Relevant and Valued

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BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis writes about the rise of the transparent corporation in the Guardian. 

Companies like Dell and Starbucks have taken the suggestion box into the digital era by asking their customers to generate ideas as to how they can run their businesses better, publishing these ideas on the web and encouraging fellow customers to vote on the ones that they'd like to see implemented.

This is content marketing with an edge. By inviting customers into the (virtual) organisation and by giving them the opportunity to drive the agenda - and allowing them to be constructive and critical in the process - Starbucks, at MyStarbucksIdea, has tapped into a rich vein of direct feedback whilst building a direct relationship with its coffee drinking constituency.

You may not care much about the differences between Venti and Grande but thousands of others evidently do. Which leads me to pose an interesting question - is content generated by customers more relevant and valued than content created by marketers?  It reflects real rather than invented perceptions of the business, and by harnessing and acting on the feedback - which Starbucks is apparently doing - it could also represent a really efficient and cost effective way of growing brand equity.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Content marketing: up close and personal

Father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, has some advice for the 'young people' that are recklessly posting personal information on social networking sites in a new BBC interview.

'Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it's all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.'

It's a sobering thought that what you spontaneously tell the world about yourself today could haunt you for eternity, though supposedly Berners-Lee's advice will not be heeded by many in the Facebook generation, many of whom don't seem to have grasped the not-so fine lines between private personal preferences and public image.  Stephanie Rosenbloom, writing in the New York Times back in January, commented how 'impression management' is critical in a world where the first time you 'meet' someone (whether a prospective partner or a potential employee) is often in an online environment.  The challenge is how  you want others to perceive you when there are several groups to whom you want to position 'brand you' in very different ways.  The problem, as Rosenbloom sees it, is that people are 'grappling with how to craft an e-version of themselves that appeals to multiple audiences — co-workers, fraternity brothers, Mom and Dad.'

In this blog, I've talked about how companies can create personas to represent their target audiences in order to craft content that appeals to each in a way that motivates profitable action.  So a company may have to appeal to investors, consumers, business customers, new recruits etc through one online presence. But usually it's easy to allow your website visitors to select the path they want to take and point them directly to the relevant content that will meet their needs. It may be tougher when you're writing copy to influence different personas at the same time, but it's a lot trickier when the conflict is between your career history and what you got up to last Saturday night!

Yet the content marketing lesson for companies and individuals is similar: identify who you're trying to appeal to, understand your chosen niche, focus as narrowly as possible, decide what you want your customers to do and create content that appeals to them. What information are prospects in this market looking for and how can you provide it in a way that leads to profitable outcomes? Be consistent, write often, test what happens and learn from it.  But remember that what you want to achieve today may not be what you want to be remembered for tomorrow and rebranding (or changing your name) is most definitely an expensive and time consuming business.

The politics of content marketing

Content marketers Stateside are getting their teeth stuck into the content marketing lessons to be learnt from the increasingly fractious race for the Democratic nomination for President between Hillary 'Billary' Clinton and Barack 'time for change' Obama.

Newt Barrett at Content Marketing Today is convinced as to the reasons why Obama has gained the recent momentum:

'There is a fundamental reason that Barack Obama is beating Hillary Clinton’s brains out.  It boils down to who is using content marketing most effectively.' (Newt Barrett, Content Marketing Today).

He goes on to explain that Obama is much more tuned into understanding the needs and attitudes of his audience and is using this insight to craft relevant and valued positioning messages that motivate voters to act: the cornerstone of great content marketing.  For that reason he focuses on the message that he will bring change to American politics and society before he moves on to talk about policy details.  The detail of his policies are there, but they are packaged within a message that enables Obama to first build a trust and understanding with voters.  In other words, he is crafting a message that taps into the mood of the market, and only then is creating content to support it.  Conversely, says Barrett, Clinton appears to be reciting a 'laundry list' of policies/features to the electorate - which leads to shallower connections with voters than those which Obama is achieving. The lesson:

'In order to connect with your customers so that you merit their trust, you must have a deep understanding of what is most important to them.  Only then can you create a communications strategy that will achieve results.  Relevant content derives from true understanding of your customers.' (Newt Barrett, Content Marketing Today).

