The Tendo View » Insight

B2B social media: Is it marketing or what?

Selena Welz — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 22:10:23 +0000

B2B social media seems to be on everyone’s minds these days. EMarketer.com reports that B2B marketing activity on social networks is estimated to increase 43.3 percent in 2010, while spending is estimated to increase by $54 million in 2014 (up from $11 million in 2009)[1].

Despite these robust estimates, B2B marketers have lagged behind B2C marketers in adopting social media. And it’s no wonder. Because B2B social media is still relatively new, few concrete examples of success exist, making ROI difficult to prove. Standards and best practices are still being developed, mostly through trial and error.

So why should B2B companies bother? In my recent social media-focused client work, I’ve been facing this very question. “We need to focus on short-term revenue,” they tell me. “How do we know this social media stuff is worthwhile?”

With no metrics to point out, this question is difficult to answer. How do you justify building a Facebook fan page, for example, when traditional marketing practices can be backed up with numbers and a history of proven efficacy?

Well, for starters, social media—even for B2B companies—isn’t marketing. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Applying traditional marketing practices in a social media context just doesn’t work. Imagine a friend posting a link to a press release announcing a new diet pill on your wall. There’s a reason the Can-Spam Act was passed. People don’t like marketing infiltrating their personal space.

The human element of social media is exactly what makes it difficult to translate into a B2B context. Until recently, social media has largely been a consumer realm, where people interact based on personal interests, personal entertainment, or to accomplish tasks. No wonder a lot of B2B marketers don’t take social media very seriously.

But this is a limited way to look at the potential of social media. Whatever people are doing on social networks, the underlying principles are the same: communication, interaction, and building relationships. Every company, no matter what it’s selling, depends on this same set of principles. It’s all about reaching your customers effectively and building relationships with them.

So when considering social media in the B2B context, keep this in mind: Behind every impersonal business decision is a living, breathing human being. And most business decisions, no matter how big and how important, originate from a network of personal relationships.

If you look at it this way, B2B companies have some characteristics that make them great candidates for using social media:

B2B companies typically have a more complicated value proposition than, say, the satisfaction of an ice cream cone on a hot summer day. Communicating intangible business value and thought leadership requires a wider platform than traditional marketing can provide. Social media opens the door to more types of communication. Furthermore, you can communicate at a deeper level using social media platforms than you can with traditional marketing.
B2B companies often have a long sales cycle. High stakes purchases require a lot of support and information. This support and information is traditionally provided by sales people working one-on-one with customers during the pre-sales/consideration phase. Why not use social media as one strategy for providing that?

Some B2B companies are taking the leap into social media. Cisco has a Facebook page with more than 60,500 friends linked to it. Marketing traditionalists might question the value of this page, but one glance at Cisco’s Facebook wall clearly shows that the audience is actively engaged in the form of comments and “likes.” Oracle, Dell, and Deloitte all have Facebook pages that show similar levels of interaction.

Even if we can’t clearly articulate the monetary value of B2B social media, it’s clear to me that it is a useful promotion tool, especially when combined with traditional marketing practices. Reaching your audience is reaching your audience, regardless of how you do it.

For some interesting insight on this topic, check out this useful blog I found, Social Media B2B.

But before you go, tell me what you think of B2B social media. Is it just marketing in disguise or is it an authentic way to reach your audience? What successful B2B social media strategies have you seen?

[1] The EMarketer report includes data from external sources. Outsell provided the 43.3 percent figure while Forrester provided the spending estimates.

How do corporate websites coexist with social media strategies?

Linda Leung — Tue, 25 May 2010 01:07:50 +0000

Following on from his controversial post of 2007 suggesting that corporate websites were irrelevant, social media guru Jeremiah Owyang told attendees at the recent GilbaneSF content management conference that corporate websites as we know them may not survive into the future.

As organizations begin to seed and continue customer interactions on external social networks, customers will no longer be able to tell the difference between a corporate website and the company’s presence on Facebook. It’s already happening, he says. Just go to Vitamin Water’s website and you’ll be forced to visit its Facebook page. In fact, a message on its website reads, “We’ve temporarily moved to Facebook—let’s hang out.”

