Archive for February, 2013
Google exec discusses new value proposition for mobile marketing
Feb 28th
Click here if you cannot view this video of Google’s Pete McAvoy.
At a recent meeting in Dublin, I caught up with Google mobile leader Pete McAvoy. In this short video, Pete discussed mobile and discovering the new value propositions available to small businesses. He also reveals two steps any business can take to “inform your strategy.”
In this video, Pete mentions an “extreme” Hotels.com video, which can be viewed here.
The Anti-Blog Post to Writing Better Blog Posts.
Feb 27th
I can’t read your blog.
In fact, I almost don’t read any social marketing blogs out there, because I’m done with wave bathing in the echo chamber. I’m done with it – people echoing echoes everywhere.
They read Seth Godin, a bit of Brogan, maybe a bit Gary V for the attitude, mash it all together and slam out another samey samey blog post. Bloggers in factory-mode.
I know this, because I was on this mode too. I kept repeating common advice, but I had nothing original to say. After a while, I burrrrned out. Like a TNT stick with both ends lit. Frizzzzzle. I knew it, and more importantly, my audience knew it. And after cranking out yet another lackluster post, one long-time reader remarked:
“Stop regurgitating, it’s getting pathetic. Tell me something original from your experience.”
Ouch.
It hurt, but the patient needed the medicine. I thought I was following all the blogging success advice, but it was leading me astray. Why ?
The answer may be James Altucher, who’s a notorious investor, entrepreneur and blogger. I don’t always like his work, heck, I often don’t even understand it. He’s irreverent and vulnerable, a human fly on my peripheral vision.
But he breaks every “blogging rule” there is to break, and breaks even the ones that don’t exist yet.
But there’s something magical about the way he writes. It’s like the wind, you can feel it but you can’t see it. His content is so unique and disarmingly honest you can’t help but smirk. It’s touching human hearts, and 5,000 to 10,000 Facebook likes per post(!) confirm that.
What’s the secret?
He doesn’t reside in the echo chamber. Everything he writes comes from him — his one-of-a-kind experience — the way he sees the world.
And that’s what inspired me to write the following anti-guidelines to craft content that’s not just another blasted re-hash on the perfect post, but a reminder of what makes great content truly special and compelling.
Now, don’t treat this like an exact formula, that would defeat the point of the whole post. Rather, it’s food for thought, by yours truly.
1) Everything’s related to everything. Use that to your advantage.
Without going too deep into meta-land, here’s a not-so-far-fetched revelation: People who only blog about what they read from other marketing bloggers have the scope of a tunnel view inside a straw.
They’re wallowing in the pool of idea incest. Instead of reading the same-old-same and echoing, extrapolate your niche knowledge from unrelated places :
- I have read posts from people talking about happiness when they’re stuck in a wheelchair, 24/7.
- I have read customer service advice from people dealing drugs on the street.
- I have read psychological advice from food decorateurs.
Every lesson you want to share with the audience can be linked to a more original example. Chose a unique experience from your life, and connect it with the point you want to make.
What has your recent Thailand journey to do with content marketing?
I don’t know. You tell me.
2) The more you systemize, the more you robotize
By now, there’s probably more blogging advice than bloggers out there. Follow it all, 1-2-3, and then you’ll succeed with viral posts that exceed 1,000,000 views. Right?
Nope. It’s the fast lane to mediocrity. The more I tried to find the golden formula of blogging, the more personality and emotion I lost between the lines. Whoosh.
Just as in Hollywood, most people (online) pretend, but nobody knows anything. The more systems and formulas you infuse, the closer you’ll robotize. Your post will be like an instruction manual for vacuum cleaners. Meh.
3) Cut to the core. Hack away the unessential.
This does not only mean a terse writing style, but also means finding the elephant in the room. Most people skate along the ice surface, but they don’t get below into the frozen water depths. All those shiny blog flares, like which share button to use or whether you should tweet at 9 or 9:05, are distracting you from making a point that will make your audience pay attention.
Give me the essence, baby, the one core thought that most people are afraid to address, but deliver it in a way only YOU can.
4) Style over substance. Sort of.
A lot of people will disagree with this, but here’s the thing – If all you provide is helpful information online, you’re competing with Wikipedia and thousands of robot algorithms that out-inform you. And with an unlimited choice of informational content, we humans pick the one that emotionally appeals to us.
So, style and attitude is what we come back for – whether it’s Seth Godin’s unabashed and clear writing, or James Altucher’s irreverent and vulnerable guide to life.
5) Allow your personal truth to shine through
Another biggie I struggled for almost two years — Keeping a cool, perfect and professional online presence seems to be the way to go, but it also got the emotional pulling power of a frozen brick. Marketing is all about evoking emotions.
