Welcome to What We’re Reading, a weekly rundown of news stories, marketing columns, and specific b2b industry news that caught our eye.

Here’s 167 examples of content marketing

Which is probably 160 more than you need. Still, this piece by Michael Brenner (this guy knows his stuff, and we’ve heard him speak. Very intelligent, realistic takes/advice on marketing, in our opinion) is worth checking out if you are thinking about doing content marketing, or even if you are doing it now.

No time to check it out? Here’s your takeaway:

“Content marketing is not a piece of content. It is not marketing with content like brochures. It is not a native ad. It is not a viral video.

“Content marketing means acting like a publisher, consistently creating content that our customers actually like to read and share. Content marketing is how to build an audience and attract subscribers who opt-in to allow you into their already over-crowded email inbox."

Because there’s not enough noise on social media…

Twitter will be increasing its character limit to 280, so yes, we all get to hear more from anonymous hateful trolls, politicians, and armchair sports experts. But it may not be all bad.

AdWeek called a few marketers up to ask their opinion, with some worried about brand visibility on Twitter, while others speculating that it could be great for customer service.

But that’s all it seems to be at this point: speculation. We probably won’t know whether this will help or hurt brands until we actually start using the 280-character limit count and see the analytics. Giles Lino, Motum’s Social Media Specialist, is a fan of the original character count "because it forced concise copy. But hey, sometimes change is a good thing."

Regardless, we’re meeting about it here at Motum and coming up with an approach, so if you’re one of our clients using social, whether paid or organic, we’ll be in touch soon with our thoughts.

Cloud-hosting experiments for faster, less error-prone websites

Your website ain’t worth the code it’s built in without a webserver hosting it, yet hosting is often an afterthought, according to this piece. And it shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Our tech team seems to agree, and the piece itself spurred them to conduct cloud-hosting experiments this week. We’ve got a a VPS (virtual private server) set up and running in the cloud for two new development projects. What’s that mean for your website? It'll be faster and have less errors.