If that sounds scary to you, don’t fret. The change isn’t going to happen overnight. And even if the change does eventually happen, you can gain control of this shift and turn it into a win-win situation for you and your customers. Your first step is to understand that your corporate website and social media networks should be blended rather than separate strategies.

Customers are directing your social strategy. The change is happening because we’re led by customer preferences. Say you’re in the market for a new car. Don’t you take information on vendors’ websites with a grain of salt? But you pay attention to what friends and other buyers are saying on car forums or other independent sites, right?

Some enlightened companies may even host discussions on their corporate sites—even if some of the comments are negative about their products. This is one of the eight evolutionary steps of the social corporate website, according to Owyang (view the slideshow).

Owyang’s evolution of the social corporate website

1. No social integration with the corporate website. Owyang cited Traderjoes.com as an example of a website that has no social media element, despite the existence of unofficial fan sites.

2. Sites that link directly away without a strategy. These sites have chicklets that encourage users to “follow us” on various external social sites, but has no strategy for what customers should do after they leave. Owyang also points out a particularly troubling offense by McDonald’s: When you click on the Twitter link on its website, up pops the legal disclaimer about the dangers of navigating away to a third-party site.

3. Sites that link away but encourage sharing. Outback Steakhouse, for example, has a Facebook “Like” link on its home page.

4. Organizations that replicate their brand across the corporate site and social channels. Starbucks is an example of this, as it replicates conversations across all its consumer-facing channels.

5. Organizations that aggregate discussions on corporate sites. Skittles aggregates conversations from Twitter, etc., on its own site. The benefit is that discussions are centralized on your site, driving traffic there. However, you have no control over the content, which may contain links to competitor sites.

This strategy reminds me of my work as an editor on a tech magazine. We were one of the first to aggregate stories about our topics from around the Web, and that included linking to stories in competitor magazines. It was a radical move—why would a journalist want to discuss and link to stories on other publications? But the result was that readers would come to us first for a comprehensive view of how the blogosphere and other media were covering the news of the day.

6. We’re seeing these types of strategies a lot—companies encouraging their visitors to sign in using their Facebook Connect log-ins. Marketers lose on the one hand because they can’t collect e-mail addresses, but they also widen the marketing funnel because Facebook friends can share their activities, including the sites they’ve visited.

7. Social login systems that allow users to stay on site, but trigger a viral loop. The Pepsi Refresh Project awards grants to community-improvement projects voted on by visitors to Pepsi’s site. Visitors vote by logging in via Facebook. Pepsi benefits when visitors recruit friends.

8. Seamless integration between corporate sites and social sites. We’re now back to the Vitamin Water example. Do you dare go so far?

Content strategy Q&A

Christine Zender — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:53:45 +0000

Content strategy has come of age. While consumers continue to embrace social media and emerging Web channels and turn away from traditional media, large corporations are being pushed into a more direct relationship with their customers. Along with LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, corporate websites are becoming the main channel for this new relationship marketing, and marketers are challenged to deliver relevance and value to earn the loyalty of their customers. But most large corporate websites are a mess—difficult to navigate, stuffed with outdated and/or incorrect information, and geared for promotion and transaction rather than offering value to their audience.

Enter content strategy.

Tendo has been delivering content strategy services long before the term could be found on Wikipedia. We asked one of our most experienced content strategists, Vice President of Content Services Chris Zender, to answer some common questions about this “old but new again” discipline.

Q: How do you define content strategy? What is it? When you conduct a content strategy, what’s the deliverable?
A: Content strategy is the road map for planning, developing, creating, and executing content that will achieve your website’s goals. There are a couple of key phrases in there. First: Planning. It’s the linchpin to success—I’d rather spend three weeks in planning and one week in creation than vice versa. Second: Achieving your website’s goals. Content should support the goals of a website.

When people hear “content strategy,” they sometimes think it’s a dense, complicated document that’s going to give them a lot of theory and not a lot of practice. The truth is that the best content strategies tell you the best route to your destination and how to get there—not one or the other.

Q: How has the discipline of content strategy evolved or changed over time?
A: Most companies weren’t thinking about “content” as a strategic asset five or more years ago. There was, and still is, a tendency for companies to take what I call the Billion Dollar Bucket approach to building websites. They spend an inordinate amount of time and resources building a gorgeous shell—the bucket—then they fill it with any old crap: old and outdated content, broken links, images and videos that don’t reflect current brand standards, etc.