This is really important: when marketing a brand or for that matter marketing yourself as a brand, you need to think about positioning yourself in a way that speaks to your audience in a clear, compelling and distinctive way. Yes, you need to have substance behind the message, but people see the style before they see the substance and that's what they will remember. Take a simple example: the content you craft for your resume/CV.

To be effective you need to think about what a potential employer is looking for, decide on a clear and differentiated positioning statement that appeals to its goals, wants and needs and then include evidence (in the form of your career history, portfolio or testimonials) that supports the position you have taken. You should state the positioning statement clearly upfront - in your covering letter or email and at the head of your resume - and integrate it throughout by defining what you have done in your career in the same context. The alternative is to list numerous examples of what you have done/what you are going to do if you get the job, without ever making your central message explicit. 

This is a clear lesson from psychology as to why the former is more effective, as featured in a recommended book for content marketers: Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion.  The authors describe an experiment in which two groups of business students saw two different adverts for BMW, one stating: 'BMW or Mercedes? There are many different reasons to choose a BMW. Can you name ten?' The other: 'BMW or Mercedes? There are many different reasons to choose a BMW. Can you name one?'  The research found that those asked to name ten reasons had a lower evaluation of the BMW than those who were asked to name just one. In psychological terms, this is to do with the 'fluency' of the experience - that is, the easier task - recalling one reason as to why a BMW should be chosen - played better, precisely because it was easier to achieve. 

You can see the power of this in action just by looking at the Clinton and Obama websites.  They are both superb sites from a marketing perspective: easy to use, clear calls to action, contain viral tools, provide easily navigable content on the candidates, the policies  and the campaign trail and have superb design. But all of Obama's content is framed in his central message: 'I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington... I'm asking you to believe in yours.'  It's both aspirational and personal, simple and clear yet it contains complex and attractive ideas.  Obama may or may not get to the White House, but I have to agree that with a more 'fluent' position in the psychology of voters, he has won the early content marketing victory.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

We're all the Google generation now

In Douglas Coupland's Jpod - a wry, witty satire of North American corporate culture - the narrator, Ethan Jarlewski ruminates on the power of search:

'The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we've started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.'

The Google generation is often defined as those born after 1993 but as a recent report commissioned by the British Library and partners into research and information behaviour finds: we're all the Google generation now.  And for many consumers, Google and other branded search engines are their only window on the world of information and content.

The report - which can be downloaded for free at www.tinyurl.com/2eslnr  - found that scholars of today do not read in a linear, sequential fashion online, in fact: 'everyone exhibits a bouncing/flicking behaviour, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically. Power browsing and viewing is the normal for all.'  In other words, people are not reading in the way we traditionally understand it. Consumers of academic and educational content in this environment are 'promiscuous, diverse and volatile'. They 'skim', often engaging in the content they discover in a very shallow way - one or two pages before moving elsewhere, commonly not returning.

Most importantly: this emerging information behaviour is not just limited to younger students - it is universal and characteristic of researchers across all generations.

The report does find some age-related differences in research behaviour: for example, 17-21 year-olds are much more likely to trust branded search engines than older scholars.  Read more about this research at my blog on the real story of book publishing in the digital age: Reading eBooks on the Beach?

This 'new form of information seeking behaviour... horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature' has important implications for content marketers inside and outside the academic environment. Using Search Engine Marketing to enable people to find your content is only the first step of the journey.  You also need to create what Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg (in their excellent Waiting for your Cat to Bark?) call 'persuasive systems': the creation of measurable, interactive content that that meets the needs of consumers and influences them to take action.

