In 2007 Forrester research showed that 90% of purchasing decisions begin online. In most cases, before a customer personally contacts your company they’re already armed with information about your company, your people, and your products. This is true no matter what they are buying.

What this means for you is opportunity-the chance to educate potential customers about your industry, possible solution choices, best practices, and the right questions to ask. This is how to build a relationship with your customer and make it easier for them to buy your product. That’s what content marketing is all about. In essence, the customer has initiated a conversation with you before you even know they are interested in your products and services.

Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong. The majority of organizations are set up to sell products and services, not create editorial content that builds relationships with customers. But there are two things you can do right now that will kick start your content marketing efforts.

Number One: Start thinking like a publisher

Doesn’t seem to make sense, right? You’re a marketer, why would you want to think like a publisher? Actually, if you believe the first few paragraphs of this post, marketing today is all about publishing. It’s all about developing information based on the needs of the reader (your customer). That’s what publishers do. Before any decisions are made about what content to publish, you need a clear understanding of your customers’ pain points – to not only fine tune your communication strategy, but to figure out how you talk about your products and services.

Let’s look at an example. The US Postal Service had a problem. Marketers were spending less on direct mail. That’s a BIG problem for the USPS. Well, instead of just blasting out messages that promoted direct mail, they developed a publishing platform, including a quarterly magazine called Deliver, and a robust website that was updated with daily educational content.

In its print and Web editorial content, you never heard how great the USPS was. What the reader saw was engaging, editorial content focused on issues important to marketing professionals, such as ROI, marketing trends, and best practices.

The result: After reading the magazine, almost three quarters of the marketers receiving the publication planned on spending more in direct mail during the next year. In addition, traffic to the USPS website is booming, growing well over 100% over the past year.

Even better, the USPS has invested even more in expert eBooks, white papers, videos, and in-depth online content.

The key: The USPS stopped thinking like a marketer and started thinking like a publisher.

Number two: Stop selling

Selling to customers before building a true relationship is the kiss of death. Consumers can smell a sales pitch a mile away, and today they have the power to block or ignore your sales message altogether. The most successful content doesn’t just don’t sell. Instead, it performs the art of “Lethal Generosity,” as coined by Forrester Research’s social media guru Jeremiah Owyang. For Web content, this means that your goal with every online interaction is to be helpful. So how do you do that? Chris Brogan and David Meerman Scott, two of the foremost marketing thought leaders, recommend giving away helpful content wherever and whenever possible. Sound familiar? It should, because that’s an example of thinking like a publisher.

Being helpful allows you to develop a real relationship with your customers, which leads to good will and more trust in your brand. It makes people want to do business with you.

That’s how it works. You give and give and give…and then you get…more than you would ever anticipate.

By doing these two seemingly small things-thinking like a publisher and putting an end to all the selling-you will transform your company. It’s not easy, but this paradigm shift is necessary for marketing survival today.

Joe Pulizzi, a thought leader, speaker, writer, and evangelist for content marketing, is founder and chief content officer for Junta42, a content marketing/custom publishing community search engine and resource. Pulizzi is the co-author of the book “Get Content. Get Customers.,” which helps teach companies why and how to create their own compelling content to drive their businesses. Pulizzi is also president for Z Squared Media LLC, a content marketing consulting firm for marketers and publishers.

The tweet in question read, “In da locker room, snuck to post my twit. We’re playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up.”

Still, there are several things working in Villanueva’s favor. First is that he did step up, scoring 11 of his 19 points in the fourth quarter as his team upset the defending NBA champions.

Next is the fact that sending a tweet at halftime is not so essentially different than a sideline TV interview, done as the player makes his way to the locker room.

Finally there’s the Shaq factor.

Never one to pass up the opening moments of a trend, less than a week later Phoenix center Shaquille O’Neal dropped word (via Twitter, of course) that he was planning something similar during halftime of his upcoming game against Washington.

Sure enough, he came through with this: “Shhhhhhh.”

That O’Neal suffered no repercussions (his coach, Alvin Gentry, also tweets) is probably a sign of things to come. Tweets from baseball players between innings. Tweets from football players between possessions. Tweets from golfers pretty much any time.