It’s only been in the last three to five years that people have started to appreciate that what you say or view is as important as how you get to that material.

I think there are a few reasons for this shift: The rise of social media and the increasing importance of SEO. Think about it: Before social media, people received information and opinion from “sanctioned” sources—traditional media outlets like magazines, newspapers, TV, or radio, or from sources they trusted like friends and family. But social media gives (almost) anyone, anywhere the ability to broadcast their content. As these voices multiplied and grew louder, they created a need to figure out how to balance this information. And as the volume of content grew, the need to find a way to search for a specific topic also grew.

Q: When Tendo delivers a content strategy, are the website goals already defined, or do they change with the content strategy?
A: We’ve created content strategies for both scenarios. We don’t create any kind of strategy—marketing, messaging, content, etc.—without knowing two things: the goals of the website and the target audience the client wants to attract. So if the goals and the audience haven’t been defined, then that’s the first step in our process. You’ve got to know who you’re talking to and assess what their information needs are, then you marry that with what you want them to do and/or what you want them to know. That marriage is the essence of a content strategy.

Once you know the site goals and the intended outcome or action of the audience/user, then you can create content that meets both objectives. There are certain things that go into every content strategy—site goals, audience profile, content organization, frequency of updates/refreshes, and how to staff or organize or assign roles and responsibilities for content creation and development.

Q: What are the primary benefits of conducting a content strategy? Why is it needed? How does having one, or not having one, affect a company’s bottom line?
A: Content strategies provide several tangible benefits:

They focus all stakeholders around the company’s and the website’s goals. In larger organizations different divisions often have different priorities, which results in the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. A content strategy that supports the overall website goals can provide a unifying foundation around which all divisions can stay focused on their priorities without undermining the total site experience.

They ensure cost-effective content creation. By standardizing the types, topics, and frequency of content you put a series of checks and balances in place that help create content strategically. The content has to adhere to the plan or it doesn’t get funded. We’ve been called in to edit content that was off message or just plain incorrect because the division that commissioned it wasn’t operating strategically—it can be a drag on resources.

“Write once, use many” is our Web content mantra. Create content once and leverage it in different ways to amortize the cost—site material, newsletters, syndicated content, etc.

They position content as a measurable asset. Deciding on and building in consistent metrics for content—something that’s not done nearly as often as you might think—enables you to determine the value of a piece of content.

Q: How does content strategy intersect with user experience and information architecture?
A: Content strategy informs user experience and information architecture; if you don’t consider the type of content, the frequency with which it will be refreshed, or even who and how it will be updated, how can you construct a cohesive information architecture or user experience?

Content strategy, user experience, and information architecture are three equal components that need to work together to deliver the highest value experience. Just as a driver might navigate a city by a roadmap, street signs, and visual landmarks, the absence of any one of these compromises the ability to effectively get to your destination.

Q: Does content strategy also include SEO strategy? What about social media strategy?
A: It should include both—and more. A content strategy, depending on what the content is for, should include a social media strategy, a syndication strategy, an SEO strategy, content analytics and metrics, etc. SEO and metrics in particular are always bolted on at the last minute in a kind of “Oh, shoot! We forgot about that” way.

The challenge is that in many organizations, these functions are handled by different people who aren’t working together or aren’t working toward the same goals. If you treat each of these very important strategies as pieces of a greater whole, you’ll increase the effectiveness of all of them.

Q: Isn’t every client’s website goal to generate leads, gain customers, and sell more product?
A: Not necessarily—and not in that order. Toyota has launched content recently in which the primary goal is to manage their reputation, influence public perception, and generate awareness. The secondary goal for this content is to sell cars. Almost every company website in some way builds or supports the brand. But sometimes a site is intended to offer customers service or support, to offer unique insight not directly related to a specific transatcion or sale. The goal of your website and the unique promise of your brand inform how you approach content.

