For companies who want to tell stories with their own “big data,” Visual.ly offers partnerships to visualize new datasets and promote the resulting infographics through sites like The Wall Street Journal and Huffington Post.

Finally, Visual.ly hosts a great library of infographics, uploaded by designers all over the world, to inspire you and open up your mind to the elegant art of infographics. Among our favorites:

Diagrams Rule: A Satirical Look at Infographics

The Trustworthiness of Beards

 

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free print subscription.

When we create the story that drives our content marketing efforts, we should already know who our audience is and what we want to tell them. When it comes to the platforms, we know how we want to say it (text, video, audio) and where we want to tell it (website, blog, social media, etc.). And typically, we stop there because we have so much to monitor, measure, and manage that we become overwhelmed.

Yet, content marketing ought to be called constant marketing, because it’s always happening. David Meerman Scott talks about real-time marketing and how we have to be ready at any given moment to react and respond to relevant public conversations. What we often forget is that stories happen in real life all the time – informally when we are on the subway, on a plane, or at a cocktail party, as well as formally at a conference or business meeting. We are always telling and re-telling our story — it happens when someone asks, “So, what do you do?” or when we are up on the stage giving a presentation.

For the purpose of this post, let’s focus on the presentation aspect of content marketing. Whether you are pitching in the boardroom or delivering the keynote address at a conference, it is your job to educate, engage, and inspire the audience. Good storytelling is the strongest, most reliable way to do this.

Truth be told, not everyone is a proficient storyteller. Some people are just born with the skill — Bill Clinton, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Louis C.K., to name a few — and have an innate ability to spin a good yarn. While most of us may not go down in history as a notable orator, there are a few presentation tricks we can use to polish our storytelling skills and prepare ourselves to win over any audience.

Avoid telling the entire story

Chances are you have a limited amount of time when you are presenting. But you can use these limitations to your advantage.

Presenting is not an exercise in how to spew out a ton of information in a short amount of time — your audience is savvy, and you will likely lose their attention within minutes if you don’t give them an opportunity to focus on your most important points, or if you fail to meet their expectations for being engaged and entertained. It’s your goal to meet those expectations and, more importantly, to keep their eyes on you (and not their iPhones).

Two weeks after your presentation, the audience may not remember everything that you said, but they will remember how you made them feel. So don’t go crazy and try to cover everything you know about your topic. Choose two or three ideas that a.) you are passionate about and b.) you know will be attention grabbers. By focusing on a few points, you will come off genuine, authentic, and relaxed — a win-win for everyone in the room!

Swab the decks

Stop relying on PowerPoint. Seriously, stop using it. Presentation tools like PowerPoint, Keynote, and Prezi are becoming crutches for presenters who feel like they will fall down unless they have their slides!

If you cannot tell your story without the use of slides, then you are in more trouble than you think. Slides are for support only! They are to be used to evoke an emotion, or to make a point. The best decks should be meaningless without the presenter’s own voice to provide context and color for the story.

If you feel you must use slides, keep these tips in mind:

• Use only high-resolution images — no clip art, and no stock photos. And have them bleed out to the far edges of the slide.
• Use only one idea per slide.
• Avoid using bullet points.
• Get rid of the cheesy animations.
• If you have a Q&A portion of the presentation, or you go off on tangents as part of your presentation, hit the “.” (period) key — this will make the slide go to black, bringing the audience’s eyes back to you, rather than staring at a slide that has nothing to do with what you are talking about.
• Use as few slides as possible. Too many slides are distracting and can dilute the power of the presentation.

Remember: A presentation is not a meeting — it’s a performance

Pete Townshend once said, “The audience is thick and doesn’t appreciate quality . . . you do something big on stage and they go ‘Ahhh!’”

What he meant is that the audience won’t get hung up on fancy charts, specific data points, or minutiae. They won’t know if you skipped a point or forgot something you were planning to say. What they will notice is if you look nervous and fidget. For many people in the audience, your presentation might be just one in a long series of meetings they have to attend – chances are that at least half of them don’t really want to be there. Take a chance, and make it fun, entertaining, engaging. Get them to pay attention. This skill only comes with practice and experience. So, rehearse your presentation. Practice it in the mirror. Record it on your smartphone and listen back. Take the time to create a compelling performance and you will win every time.

