1. Content type: Trend pieces
Mistake: Promoting a trend that is too navel-gazing and doesn’t consider true audience need
Trend articles are a great way of getting across your company’s point of view of a changing situation in your market. But be sure to think through the trend that you’re focusing on. Is the trend truly something that is happening across your industry or is it a change that you’re hoping will happen as a result of customers using the product that you’re promoting? For example, is it truly a trend that consumers are buying 3D TVs and regularly consuming 3D content? Or is the “trend” the imagination of the 3D entertainment industry and the reality is that not many consumers are crying out for the technology? Readers appreciate authenticity and will place your brand in higher regard if your thoughts are based on fact.

2. Content type: Case studies
Mistake: Being merely a rah-rah vehicle for your company or product
Granted, you’re not going to develop a case study of a competitor’s user, nor are you going to spotlight a customer that’s using your services in a less than optimal way. But that doesn’t mean you should view your case study as a way to pat yourself on the back without considering whether the case study offers lessons learned or tips that could be useful to other current or potential customers.

If possible, consider selecting a case study in which the customer did experience stumbling blocks when implementing your technology or service—and was able to overcome them. Highlighting the stumbling blocks doesn’t put your company in a bad light; rather it adds some realism to the case study and demonstrates that it’s possible to overcome obstacles. We all know that it’s never smooth sailing when it comes to implementing new technology or using a new product for the first time.

3. Content type: All
Mistake: Being formulaic
What types of movies have made a lasting impression on you? Formulaic Hollywood blockbusters, or indie movies with a plot that has interesting twists and turns? My guess is the latter. Likewise, content types can have more impact if you approach them in different ways.

Consider case studies. Instead of introducing Customer A, its problems, and how your technology or product helped it solve the problems, consider a different approach, such as a fly-on-the-wall report. I’ll never forget the day-in-the-life report I wrote about how vendor nCircle creates its security vulnerability testing software. I was invited to be a fly on the wall on one of its crucial days of the month. The article was an interesting way of describing how nCircle’s products work and their benefits.

Q&As are another example. They’re a frequent go-to content type because you can create them with your in-house subject matter expert via email interviews and you don’t have to worry about writing a free-form article from interview notes. You ask the questions and you publish an edited version of your questions and the interviewee’s answers. It’s straightforward. But sometimes it can be more interesting and useful to your audience if they could ask the questions…or if the interviewee was an expert from a third party, such as an industry analyst firm, an industry association, or a customer? Or perhaps have the third party ask questions of your in-house expert? That would help to create a discussion based on issues that really matter to your audience—not what you think your audience wants to hear.

4.  Content type: Response to sudden industry changes
Mistake: Promoting your company without providing anything useful to your audience
In his blog, Friesen describes this content type as “the meteor”—a sudden change in your industry as opposed to a “trend” that may be slow moving. I interpret that to mean news of a major security breach at a credit card company, for example. If your business is personal security or security software, you’ll want to take the opportunity to respond to the news. A good response would be to provide useful tips on how consumers can protect their personal identity if their personal information was potentially compromised. Don’t merely use the opportunity to sell your product. That would seem disingenuous.

Have you come across any of these mistakes? How have you approached these or other content types? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Content marketing has hit its stride and entered the marketing mainstream. According to a Content Marketing Institute (CMI) study, 60 percent of marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget this year; that’s up 9 percent from 2011.

Before you start creating content in earnest, however, you need a strategy. And before you can create a strategy, you need to get a handle on the content you already have. That means cataloging all of your content—and not just what resides on your website. This list includes:

•    apps
•    articles
•    blog posts
•    case studies
•    newsletters (print and digital)
•    interactive content
•    magazines (print and digital)
•    mobile content
•    podcasts
•    presentations
•    slideshows
•    social media
•    tools (such as an online calculator)
•    videos
•    webinars/webcasts
•    white papers

It’s also a good practice to audit the content you’ve posted on sites such as YouTube, SlideShare, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

At Tendo, we recommend auditing your content at least once a year, preferably every six months. If a lot of the content you’re creating is time-sensitive (as opposed to evergreen), you should consider auditing your content quarterly.

Audience and goals
When taking an inventory of your content, think about the target audience for the content and what stage of the buying cycle it addresses. Ideally, you want a mix of content that targets all your audiences at each stage of the buying cycle. Focus your content creation efforts on the gaps your clean-up exercise uncovers.

Consider, too, whether the content type is the most appropriate and effective for the topic. For example, a customer success story currently executed in HTML or as a PDF on your website may be more effective and reach a broader audience as a video on YouTube.

Finally, review all content for how well it addresses your business goals. You may have a plethora of case studies for acquiring new customers but a dearth of content aimed at retaining your customers. Keep the distribution channel in mind, too. Different channels are more effective outlets depending on the goal. If one of your company goals is brand awareness, then sharing your content on Twitter makes sense. But if you want to improve your company’s thought leadership in the industry, a webinar or SlideShare presentation would be a more appropriate distribution channel.

