he said, “Tools come and go.” To create a content strategy, focus on “what’s interesting about you.”

Recent research by the Content Marketing Institute showed that 65% of companies it surveyed had some kind of blog, up from 28% three years ago. However, “that doesn’t mean it’s all good content,” Pulizzi added.

Phases of mobile marketing adoption: Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer at Ektron, a content management software company, said many companies still haven’t figured out how to best use mobile devices to reach customers. Some have moved on to a “mobile focus” where they’ve mobile-enabled some pages to be optimized for hand-held devices. When making this shift, companies should make careful, objective content decisions and not try to port the whole web site to smartphones and tablets. He likens many home pages to an episode of “Hoarders” a cable television show about people who cannot throw away anything and jam their homes with stuff, much of it useless. Many home pages will display an overload of content – often clearly the result of content decisions by committee – as well as generic ads that are not targeted and therefore irrelevant to many customers, Wentworth said. He has great hopes that “smart phones will force clarity.”

There is more to it than just your own content. Marissa Peacock, a social media consultant and reporter for CMSwire, a website focused on content management, said organizations can boost their credibility by sharing other people’s content as part of their own content marketing efforts.

“It’s not just about you,” Peacock said, when advocating the sharing of content at a panel discussion.  If companies give the nod to other content producers,  ”that’s how [customers] will look to you to find out what’s important,” she added.

It seems there is no simple answer.

At a conference panel session, content management experts debated how to incorporate mobile devices into content marketing strategies. At issue is just how much content a company should deliver to handheld devices – should marketers try to mimic the Web content experience or design an application that delivers something unique to mobile devices?

Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer at Ektron, a maker of web content management and social software, said companies should adopt a “mobile first” strategy  where mobile applications are focused on tasks customers want to perform on a mobile platform, such as checking statuses or performing quick transactions.

“It’s a whole new way of thinking,” Wentworth said. “You are flicking and swiping. It should be tasks first, then content.”

“I totally disagree,” said Arje Cahn, chief technology officer of Hippo, a Netherlands-based maker of content management software.

A task-based application works well for “the customer out on the street, on the move,” but many customers will want to sit and use their mobile device for more thoughtful experiences, Cahn said.

“Mobile first is a crock,” said Scott Liewehr, a senior analyst of web content management at the Gilbane Group, a division of Outsell Inc. The real value a company can deliver is in the content, not in the mechanics of the mobile device, Liewehr suggested.

Wentworth held his ground, however. If a company wants to truly educate a buyer with their content then they should “make it as easy as possible to consume it,” he countered.

Many companies have not even mobile-enabled their websites. When customers try to access sites from mobile devices they get large pages that don’t render well.

“They are big users of Flash, you can’t pinch and expand things,” and the pages just don’t work for hand-held devices, Wentworth said.

The real estate on mobile devices is smaller, forcing companies to streamline content and display only their most critical information, Wentworth added He predicted “responsive web design,” a technique of designing web pages to dynamically change as a user navigates through them, will become more pervasive as companies design more mobile applications.

Michael Assad, chief executive officer of Agility, a Toronto-based web and mobile content management company, may have offered the most reasonable solution of all. He suggested that companies need to figure out who their customers are and then tailor the mobile content to that population. For example, one of his clients operates movie theaters and their customers want quick interactions, such as looking up a movie time or buying tickets. They aren’t interested in reading lengthy content. The company developed mobile applications that provide easy navigation to searches and simple-steps for purchases. Other companies may have customers that want to invest time reading complex information and that may be best provided on a laptop.