What is Content Marketing and Why do Brands Need it?
[...] the shift to social (and ultimately mobile, which I’ll discuss when I get to market size), is forcing every marketer in the world to become an expert content creator who can create a wealth of interesting, relevant and on-brand content to reach consumers through their platform of choice.
What that means is that content is a unit that transcends social networks and media channels; it spans marketing from analog to digital and is increasingly important to gain and keep attention as we shift to social streams and mobile applications.
The Million Dollar Homepage still exists, but 22% of it has rotted away. Quartz: The atrophy of links has been shown to stabilize over time, meaning we should expect fewer than 22% of links to break over the next eight years. The longer a link continues to work on a webpage, the longer it can been expected to work into the future. Nonetheless, it remains a problem for thought experiments and seminal works alike.
Entrepreneurial Archetypes. Gunther Sonnenfeld: Adaptive systems, in general, are designed to bring out the very best faculties in individuals and groups. They also bridge the gaps between business and society.
Nomi-nation: What made the #nomakeupselfie so successful? Future Foundation: In the realm of the social media and Performative Perfection it’s not good enough to just be a caring/hilarious/creative/[insert other appealing trait] person. You have to be seen to be this person. In this instance, the cost of donation added to the rational cost of going ‘bare faced’ in a single self-selected photo is significantly outweighed by the kudos of involvement: telling your social circle that you are popular enough to be nominated, that you are confident, caring and above the layer of fakery commonly associated with selfie photographs.
Parentology: The first parenting book I actually liked. Danah Boyd: the first parenting book that I’ve read that I actually enjoyed and am actively recommending to others. Conley’s willingness to detail his own failings, neuroses, and foolish logic (and to smack himself upside the head with research data in the process) showcases the trials and tribulations of parenting.
Building the Next Pixar. Fast Company: The Winston Show is developed with ToyTalk's PullString technology, which allows writers to create branching dialogue based on children's potential responses. The system also collects kids' replies in the cloud for the writers to study and use in story development.
Jacob is eager to clarify that perfecting the technology is not ToyTalk's mission. Writers spend endless hours reading transcripts from children's interactions with Winston and other characters, assessing the audience's thoughts, imaginations, and emotional needs to create a more entertaining and engaging world. "Our vision is less about honing the technology than the craft of conversation," says Jacob.
More Storytelling Lessons from Cosmos. Presentation Zen: "You realize that science is not just this subject from a textbook," Tyson said. "It's a human story. Discovery is human… It's a celebration of human curiosity and why that matters to who and what we are."
The question of the day, I suppose, because we are on a constant quest to prove and disprove -- which in and of itself would be a good thing.
Except for it seems all the proving is focused on one direction and all the disproving in the other -- mostly, pointing away from the source of the pseudo-research. Analysis would require the proving/disproving to be part of the research process.
Me? I love perspective and good old fashioned thinking out loud. So I'll start this post by referencing Om Malik's brief recap of his take on the Facebook's $2 billion bet on Oculus: billion dollar dart throwing#.
[...] is it that both Google and Facebook realize that there is only so much they can do with web-based advertising and ensuing revenue stream?
Resonates with the eventual glass ceiling in advertising as we start to move away from content consumption mainly on the desktop and toward chunking tasks onto smaller screens/apps, under compressed time frames, and under divided attention conditions. They have a billboard for that in San Francisco#, or they will soon.
And staying with the billboard visual for a moment, I once bought a billboard ad for exactly the same reason Malik cites. Part of the reasoning is probably doing cool things for the company to please both the market and the employee base, both emotionally sensitive.
Brinker himself is not afraid to confront the facts and new information and to use his experience to ground his take on convergence in marketing, technology, and the modern enterprise. You may remember his contribution to Marketing in 2014.
That rigid approach will cost you; self-serving research will cost your clients.
In a white paper titled Marketing Gurus and Fads – how to avoid them, Dr. John Dawes explains how “Marketing abounds with ‘fads’ – which over-promise and under-deliver. Courtesy of Aite Group senior analyst Ron Shevlin#, we now have a handy reference point.
They’re not willing to accept the fact that marketing is hard. It’s a science (or could be) and an art (or should be). Not willing to accept the fact that human behavior is complex, and that defining, designing, and executing marketing strategies that seek to shape and capitalize on these complex behaviors is hard.