While we continue to craft our content strategy and proliferate it across all media, let’s not forget that there is no better way to tell your brand story than in person — so they get their information right from the horse’s mouth. So from this day forward, I urge you to make your presentations an integrated part of your content marketing strategy. When you have the opportunity to present to an audience, it’s critical to be interesting, captivating, and focused on the story itself — not fumbling with a bunch of slides and data that may only confuse the audience. If we take half the time we spend on creating effective presentations, audiences all over the world will be more than thankful.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

Audience image via Flickr Creative Commons

Breathe deeply. We’re about to document the 25+ tools marketers need to know about if they’re serious about real-time marketing.

Real-time marketing—the ability to monitor, manage and guide your marketing efforts as they occur — is one of the most important areas of marketing today. Fortunately, new tools that show breaking trends on Twitter, revealing how an individual customer interacts with your content, identifying your brand’s social influencers and making sense of all that data to make it actionable, are available to CMOs in 2012. The challenge most face: Where to begin?

The landscape of real-time monitoring tools is particularly wide and deep, so let’s focus on digital channels. Further, let’s divide real-time marketing tools into two categories: onsite and offsite. Onsite is any customer interaction that occurs on any digital property you own, such as your website. Offsite is simply everything else, including social sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Most marketers already employ a suite of tools for onsite analytics reporting. Omniture and Google Analytics are two popular tools for viewing your site’s visitor data. These standard site reports won’t be phased out anytime soon, but there is a relatively new breed of tools such as Woopra, Chartbeat and Clicky that offer the ability to view real-time interactions with your site. They answer, “How many visitors are on my site right now and which specific pages are they viewing?” (Google and Omniture also offer real-time tools, but they are not singularly focused, as with the others.)

While these real-time tools are an improvement over the previous generation, they still essentially provide a “web-centric” view of the data, meaning they are designed more for technologists than marketers. Marketers want to know, “How many visitors, at what time, resulted in how many conversions?” Fortunately vendors now realize the importance of this data to marketers and are introducing software that add context to the raw site statistics.

Real-time analytics guides real-time content

Mixpanel offers sophisticated, real-time segmentation, funnel and retention analysis, while GoSquared provides real-time views of top content, top referrers, top searches and social media influence. GoSquared and Lexity also offer customer-centric views of your site. Both of these tools can report on a single individual in real time as the visitor arrives on your site, how he or she got there, what pages were viewed and if an order was placed — or not.

Onsite tools are pivoting from passive monitoring to actively guiding the generation of socially relevant real-time content. InboundWriter monitors your audience’s interests and online conversations, and then instructs you on how to craft content your audience will find compelling. It even coaches you on how to tailor your content for different mediums, such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. This active shaping of content is very reminiscent of search engine optimization. But unlike SEO, it happens in real time and you can see the results immediately.

Offsite tools are evolving even faster than onsite tools, fueled by apps offering new social experiences. Marketers once only worried about Twitter and Facebook. Now add Foursquare, Instagram, Path, Pinterest, Fancy and others.

Real-time social media

There are many tools for managing your social effort, such as HootSuite, CoTweet and TweetDeck (now owned by Twitter). I like to call these “meta-tools” because they add additional functionality on top of existing applications. These tools can post to multiple networks, schedule tweets and filter your stream so you can hone in on important content. HootSuite also provides niceties like CMS functionality (e.g. team collaboration, messages drafts, analytics) and offers a custom URL shortener, Ow.ly, which enables click-thru link tracking.

SocialMention is a stream aggregation tool. It monitors more than 100 social media properties and creates a single, searchable stream. Want to know what’s being said about your brand (almost) anywhere on the web? SocialMention might help you with that challenge. On the other end of the spectrum is PostPost, which is a surgical Twitter search scalpel. It only searches through content from your Twitter followers.

Other social monitoring tools worth mentioning are Radian6, BuddyMedia, BuzzMetrics and ScoutLabs, all of which provide the ability to monitor, measure and report on social activity.

Once you have identified who is talking about your brand, you would probably like to know how influential they are in the social media landscape. Klout and PeerIndex are attempting to attach some context to users’ online persona by monitoring their social stream, and then ranking their influence on specific topics and with other people. Both indexes are nascent, but it’s interesting to watch them try to establish themselves as the index of record.