Q: What are the top three challenges you encounter in creating content strategies?
A: First, the people and processes part of the strategy. In many cases, defining roles and processes for content creation creates an organizational shift that is uncomfortable for many companies. Second, once companies realize the importance of content, they often have unrealistic expectations about what content can achieve for them. Many expect content to propel them to a permanent place at the top of search pages or increase their sales by 500 percent. Third, and it’s more of a surprise than a challenge, clients are always taken aback by what’s on their website. We get a lot of “THAT’s on the site? Why?”

Usually it’s because there was no strategy in place.

Avoid PowerPoint abuse

Selena Welz — Fri, 14 May 2010 15:49:14 +0000

Do you have PowerPoint skills? Can you size images and auto-create charts and graphs from Excel spreadsheets? If so, you might say that you indeed possess PowerPoint skills. It may even be listed on your resume as a job qualification. But if your definition of PowerPoint skills doesn’t extend beyond use of the software program, your skills may have room for improvement—at least according to Edward Tufte, a statistician, professor emeritus at Yale University, and noted analytical design expert.

I’ve been subjected to a lot of PowerPoint presentations lately, which is why this recent blog post, “Death by PowerPoint,” caught my eye. Nearly dead is exactly how it can sometimes feel sitting through a droning presentation while squinting at vague, text-heavy slides.

So why are PowerPoint presentations usually so boring and ineffective? Those in Tufte’s camp believe that PowerPoint provides the crutch for fuzzy communication. I’m inclined to agree. You don’t have to fully articulate your thoughts or follow lines of logic when all you have to do is cram a few phrases into bullet points.

“Combine that with the all-too-human reluctance to think (see ‘ditto heads‘) and the popularity of PowerPoint is clear: It creates the illusion of participation without the sweaty bits,” writes Robin Harris, author of the blog post referenced above. “Getting into issues requires the hard work of questioning assumptions, examining evidence, determining values and accepting compromises.” It’s difficult to generate that kind of mental activity from a few bullet points and a gradient-enhanced bar chart.

All of this got me thinking back to a Tufte infographics seminar that I attended last year. Below are a few of Tufte’s primary information design principles. Use these tips to avoid gratuitous PowerPoint abuse.

The human brain uptakes information very quickly…

And uses multiple skills to analyze and understand it. But your typical PowerPoint chart dumbs down information to the lowest common denominator. Tufte recommends that you trust the intelligence of your audience to understand the material you’re presenting, in all its glorious complexity and detail. Which leads to another one of his main principles…

Don’t just know your audience. Respect your audience.

Tufte says that simply claiming to “know” your audience usually results in underestimating it. He’s a big believer in people’s native intelligence and analytical skills and feels that acknowledging and playing to that intelligence is the first step to understanding what your audience needs.

Let the content drive the vehicle (or format), not the other way around.

Tufte’s basic principle is do “whatever it takes” to convey your message. That means looking closely at your content to find the best way to present it. In other words, don’t fire up the ol’ PowerPoint and create a colorful bar graph or pie chart every time you have some data to present. Instead, let the data guide you to the best vehicle or format in which to present it.

Show as much information in as few pages as possible.

That doesn’t mean reducing your font size to shove as many words and pictures as possible onto the page. It means designing your infographic, chart, table, etc. to convey as much information as possible. Tufte said, “There’s no such thing as information overload. There’s only bad design.” And bad design tends to be the result of muddled thinking.

Use a “super graphic” handout instead of a PowerPoint.

This was, at least to me, one of the more provocative viewpoints presented in the seminar. Tufte prefers a “super graphic” to multiple pages of charts and graphs that the audience then has to string together in their minds. The idea is that one dense graphic tells a more complete story, and engages the intelligence and analytical skills of the audience. When information is presented tangentially in space, rather than separated on multiple slides, it can present a more complete picture.

Below are a few examples of what Tufte would call “super graphics.” These graphics are obviously more suited to print than digital media, and they do require a fair amount of study to get the full picture, but that’s one of Tufte’s points.

What would you add to Tufte’s basic principles? Are they outdated or still fresh and modern? And do “super graphics” have a place in today’s digital world? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

P.S. For dessert, please take a moment to check out one of my favorite examples of visual info display, The Music Animation Machine. I find it brilliant in its simplicity, and hypnotic to watch. Enjoy.