Making the product better is hard. Making the experience better takes work. Simplifying takes more time than filling up the screen, etc. etc. etc.
Hope me quoting people who are alive and working is not a turnoff, after all we much prefer to share widsom from the people who fought their battles at a safe distance of decades or centuries and who are often very dead.
- 85 percent of consumers regularly or occasionally seek out trusted expert content — credible, third-party articles and reviews — when considering a purchase.
- 67 percent of consumers agree that an endorsement from an unbiased expert makes them more likely to consider purchasing.
I don't have all night so I'll just point out a couple of obvious parts to think about. The study is about consumer brand awareness.
How many experts do you talk to before you buy toilet paper? Arugula? Tortellini? Chewing gum? It's a legitimate question, apparently 85% of consumers do it "regularly" or "occasionally" (I highlighted the words to help you notice them) -- which one is which?
And yes, I have been reading Malik, Brinker, and Shevlin because they do ask good questions and do the proving/disproving bit as part of the process. Of course, our points of view differ -- we do have different experience, after all. So do your customers', by the way. Hence why marketing is hard work.
[...] For digital things, the distinction has becomes super blurry [...].
Digital utilities and products as a kind of proxy for when marketers cannot fix the experience readily or while they are.
I have sat in that chair for many years, I know the cold, hard organizational reality is often at odds with the desire and ambition to make the product better.
It is a constant negotiation -- especially when talking about trying something. Which is why the most-asked question is "who else is doing this?" Innovators are labeled as such later, in retrospect, connecting the dots, as Steve Jobs once famously said.
They are prepared to look at the question differently, and to use their experience to test hypotheses. Brinker, a CTO, calls it agile marketing, borrowing from agile software development, I call it "responsive strategy" borrowing from responsive design and my years working alongside UXD pros talking to customers and to brands in our research to prove/disprove.
The kinds of businesses and brands that keep their promises, despite the various temptations to cut corners, believe in incomplete research that infers conclusions from high level behavioral trends, react to buzz, virality, and the mirage of a silver bullet.
This is a quick take to connect a few threads form the Interwebs -- a source of useful, educational, and entertaining content of all kinds.
It is filter failure when we fail to make sense of what we read.
My thoughts on what makes a good blog.
Seven is a prime number and the sum of the first four Fibonacci numbers.
There are seven colors of the rainbow, seven days in the week, seven continents, and seven directions: north, south, east, west, up, down, center.
The seven new wonders of the world voted online in what was said to be the largest poll ever included the Colosseum in Rome.
Thanks to social technologies, we are now using collective filtering tools and visualizations with teams and networks to discover patterns in large, complex systems faster -- and trigger faster collective responses.
Twitter is just one example of how that works. There are plenty of other ways -- online and off line.
For example, when looking for wine advice, whether you listen to Gary Vaynerchuk or find Alfonso Cevola amazingly insightful and interesting, they are both wine guys and they both feel real.
I connect better with the Italian Wine Guy, for cultural reasons.
Do you know what's real for your customers? What's their point of view?
We are not ready to be sold to until we're ready to buy. What's right then depends on timing and frame of mind.
This is one of the top reasons we we started talking about customer journeys in marketing -- the funnel is alive and well behind the scenes.
Relationships between people and the tasks they are looking to accomplish are quite important and call for a different approach. While the world is not waiting for your message, delivering it appropriately goes a long way.
Other paths to consider: inspiration, education, curiosity, appreciation, simplicity.
Why would anyone pay attention to you when you are not paying attention to them?
Influencer outreach continues to go strong as a part in marketing programs, yet most of the outreach is limp, bland, unremarkable, and sometimes downright inappropriate.
Attention is currency, and respect is earned every day. People have long memories -- your actions will follow you long after the campaign need is gone.
When we become better listeners, we learn to appreciate the truths of our customers and communities. Our work is to help people make the connection between what they say and what they do by aligning our own actions in that direction.
Having values and beliefs of our own is important as long as we walk the talk and keep our promises.
Especially if you're going to do things your way.
Staying on purpose is more important than staying on message. People respond well to the former, not so readily on your time frame to the latter.
To simplify further, making the purpose and the message one and the same helps with keeping an eye on how you're doing over the long haul.
Fear might however feel like forever waiting at a terminal without even trying.