Making sense of so much data

OK, so you have tons of onsite and offsite data, and very likely a truckload or two of offline data. While linking the data is critical, making that data actionable in real time, whenever and wherever you see a user, would be the “killer app.” Well, this is possible right now with Data Management Platforms. DMPs are essentially large, fast, real-time data warehouses; they store and link together data based on cookie data or other unique keys, and provide an interface for asking questions against the data. You can import first-party data from your site and your offline campaigns; you can import second-party data from partners with whom you share data and you can import third-party data from providers like BlueKai, TargusInfo, Bizo and Excelate.

Once the data is married in the DMP, you can analyze it, aggregate it, slice it, dice it, report on it and most importantly, make it actionable. For example, you can, in real time, identify the audience a visitor to your site belongs to (e.g. male, 45-50, divorced, kids, into cars and motorcycles) and then, again in real time, tailor the site (content, ads, even layout) directly to that visitor.

You’re a marketer. You’re familiar with audiences, demographics, psychographics and now on/offsite social data; but up until recently, it was a passive undertaking, requiring long cycles of content planning, months of site design and development, weeks of deployments and days of generating reports. With DMPs, you can leverage all of the social data you’re collecting, combine it with your offline data and act on it all in real time. Right now.

Technology alone will not run your marketing strategy. The best tools are only as good as the people using them. CMOs who put together the right combination of talent and technology will have the edge in today’s real-time world. 

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free print subscription.

While many brands rush to leverage these direct to consumer channels, few have altered their brand narratives and their approach to content creation as they move from paying others to broadcast their brand content to leveraging it themselves for direct consumer engagement.

Despite the existing opportunities, it would seem that few brands — and only a few more of their agencies — have the content, process, and methodologies in place to fully benefit from direct distribution to the audience. The current brand-agency paradigm has been effective in leveraging search and social algorithms for more efficient distribution of “brand” assets, but the efforts stemming from this approach have failed to deliver some critical elements: engagement, efficiency, and scale.

Brands looking to achieve this “holy trinity” of digital effectiveness need to shift their content creation approach even further.

Owned media, redefined

Strategist Jim Cuene recently proposed a state of constant content to help marketers behave as publishers. And the Altimeter Group’s Content: The New Marketing Equation does a great job of illustrating a “path” for brands to follow in rebalancing their marketing efforts, shifting “from push to pull.” In fact, Cuene and Altimeter both reference the need for this shift in their content creation. But what characterizes this shift, and how can CMOs get started when looking to alter the manner in which their organizations influence consumers?

The shift they both reference is to a state of “owned media” — not the narrow, “brand-controlled” definition that seems to be pervasive across many media strategy blogs. Rather, it’s to a state of “media ownership” — a more progressive definition of owned media. By simply flipping the words and adjusting the grammar, we add clarity around the model. Jim Cuene is right. Brands need look no further than many online publishing properties for a model on how to create content using an operational discipline that ultimately leads to better results.

Do you own media?

Does your brand stand to benefit from media ownership? Answer the following questions to assess your brand’s state of media ownership:

• Always-on: Are you publishing content for an audience on a daily basis?
• Editorial: Are you publishing content that an audience needs and shares?
• Independent: Do you own the technology or the platform delivering the content? Do you have the final say in all aspects of the user’s experience?
• Networked: Is the content on your platform optimized for distribution?
• Measured: Are you evaluating how efficiently you are producing media, or the consumption of your content?
• Monetizable: Could your content platform be someone else’s paid media?

If you answered yes to all of the questions above, then congratulations, your content marketing initiative is optimized for better business-building results. If you answered no, then the next step is to assess where your organization is in its journey to operating as a publisher. 

Ownership makes for better content

This assessment of owned media is important because it instills a level of accountability with content creation.

Online publishers operate by exacting principles because they need their audiences to consume, engage, and share the content they produce. Operationally, these publishers need to ensure that their editorial efforts are efficient and yielding high-quality content that resonates with their most important critics — the audience. Their very businesses depend on it. 

Brands want their audience to consume, engage, and share content, as well. By applying the same business acumen in planning and evaluating your audience engagement as any publisher would, brands can effectively achieve the three goals of engagement, efficiency, and scale. Not employing this methodology, in my opinion, is the single biggest reason brands are finding underwhelming results in their current search and social efforts.

Discovering the path

With some brands, asset creation evolves into a content strategy, wherein incremental success can be achieved by delivering the same old brand narrative but doing so with a slightly broader focus on types of content, and through innovative channels such as Facebook and Twitter. But the issues of reach and engagement are not addressed by this approach.

