Content Marketing

SocialTech 2012: Practical Fascination

One of the things to love about MarketingProfs is its focus on B2B social media strategies and B2B content marketing. Certainly there is a lot of hype about how various consumer brands are using social media channels to their benefit. Often those stories are the bane of a B2B marketer's daily life. We get to the office in the morning, greeted by a voice mail imploring us to read a [enter business publication here] article about how [enter worldwide consumer brand here] executed a [enter social media tool here] campaign and saw thousands of customers flood in as a result.

Let's face it, B2B marketers, one of the reasons we work with B2B companies is because just adopting social media is not enough. One must carefully consider the end-user audiences that are the result of a given campaign, what tools and platforms realistically are best to reach that audience, and how to measure a given effort's effectiveness. At the same time, we must also put in place processes to make companies truly social companies, alleviating any fears and demonstrating how the long-term benefit will greatly outweigh the short-term pain (without being specific as to how "long-term" we're talking, here).

MarketingProfs agrees with us. Which is why I was thrilled to attend MarketingProfs SocialTech 2012 event last week in Seattle. Without a doubt, the event featured some of the most forward-thinking B2B social media marketers on the planet. The sessions at SocialTech were great. I heard front-line observations from marketers at SAP, Network Solutions, Boeing and Cisco, and I mingled with dozens of other B2B marketing pros who could speak, on and off the record, about their own successes and challenges.

Now that it has been a week since my return to Boston, I have had a chance to take a deep breath, review my notes, and draw up some observations based on my trip. Here goes:

Practicality is not a sin with B2B social media: I have been to a number of events where the "true" social media marketers in the room are aghast if you bring up older B2B marketing techniques that actually might still have an impact today. Many social media zealots think that these older techniques--which they tag under the ignominious "traditional" category--all became juvenile with the advent of the social platform.

It was refreshing at SocialTech 2012 to hear the role that email marketing still plays within a B2B social media effort. (I believe one speaker even said that email marketing is a *vital* part of a B2B social media effort, noting that it is the beginning of the lead generation process.) I also liked how many people talked about incorporating blog content into their social media programs. As an aside, I am often amused at how many marketers don't even consider blogging to be social media. The earliest "social" campaigns I remember tracked a series of influential blogs and made recommendations on how to engage within those blogs' comments sections.

Measurement today still stops with audience reach: At Schwartz MSL, we press our clients more and more to connect our work with lead generation, since for the most part, that's what B2B companies care about. (I should mention I work only with B2B clients at Schwartz MSL.) Most of the measurement discussion at SocialTech centered on how to measure the reach of a given campaign, stopping short of measuring an audience's action. Most campaigns noted website traffic, Facebook likes and other metrics that outline how well a given campaign is noticed. The bleeding edge here, which was also discussed at the event, is creating content marketing programs that connect a given social media campaign to leads--and even sales. At the next SocialTech, I am going to press to see case studies of campaigns where leads were the measured result.

It's entirely possible that my measurement observation at SocialTech is based on an over-fascination with lead generation as a metric. Admittedly, the lead counts provided by various content marketing and marketing automation platforms will under-represent the true impact of a campaign; for one thing, they cannot account for programs or content that greatly impact leads generated at some point in the future.

Further, despite the role content marketing must play in a B2B marketing effort today, it does not mean that other, older, dare I say traditional ways of generating leads are no longer important. Business cards still exist, and people exchange them at physical events. (Here's where I go back and read the description of my first observation again.)

Finally, social media marketers (including myself) just can't seem to stop our love affair with tools. Each and every session at SocialTech devolved for at least a period of time into a discussion about tools. Tools for scheduling content. Social media platforms. Tools for listening. Pinterest. Tools for Twitter (lots of love for Hootsuite---Is it bad I still use TweetDeck?).

Not that discussing tools is bad, but what often gets lost in the discussion about social media tools and social media measurement is the actual juice that drives interest. That's right---the content. One of the best parts of my entire trip came when Ron Ploof, new media strategist at OC New Media, put us through an exercise on how to create "fascinating" content that is still strategic to our businesses. The reality is so much of the content out there within B2B marketing content campaigns, frankly, is just boring.

Always the teacher's pet, I was happy Ploof applauded the "fascinating" content I brainstormed for Schwartz MSL. I focused on a recent popular question from friends about whether my job really is like the setting of "Mad Men" (it's not), and wondered if I could tell a story about a day in the life of a B2B PR pro from the perspective of the scotch bottle that is on every "Mad Men" executive's office table. Don't worry HR, I don't have scotch in my office. As to whether such fascinating content ever does see the light of day, well, I guess you will just have to keep reading this blog.

Posted by Ross Levanto on April 6, 2012 at 9:06 AM
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It's a B2B SxSW Monday

Today was my last full day at SxSW and it was once again filled with great discussions. For once I decided to forgo payments panels, and spent more of my time in panels that discussed B2B social media as well as a panel on brand journalism, and yes, one on the future of money.