I don't think Ethan Jarlewski is right: we won't feel nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless in 2020. Rather, we will continue to be unforgiving of online content that does not help us find the relevant and valued information that we're seeking.  And instead of hitting 'buy now', we'll hit the back button, never to return.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

The improbable story of the content marketing Goldfish!

Content marketing by financial services companies is commonly based on meeting informational needs of consumers in order to convert prospects or develop existing customer relationships. Choosing a new credit card may be a lower engagement decision than, say, selecting a pension plan, but innovative credit card company Goldfish is taking a different approach to content strategy nonetheless.

Associating itself with National Storytelling Week which kicked off yesterday, the focal point of the campaign is the stories told at the website meandmygoldfish.com by respected British celebrities about the relationships they have built with their credit cards. 

Comedian and writer Meera Syal tells a tale of motherhood and sleep deprivation. Anthony Horowitz , author and script writer, of a diving holiday in Egypt. Comedian Rik Mayall writes of a planned trip to the pub which turns into a surreal adventure. The stories are written around the 'Me and My Goldfish' brief with the Goldfish less of the flexible plastic friend and more taking on the personality and dialogue of the 'sole' (as one of the storyteller puns) mate. Adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes portrays his Goldfish as a trusty compass for a treacherous journey across frozen wastes.

It shouldn't really work but it kind of does.  Far from being the strongest fiction ever written, it's quirkiness is charming. You can read the tales or you can listen to or watch the authors narrate them. And you can bookmark the stories or email them to a friend.

The distinctive thing about the fishy tales is that they have absolutely nothing to do with product.  Why? Because, 'these stories tell us more and more about the relationships we have built with our cardholders over the last 12 years.'   This is using content for a pure branding exercise. Even the calls-to-action are understated on the marketing site, although when you go through to goldfish.com proper, the copy and design embodies direct marketing best practice.

But is it effective?  Without access to the key data, it's difficult to say but they've certainly differentiated and - with the help of teaser billboards throughout the UK - grabbed attention. And in a world where one credit card is much the same as another, that's not a bad thing.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Content: the missing link between search and action

The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott is a Relevant and Valued book for marketers who want to harness the power of their content for tangible sales results.

Meerman Scott positions his book within the growing movement that heralds pull tactics rather than push tactics as the marketing currency of the digital age:

'The Web is different. Instead of one-way interruption , Web marketing is about delivering useful content just at the precise moment that a buyer needs it.'

He also argues strongly that the worlds of PR and Marketing have become blurred on the Web and that much of the PR profession is living in a rose-tinted world of traditional media focus, ignorant of the fact that marketers need to be where their customers are and the irresistible power of online marketing to reach individual customers directly and efficiently. 
Key lessons of The New Rules of Marketing and PR include:

• Web marketing is about 'understanding the keywords and phrases that our buyers are using and then deploying micro-campaigns to drive buyers to pages replete with the content they seek'.
• Niche markets can be reached profitably online.  Creating messages that appeal to niche marketers can be achieved through the generation and dissemination of effective content.
• Visitors to your website want to solve problems. You need to understand what these problems are and present content that helps them find the solutions they are seeking.
• 'The media have been disintermediated.'  Write press releases but distribute them online to have maximum impact on your customer base who will find them directly through their search activity, especially when you are selling direct to consumers: exploit the fine line between PR and direct marketing.
• Particpate in the debate!  Astute marketers engage and inform by joining conversations online, without alienating by over-selling. 
• Focus relentlessly on buyers and what they're looking for. Create personas and write for these personas.
• Measure and test everything, use results to refine content and improve its impact.

Meerman Scott is convincing and entertaining. The short chapters allow the reader to dip in and out and quickly gather ammunition to use in practice, key points illustrated by engaging and succinct case studies about real world practioners. This book comes highly recommended.

Above all the message I particularly enjoyed is that great content not only strengthens an organization's brand but calls its readers to action: 'on the Web, smart marketers understand that an effective content strategy, tightly integrated to the buying process, is critical to success.'