I’ve had brands with significant search and social programs in place confess to me “We’re not getting enough traffic to the website,” and “We have 1 million Facebook fans, but very little engagement.” And, these brands are sustaining the same paid media spend to maintain the necessary share of voice in their respective categories. This is not the kind of efficiency brands are looking for when executing content marketing strategies. 

The good news for brand marketers is that their preliminary efforts in content marketing put them squarely on the path to owned media. It’s within these initial phases of content marketing that brands soon discover how important some level of editorial process is in generating quality content at a faster rate, and at higher volumes. By editorial, I mean the constant process of determining what the audience needs. It’s also at this stage where brands discover how important the investment in a centralized platform is in helping them manage to and optimize content marketing across multiple digital channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

There are several successful, brand-owned media programs that can help guide other brands. Home Made Simple, Nutrition Possible, and The Responsibility Project are all examples of how brands can take an editorial approach to engage the entire audience — not just limited segments of it, which is where most brand marketers seem to focus. This audience-centric approach is paying dividends for these respective brands while amplifying their earned and paid efforts, as well.   This shift to true “always-on” editorial is the biggest challenge most brands will face on the path, but it is critical to creating quality content that audiences prefer, and realizing the full potential of owned media.

Editorial shift

So how do marketers go from content that represents their messages to consumers to content that audiences themselves are looking for? It first requires thinking beyond the brand’s target segments and focusing on understanding the needs of the entire audience in much greater detail. This can be particularly challenging, as marketing operations are almost exclusively geared toward distilling layers of consumer research into one-size-fits-all insights and, consequently, focused messaging. And for good reason — brands don’t have the resources to talk to the entire audience through traditional paid means. But they can accomplish this through the right owned media strategy.

For most brand marketers, becoming more informed editorially simply requires organizing all of the available data around audience behavior to define and understand consumer’s content needs. For example, Man of the House publishes dozens of articles that present unique perspectives on personal grooming — from the best grooming gifts for dad to rationales for getting a manicure. This content might fall outside the focus of brands like Gillette or Art of Shaving, but Man of the House content is informed by extensive consumer research. And by interpolating this existing audience data, Procter & Gamble knows its articles are falling in line with what interests the site’s primary audience (dads), which is likely much larger than the consumer segments Gillette advertises to.

Once this audience editorial analysis is complete, it will continue to guide your brand’s editorial strategy development and help you determine the right level of owned media investment.

Having worked with a multitude of consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers, I’ve always been somewhat amazed with the sheer depth of consumer knowledge each organization possesses — and equally amazed at how little of this knowledge actually factors into its content creation. When brands take a deeper look at their broader audience, there is always a more detailed set of topical categories to map, and brands should follow this map in creating the content they deliver to this broader audience. The appropriate level of data analysis can help brands chart this map.

Editorial mapping

Beyond existing consumer data, analytics should be used to inform the editorial on an ongoing basis. The resources required to develop and sustain an owned media strategy can usually come from the brand’s existing investment in analytics. But even free resources, such as Google or Compete, can provide a wealth of information — especially if they are used in conjunction with more robust paid tools.

The process for mapping an editorial approach should rely on at least four key data channels:

As the chart illustrates, this process is well informed by analytics and can yield a detailed editorial map of topics that are based on the audience’s preferences. Revisiting our example around Man of the House, these various data sets are advising the editorial focus for the entire grooming channel:

• Google Analytics data is being used to identify the most popular articles, which are then served up at the top of the page to drive further content consumption.
• Google Trends helps to advise on topics that are trending throughout social media,
• Google Adwords is being used to track topic popularity by reviewing search query volume across a host of long-tail keyword phrases related to grooming. 

Lastly, it’s critical that publishers keep track of the competitive space for topics. This article in particular is a great example of observing what is being talked about and joining in the discussion. This editorial map is the foundation of an iterative process that’s always on, and optimized for producing content that gets consumed, creates engagement, and gets distributed.

And, not or

To be clear, the editorial shift required to create owned media impact is not an “or” that could replace another approach. It’s an “and” that supports a brand’s broader marketing strategy. Advertising and other paid media still work, but technology has now made direct distribution to an audience an affordable strategy (with the proper approach).

Regardless of where a brand might be in its use of owned media, it should consider developing an editorial voice that guides sustained content creation to address the needs of its audience that aren’t being met through that brand’s other marketing efforts. 