The brand journalism panel and B2B panels were filled with a lot of insight and tips that will be of interest to our B2B clients and to B2B communications professionals.

First, it is clear that B2B companies are embracing content marketing. According to a survey from Marketing Profs, 49% of companies plan to increase their content marketing spending in the next 12 months. The two biggest content challenges these companies face are: 41% their content is not engaging enough and 20% have trouble producing enough content. As trusted advisors, communications professionals need to find ways to help our clients overcome both of these challenges.

This brand journalism panel, and a solo presentation from Tim Washer, Cisco’s Senior Manager of Social Media, hit on a key issue: B2B companies need to remember to talk to people in a human way. 

B2B purchasing decisions are made both on facts and emotions. If you sell on just speeds and feeds in a competitive market, you are at a competitive disadvantage. Communicators need to keep this in mind and call out the human elements inherent in any story.

Following are four other key insights it took from the panels today:

1. Gamification is everywhere and is starting to be used to drive B2B engagement. When people hear about gamification they tend to think of consumer brands, Foursquare badges or Scvngr. But Cisco has added badges to at least some of its blogs. Now visitors can receive badges for visiting the blogs, leaving their first comment, leaving 10 comments, Tweeting the blog post, etc. This is a great step. It is an easy and focused incentive to drive the business outcomes a company desires (engagement and awareness). IBM and Xerox also spoke about how they are using gamification, with IBM using it internally to drive activity and identify those most passionate about social media.
2. Re-examine how you gather registration information. Cisco and other B2B companies are using Facebook and OpenID to enable social login. Why does this matter? Since Cisco implemented it, they have seen a  40 percent reduction in cost and 20 percent increase in registration.
3. B2B Needs to embrace video – If your B2B company is not yet using video as part of its communications strategy you are missing great opportunities. Here is a great video from Cisco about how it is helping in Africa. It does a great job humanizing the story and moving it beyond the basics.
4. Look at humor. This one is near and dear to my heart as I do standup comedy in my spare time, and understand the power of humor in business. Humor in B2B can engage your prospects and customers. It is a positive emotion, humanizes the brand, builds goodwill and cuts through the noise. If you don’t have the budget, go to a film school and ask the professor for his best seniors. Offer them an internship and $1000 if you end up using their final product. One example of humor in action comes from this Cisco Valentine’s video. It has almost 200,000 views and drove coverage in the New York Times, Network World, Light Reading and other outlets. See it here.

If B2B communicators start doing just one of these things that they may not be doing today, they will help their brand prosper and their communications programs deliver greater ROI.

The five most quotable observations from Monday at SxSW:

1. Content is the new black
2. Your B2B story may not be good enough for TV, but it is good enough for YouTube, your clients and prospects
3. Information without analysis in the information age is as valuable as stone in the stone age
4. We make things complex because frequently we are too insecure to be simple. But look at Apple. Simplicity sells.
5. Question conventional wisdom. For Trulia, blogs about sports figures drove 3x the traffic as those about celebrities

Posted by Mark McClennan on March 13, 2012 at 12:10 AM
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SxSW Saturday Takeaways: Destroy Labels, Know Yourself

Saturday at SxSW was much more interesting than Friday. I had the pleasure of attending a very wide range of panels. The topics included strategic communications, Dad bloggers, enterprise social media, the future of mobile wallets, a comedian/activist keynote, and a look inside Joss Whedon’s head. The panels were a mix of both aspirational visions and cautionary tales.

The sessions were all great learning experiences, but they present something of a challenge. How do you blend parenting lessons from Leviticus with social analytics and loyalty programs? While many of these sessions merit their own posts (and will likely get them in the future), I wanted to focus on overarching themes that I noticed.

I would say there were two key takeaways from these sessions.

• Destroy the labels
• Know who you are

From the Mmbile wallet to NFC Chips to Dad bloggers, people and companies are too often failing to reach their full potential because they are succumbing to easy labelization. Don’t get me wrong, there is immense power in the study of groups and flocking, but if you too quickly group someone, you may come to the wrong conclusion or miss opportunities. I saw that time and time again today.

This is particularly insidious when it comes to Mom bloggers. Mom bloggers are too often defined by who they are rather than who they write about. Very few “Dad” and “Mom” bloggers blog about parenting. They are parents who blog. A mom blogger who writes about beer or food, should not be lumped in the same category as one who writes about technology or parenting. I personally have seen too many companies make this mistake. The lists created by influencer tools may serve as a good start, but influencers are not Oreos. Each is unique and needs to be understood and communicated with in context.