Or to put it another way, content is the missing link between search and action.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Monitor the content that others are generating about you and your business

Who in your organization is responsible for monitoring the content that's being generated about it and its products and services?

We've all heard the buzz around UGC and UCM - User-generated content and Consumer-Generated Media - but this is far from just a passing fad.  As the lines have blurred between consumers and producers, so-called prosumers (a term coined as long ago as 1980 by Alvin Toffler) have emerged to become critically influential players in the conversations taking place in your market.  Mainstream media reviews and articles still remain vitally important to influencing opinion but focusing on these alone is the marketing equivalent of listening in to one end of a telephone call and hoping to understand the detail of everything that's being said.

Your challenge is to market-watch efficiently. But like consumers, the attention of marketers is scarce and because we're all so oversubscribed with information, it's hard to cut through the white noise and follow what our customers are saying about us.

What's the best way to monitor the conversations in the blogosphere? Google offers a solution with its Reader, which styles itself as an 'inbox for the web': enabling you to source, consolidate and manage what's being said about you on the internet. 

Not a unique idea but the most consistently impressive solution available says Steve Rubel who evangelizes about Google Reader in his blog at Micropersuasion.com 'Become a knowledge management ninja with Google Reader':

'In this era of data smog, the knowledge worker who can act like an agile ninja by consuming vast quantities of information, synthesizing it and getting it in the hands of the right people at the right time is invaluable'.

Reader enables you to organize, file, tag and share feeds and web content easily and efficiently.  If you're having a problem keeping up with all the conversations in your area of specialism, then it's a fantastic solution because when you log in, the homepage consolidates all the content updates for you. Cancel your email subscriptions and replace them with RSS feeds that you can subscribe to within Reader, with unread posts clearly visible. You can also organize the feeds into folders to ensure that you are able to differentiate quickly between multiple conversations that you are following: for example, you may be a marketer who needs to keep the different info streams apart because you are responsible for several products or product groups in your portfolio.

But is simply monitoring the content enough?  How about re-using it in your own marketing messages or joining the conversation yourself?  This is a core topic of Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR,  a full review of which will appear in the next Relevant and Valued.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Why is content not a board level responsibility?

Gerry McGovern reflects on why senior managers don't respect the value of writers and the content they create in a post about Sears Roebuck: the first corporation was built on content. He wonders why this is the case:

'People who create content, unfortunately, are often their own worst enemies. They see writing a good piece of content as the objective. That is not the objective. The objective is to make a sale. The objective is to help a customer solve a problem.'

This got me thinking: why do organizations not value their content more highly and how can we work to improve that situation?  Of course, as McGovern suggests, we need to work hard to sell to the board what content can do for profitability and company value but how?

The answer is accountability.  We need to develop and seek adoption for metrics to measure the value of the content we generate. We need to show the links between what we write and the impact it has on results. It's easy for publishers: content is their business and the value is in the content. But for everyone else, we've got some work to do.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Unaccountable content marketing sucks

A pervasive theme of Relevant and Valued is the importance of making all marketing activity accountable. Mark Stevens' Your Marketing Sucks: the hard-nosed guide to implementing ROI marketing is a call-to-arms for those who believe that marketing spend that does not have a quantifiable impact on financial results and on company value, is marketing spend wasted.

Stevens calls his approach Extreme Marketing, which takes as its starting point that if it can't be measured then it should be cancelled. His basic tenet is that 'to be effective, marketing must produce positive arbitrage - that is, it has to generate more dollars than the dollars you invest in it.'

It's a no-nonsense, hard-hitting read, full of uncompromising gems like:

'Not only is it possible to design marketing so that the initiatives and tools you create can generate customer relationships (and ultimately sales), it is near criminal to accept anything less'.

Great content marketing also demands that accountability is built in to the strategy from the outset. By stating measurable goals and objectives upfront as part of your strategy development, it follows that you are more likely to embed measurement in every single campaign.