Creating a variety of engaging content—and enough of it—is a challenge for most businesses. Knowing what content you currently have will help you decide what you want to keep, revise, or repurpose, or get rid of altogether. From there, you can focus your efforts on creating content to fill the gaps.

When was the last time you cataloged your company’s content?

To do that, you need to know your audience—their needs, their preferences, and their behaviors. Without that vital information, you can’t create content that effectively builds awareness; impacts a potential customer’s decision to purchase your product or service; or keeps current customers engaged with your company, resulting in repeat business or referrals.

When it comes to creating content, perhaps it’s better to think of the customer experience as an hourglass rather than a funnel, as Tricia Smith suggests in a recent SmartBrief post. This would ensure you’re meeting the needs of current customers, creating information resources that are useful after they’ve made a purchase. For example, start a community on your site where customers can help each other or provide the ability to post reviews of your product or service. And these resources can be a great well of information that you can then use to create new content to help build brand awareness, for example.

This underscores a best practice we mention often to our clients: Content types and topics should be appropriate to your audience and their goals—as well as your company’s objectives. White papers, how-to articles, and webcasts are helpful for addressing the awareness and consideration stages of the sales cycle, for example, whereas online demos and case studies are useful for influencing the purchasing decision.

Finally, when you’re creating content for all phases of the sales cycle, don’t forget about SEO. A joint study (PDF) from Google and TechTarget highlights the importance of making sure your SEO efforts, such as keywords and titles, are specific to the particular stage of the sales cycle you’re targeting with your content.

What content are you creating to keep current customers engaged with your company?

Although search engines frequently tweak their algorithms, Google threw a significant curve ball when it changed its algorithm a couple months back. The search engine now assigns a lesser ranking to low-quality sites like “content farms” or others that use duplicate or recycled content.

The significance of this change is something we at Tendo have been advocating to our clients for years—content is key. If you want to ensure that your company gets found online, you need to create original, high-quality content. It’s this content that will create relevance for your site and improve your ranking on SERPs.

Producing new content on a regular basis certainly requires more time and effort. Here are a couple suggestions for creating original content:

• Start a blog. This is a great way to generate a regular stream of content. And if you’re looking for fodder, listen to what your customers are saying on your social media channels and location-based services such as Foursquare.
• Write on a topic important to your customers and/or to your industry. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just make sure to add your own unique take on the subject.
• Use content you already have. If your company produces original research, in-depth reports, or other analysis pieces, turn those into a series of articles for your site.

In defense of keywords
Although meta information, keywords in particular, hasn’t been the key to SEO success in years, that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. In fact, keywords are very important to your content. You should use language your customers use—not jargon or marketing speak—and base your content around those keywords. This will help make it clear to search engines that your page is relevant to those keywords. Also, you can use your keyword research to help identify themes for new content.

The only thing you can count on with SEO is that it will change. Creating informative content that’s relevant to your audience—customers, partners, or both—will ensure that your site gets found and give you the best chance at converting visitors into customers.

What’s your company’s strategy for creating original content for your website?

Describing consumers’ fondness for apps, the author points out that apps “often just work better or fit better into their lives,” and that “the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen.” The fact that companies can charge money for apps, the story argues, “only cements the trend.”

So, according to the story’s author, consumers find that apps are easier to use and offer better content and services. Whether it’s reading the news, hailing a cab, or finding a recipe, consumers are often willing to sacrifice the nearly limitless choice of the Web to pay 99 cents to several dollars for the convenience and quality of an app.

Since search engines can’t crawl apps for content, they don’t show up in search engine results. Nor can you link to apps on your website. They’re effectively “walled gardens” of content.

This begs some interesting questions for a marketer: Should you dedicate more resources and content to apps and charge for content in lieu of broader exposure on the Web? Or should you develop content for both your public, mobile-optimized website and a proprietary app?

Just how popular are apps?

They’re pretty popular. According to a May 3, 2011 press release from IHS Screen Digest and reported by eMarketer, downloads of mobile apps are increasing at a brisk pace. IHS Screen Digest reports that worldwide, there were 9.5 billion app downloads in 2010 and 18.1 billion in 2011. By 2014 downloads will reach 33 billion. On the apps revenue front, the registers are “cha-chinging,” as they say. According to Gartner, apps revenue for paid downloads and advertising will increase from $5.2 billion in 2010 to 15.1 billion in 2011.[1]

The open Web shows signs of life

Despite the meteoric rise of apps, the open Web’s demise isn’t writ in stone. Some research actually indicates that despite the explosion of apps, consumers will continue to use—perhaps even prefer—the open Web. Jumptap, a provider of mobile advertising solutions, announced in a May 11, 2011 press release, that consumers spend more time engaging the mobile Web on their smart phones than with advertising-supported mobile apps. The results were released in the company’s STAT (Simple Targeting & Audience Trends) Report.