The same lesson applies to the mobile wallet. First of all, there is a blurring between mobile wallet and P2P payments and this line needs to be clearly understood.  It also applies to enterprise social media when “employees” are lumped together as one audience as companies roll out solutions. Some of the best advice from IBM today was to understand what your corporate culture is like and what tools employees use to work and to communicate, and enhance those existing tools rather than make everyone conform to new tools. If you try to force people to do something they do not want to do, you will end up with an empty wiki, upset employees and wasted budget.

The second point is to know who you are. If you have a niche, carve it out. Just don’t let others put you in that niche.

Isis in the digital wallet space seems to clearly know this. They understand that in order to convince people to move away from contactless cards and Mag Stripe they need to offer more to retailers and merchants. They are betting their success on the premise that bringing loyalty cards and coupons into an integrated whole to provide consumers savings and convenience; and providing retailers a chance to impact consumer purchasing behavior before a transaction will push them over the edge. (That and retailers being penalized by the issuers if they do not adopt NFC by 2015).

I am not sure I agree with them completely, and I know not everyone in the audience did. Consumers have shown amazing willingness to stay with what works. As one panelist pointed out, 10 years ago the cover of Card Transactions was “Mobile Commerce is Ready for Takeoff” and we are still discussing its pending rise today. Additionally, consumers have shown a willingness to have multiple loyalty cards and apps, and there are other alternatives to impact pre-shopping behavior today (such as eGiftcards – technology from a client of mine - and location based deals).

The audience definitely did not all agree about the easy path of NFC. My most popular tweet of the day was “NFC being positioned as the Borg. Do not resist. You will be assimilated.”

Knowing who you are also helped many companies in the first panel I attended of the day. The reaction to Zappos’ data breach was much less negative than most breaches of its type. That was because Zappos quickly communicated in a way that was appropriate for its customers.

This post is getting long, so I want to wrap it up with the five most quotable observations of the day:

• Before you make a critical business decision, ask yourself – what would John Stewart say about it?
• Great ideas are not always great and not always well received.
• Bloggers have more influence over purchasing decisions than traditional celebrity endorsers do
• 48% of B2B CEOs say social media helped generate qualified leads
• Voice of customer research is not for validation, it is for discovery

Posted by Mark McClennan on March 11, 2012 at 12:26 AM
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SxSW 2012 - Wait, Talk, Discuss

If today’s registration line is any indication, SxSW Interactive is going to be more popular than ever. Despite coming at an off time, registration still took more than 90 minutes – more than I ever had to wait at CES or COMDEX in its prime.

True to SxSWi though, the time was not wasted. While in line, I had great conversations about the future of interactive marketing, the rise of mobile payments, better uses of technology to aid elections and those suffering in Africa, and the five major design flaws found in most socks today (who knew?).

Based on my (admittedly small) sampling from the first day of the show two of the most prominent themes already at the conference are:

1)    The transformative rise of mobile payments
2)    The evolution of content

Financial services technology has always had a strong, but limited presence at the show in previous years. But between Isis’ prominent sponsorship to the 13 scheduled sessions looking at mobile wallets or mobile payments, financial technology discussions are becoming much more mainstream. It’s interesting to look at the dichotomy of the sessions’ focus. They range from “The Payment Revolution is Coming” to “How the wallet was won.” There is a very divergent set of perspectives on this topic. Personally, I disagree with both. The payments revolution has been underway for some time and the wallet is most assuredly not won. Expect me to blog more about it in the coming days.

Theme two: Content. This goes beyond Content is King. People are discussing new ways of using content to engage. I had a great 60 minute conversation with a USA Today executive about their new iPad app and new ways they are looking to leverage and use content. There were a few interesting debates on the form of content (video was the  most discussed, followed by a debate on how not to lose the richness of language and its ability to subtly shift perceptions as we move to microbite creation and consumption).

All in all, a good first day at the show.

Like anyone, I realize my impressions at SxSW are shaped by the relatively small number of people I had the pleasure of speaking with. I thought it might make sense to take a step back and look at what the overall conversation trends were today:

Over the past day there were more than 140,000 tweets and blog posts about SxSW (98% were tweets). To put this in perspective, the social media volume around SxSW far exceeds that of the recent Mobile World Congress or RSA:

The discussion is relatively fragmented. The only tech brand to break into the top discussion word cloud is Nokia, thanks to its foursquare badge. Most of the discussion is what you would expect, with people surprisingly upbeat despite the rain.

What are your thoughts so far?
 

Posted by Mark McClennan on March 10, 2012 at 2:01 AM
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Only 19.5% of News Release Headlines are Optimized for SEO

For the second year in a row, the Schwartz MSL Research Group worked with Business Wire to determine how many PR professionals are optimizing their news release headlines for SEO. There was slight improvement compared to last year, but there is still a long, long way to go.

The two most important elements for optimizing a news release headline are keyword inclusion and brevity. In terms of brevity, a full release headline must be 65 characters or fewer to be fully displayed in Google.