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

An interview with Mitch Joel—a founding father of blogging and president of Twist Image—about the art of the podcast and what ‘screen’ marketers should keep their eyes on.

Joe Pulizzi: You’re an incredibly prolific blogger for Twist Image. Do you single-handedly write it all?

Mitch Joel: It is 100 percent human me. No one touches it but me.

J: What made you begin blogging and how do you keep up with the pace?

M: My background is in music magazine publishing. Prior to that, I was a music writer. I loved writing about things that were of interest to me. Back in 2002, I was wondering how Twist Image could get its message out there. At that point blogging was just coming into popularity and I thought, “This is unbelievable. I don’t need an editor. I don’t need permission. I don’t need a printer. I can just put my thoughts down and share them.”

If you go back to those terrible, early posts, the content was “navel-gazing” and narcissistic. But as it started building, I realized blogging was a platform for me to be a journalist again, and to pursue the writing that I loved so much and missed. Eventually I expanded to podcasting. I’m going on 300 episodes this week. With the podcast, I realized that perhaps — like God — I needed a day of rest! The thinking was “I’m tired of writing all the time. One day per week I’ll talk. That will be easier.” Little did I know that an audio podcast is not at all easier than producing one blog post!

The blogging and the podcasting cumulatively have led to the point where I’m asked to write for traditional outlets, like a book deal and speaking. It’s led to a very strange model for us as an agency: Our business development efforts are cash-flow positive because of the speaking and the writing. We actually generate a significant amount of income, and all that still drives new business.

J: For a business starting out today (and let’s assume they have fantastic writers with interesting things to say), does blogging still have the same potential it did in 2002?

M: I just published a post called “How to start a blog in 2012.” In short, definitely yes. I look at someone like Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner and just think, “Wow, this guy started a social media blog a few years ago. It’s a multimillion-dollar business now.” So yes, I’m a strong believer. The challenge is most businesses publish stuff that’s so terrible and narcissistic — about their updates and upgrades. That’s not value.

The majority of people who read my blog are not my clients. But when clients come to us to potentially work with our agency, the blog is social proof. They look at a blog post and think, “There are 60 comments on a single post. They’ve got to be good.”

J: Podcasting is a largely unexplored content marketing tactic. Tell me what makes it worthwhile for you?

M: I see it as a very simple way for me to corner a major thought leader and ask them everything I ever wanted to ask them. The listener gets to be the fly on the wall. I’m a massive fan of people like Charlie Rose and Howard Stern. As diverse as those two characters are, they are both excellent at engaging in conversations. When I interview Seth Godin, I’m not going to ask, “Why Purple Cow?” I’m going to ask what his day is like. What’s it like to be him? Where does he go to work? I would never say I’m at the level of Charlie Rose or Howard Stern, but I try to copy them a lot. I’m trying to give the marketing industry an in-depth conversation with really unique people, posing questions you may not have heard before.

If you’ve ever been on one of those [press] junkets in the music industry, they put the artist in a hotel room and they walk the interviewers in like cattle, one after another for short intervals. I always knew going in that the last reporter asked, “Tell me about the new album. Tell me about the producer. What are your touring plans?” I’d go in there and say, “Tell me why you first picked up the guitar?” I’d ask them questions that would spark a conversation. I never wrote down my questions, but I knew the artists and I actually cared about them and their music. When you parlay that to our world, the critical error is that the person creating the content doesn’t care. They don’t know the back-story. They haven’t studied the subject. They write down their questions and read them one after another.

J: Great. Now you’re making me self-conscious because I have a bunch of questions written down.

M: Just keep on going down the list!

J: Marketers have this hunger to discover the next big thing first. It’s a “gotcha” of sorts. What do you think that new big thing is?

M: For me, it comes down to concepts more than tactics. One thing marketers don’t understand well yet is the idea of “screens.” Yesterday I spoke at a conference and the speaker before me was talking about “four screens.” (I thought there were three. Turns out tablets are the fourth screen.) I talk about one screen. In a cloud-based, hyper-connected, super-untethered world, the only screen that’s going to matter to the consumer is the screen that’s in front of them.