What is the worst that could happen? Not much happens even with big launches of marketing programs.
Plenty of room to try something different.
Sweet irony; we are terrible at taking our own advice.
Craftsmanship takes time. Using a simple rule of thumb: constructive words work better.
We are all in marketing these days: How do we rise above the fray to lead instead of following?
How do we show respect to customers (and each other -- we are all different and bring something valuable to the table)?
How do we make a better product? Not just sell one.
While the focus of recent research and trend reports is Millenials -- the generation between 18-34 in age -- the behavioral distribution tends to be less clear-cut when taking into consideration early adopters.
When driving user experience, brands should consider three areas of focus, in this order.
"Millennials aren’t locked in to one at the expense of others."
“Major” means Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Snapchat, per comScore.
If we are what we do, we also are what we say – i.e. Digital body language – how words paint the trends# by trendspotter Marian Saltzman is a useful guide to how we should approach linguistic research and analysis.
Of course, the reach for this terminology is courtesy strong voices creating or kicking off the online echo chamber and an argument could be made for other, less self-absorbed, themes.
Where earned, paid, owned are part of a continuum and constantly in need of adjustment as consumption habits are in flux and people negotiate attention thresholds based upon what they are trying to accomplish.
Going back to thinking about Millennials, Danah Boyd just published some thoughts as to why SnapChat is valuable#.
TL; DR - relevance sits at the middle of customers, content, channels.
Two waves of tickets, two sold outs, one wave left#.
It's more than event, it's an experience. See the recap from 2013.
I bought my ticket when they first went on sale almost a year ago.
My plans have changed. And I am glad to have the opportunity to help someone else go instead. Life is a "both/and" proposition.
I have been very lucky to have enjoyed an early education in Italy that was very much about meaningful interactions and experiences. Luck followed me in the U.S. where I had the privilege of serving the families of brain injured children for six years; those children drove home the value of life.
I wrote about the experience in my forward to The Age of Conversation. It was a gift that keeps on giving over the years. That is what I call making a contribution.
Both my early experiential education and the experience of serving others in exchange for not much more than a roof over my head made up a good chunk of what I call a good education in being human and living up to one's potential.
Life is what you make it. When you learn to keep on going through personal set backs and family hardships, you realize that not much else measures up to the specialness of knowing from experience.
Resilience, courage, endurance, all the stuff best sellers talk about is more vivid when you live it on the inside. It changes you, and in a good way, if you let it. It changed me.
Building a community and all that jazz that followed the enthusiasm of real time conversations with the Fast Company network and attending the incredibly engaging experiences they organized were the cherry on the top.
They brought to life conversations with Jim Collins, Kevin Roberts, Seth Godin, Dan Pink, Bill Taylor, Alan Webber, Keith Yamashita, and so many others. It was like being at a condensed college program at the time when everyone was developing the focus of their life work. It was incredibly rewarding, and I am lucky to be able to call so many "friend".
Those multi-year experiences were invaluable in helping me see the bedrock from the sand. They made me realize the uniquely specialness of each moment.
Make it your moment this year. I am choosing to transfer my ticket for the original price -- about $500. Contact me if interested.
Why Snapchat is Valuable: it's All About Attention. Danah Boyd: As a result, I watch teens choose not to open a Snap the moment they get it because they want to wait for the moment when they can appreciate whatever is behind that closed door. And when they do, I watch them tune out everything else and just concentrate on what’s in front of them. Rather than serving as yet-another distraction, Snapchat invites focus.
Tesla Can Topple the Car Dealer Monopoly. Bloomberg: By carrying the standard for retail market liberalization, Tesla shows that it aspires to be more than a green gimmick, but heir to the best traditions of American innovation. And that's a revolution worth getting excited about.
Promotion Addictions. RSR: the biggest challenge facing brands as they engage with these digital coupon distribution sites is whether their ultimate goal is audience or targeting. These sites aren’t made for targeting, unless you mean by acquiring an audience that represents a specific swathe of shoppers – price conscious moms, for example.
Pixel and Dimed. Fast Company: The reason these people make good headlines is precisely because they are outliers.
Go Native, Ad Man. Om Malik: to me native advertising is a sales pitch that fits right into the flow of the information being shown. It doesn't interrupt--native ads don't pop up or dance across the screen--and its content is actually valuable to the person viewing it. And that, in turn, leads to a higher percentage of users engaging with the ad, and to greater effectiveness.