The lesson here is one of accessibility, of giving your audience (or your customers) what they want. Debates about an athlete’s in-game focus will always have a place at the table, but so long as the NBA—or Charlie Villanueva or Shaquille O’Neal—is more popular now than it was a month ago, even a die-hard traditionalist must admit there’s some merit to the practice.

O’Neal was among the league’s most popular players before Twitter ever existed. Now he reportedly has more than 471,000 followers and plays Twitter tag, wherein he tells people where he is at any given moment and offers game tickets to the first person to find him.

Could any marketer come up with a better program?

He’s right.

The site is little more than a redirect to the Ford Drives U site, which is a program offering special deals, rates, financing, etc. for college students wanting to purchase Ford cars. It’s the prototypical example of how not to use Facebook.

BRAVO

The site features 500+ photos of all kinds of Fords in varying states of stock to fully modded. That’s it: Photos. Of cars. Most—but not all—of them Fords.

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The site hasn’t been updated since May 2008, when Ford posted a call for entries to the College 500: Driven by Ford. Billed as the “The road trip of a lifetime,” mtvU and Ford were looking for college students “to take part in a competitive journey across the country in the new reality show.”

There are no updates to the page, so I initially assumed that either the show got scrapped or they didn’t get enough entries. Not true. The show aired on mtvU last year. Hmmm.

There are 7,613 fans on the site as of this writing; yet there are no posts, no chatter, and no engagement between fans and Ford or among the fans themselves.

It’s a brilliant concept, with execution that lives up to the company’s lofty ideals.

BRAVO

The Footprint Chronicles essentially serves as a learning tool. Environmental awareness at a local level is a daunting topic as it pertains to a global company’s worldwide operations, but Patagonia has managed to raise a significant number of consideration-worthy topics in a straightforward and concise manner.

The menu is simple to read and navigate, consisting of 14 items from Patagonia’s lines of pants, shirts, jackets, and shoes. Each product links to a global map featuring points of interest in the item’s creation, with multimedia presentations explaining the process and sustainability of each link in the supply chain. From green practices at a Taiwanese manufacturing plant to lessons on organic cotton farming in Turkey to ozone-based wool treatment in Japan, the topics are varied and interesting—and arm conscientious consumers with questions to ask of any large producer of goods.

One excellent touch is the overview panel that accompanies each product, with headings “The Good” and “The Bad.” That the Talus jacket performs well and can be recycled through Patagonia’s innovative recycling program is good information. But listing the harmful chemical in the jacket’s water-repellant finish gives the site instant credibility. (It’s necessary to the jacket’s performance, says the company, adding that it’s researching acceptable alternatives.)

Even more beneficial to Patagonia is that the site establishes its credentials as a company at the vanguard of the environmental movement. It’s difficult to fake this level of commitment.

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This is a simple site with a singular purpose, and it’s pulled off very well. A few of the videos run on a bit and one is shockingly out of focus, and some of the slideshows are slow loading.

But that’s nitpicking about what is ultimately a valuable and satisfying user experience.

BRAVO

The microsite is the online equivalent of the car itself—small, thoughtfully organized, well designed, and fun.

Visitors can view the site accompanied by a John Cleese-esque narrator and/or with letterbox subtitles, making it suitable for both home and office viewing. It opens in a garage with the arrival of a pair of Smart Fortwos. The user can continue in a linear manner through the various chapters—comfort, safety, space, fuel economy, and features—or experience it chapter by chapter through tabs at the top of the page. Regardless of which method one chooses, the scene transitions are especially slick as the site flows from one chapter to the next with lateral screen wipes from scene to scene.

The quiz elements and visuals are surprising at times, and captivating enough to inspire multiple viewings. In addition, the entire experience runs just a few minutes, even if viewed through to its entirety from start to finish.

Extra credit goes to the production team for the voiceover interruptions in which the narrator takes a call and orders tea or lunch when the screen is left idle.