It’s tough to go personal and open yourself up, especially with all those trolls out there, but that’s the only advantage you have over robots and computer-generated content. In a world where your potential customer and reader is a click away but also countries apart, separated by lifeless screens, there’s a huge emotional gap.
I want you to close that gap.
Conclusion
Before you create your next content, step back for a second and be still.
Are you creating an original piece of work, or are you merely soaking up the sound waves from the echo chamber? Tell yourself the truth. Then slap your face left and right.
Forget about all the average posts about which WordPress theme to use, how we all should have a tribe, and why we need a manifesto.
Been there, done that.
Instead, craft a post from the edge of your mind, with all the mojo, vulnerability, personal experience and original opinions — a little, uncomfortable masterpiece only you can come up with.
Give it to me.
Mars Dorian describes himself as a creative marketeer with a moon-melting passion for human potential and technology. You can follow his adventures at www.marsdorian.com/
Original illustrations by the author.
The hinge to social media success? It might surprise you.
Feb 26th
By Matt Ridings, {grow} Community Member
Since my company, SideraWorks, was formed, I’ve had the chance to work with a range of companies on their social business transformation and discovered a common hinge to social media success. And to be honest, it surprised me.
I never imagined that our work in developing social media policies (and the related processes and governance models to support them) would become so popular. That was shortsighted, perhaps even naive on my part, but as a company focused on social business culture and change management it just didn’t stand out to me as one of the more important things. It didn’t feel “serious” enough. Boy was I wrong.
For many companies, this has become their ignition point to social media success. Today, we’ve built a specific toolkit and methodology just for this purpose and now teach it to others at a few publicly available workshops (like Social Slam). Let’s explore this critical component more closely. Why is the social media policy such a critical component in becoming a social business?
Social Media Policies – The Hinge to Success
- Social Media Policies Are Universal – Whether a company is heavily engaged in external social media or not, its employees and stakeholders are, and it needs to account for that. This makes it a good entry point for beginning social business initiatives. As we’ve seen with the recent hacks and takeovers of social accounts, no one is immune.
- Social Media Policies Are An Ideal Introduction Into Social Business Mentality– You can’t create meaningful social media policies and situational playbooks without involving Legal, HR, and the edge related functions like Marketing, Customer Service, and Sales. Developing these policies, processes, and governance models using a scenario based approach gets people out of their silo’d viewpoints and makes them view the impact points of social media across the organization more holistically. It allows you to begin the process of getting these varied groups on the same page and become more involved in what the organization is doing where social is concerned. That exposure through this process helps immensely when it comes to easing adoption of social business throughout an organization.
- Social Media Policies Directly Address Culture – We use a process called Social Scenario Modeling™ to build policies and related playbooks from real-world scenarios. These range from PR crises to employee engagement concerns and opportunities, and all points in between. The approach has become key for in helping to establish a mentality in organizations that this is a “give and take.” Policies aren’t only about risk mitigation they can also be about enabling desirable behavior that benefits the organization. Finding that balance requires an open dialog across the social ambassadors, Legal, and HR. How these policies are written, the language they use, and the way they are communicated can either have a positive or detrimental effect on the organizations culture. It’s a direct expression of an organizations viewpoint and value structure on something (social media) the individuals within it associate with at a very personal level.
- Social Media Policies Create A Foundation For Education Programs – Distributing knowledge about social media policies is about more than just having an employee sign off on a form. It’s an opportunity to build education programs that develop social judgment and alignment within the workforce. With an increase in judgment comes a commensurate increase in employee empowerment. That empowerment and judgment allows an increase in an organizations agility.
Beyond The Basics
As you can see, social media policies can be about far more than employee paperwork to mitigate risks. If handled properly they can serve as a powerful point of entry to becoming a true social business. SideraWorks is proud to have partnered with forward thinking events like Social Slam to help bring our methods to the public, but regardless of whether you take our approach or come up with your own, I hope you’ll go beyond the basics and take advantage of the opportunity that something as ‘simple’ as a social media policy can present.
I would be curious to know — Are you also seeing an important role of the social media policy in your company? Join me in the comment section!
Want to learn Social Scenario Modeling™ for yourself? Come visit Matt at the upcoming open workshop on this topic including the Implications of Social Business & Crisis Preparation: at Social Slam Plus on April 4 in Knoxville, TN. Social Slam Plus is a series of intimate workshops available before the main Social Slam event on April 5. The workshop is also being held at Explore in Scottsdale, AZ on April 13.
Matt is a co-founder and CEO of Sidera Works, a marketing and organizational development consulting practice. His work over the last 10 years has focused primarily in developing innovation cultures, change management initiatives, and specialized market research. Follow Matt at @techguerilla.