Publishing as a Product, Pageviews as Users, and What It All Means. Taylor Davidson: But new “attention” metrics aren’t what make Medium, Upworthy and others compelling as new publishers: what’s more interesting is how they’re built differently to think about publishing as a product and readers as users. In a web seemingly ruled by social networks, building a next-gen publisher isn’t just about creating the “flywheel” of user-generated content, it’s also about understanding the users themselves at a level traditional publishers simply aren’t architected to do.
What Makes a Good Blog.
Content is Bigger than Google.
3+ Lessons on Twitter Interaction from Stephen Fry.
Your Customers are Slipping Through Leaky Experiences.
I've been following the discussions about FiveThirtyEight for ESPN around the web in the past week or so because we are finally wading into new territory -- and this goes beyond Nate Silver's new venture.
The commentary by media and readers like you and me is becoming as important as the content published on the site itself in looking to make sense of what publishing is becoming.
For example, Scott Lewis# wrote a thoughtful point of view in the comments section of Jay Rosen's PressThink article# on the launch of Nate Silver's new site.
Can talented writers scale themselves? Silver [is] best known for one thing.
he [Silver] has to find similar quests for his writers. They have to be bold, big questions to which his algorithm can add tremendous value. And my initial take on it is that he has not found these big questions.
Explanations aren’t valuable just to bring a reader up to speed. Explanations are valuable, if they’re done well, because they’re entertaining.
To extrapolate where we can apply those points to learn something useful about blogging, and writing for online audiences who: a) have less time to hunt around for a good nugget, and yet b) more appetite for discovering good content.
1.) Talented writers have a distinct voice that is hard to replicate at scale.
Extrapolating this point further; if you are looking to staff a content strategy for a corporate blog, you are erring on the side of the brand's voice rather than the individual's voice because rarely the two are one and the same.
And rarely there are enough people to go around for writing regular content for the site and the rest of the company's content needs, including when subject matter experts find the time to help out.
Companies and brands are usually not in the publishing business, unless their business happens to be media, so it does not make sense to invest too many resources into developing content.
When the brand voice and the individual's voice are one and the same we are probably talking about a small business, or a startup. In that case, the choice is rather simple, unless there are paid alternatives.
This works with products as well.
2.) Bold questions are risky business.
So if you are in the business of creating risk and have a thick skin you have a good starting point. Pulling it off also requires an ability to hold on to the question long enough to pursue it via a hypothesis, or theory.
Attention and focus are being depleted at a staggering rate by multitasking, doing more with less, having to make too many choices and decisions, having too much data to sort through, and plain old impatience.
Instead of holding two opposing ideas in our minds long enough to be able to pursue proving and disproving a hypothesis, we end up speaking, or in many cases streaming, from two sides of the mouth.
Thinking is hard work, one we are not preparing to do much of anymore. Not in school, not in the course of our workday.
Take a look around, most of the wisdom quotes populating social networks and blogs are from people who lived in other times. They were mostly not popular at the time, I should point out -- poisoning, forced suicide, etc.
We are quoting them from the safety of the future. You can afford to be bold when you are very dead. We are quoting others to do it safely.
3) The market for valuable is infinite.
In the same way using entertainment as a learning device is valuable, so is breaking down information to make it more digestible as a process to out-teach your competitors.
People do like to learn. The most popular posts, articles, etc. put forth new ideas, organize known information in new ways, expose us to counter intuitive approaches, and are entertaining. Learning is about making new connections, and laughter is the shortest distance between two people, after all.
The conversational nature of blogging makes it an ideal medium to power learning. Blogs also have a comments box, a unique feature that merges the characteristics of a site with those of a forum. Good blogs link out to references, further information, and resources. Combined, these two alone make a blog more useful as a destination.
Social networks are more like streams, places where we are meeting more people, yet where we are sharecropping when it comes to content. Even when arranged with comment threads, streams are by nature passing by to be replaced more quickly by newer posts.
Despite its lack of innovation, the format works to help distinct voices with something to say put it out there and build -- dare I say -- a community. Being part of a community often fuels finding something valuable to say.
What makes a good blog is also what makes it hard to sustain over time, where the results of the work accrue.
Also see, why have a blog?