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The major shortcomings of the site, to the extent that these can be characterized as such, are its regionality—the call to action to arrange a test drive or request a brochure only apply to U.K. residents—and the fact that it lacks the requisite social media tags to give it additional viral impact. Ideally, the site would have been set up to reconfigure the final call to action and sub links based on the IP address of its viewer, so that North American buyers, for example, could also request a brochure or set up a test drive. With no additional tweaks, the site would work as is for English-speaking countries, and it would have been relatively easy, given the voice over/letter box format, to translate the experience into additional languages.

Further, while the site has made the rounds on various automotive message boards and blogs, it could have had wider reach if it was set up for easy social tags like Digg, Delicious, and Facebook.

Overall, the site hits a bull’s-eye for its target demographic, leaves a striking impression of how far off base some of these misconceptions are about the Smart Fortwo, and reinforces the brand voice for Smart.

I suppose that if voting methods can’t be uniformly implemented—electronic voting versus paper ballots, versus paper ballots in wacky shapes like butterflies—then voting stickers are just as susceptible to similar independence. Still, it’d be easier to take if my once-proud emblem wasn’t so clearly the runt of Tendo’s litter.  Heck, everyone else walked in with “I Voted” in three languages.

“Your sticker sucks,” said Chris, in a rare moment of subtle tact.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here about marketing, it’s that design does matter. My sad little oval with the rudimentary and hardly-to-scale corner image of a flag doesn’t even match up to San Francisco’s tri-language sticker, which employs only a tiny star as its lone design element. Head down the Peninsula to San Mateo County and you’ll find a full presidential seal, complete with “I Voted” in the requisite three languages, plus the signifier that it’s a presidential election. It’s also the only sticker to identify where it’s from.

Unless there’s a clearinghouse of generic voting stickers doing gangbuster business somewhere, the San Mateo offering couldn’t have cost much more to produce. And it goes a long way toward showing that effort and execution do matter in one’s final product. Perhaps this is a lesson to learn in campaigning, as well. —Jason Turbow, managing editor

BRAVO

The website follows the same sense of visual simplicity as the company’s products. The home page ensures that the featured product takes center stage with lots of white space, limited copy, and large images. Apple displays restraint by focusing most of the home page’s attention on one product at a time, usually its latest release.

The site places a heavy emphasis on visual design, blending colorful imagery with bold headlines and copy to create balanced compositions on each page. It’s a pleasant departure from the usual column format with pictures in boxes.

The copy is short, decisive, and punchy (if a tad smug at times) and does a good job of tapping that emotional response to Apple’s products that makes its fan base so loyal. And just like all of Apple’s branding, it’s carried out consistently across the site, from the copy to the look and feel.

Because Apple has fewer products to sell (as compared to Dell or HP, which sell hundreds of products to a variety of market segments), the site is easily divided into six segments: the store, three product categories (Mac, iPod/iTunes, and iPhone), downloads, and support.

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While the site offers seemingly rich and varied product info, including video and galleries of dramatic product photography, most of it offers more style than substance. Many links on the site, such as the “iPod Your Life” link, lead to pages that are little more than additional branding experiences, yet provide no additional value.

Top-level navigation, such as locating your desired product or service segment, is easy. But cross navigation, i.e. moving from one segment to another without using the top navigation, is unclear, if it exists at all. Beware the hapless user looking for clear links to iPod support in the iPod product segment.

Apple offers a ton of self-help product support on its site, but finding the specific info you need can be extremely difficult. Basic problems are easy enough to locate and solve with the support content, but it ends there. Need to find information on problems that are more complicated? The answers are usually buried deep within the discussion forums.

We have to throw some props to Apple for supporting and maintaining such a robust online community of users, but navigating the vast discussion boards is like entering a labyrinth. Cross–navigation to other discussion boards isn’t possible, and if you do find some useful information, you’d better copy and paste it into another document because you may never find it again. While the moderators do a decent job of responding to posts (and providing links to other posts or other areas of the site that may answer questions), the discussion boards mainly work because of the persistence and helpful nature of other Apple users who have encountered—then solved—a multitude of problems.

Overall, Apple’s site is a branding powerhouse that is presented beautifully and consistently. It stands apart from other consumer electronics e-commerce sites. But also true to Apple’s tendency, a little more polishing beneath the surface would make for a user experience that matches its sleek design.