Think of it this way: Say you read a page in your Kindle. You put it down then pick it up again on the subway on your iPhone app. You come to the office and maybe you read another page or two on your screen. It’s asynchronous. As you move to a world where anything in front of us can become a screen — which is something else we are going to see — that changes the game! In the world today, I can see how you would say “four screen” or “three screen.” Mobile is not the same as an iPod Touch, which is not the same as a computer. That’s fine. But don’t you see that the smartphone looks a lot like the iPad? The interaction is very similar, and becoming closer and closer. And as TVs are becoming more and more web enabled, they will be operated by voice or touch. It’s all very obvious. So what are you going to do today as a content professional as we rapidly ascend to this one-screen world?

About Mitch Joel: When Google wanted to explain online marketing to the top brands in the world, it brought Mitch Joel to the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. Mitch is president of Twist Image—an award-winning digital marketing and communications agency. He has been called a marketing and communications visionary, interactive expert and community leader. He is also a blogger, podcaster, passionate entrepreneur, and speaker who connects with people worldwide by sharing his marketing insights on digital marketing and new media. Mitch is also a keynote speaker at Content Marketing World 2012.

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free print subscription.

That’s right, when you get right down to it, the process of marketing your content draws heavily from the process of marketing your products.

I treat each piece of content Eloqua publishes like a product. Every new asset has a target audience, a list “price” (gated, ungated, hybrid) and an upgrade road map. Most content we publish is supported by a PR push, a direct marketing element, and a media buy. Content that “sells” (is downloaded, shared, liked, commented on) gets more funding; content that doesn’t is retired. Sound familiar? It should. These are the basics of product marketing.

So what lessons can content marketers derive from our counterparts on the product side of the house? Lots. Here are three of the most essential:

Avoid “content in search of an audience”

The best products fill a real need, and the best product marketers collaborate with product management to dissect every element of that need. This process consists of studying analyst reports, interviewing customers, meeting with sales reps, even talking to people who bought a competing product — all with the aim of reducing the likelihood that the company will release the doomed “product in search of a solution.”

There’s a content marketing parallel, particularly as content becomes a service. Before you create your next supercool presentation, infographic, video or eBook, pause to ask yourself why you are creating it. Are you interested in the subject, or is your audience interested? Is it filling a discernable need, or just making noise? If you aren’t sure, vet the idea with customers, dig into long-tail search queries, and scour Q&A sites like Quora for interesting yet unanswered questions. Float a trial balloon on your blog. Just make sure you aren’t publishing content in search of an audience.  

Shorter, fresher, more visual

We’ve all heard it said: “Better, faster, cheaper . . . pick two.” The maxim, which is as old as tech marketing itself, reduces the universe of product benefits to three essentials and acknowledges that the baseline for success is achieving two of the three. Better, faster, cheaper can be repurposed for content marketing.

“Shorter, fresher, more visual . . . pick two,” should be content marketing’s answer to better, faster, cheaper. If the piece of content you aim to publish isn’t more succinctly written, more intelligently designed, and/ or it doesn’t contain a fresher or more unique perspective than what’s already out there, then it’s unlikely to take root. The social web is a crowded place. Make sure to meet at least two of these three criteria if you expect your content to stand out.

Do you have “permission” to publish?

There is a funny storyline in NBC’s hit series, “30 Rock” in which Alec Baldwin’s character, the revenue-obsessed programming honcho for a Podunk cable network, decides the company should manufacture sofas. He implausibly argues it’s a natural fit for a television network to make furniture because viewers sit on furniture while watching TV. 

Baldwin’s absurdist vision for product marketing not only makes for must-watch television, but it also provides a useful lesson for content marketers. While your content shouldn’t necessarily center on your product, it should focus on subjects reasonably connected to your goods or services. Be sure to ask yourself if you have “permission” to create a particular piece of content. Does your organization have the authority required to publish a definitive guide to a topic? Would your followers look to you to make predictions about how a particular industry will change or evolve? In other words, just because you might want to make sofas, it doesn’t mean buyers will consider you to be a credible manufacturer that they would buy from.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

Image via Bigstock

Blue Fountain Media operates in a cut-throat, crowded field: website development and design, and online marketing. From 2007 to 2010 — years that were downright cruel to most U.S. businesses — revenues at Blue Fountain Media grew 620 percent.

The company was named an Inc. 5000 high-flier in 2011 —reaching number 541 on Inc. Magazine’s annual list of fastest-growing U.S. companies — and executives write columns for among the most recognized media properties in the world, including the New York Times, American Express OpenForum and Inc. Magazine.

Despite appearances, the Blue Fountain Media’s publicity engine is fairly young. “Just five years ago, the world didn’t know much about us,” says Jon Gelberg, chief content officer. “We created a content marketing strategy because we felt people wouldn’t take us seriously until we were recognized by the media as experts in our field.”