Traits of an engaging blogger

Linda Leung — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:57:05 +0000

Your organization has a blog. You’ve even got some employees who are eager to put pen to digital paper and produce content. But there’s a difference between blah content and the “I’m-subscribing-to-this-blogger-because-he’s-got-interesting-views” content. The writer of the latter often attracts regular readers, engages readers in conversation (not only on his or her own blog, but also on other people’s blogs), and posts prolifically.

How do you find these types of bloggers? And what’s the best way to manage them?

Model bloggers

Before we get to that, let’s look at some examples of executives who effectively engage the blogosphere. Chuck Hollis is vice president of global marketing CTO at EMC. He’s been at EMC for 15 years in a variety of technical and marketing positions. In other words, Hollis knows his stuff. He’s comfortable writing easy-to-read posts about everyday life (such as “What iPads did to my family”) and is not afraid to state his views about EMC activities.

Take, for example, EMC’s bidding war against NetApp for Data Domain last year. Although some company executives may stay silent on such company activities, preferring to speak through their PR or legal teams, Hollis posted a blog about his personal perspective of EMC’s move. Not surprisingly, that post attracted multiple comments.

Hollis’ opponent at HP (they often cross swords on each other’s blogs) is Calvin Zito, author of HP’s Around the Storage Block blog, and StorageWorks marketing communications manager. Like Hollis, Zito has held a variety of positions in marketing and engineering.

Zito is a prolific writer with a great writing style, and commands a regular audience—including Hollis.

Ideal traits

Judging by their blog posts and the frequency of their updates, both Hollis and Zito are comfortable writers and are quick to analyze their markets. The results are thoughtful and engaging blog posts. Hollis and Zito are quick to respond to reader comments—both complimentary and not—and engage with readers of other blogs by placing comments there.

Once you’ve identified executives who have the necessary traits to write blogs, how do you manage them?

You don’t.

Opinion writers

View such corporate bloggers as you would opinion writers on newspapers. By all means run a blog that is a mouthpiece for your organization, if that makes you feel more comfortable. However, encourage other voices to speak as well.

It’s not possible to silence people who have strong views, but B2B readers are mature enough to decide for themselves whether these bloggers are stating their own views and not those of their employers. (Some bloggers state this on their blogs, particularly if they’re hosting the blog themselves.) Of course, it helps when these bloggers are senior executives and not entry-level employees.

It is better to have employees who are able to engage with readers and get the blogosphere talking than to run a bland corporate blog that commands no attention whatsoever. You’re now in the publishing game, so be prepared to loosen the reins.

Minting customers with infographics

Bill Golden — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:51:41 +0000

Imagine trying to explain the concept of deflation, the oil economy or how the Federal Reserve works so it’s easy to comprehend for the financially illiterate. Oh, and it must be interesting and you can’t use more than a Web page worth of space. That’s the type of challenge the folks at MintLife face day in and day out. How does MintLife do it? Largely with visual content.

An offshoot of the personal finance website Mint.com, which Intuit acquired in November 2009, the MintLife blog dispenses all kinds of helpful advice and insight on personal finance. It’s successfully built a large and very active online community (approximately 700,000 unique visitors a month) of personal finance devotees. The MintLife blog serves as a customer acquisition channel for Mint.com, which offers a variety of free personal finance services.

Like any company trying to attract and engage customers online, Mint.com faces the usual challenges: readers with short attention spans, competition that’s just a click away, and an increasingly fractured media landscape. But MintLife has another big challenge: presenting complex financial concepts and terms to non-finance types. The site has solved this challenge through the use of effective infographics.

Simplifying complex information

“Infographics allow us to present complex information and data in simplified, easy-to-approach visual formats,” says Lee Sherman, editor at Mint.com. “Given our subject matter and target audience, infographics are a very effective way to present complex information. They allow us to tell a story in an interesting and efficient manner.”

MintLife is not targeting your traditional personal finance audience, which is predominantly male and older. MintLife’s audience is 40 percent female and relatively younger (the median age is 30). Knowing that its audience won’t read in-depth explanations, and understanding full well how the Web has changed the way people consume information, MintLife made infographics a core piece of its content strategy.

Visit MintLife and you’ll quickly notice how central visual content and infographics are to its content strategy. Every feature story includes a prominent photo or visual element and infographics are used generously.