Many search engine optimization (SEO) experts, including our experts here at Schwartz MSL, advise that companies try to keep the characters in the headline under 70 characters. Anything beyond that will be less effective in supporting a company’s SEO.

This year, the Schwartz MSL Research Group, with invaluable help from Business Wire, analyzed the headlines of more than 16,000 news releases issued over Business Wire in a 31 day period (July 26, 2011 to August 25, 2011). This is the same period we examined last year. Since Schwartz MSL cannot know the keywords that thousands of companies are hoping to use to optimize their content and releases, the Schwartz Research Group focused on headline length as a success factor.

The results?

Most PR professionals are not fully optimizing their headlines. (I am sure Schwartz MSL is guilty of that as well from time to time.) Our analysis showed that only 19.5% of all releases have headlines with 65 characters or fewer, a one percent increase over last year. When we look at 70 characters are less, the total is 23.7%, an increase of less than one percent.

While the majority of releases are under 150 characters, we did see some examples that were much longer than the recommended length. The most egregious cases were the 2% of releases with headlines in excess of 300 characters, with one headline that was over 1,800 characters. The shortest headline we found was 21 characters, which is also probably not ideal for SEO as it’s unlikely that enough of the company’s keywords were included. Overall, the analysis found the average headline length to be 123 characters, unchanged from 2010.

The Schwartz MSL Research Group has written a Research Brief that takes a more in-depth look at this topic. If you would like additional analysis, including buzzword usage, and the geographic headline faceoff, you can download it here

Posted by Mark McClennan on February 13, 2012 at 8:09 AM
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If You Write it, They Will Come

An understated fact from this past holiday shopping season was the torrid sales pace of tablet computers, especially iPads and the new Kindle Fire. For anyone watching developments related to content marketing and marketing automation, the news is significant, for these devices are useless unless there is something on them to read.

At least that's one of the findings in this year's "State of the Media Report," which was recently issued by the media tracking and analysis company Vocus. "When people hold a tablet in their hands and seek content to consume, they are willing to pay for it," the report quotes Rebecca Bredholt, managing editor, Magazine Content. The context of the analyses was the iPad's impact on magazines, but the implications of both tablet adoption and the Vocus study reach far wider.

It would seem that humans have an insatiable appetite for consuming media. I would love to see a study on the most prolific iOS apps. Something tells me that beyond apps for searching, the most popular category has to be news (even more so than games). That's because of our innate desire to gather content.

Enter content marketing. No discipline can have a greater impact on both SEO (affecting those search iOS apps) and materials that can be consumed by those tablet devices. Given the value of the content and the insatiable desire by all of us to consume it, consider two other realities: the shrinking universe of professional media and the low-cost of entry for becoming a content producer. The Internet today allows anyone to be a publisher, which means companies have a significant opportunity to fill the void left by shrinking professional journalism staffs.

Companies are hiring journalists to write content for their blogs. Many of Schwartz MSL's clients are signing up for our content marketing services, and we are driving the content creation efforts for them. When done correctly, such efforts aid SEO, increase website traffic, align to other marketing efforts and campaigns, and--when tied to a marketing automation solution such as HubSpot-- ultimately lead to leads and sales.

More fundamentally, the content marketing efforts work because, very simply, people want the content. To radically oversimplify the point, it really is a case of if you write it, they will come.

Posted by Ross Levanto on February 7, 2012 at 9:12 AM
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SEO for PR Pros

Yesterday I participated, along with Tom Lynch of interactive web marketing firm Astek Consulting, in a PR News webinar on SEO best practices. I'm not an SEO expert, but have developed a strong interest in search over the past several years. To me, it goes hand in hand with PR.

We all know that PR is about telling great stories. But to tell those stories, communicators have to create more content, and content of different types, than we did even a few years ago. At Schwartz MSL, our target audiences are generally online, so it makes sense to optimize that content for search to increase the likelihood that people who are looking for information on problems that our clients can solve find them online. I can't imagine running communications programs that don't take SEO into account.

If you're looking ahead to 2012 and planning your content and PR strategies, will you factor in SEO? Or do you feel that great content will be found and shared independent of optimization efforts?

Posted by Laura Kempke on September 28, 2011 at 11:36 AM
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Social Media and B2B Buying Behavior

A new survey from Base One, Report 2011: The annual survey of changing B2B buyer behaviour, takes a look at "the extent to which B2B decision-makers are using social media tools and channels to help them in the process of refining their needs and identifying suitable suppliers for major business purchases."

Base One surveyed more than 1,000 people in the UK, Germany, France, Belgium and Italy in spring 2011. If your assignment includes European communications, the report is worth a look. It examines buyers' sources of information and, importantly, which of these have the most influence.

Here's a look at information sources used by UK decision-makers and changes between 2010 and 2011. In each year, the most relied upon sources are corporate websites, searches and industry media.

The report goes on to tease out opinions on social media and whether it's trustworthy or worth the time. It doesn't end with recommendations, but leaves it to the reader to determine what to take and apply to their own marketing strategy.