Defining the point in the customer journey that your marketing is intended to impact, is a useful methodology for achieving accountability. Starting with a definition of the problem in terms of the action that you are trying to get the customer to take will ensure that you build in tools to measure what the customer does in practice.  This approach will also help you to choose the medium that best delivers your objectives, by ensuring that not only is it appropriate to the context and informational needs of those you are targeting - but that it also supports a mechanism to track actions taken. If you can't build in usable metrics, then there's no point in running the campaign.

The benefits of this principle are highlighted when you consider the specific stages in the customer journey defined in Content marketing tactics and when to use them:

• ACQUIRE --- select a medium that enables you to clearly track how many 'strangers' you persuade to give you permission to start a marketing relationship with them as a percentage of those you initially target. Downloadable White Papers are a great example of this. You can measure the number of people who visit the web page against the number that download the Paper or, if integrated into an e-marketing campaign: the number that download as a percentage of those you have mailed. 
• CONVERT ---conversion metrics are of course essential in any online or direct marketing environment. Defining a clear call-to-action, you need to know how many have taken it as a proportion of the total prospects. A telemarketing campaign that follows up those who have downloaded the White Paper is an example.
• RETAIN AND GROW --- when the prospect becomes a customer, many marketers forget the importance of measuring the value of the ongoing relationship.  But investing in existing relationships is often more profitable than driving new ones.  What the content marketer needs to know here is the impact on lifetime customer value or on repeat purchases of the ongoing content marketing engagement. So if you're producing a custom magazine, you need to ensure that you understand the consequences of the subsequent action taken by your reader as a result of interacting with that content.  Track this through your CRM, build clear calls to action into the content and measure specific outcomes that way.
• RECRUIT AND AMPLIFY --- if you're asking an existing customer to help you recruit other customers, then the medium you use needs to build in a tracking mechanism to help you quantify the success of that objective.  The content here could be either the incentive or a way of promoting the benefit of recruitment. For example, if your content is viewed as of specifically high value, you could reward an existing customer with a free subscription, free book or access to premium content in return for their success in signing up a new customer or prospect. Alternatively, you could use a simple discount reward and faciliate this through your existing content marketing relationship to sell the benefit of participation. Either way, you should link the outcome back to the marketing that drove it.  As the best medium for recruitment and amplification is frequently the Internet, this goal of complete transparency is increasingly simple to achieve.

Many of us will recognize the refrain: 'it's impossible to measure but... [delete as applicable] anecdotally we know it makes a difference/if we don't spend the money this year, we'll lose it next year/we have to do it because that's what our competitors do.'

Mark Stevens' Extreme Marketing suggests that this is woolly thinking.  If you can't prove it adds value then it probably destroys it.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Sign Up for the Custom Content Conference

Content marketers Stateside will head for New Orleans, 9-11 March 2008 for the first ever Custom Content Conference, organized by the Custom Publishing Council.

Focusing on branded content and content marketing strategies for marketers and publishers, the conference is positioned as a showcase for best practice, new ideas and as a  fantastic networking opportunity. 

Joe Pulizzi, a board member of the Council, writes  on his blog at Junta42:

'Organizations have the power to create great content through multiple formats that truly make a difference in their customers' lives. That's what this conference is all about. If you are at all interested in learning how to create more valuable content for your customers, and learn how to market it through the most effective formats - attend this conference.'

The aims of the Custom Publishing Council are closely aligned to the objectives promoted by Relevant and Valued. Its mission statement encapsulates the key central ideas expressed at this blog: 1) content that meets the informational needs of a closely understood group of customers is a great marketing tool and 2) a call to action that meets the customer's needs profitably should be the targeted result of any credible content marketing strategy.

"Custom publishing marries the marketing ambitions of a company with the information needs of its target audience. This occurs through the delivery of editorial content – via print, Internet, and other media – so intrinsically valuable that it moves the recipient’s behavior in a desired direction."

Sign up now at https://www.custompublishingcouncil.com/industry-conference-2008-registration.asp?affiliate=1

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com