Going viral

In addition to making it easier to present complex financial information, Sherman also points to the viral nature of infographics as a powerful marketing and customer acquisition tool. “Our infographics are syndicated on a lot on other websites, so having our logo on the graphic, as well as built-in code that links readers back to our site, translates to a lot of Web traffic that would otherwise cost us money.”

A great example of an effective infographic is the one MintLife created in September 2009 to educate readers on the realigned U.S. automotive industry. The Big Three automakers—GM, Ford and Chrysler—were in the spotlight throughout the recession of 2009, having received hundreds of millions of dollars in bailout money and undergone a major shake-out. With so much change to the industry—brands shuttered, acquisitions by foreign automakers, and new upstarts—it was hard to figure out what the reformed industry looked like. And few easy-to-understand explanations were available.

The “New Auto Industry Breakdown” infographic provides a succinct visual synopsis of the U.S. auto industry. It shows how each automaker was impacted by the shake up, their new ownership, and the job toll. It also offers a brief forecast for each automaker’s future prospects.

The auto industry infographic generated 51,000 page views on MintLife alone and received 642 “diggs” on Digg.com. (The highest number of page views MintLife has generated with a single infographic is 120,000.)

“MintLife’s page-view numbers would not be possible without infographics,” says Sherman.

Given its specialization in financial and quantitative analysis, Mint.com practices what it preaches when it comes to its own investing. According to Sherman, the strong conversion of blog visitors to paying customers has more than justified Mint.com’s investment in MintLife.

Less is more with YouTube redesign

Siobhan Nash — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:27:04 +0000

I have to admit, I never got the fascination of YouTube. What I didn’t understand was how my friends, and the masses in general, discovered these video gems. Really, my trouble with YouTube was that the site was hard to use. For me, it was like walking into a thrift store. I knew there were great finds to be had, but I couldn’t get past all the clutter.

With YouTube’s recently redesigned website, it’s like walking into a brand new department store that’s bright, spacious, and nicely laid out.

The new YouTube site exhibits many of the best practices we at Tendo preach to our clients about website design. Most importantly, it’s clean and well organized. Gone is the clutter that overwhelmed the old site design. The use of mouseovers to reveal additional actions is a great device for taming clutter.

The most often used user tasks are easy to find. Also, the site presents users with options (for example, viewing the next video) at the appropriate times and doesn’t distract them with unnecessary information or actions.

Providing users with a clean design and simple navigation will keep them engaged so they spend more time on your website. I’m going to go watch the much-talked-about videos of my friend’s dog now that I’ve found them.

3 keys to conversational marketing

Bill Golden — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:53:36 +0000

Gone are the days when marketers could produce slick creative campaigns, then sit back and control a brand message through one-way mediums such as TV, radio, and print. The advent of new communication platforms and applications has created the opportunity for conversation between consumers and the brands and products they purchase.

This conversation is driven by content. And “content marketing” has rewritten the rules for engaging prospects and promoting products. Content marketing is all about nurturing a relationship with prospects and customers, enabling a dynamic two-way dialogue that isn’t possible with old media.

The explosion of mobile devices, led by the iPhone, netbooks, and Apple’s new iPad tablet, and social media sites, such as Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Twitter, have redefined the rules by which marketers should plan, produce, and serve content. Because nearly all of the platforms are optimized for peer-to-peer communication and publishing user-generated content, it helps to look at how these content dialogues play into the consumer experience—especially for big-ticket items.

For example, according to Forrester Research, more than 25 percent of U.S. online consumers who expect to purchase a new or used vehicle in the next year have viewed or listened to user-generated content about vehicles. That’s almost as many online consumers who got vehicle information from magazines, newspapers, and TV—combined— the last time they purchased a new vehicle.

These new platforms are rich in functionality and can enable content marketing in a variety of ways. But with new devices and applications hitting the street every day, staying on top of it all is difficult. When it comes to planning a content marketing strategy for emerging platforms, it helps to keep three things in mind: immediate, interactive, and in control.

Immediate
The next time you’re in a public place, look around. How many people are reading, texting, and scrolling away on mobile devices? People are accessing and interacting with media everywhere they go.