I read the report because a post on Forbes.com caught my eye, "Social is Intriguing, but Search is Proven." It displays a similar bar chart to the one above and concludes, "Don't let social media detract from the focus of optimizing your corporate website and search, both organic (SEO) and paid (PPC). Social media might pay off in the future, but search is a sure bet today."

Here's what I wish the report or the Forbes.com write-up had done: point out that if search matters to your business, so does social media. The number and quality of links to a website seem to be of great importance to search engines, as do pages on a site devoted to topics that people are searching on (as opposed to just promoting a brand). Blogs are a terrific way to add those pages and keep the content fresh over time and when it comes to links, about nine months ago, Google and Bing both said that they now look at links from social sites and consider the social authority of people who do the linking.

For more info on how social media may be increasing in importance to companies that care about search results, take a look at the SEOmoz report on Search Engine Ranking Factors. SEO experts polled by SEOmoz view "social signals at page level" and "social signals at domain level" as likely growing in importance.

If social media is becoming more important to search engines and search engines and corporate websites matter more to European B2B buyers, then I'd suggest that the role of social media may be obscured or underappreciated to some degree by the report on buyer behavior. B2B decision-makers may not be turning to Facebook and blogs for information as frequently as they do webinars, for example, but all those fresh blog posts and links from social sites and consequent improvements in search rankings may be an important reason that buyers are finding companies' sites in the first place.

Posted by Laura Kempke on September 12, 2011 at 4:49 PM
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PR Pros: Get Into the SEO Mindset

A couple of days ago, I spent some time with colleagues learning about a tool to help identify online "influencers" -- the people many of our clients would like to reach, naturally. Those influencers are mostly not reporters, although it's interesting to see as we start using the tool that reporters are at the top of many of the search results.

It used to be that PR was largely about media relations, but now we of course know we need to look far beyond reporters. Journalists matter, but so do people who blog or tweet or otherwise share info about the topics they're passionate and knowledgeable about.

Anyway, so there we sit, talking about the new tool, which seems mercifully easy to use. Everything is rolling along until the person conducting the training comes to keywords -- you need to lose the SEO mindset, she says. To find the conversations you care about, don't use your SEO keywords.

Sacrilege! How about if you tell me next that down is up and the world is flat. I had to think it through for more than a couple of seconds (which I probably shouldn't admit) and now that I've started using the software, I'm still not sure that "leave SEO aside" is the most accurate description of what's required. I'm now thinking of it as keep what you know about SEO, but add phrases that people use when writing. For example, "buy for your SMB" might accompany "database security software."

I'm glad I worked through that potentially emotional issue. I really didn't want to think that the terms people use to find information that they care about should ever be anywhere other than the very front of my brain when I'm creating any sort of content.

By now you've probably seen The Content Grid v2 from Eloqua and JESS3. If you have not, it's lovely, so cast your gaze upon it:

It seems to me that to get to the content in the middle of that grid -- white papers, demos, case studies, press releases, analyst reports -- you'll often use a search engine. If the content lives on your website, on Twitter, on YouTube, it should be optimized, right? But, you say, that will naturally happen if you're creating content that speaks to problems and interests that people really have. Are fancy techniques necessary when you have fabulous content that speaks to your audience's issues?

Personally, I agree that some marketers are so in touch with their target audiences and so able to deal with both volume and quality that they can't help but create content that appeals to search engines. That's a fantastic thing. I'm guessing that many marketers, however, could use a few pointers. The ebooks, customer profiles, demos and graphics aren't flowing so freely that all the search stuff is going to work itself out.

In a month, I'll participate in a PR News discussion of "day-to-day SEO tactics" that should give people who don't have technical backgrounds some guidelines on creating content that can readily be found online. I'm looking forward to it because I know it'll make me even more focused on the subject. I don't want to "lose the SEO mindset."

How do you work info about search into your day? If the answer is "I don't," here are a few things you might check. They'll inform you without overwhelming you:

• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• B2Bbloggers
• TopRank Online Marketing
• SEOmoz -- some of the software requires a subscription, but there's a lot of free info, too. 

Posted by Laura Kempke on August 25, 2011 at 7:37 PM
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The power of simplicity

Take a look at the billboard below. Do you think this is effective communications or not?

I took a photo of this billboard as I was driving through Connecticut. I was convinced this was one of the worst billboards I had seen in my life.

Yes, the message was simple. If you are injured, you should get Carter.

I love simplicity, and frequently point out that a simple message delivered with a 10 lbs. sledgehammer can be very effective.

But sometimes simplicity goes a bit too far.

• Carter who?
• Most importantly, how do I “Get Carter?”

There is no phone, no email, no twitter, no address, no Website. The full name is in tiny print that is tough to see as you are speeding by.

I knew who to get (but not why), but had no way of getting him.