As with any emerging platform or content type, it’s important to embrace the new without abandoning the old. This means as a marketer, you need to consider both the open Web and closed apps when planning mobile experiences for customers.

Here’s a list of important considerations with regard to apps versus the open Web.

Apps

• Apps can take better advantage of smart phone features because they integrate more deeply with a mobile device’s operating system. Facebook’s mobile app, for instance, lets you call a friend with one click by finding that friend’s number on your contacts list.
• The apps opportunity will continue to grow as the smart phone market expands.
• Apps are powerful vehicles for engagement and will continue to offer new business opportunities.
• Mobile apps improve brand visibility by putting your brand icon or logo on the user’s smart phone screen.
• Coupled with analytics tools, apps can capture consumer behavior and feed CRM programs.

Open Web

• A mobile website is more cost-effective in reaching a wider audience.
• Despite billions of apps revenue and downloads, globally, more consumers will access the Web via a browser, than use mobile apps.
• The barriers to accessing a website via a browser are lower than the barriers to downloading an app—even for smart phone owners.
• Mobile browsing technologies will improve significantly—for instance HTML5 will greatly improve browser-based audio and video experiences and make browser functionality more seamless with the desktop.
• The mobile industry is still fragmented, which means porting and maintaining apps for different platforms remains a considerable cost.

HTML5: The Web’s knight in shining armor?

Amid the debate over whether apps will render the open Web obsolete, many are hailing HTML5 as the technology that jolts the Web back to life. The fifth generation of HyperText Markup Language, HTML5 is, of course, the programming language that Web pages are written in.

The breakthrough with HTML5 is its ability to enable a more rich and compelling visual experience, and its interactive features. Unlike its previous generation, HTML5 has the built-in capability to render video and doesn’t require video playback software plug-ins like Adobe Flash and Silverlight from Microsoft.

Although HTML5 has a ways to go before it’s mainstream, it’s gathering momentum and accolades. All the major Web browsers have announced their support of HTML5, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome.

And content publishers and technology investors are not lost on its potential. In a March 26, 2011 New York Times article, Jeffrey Jaffe, chief executive of the World Wide Web Consortium, called HTML5 the “next big step in the progress of the Web.” And John Lilly, a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, said, “Right now we’re in an apps world. But people are underestimating the power of the Web. I think we’re going to see an explosion of Web-based apps over the next couple of years.”

So, as if you didn’t have enough to think about, you might want to make sure your new website is built with HTML5.

The answer is no. Content aggregation, the automatic gathering of links, merely presents content that’s related by broad topic, such as business, politics, and sports. However, there’s no connection—no theme—tying the individual articles together.

Content curation picks up where aggregation leaves off, requiring human intervention in the form of editorial judgment and organization. Just as a museum curator assembles a collection of artwork based on a theme (such as an artist, a period, etc.), a content curator pulls together related content on a particular topic from a variety of sources to tell a complete story.

There are several benefits to curating content on your company website. By gathering and presenting targeted material, you help establish your company as a thought leader in your industry. As well, you become the go-to source for prospects in the decision-making process. By promoting curated content on your social media platforms, you help drive traffic to your site and further your efforts to create a community of users interested in the industries your products and solutions address.

You can even curate your own content if you’re a large company with multiple business units. Pulling together related content on a topic from your various microsites gets you more bang for your content creation buck. At Tendo, this is a best practice we espouse daily: write once, use many. And for highly regulated industries, like financial services, curating content can be a viable alternative when tight restrictions make creating content difficult.

When curating content, make sure to give credit where credit’s due and attribute articles, blog posts, videos, etc. to the original creator, if it isn’t your company.

Do you currently curate content on your site? Tell us what the benefits have been for your company.

If you’re interested in reading more about curation, check out my colleague Linda Leung’s post about Pearltrees.com—a social curation tool.

Here are some interesting statistics related to the use of video in business:

• The number of people who view online video content monthly will increase to 147.5 million in 2010, up from 135.1 million in 2009 (eMarketer)
• 63 percent of U.S. Internet users watch online videos (Dynamic Logic)
• The use of video blogging among Fortune 500 companies with public-facing blogs rose 10 percent from 2008 to 2009 (Society for New Communications Research)
• Of rich-media features, video ranked highest at 46 percent with multichannel retailers (Multichannel Merchant)
• Among various online video types, more companies created branded video content in the last 12 months (TurnHere)
• This year, the number of mobile video viewers will grow nearly 30 percent (eMarketer)

So what’s your Web video strategy?

Editor’s note: The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) is currently conducting a research study on the use of video storytelling in business. Share your experiences with video by participating in the survey.