More thoughts on what makes a good blog tomorrow. In the meantime, I am thinking about 1) native advertising as units of content, and implications, 2) greater use of cards across social with embedding capability applications, 3) data AND user-driven iterative process.
More on streams in my post for the AM.
A short week ago I found myself face to face with a Google believer -- someone who puts all of its eggs in the Google sandbox, relying on the search giant to build traffic, and doing the bare minimum required beyond that to play into it to the fullest.
That is a mistake. One that is increasingly going to isolate the content of that site.
Because given the avalanche of posts, articles, text, even visual content to a degree, individuals are faced with every day, a site will not continue to become a destination with Google alone -- nor will it be able to rely on the strength of its content.
This, of course, is made possible by the Internet. No longer are my reading choices constrained by time and especially place. Why should I pick up the Wisconsin State Journal – or the Taipei Times – when I can read Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, Bill Simmons, and the myriad other links served up by Twitter? I, and everyone else interested in news, politics, or sports, can read the best with less effort – and cost – than it ever took to read the merely average just a few short years ago.
The zero moment of truth for content is this: become a destination or struggle to come out of the Google sandbox. And that is increasingly just one part of the content consumption pool.
People share on Twitter and Facebook, bookmark and subscribe -- RSS or email, many choose email, not all because apps like Flipboard make it easier to create one's own publication -- to read later, maybe on the subway. You have no idea how many save articles to read on the subway even with the subpar connectivity we have in the US.
And G+ was supposed to take care of social; for now it is an excellent complement, a Plus to your SEO strategy#. All the people you follow and friend elsewhere are probably not on Google+, and not planning to join. Medium may be attractive to the early adopters.
Many of your connections in social may be considering LinkedIn for the sake of establishing their business an/or career. That is great news, because LinkedIn is searchable, right? Well yes, and no.
LinkedIn recently expanded its "Influencers" program the ntwork started in the fall of 2012. If you were among the first 150 select contributors, congratulations, you were publishing to the site alongside Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Martha Stewart, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Conan O'Brien, who started posting in mid-October of last year#.
As of today, the ranks of LinkedIn Influencers has tripled from about 150 to about 500 including CEOs Ian Read of Pfizer, James Gorman of Morgan Stanley and Carlos Ghosn of Nissan.
I received one such invitation and plan to be publishing long form thought pieces on the network, the first I joined among the ones I currently participate in, as member number 1,993,563 way back in 2003. For perspective, today the network counts 277 million members. Even if just one fraction of those members become publishers that makes for a lot of content.
Is Google going to go away? Of course not. Optimizing just to the search engine, without taking into consideration what makes content valuable, how, and where people read it is shortsighted.
We are way past the one thing solution -- optimizing to the search engine. Even in social networks we are getting to the (saturation) point, needing social or native ads just to be discoverable.
It will need to be a combination of things: both/and.
When your content has depth to it, both in format, functionality, and the quality of your writing, it goes from unremarkable to worth reading. You're not a bookmark or a destination yet, just worth reading, or scanning as it may be.
I have another number for you: onethousandfourhundredandforty. Written out like that seems a lot, doesn't it? It is the number of minutes we each have each day. They are never enough to get everything done.
We probably regret many things we did not do today. Not reading one more unremarkable post we learned little from and could not make actionable, or be inspired by, or share with at least one person, that I am guessing is not one of them.
Since what we share becomes a reflection of what we read and internalize (hopefully we do at least read it), we are becoming more discerning. It's the same as providing a recommendation -- you build your reputation through it.
Despite the avalanche of content and the social networks to feed with something, the destination sites have become even more selective about what they post as curated links. Every given Sunday I share six, grouped by themes or threads. This past week it was about Lessons Learned.
Nate Silver’s manifesto for his new site is 3500 words long, meaning it would take the average adult just under 12 minutes to read. That 12 minutes is then gone forever, a bit of attention taken from whatever other activity said reader would have otherwise consumed, and instead gave to Nate Silver. That is why Nate Silver is so valuable.
Writing more content or posting it to more places to get higher search value is only part of the answer. Making the product better so that they can do something with it, draw inspiration, see things a little differently, now that is a goal worth pursuing.
The social Web and mobile reading are demanding that kind of sustained commitment. One that long form bloggers who are still publishing have known from the start. Publishing is a privilege, and when treated as such it becomes a destination.