I was pretty set on writing a fairly critical post about the billboard. But then I did what millions of people do. I Googled it. The search was simple – Injury Carter.

The results are below:
 

What do you think?

Posted by Mark McClennan on June 16, 2011 at 10:28 AM
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With Content Marketing: It's About The Content, Stupid

Lately, a few outside experts have visited with us here at Schwartz. We love it, because it allows us to test our thoughts about how tech PR and healthcare PR are changing with people "outside the Schwartz firewall." It also allows us to twist the arms of our guests and get them to sit down on camera so we can ask them some questions.

Ann Handley came to Schwartz recently for a couple hours of fun mixed with good discussion about the state of content marketing and how it fits with a company's overall marketing program. Ann recently teamed with C.C. Champan to publish Content Rules, which is a fantastic read and provides an excellent analysis of practical content marketing examples.

Ann sat down with my co-worker, Laura Kempke, to discuss some trends and best practices with regard to content marketing and PR. You can watch below. The Schwartz digital team goes further in an earlier post by poking fun at a particularly "amusing" story related to Ann's visit.

Posted by Ross Levanto on May 3, 2011 at 4:46 PM
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Talking Content Marketing and Content Rules with Ann Handley

Schwartz friends and family might recall our December 2010 content marketing event with MarketingProfs Chief Content Officer Ann Handley and HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan. We received great feedback on the talk and were happy to see the room packed, but guess it's to be expected--content is very much on marketers' minds, particularly as they consider social media and lead generation.

Yesterday my colleagues John Moran, Matt Duffy, Ross Levanto and I got to meet up with Ann again to chat about topics ranging from the importance of setting content marketing goals (and why "we want a Twitter strategy" is absolutely not an appropriate goal), to how content marketing and PR can work together, to the relative importance of optimizing all that content.

The real question, however, was whether it's acceptable to order and eat two entrees at a business lunch. (Answer: It's absolutely fine, and is best accompanied by your story about the time you vacuumed up 14 Krispy Kremes without getting sick.)

Fortunately, we left time to talk about Ann's new book with co-author C.C. Chapman, Content Rules. The book has become required reading for Schwartzers, not only because we offer content marketing alongside our public relations, social media and public affairs programs, but because its suggestions are valuable across industry segments, I'd argue, and for companies of all sizes.

Most authors and speakers assume that all marketers and communicators find value in hearing about big-budget case studies from major brands, but honestly, I check email when someone starts talking about what car and candy companies accomplished with high six-figure budgets. Content Rules shows you how to work with the story, money and time that you've got.

Check it out if you haven't already to see how content and content marketing might work for your business. I know we'll be pulling the book's recommendations into many of our own programs.

Posted by Laura Kempke on April 20, 2011 at 10:24 AM
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Salesforce/Radian6 Deal Reinforces the Power of Listening

Today, Salesforce announced its plan to acquire Radian6 for ~$326 million in cash and stock. Radian6 is one of the main social media monitoring and engagement tools we use at Schwartz Communications. This is good news for Radian6 employees, but what are the takeaways for the industry?

To my mind, it all boils down to another company betting that even more companies will realize the power of listening, and as a corollary, the power of engaging. Salesforce.com is one of the top sales and CRM solutions.

This is enhanced when you add inbound marketing companies, such as Hubspot, that can help sales and marketing nurture the most valuable customers and promising prospects. That is one reason Hubspot makes such a big deal of their Salesforce integration.

The social listening (and to a lesser extent engagement) offerings provided by Radian 6 are another piece in the customer engagement puzzle.
 

Good PR has always strived to understand the needs and desires of the customer and other key stakeholders. Only by understanding them can we give the most effective counsel to the organizations we represent. The future tie-in of sales/crm, social listening and nurturing should help companies develop deeper, more meaningful and effective relationships with their customers.

I am intrigued by the possibilities of this acquisition, but it will be interesting to see how it proceeds.

Some of Radian6’s greatest weaknesses are Salesforce's strengths. But I can also see the volume of data that Radian6 regularly captures overwhelming the needs and desires of many users and too much less than useful information being integrated into the Salesforce contact stream. As my wife often tells me, just because you hear what I am saying, doesn’t mean you are listening. The data is only good if it is processed and acted upon.

I don’t think this is the final piece of the puzzle. Integrating capabilities such as Rapleaf into the new Salesforce/Radian6 would create some very targeted and meaningful monitoring and lead to even greater success.

No matter how this acquisition proceeds, the winners will be the companies that increasingly engage with their customers through tailored, proactive communications.

Posted by Mark McClennan on March 30, 2011 at 11:17 AM
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Google Rolls Out its Own Magazine

Google has launched a magazine, Think Quarterly, and mailed the limited number of copies (they printed only 1,500) to advertising partners in the UK. The magazine, Google's first, was created and published in the UK and is also available online.