As marketers, you have to plan content accordingly. Is your content enabled for mobile devices? Is it optimized for a small screen? Are you taking advantage of the spontaneity that mobile devices afford?

It used to be that only exceptionally good or exceptionally bad experiences found their way online as reviews, complaints, or discussion points. Opinions that reflected the average consumer’s experience often weren’t published because the moment had passed by the time the consumer got to a computer.

Now, with the proliferation of 3G-enabled smartphones, anyone can voice an opinion or post a comment within minutes—or seconds—of an experience. The upside of this is that consumers’ ability to comment anywhere, anytime results in a more representative experience of your company’s products or services, not just the very good or very bad instances.

Interactive
Mobile applications have opened new doors for marketers to engage customers in meaningful ways. A branded interactive application that performs a useful task can do a lot to build loyalty. I can’t tell you how many times the Epi app from Epicurious has reduced my time in the supermarket when I’m stymied about dinner.

These days, brands build trust and rapport well outside product or service attributes. It wasn’t long ago that consumers purchased a particular brand of gasoline because they trusted that the product delivered reliable performance. In the future, consumers might choose a gas station because it has the best travel app for road trips.

In control
For better or for worse, consumers have more control over brands than ever—a direct result of the Internet and its many emerging platforms. Not only can people publish blogs and broadcast their opinions to the world, but they also can comment on, rate, and review brands and companies almost the instant an opinion comes to mind.

Much of this newfound consumer power is made possible by the mobile applications and devices that make up today’s emerging platforms. The growing presence of peer-to-peer discussion as a key component of the consumer experience is compelling proof that consumers, not brand managers, are having the final say in defining a company’s brand.

Think about these three key things as you craft your content marketing strategy. With them, you have a pretty good shot at success. Without them, you may just be talking to yourself.

What’s the Buzz? Stop telling me what’s a-happening!

David Murphy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:43:57 +0000

The birth of Google Buzz into the grand cacophony of social updates that is the modern-day Web is nothing special—not unless you want it to be. And you should want it to be. There’s a special place in Internet Hell reserved for those who connect their social networks together in one almighty amalgam of real-time updates.

As a marketer, I respect and appreciate the need to stay on message and deliver viewpoints across all the places an audience lurks. And as a Tendo editor (and Web site admin), I realize that we do this very thing on our own platform—anything that gets posted to the Tendo View gets automatically updated to our respective Twitter feed. So am I just as guilty of feeding the flames of social media as my online friends, who have managed to port everything they do across every Web platform they subscribe to?

Not really.

The difference here is that I’ve recognized the value of Twitter as its own communications platform—essentially, its own entity. Think of the service as a little lemonade stand and Tendo’s updates as the fresh, yellow ingredients. Increasing the amount of available lemons doesn’t hurt the stand. In fact, it might even help the fledgling business attract some new customers. That’s the business of social media—a network of portals that receive content that others can use to connect and form relationships, both with you and amongst themselves.

Would I want my lemonade stand to suddenly partner up with the lemonade stand on the other side of the street? No. I wouldn’t call them the enemy per se, nor even the competition. Even though we have the same ingredients, it’s apples and oranges. Perhaps I’m fueling up the schoolchildren who exit the nearby elementary school, whereas the other lemonade stand is offering double-sized portions for the firefighters who wash their trucks every day at 4 p.m. I could get into this huge capitalistic description of why it would be excellent for one lemonade stand to rethink its business strategy to attract new customers and such, but this is a metaphor and these are lemonade stands: They are independent, period.

Lemonade, the Social Web, and You

It’s long-winded, but my little simulated scenario (likely brought on from playing too much Lemonade Tycoon on my iPhone) is an accurate description of the Web’s current social offerings. For simplicity’s sake, let’s consider the Big Three: Facebook, Twitter, and the upstart Google Buzz. Post whatever you want to each source—that’s not the issue here. The problem arises for users who blindly post the exact same content on each platform or, worse, link the three such that anything posted to one gets automatically duplicated to all.

Here’s why. Each platform caters to a different audience—one that subscribes to a particular interest based on a given need. My Facebook friends are just that: my friends. I list enough personal details to make me a bit loathe to allow random strangers into this personal hub of my life. By the same token, I extend these friends the same courtesy of not having to read through all the different articles I’ve written and subsequently promoted on other social platforms. I don’t post very frequently on Facebook to avoid burdening my friends with inane details that they probably don’t want to hear about; Twitter, however, obviously gets these updates, and I’ll friend anyone with a pulse in a vain attempt to increase my own social standing on the Internet.