Also according to the Nielsen report, the total mobile viewing audience “grew 51.2 percent year-over-year, surpassing 20 million users for the first time.”

This trend is supported by an eMarketer survey showing mobile content and Internet usage of U.S. mobile phone users. Although video streaming falls close to the bottom of the list in this survey in terms of content usage, it’s estimated to more than double this year from 2007, from 11 percent to 25 percent. And in 2011, that number will grow to 33 percent.

These statistics aren’t too surprising given the proliferation of smartphones and the introduction of other Internet-enabled mobile devices, such as Apple’s iPad. These devices present a great opportunity for reaching your audience in an engaging medium—video. With so many eyeballs on the small screen, the question is does video factor into your current or future marketing plans? If not, why not?

The first thing I noticed as I began reading the book were the long and melodious sentences so full of rich detail that I could envision and smell and taste exactly what Conroy was describing (typical of vintage Conroy). Consider this sentence:

“When I turned left on Tradd Street, I looked like an ambitious acrobat hurling papers to my right and left as I made my way toward the Cooper River and the rising sun that began to finger the morning ties of the harbor, to dance along the spillways of palmetto fronds and water oaks until the street itself burst into the first flame of morning.”

I was struck by how accustomed I’ve become to the short, terse, bulleted prose that Tendo typically develops for clients’ websites. The criteria for one client requires sentences to be generally 20 words or less; paragraphs are fewer than 75 words; and no more than three paragraphs should appear in a row without a visual break. So the Wired article struck a nerve with me.

Carr cites research that concludes:

“When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

He also points to a 1990 experiment that claims the mental calisthenics required of hyperlinks—figuring out whether the link is worth a click, clicking on it, adjusting to a different site’s format, evaluating whether the info is of use, clicking back, etc.—causes us to forget what we’ve read. We’re not retaining the content we skim on the Web.

The Wall Street Journal also excerpted Carr’s book in its Weekend Journal but presented a counterpoint from Clay Shirky’s book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky argues a different point entirely, one based not on research but on historical analysis: He points to Gutenberg’s press and Bible translations, followed by contemporary literature and the mediocrity that followed, as evidence that all new media has a disruptive influence initially but that history proves the medium worthy. And that the “linking together” of the Web lets us “tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about.” And that the social Web’s model of participation has enormous positive effects over television’s consumption model .

As of this writing, 64.7 percent of the WSJ respondents to an online poll agree with Shirky—that the Web makes you smarter. I’m not sure I agree, especially in light of my recent Pat Conroy experience. (For other discussions on this subject, check out GigaOm’s and Slashdot’s posts.)

An article in Monday’s New York Times, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price,” reinforces Carr’s position (and it includes pretty cool interactive tests to gauge your ability to ignore distractions). It focuses not just on the Web but on our growing addiction to gadgets and the multitasking we’re forced to do to consume a fast-growing influx of information and media. “Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress,” according to the NYT piece. Even after you stop multitasking, “fractured thinking and lack of focus persist.”

I can’t help but wonder if Carr and Shirky are asking the right question when they address whether the Internet makes you smarter or dumber.

• Consider the goal. Could it be that consuming information on the Web is just offering us more of the type of experience we’ve done for years: scanning, researching, applying judgment to whether information tells us what we need to know, etc. Isn’t that type of experience more about reaching a conclusion or making a decision rather than learning and retaining and deep thinking? Is the Web allowing us to make better decisions more quickly?
• Where’s the soul? I would argue that scanning on the Web makes us more soul-less than brain-less. Compared with reading Conroy, scanning the Web involves no sense of taste or smell or emotion. Interacting on the Web might involve that—think of comment threads and the YouTube video of the guys reuniting with the tiger (made me cry) and Facebook posts from old friends. But scanning the Web involves very little emotion.
• Form serves function. What does Carr’s research and argument say about the state of content on the Web? If it’s only meant to help you make a decision, maybe terse, bulleted content that’s easily scanned appropriate. But if it’s intended to teach or instruct, perhaps more complex language is not only appropriate but also called for. And would an instructional piece be formatted for easy (and attractive) printing so you could consume it more easily (as I did with the Wired article)? And if it’s intended to provoke, like a blog post, what’s the best format? A podcast? A video?
• Consuming print vs. online. Another relevant question might be this: How many Web users actually try to read online articles? When I find something of interest on the Web, I either print it out to really absorb it, or I save it somewhere so I can print it out and fully absorb it later. So the question isn’t whether I read content online (vs. scanning it), but whether I print it out to read it (vs. reading it on-screen). And whether reading print material rewires my brain in the same way than does consuming Web content.

What do you think? As a corporate marketer, how are you tailoring your Web content for different purposes? As a Web user, do you agree with most WSJ readers that the Web makes you smarter?