Since we, as lovers of technology PR, of course pay attention to Google and pitch editors of magazines (although it's not at all clear to me that Think Quarterly is pitchable), I thought the debut was worth noting. You may have caught the news yesterday on Mashable.

This issue is almost 70 pages long and is all about data, how people are trying to wade through it and find value ("data obesity and how to treat it"), how basing business on facts can be beneficial, etc. There are also several topics of interest to advertisers (e.g., "how to maximize return on search advertising").

Click on the image above if you like to check out the full issue.

Posted by Laura Kempke on March 25, 2011 at 9:21 AM
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Analytics and Measurement in Practice at SxSW

For me, Sunday at SxSW could best have been described as analytics day. They decided to have all the research and measurement die-hards make the trek out to the AT&T Executive Conference center.  The surroundings were plusher, the seats much more comfortable and the data was fascinating.

There were two interesting panels on measurement and analytics and the most exciting part is none of the speakers were from vendors. Shawn Brown from MIT’s Sloan Management Review and Chris Traganos at Harvard  spoke about how they measured Web success and worked to increase traffic; while Elizabeth Winkler from the University of Texas - Austin, discussed how she and her colleagues developed a model that showed how Twitter chatter accurately predicted movie revenues.

Harvard was doing some very interesting things and relies primarily on five social media tools:

• Wordpress feeds
• Facebook Open Graph
• Chartbeat
• QR codes
• Socialflow

By comparison, the tools MIT highlighted included:

• Google analytics
• Bit.ly (Think about using Bt.ly pro so you can have custom links you can control if Bit.ly goes out of business in five years)
• Google alerts
• Topsy
• Tweetreach

These are tools most of our readers know, but it shows that tools like these, used intelligently and backed by great content can deliver very good results. A few practical tips on how they grew traffic included advice such as:

• Lots of tags are your friend: every story they push has 30 tags that are fed into blog aggregators
• If you aren’t using Facebook’s OpenGraph and you create content, you need to start doing so. Instead of the share button, use the like button. Despite the power of the tool, you should check URL Linter to see what Facebook is getting and not getting.
• Chartbeat is a perfect complement to Google Analytics. I haven’t used it on my sites, but I plan to check it out. It gives you real time analytics in a way Google does not.
• Probably the biggest “huh” in the session was the tidbit that the smaller the URL, the less dense the QR code is, so it works faster. Keep using those URL shorteners, and make sure they point to a site that is optimized for mobile.

These are great practical tips for growing and analyzing site traffic.

This was a great primer for the next session that looked at how Twitter chatter could be used to tell how good a movie will do on a weekend. Elizabeth Winker and her team used a set of 20 servers to gather and aggregate tweets on movies and store than in a database for further analysis.

They first eliminated the false positives (which was very tricky for the movie “The Hangover”) and broke the results down by positive, negative and neutral using an automated system they built themselves. By then analyzing how many people said they planned to go to the movies and the reaction and buzz afterwards, they showed how positive Twitter chatter mapped nicely to box office sales for the 60 movies they analyzed.

One area Winker touched on briefly, but I think is worthy of further consideration is the power of Twitter and geolocation. They could map the Tweets on a certain movie to the subset of those that have enabled geolocation on their phones and break out the analysis and prediction on a regional level. This could help allocate ad and marketing spends to the areas where it is most needed. One Winkler didn’t explore that I would love to see is if there is greater correlation based on the chatter that is made immediately after a movie (which a movie company should be able to do by mapping the tweets to theatre locations). This also has implications for CPG and consumer technology companies.

The panels weren’t earth shattering, but they gave good practical advice and a glimpse into the future of quick, high-volume analytics.

Posted by Mark McClennan on March 14, 2011 at 11:15 PM
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3 Simple Tests for Before, During, and After Delivering Content to Your Audience

I read two good blog entries yesterday about how marketers need to make sure they’re creating content that is engaging. One of them was a piece in PRWeek written by Schwartz president Bryan Scanlon. (I’m sure you’re all shocked I would speak highly of a blog written by my boss.) The other was a blog by Ann Handley of MarketingProfs, of whom I’m a big fan.

Both of them make basically the point that sometimes marketers lose track of the ultimate goal of content – to connect with or engage a community. In other words, yes, it’s important to create A LOT of content, but it’s more important that the content is educational and not overly self-promotional so your audience will come back for more. A marketer could create five eBooks and ten webinars in a year and say to their CEO, “You wanted content marketing, well mission accomplished!” But in reality, it only moves from being content creation to actual content marketing if you can show that you connected with the audience.