Buzz, the ugly duckling, is a strange beast. Ignoring for a moment the launch-day privacy issues that allowed anyone under the sun to follow what I said (hello, work contacts!), there’s nothing that irritates me more than having a Buzz feed that’s been overpopulated with the exact same information that’s already available on other platforms. No, I do not need Buzz Tweets; no, I do not want Buzz Facebook updates. It’s a different medium, a different playing field, and those running around on it should realize the value it brings rather than trying to mindlessly transform it into yet-another-[social network of your choice]-clone.

This is the real gist of conversational marketing: Identifying when and where the very act of conversation can and should take place. Marketing can’t be a carpet-bomb that relies on the copied content to blast an audience into submission. Though they might appear similar at first glance, each online platform embodies real strengths in its setup and the psychographic profiles of its users. If you fail to recognize this, you risk annoying your audience with improper messaging for their online lifestyles. Or, in layman’s terms, don’t turn your conversations into a total buzz-kill.

Buy, try, choose: Are these calls to action still relevant?

David Vespremi — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:13:19 +0000

Call it content marketing, conversational marketing, or permission marketing—the premise is the same. If the goal of traditional interruption marketing was for marketers to act like shepherd dogs herding prospects like cattle through a sales funnel for cowboy salesmen to lasso and corral, then under the new rubric we are now farmers tending to our garden of seedlings, nurturing and nourishing them to the point of harvest.

In essence, what has always been a well understood role of marketing is shifting from the “deliver me the eyeballs/impressions/clicks” model to one that asks that prospects form a meaningful relationship with a brand before anything is asked of them.

Consider the calls to action that, until recently, were ubiquitous in billboards, print ads, and commercials. Test-drive the new Ford Mustang today. Choosy moms choose Jif. Try Tide with blankety blank cleaning action for even brighter whites. The call to action was try, buy, or choose, and the measure of success was whether the intended audience tried, bought, or chose.

With the advent of coded phone numbers and URLs, marketers could, for the first time, separate the sheep from the cattle and the pigs from the chickens. It was consumer bucketing in its most elementary form, but it did lay the important groundwork for both benchmarking the performance of specific ad insertions and campaigns, as well as the ingredients for bucketed relationship marketing based on consumer response.

Still, prospective consumers remained largely anonymous and we marketers had little insight beyond our intuition about why they chose to test-drive Mustang on a particular day, or how many times they encountered the Jif ad before choosing Jif, and whether they chose Jif because of that message or despite it.

With the expansion of online channels and a renaissance of content marketing, today we start off with the same naïve assumptions about how prospective consumers might perceive our products and our brands. But from that starting point, we see doors open that were firmly shut just a few years ago.

Through forums, message boards, blogs, and peer-to-peer communities, we can now track what consumers think about our brands, our products, and our services. Do they think about us at all? Are we top of mind? How does their perception of us change over time? Are there folks who seem to be the trusted authorities in these peer exchanges—people who have a key role in shaping opinions?

Just as importantly, we have an opportunity to provide our own sandbox, with our own toys, for folks to play in. Our websites allow users to come in from banner ads, communities, search, or simple word of mouth. Once they reach us, they can elect to rate our products or services, exchange information and tips with other users, and upload pictures and videos directly to us.

The assumption, of course, is that by providing the sandbox and staying involved, we care enough to listen and interact with our audience beyond treating them like cattle, with prospect rankings branded into their hindquarters. If they buy, great. If they don’t buy, but a friend (or three) buys on their recommendation, all the better. Maybe they give us some insight about a product glitch or shortcoming, or help identify a novel new use or application that hadn’t occurred to us. Either way, they are adding value for us; as the relationship grows and flourishes, we do our jobs more effectively as a result.

Not to worry, MBA scholars: The cowboys with their lassos at the ready will still get their shot at closing the deal. But when you can stop barking and chasing and take the time to listen to and interact with your target audience, the message can morph from buy, try, choose to share, join, and participate.