Hinge image courtesy fontplaydotcom, creative commons license
What comes after content marketing? Here are four ideas.
Feb 24th
I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the evolving role of content in the marketing world — from the challenges of the “physics” of social media marketing, to Coke’s bold vision for a content-based marketing strategy.
My friend Mitch Joel has also been pondering this topic. In a post entitled The Content Crash, Mitch states that the field has simply “become a pumping ground for a marketing message. Very few (companies) are thinking about utilitarianism marketing and even fewer are thinking about the overall experience.”
Content is advertising?
But here is the line in Mitch’s post that stung me: “It is my belief, that content is the new advertising.”
Wait a minute. People HATE advertising. Does this mean that people are increasingly hating our content too?
Advertising is a paid interruption in an otherwise pleasant stream of content. Is content becoming an unpleasant interruption in our lives, too? With this native advertising trend of craftily embedding paid messages in “free” content, are the lines hopelessly blurred so that content marketing is suspicious and meaningless? Are content marketers the new snake oil shills?
Mitch contends that for content — sponsored or otherwise — to work, it must be exceedingly useful. So what does that mean? What could a possible game plan be to become the signal instead of the noise in this overly-crowded space?
Here are four possible scenarios in a “post content marketing” environment.
Radical trust
It seems that when bloggers reach critical audience mass, most succumb to the temptation of taking money to pump paper shredders, luggage, weight loss programs or any other product willing to exchange a fast buck for audience trust. Once you cross that line, your content becomes an ad, not something that is exceedingly useful.
Here is a chart that I believes graphically demonstrates the impact of turning your content into an advertisement – the Alexa traffic rank of a blogger who began aggressively monetizing their blog through sponsored posts in 2011:
In just 18 months, the popular site has dropped from position 5,000 to 30,000. Other key metrics such as reach and pageviews have similarly dropped off the cliff. Of course this is just one data point and we can’t necessarily make a conclusion about absolute cause and effect, but I think a strong hypothesis is that this blog is hemorrhaging because it is no longer a trusted source of content. It is an infomercial.
I think one possible lesson as we look to the future is to create a content environment of radical trust. Once you become an ad, you can never go back. I think this chart demonstrates the business case for trust.
Content that learns
In Don Tapscott’s fine book Grown Up Digital, he makes the case that the Net Generation puts a huge premium on customization.
The Baby Boomers take technology for what it is and hope it works. Net Geners make the technology theirs. They want options. They love to customize, and even the option to customize makes a product more attractive.
Why would they want your news stream when they can create their own? How do we enable our content consumers to determine HOW, WHEN and WHAT they receive from us?
While we have rudimentary forms of aggregation available to us — by topic, by keyword, by author, for example — we need to create self-aware content that conforms to the immediate needs of our customers.
This is happening to a large degree with display ads. If you type an email in the gmail platform, the sidebar ads may change to reflect the topic you are writing about. Spooky when it comes to ads, but immensely useful when it comes to content. Although we are collecting vast amounts of information about our customers, we have yet to unleash it in a way that is relevant for a moment in time.
An example: A reader of {grow} has just visited Stanford Smith’s blog and searched about blogging fundamentals. When she comes to {grow} she is offered a suggestion of similar topics, in addition to the latest news from my site. Or perhaps readers help the process along by choosing the precise topics they want to see and the hourly, daily, or weekly level of delivery for those topics.
Content that pays
I think we are on the cusp of seeing a merging between content marketing and the gamification trend. Why not reward your most loyal readers with badges and award levels after completing certain tasks? A frequent flyer program for content.
Would you like to receive a Platinum Reward Level on {grow} after so many comments, shares or page views? I am already seeing some sites that are creating Foursquare-style badges and leaderboards for participating in site activities.
As it becomes harder and harder to cut through the web’s information density, isn’t it logical that companies would start paying you to view their information?
Making the leap to something entirely new
We are probably 24 months away from the augmented reality revolution. The Internet, and content, will surround us like the air that we breathe. There will be an opportunity to create content in an entirely different way — in three dimensions, in the moment of need, on voice command. Blogs, podcasts and even videos may seem old-fashioned. There will be a huge advantages and opportunities for the pioneers of this entirely new vision of content.
Beyond “overwhelming”
Here’s a dirty secret of content marketing. Today it is possible to win the inbound lead battle simply by being first and overwhelming, a trend I characterized last year as the content arms race. You don’t have to be great. You don’t even have to be good. And to some extent it is even possible to fake your way to the top. But that can’t last. The market will adjust. Something has to emerge that will trump strategies based on sponsored posts, social proof, and commodity content.
I’ve provided four scenarios but what are your ideas? How are you going to move your brand beyond the noise and become the signal?
Illustration courtesy BigStock.com
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