So how do you do this? There are many different ways to test whether your content is engaging, but as a start, I thought I’d just provide one thing to think about at each stage of deploying your content:

Before Deploying Content:
This has been said before (and probably said best in Ann Handley’s book Content Rules), but before you put any content “out there,” you should make sure it’s solving a problem for your target audience. Ask yourself: “does my content explain a problem and provide a solution or does it only explain how my product/service works?” Ideally you’d present the problem, and help your audience to see many ways to solve it that will eventually lead them to you for help. Start with making it interesting, and hopefully the customers will come to you. This always reminds me of what 1960’s ad executive Howard Luck Gossage said: “People don’t read ads. People read what they’re interested in and sometimes it’s an ad.”

While Content is Being Consumed:
Two words: trackable links. This is not at all a new way to measure engagement, but all of your content pieces should contain trackable links within them so you have data on which links were interesting enough for people to click on. It’s ok to say “500 people downloaded my eBook,” but it’s not a real measure of engagement unless you look at what they did once inside the eBook. You can also go way beyond data about clicks when measuring video content engagement using tools from VisibleGains and others. It’s critical to know how long people viewed certain segments and where there was drop off.

After:
This may also seem obvious, but the best measure of engagement is what your audience does with the content after it was consumed. Did they forward or share the content with others or tweet about it? Did they come back and consume more content from you later (content that you were, of course, smart enough to push out to them)? Did you check in with them within a week and ask what they thought of the content? I’d rather have 200 people read a piece of content, share it, and return later for more content, than have 500 people read some content and never come back.

Posted by Matt Duffy on February 8, 2011 at 10:32 AM
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Optimism for Tech, Tech PR and Content Marketing

It is perhaps human nature to be a bit optimistic to start the year. And early headlines to lead off 2011 are fueling that optimism.

Two days into the new year, The Boston Globe pointed optimistically to the start-up community, noting that it has never been easier to launch a new company, because of efficiencies created by cloud computing and other data center advances. Of note is this sentence, which fittingly stood out as its own paragraph: "It’s also possible today to target potential customers online rather than pay traveling sales forces." No doubt that's a clear reference to content marketing and inbound marketing, two services that Schwartz now provides.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal pointed to large companies across a number of industries as having "cleaned up their balance sheets and, flush with cash, appear open to using it in 2011 on factories, stores and even hiring."

Also yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed higher to start the year, and at one point intraday the market was at its highest point since August of 2008.

It would appear there's a lot of good news to go around as we begin 2011.

Posted by Ross Levanto on January 4, 2011 at 9:29 AM
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Can you really jump-start a Content Marketing program in a week?

Last week we had about 100 marketers in the room for our breakfast roundtable on content marketing here at our headquarters outside of Boston. (Watch highlights from the first half of the event). We came up with an interesting premise for the event:  one week before the event we would pick the name of an attendee out of a hat and create some free content for their company and show it at the event.

Cool idea, right? We thought it was, but I have to admit that my biggest concern was around how much cooperation we’d get from the marketer we chose. As it turned out, we chose a great company in downtown Boston, Exari (note: they’re not a Schwartz client), and their marketing team was more than willing to let us dive in, grab pieces of content they already had, film people in their offices, and immerse ourselves in their message for a week. Exari is a growing document assembly software company that helps companies automate the creation of NDAs, contracts and other legal documents. Here were the big issues, as we saw them:

• Exari was driving a lot of visitors to their site, but wasn’t converting enough to leads. The company has great blogs, but hasn't created a lot of content that merits asking for registration information
• A lot of Exari’s target customers (CFOs and other top executives) don’t necessarily know there is a software solution to address their document assembly woes
• Our SEO team noted that “NDA” is by far the most-searched term related to Exari’s products, so NDA-related content may be a good way to cast a big net
• The Exari site was in need of compelling video content to tell their product story.

So here’s what we did:

• We created a short (6 page) white paper for them with the word “NDA” in the title, focusing on the benefits of automating the creation of NDAs and other corporate documents. (Note: Exari is making final edits to the white paper now). We also had a new white paper template designed for them.
• We created a landing page for the white paper in HubSpot (Exari is a new HubSpot customer), to show how they could easily deploy the content on their site without involving their IT staff as well as offering them an easy way to collect visitor data through Hubspot’s contact forms.
• To help Exari highlight the business need for their solution, we got a group of CFOs and other executives to give us quick sound bites about the arduous process of manually creating documents. We also added a brief impromptu video intro from the Exari founder.

We presented the content at the event and got a great response from the attendees, and more importantly, from Exari. The speakers at our event also gave some good additional tips about the content. Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs.com, who has a great new book called Content Rules, made the point that you have to think very carefully about which content should be behind a registration wall; ideally it shouldn’t just be a re-hash of existing blog content. Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot (who also has a great book out), added that eBooks are great for lead generation, so it sometimes makes sense to take the content for a whitepaper and present it in eBook form.

Overall I believe we got our message across that creating content doesn’t have to feel like writing War and Peace. If we could do it in a week for a company that isn’t even a client, we think every marketer should take the plunge for their company.

Posted by Matt Duffy on December 21, 2010 at 3:17 PM
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