And it’s obviously doing something right; the company has a growing roster of high-profile brand-clients, including, Walt Disney Resorts, Procter & Gamble, Oppenheimer Funds and the NFL.

How does a web marketing company stand out from the tens of thousands of companies offering similar services? According to Blue Fountain Media’s chief content officer: gravitas. (We’ll get back to that in a moment.)

Using content to fuel a heady climb.

Gelberg joined the company in 2009 and recounts that Blue Fountain Media was producing very high quality web designs and online campaigns, but little promotion was in place to build momentum and brand recognition.

The first move was to pre-fill an online learning center with more than a dozen articles on popular marketing topics, such as “What Should My Web Design and Development Project Cost?” and “How Social Media Marketing can Enhance your Bottom Line.” With a solid — but very small — library in place, Gelberg began an intensive campaign to pitch stories and expertise to the media. He explains, “We would contact a newspaper or magazine and say, ‘We see you’ve been writing about how to use Facebook. We have that area of expertise.’ Then we linked to an actual story with ready-made quotes for journalists to use.”

Slowly and steadily, the combination of digital content plus PR campaigning began to pay off. Blue Fountain Media gained access to smaller, regional media companies, publishing columns and winning interviews. Those stories in smaller publications were picked up by aggregators like Yahoo, and before long, Blue Fountain Media executives-turned-authors were climbing the media rungs, reaching bigger and bigger media properties with bylined articles, interviews and regular columns.

When asked how the company measures the results of its PR offensive, Gelberg is decidedly circumspect. “I can recount for you the number of clicks or calls to our office mentioning our press coverage,” he explains. “But as a company we also get a big boost from the respect or gravitas of our content marketing program. Our column in the New York Times, for example, bestows a lot of credibility and respect on us, particularly when anyone can call themselves a web designer or SEO guru.”

Don’t bother if you don’t actually possess real expertise.

“Content has gotten a bad name for a good reason,” says Gelberg. He’s referring to what many call “content farms,” or agencies and technology companies that staff up blogging platforms with hundreds of writers who are paid-per-click for branded media sites. He explains that if you hope to get the attention of media companies, you need to have something valuable to share (i.e. insightful expertise) and high-quality writing, not SEO-stacked cotton candy. Without value and quality, your public relations push, no matter how hard you work, will amount to nothing.

Ultimately, catching the attention of top media outlets takes more than great content. It also requires a bit of grace when developing and executing on the all-important pitch. Gelberg offers a few pointers for content marketers with PR aspirations:

• Craft your pick-up line: Remember top media editors receive dozens of pitches per day. How will you break through the clutter? Do you have an insight into a current problem that is unique, practical and valuable? 
• Focus on the editor’s needs: Don’t babble about yourself. Show you are interested and knowledgeable about them — both the publication and the reporter. Point to a specific story and offer an additional insight for a future story on the topic.
• Keep your chin up: You will be rejected. Repeatedly. Get over it. Be persistent; if someone doesn’t answer a call or e-mail but you’re convinced it’s a good fit, follow up multiple times, stopping just shy of pestering.
• Give and take: Be specific about what types of insights and information you have to offer. After a media outlet has relied on you, become a trusted resource by saying “thank you” and keeping in touch with additional insights and story ideas. Follow editors and journalists on Twitter and LinkedIn to see their latest bylines; keep up the social banter to ensure your name is top-of-mind.

What’s ahead for Gelberg and Blue Fountain Media? Consistently executing more of the same. “In our business, staying on top of technologies and trends, and studying online user behavior is the most important thing we do across the company,” explains Gelberg. “By keeping up with and growing our expertise, we serve our clients well and produce intelligent, high-value content.” Touché! 

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free print subscription.

But companies are now left trying to make sense of which ones they should be paying attention to, what they need to be doing in these channels to gain a competitive advantage, and how it all ties into their overall content marketing strategy. 

On today’s rapidly shifting web, it’s essential that companies start to take a more holistic approach to content marketing and connect more effectively with their various stakeholders across a number of web and social channels. This “pressure to extend” has created a new strategic online content life cycle that is imperative when competing on today’s unpredictable social web — especially in light of recent changes in Google search algorithms and how they might affect established SEO strategies. 

The new content life cycle

In a business climate that’s moving at “web speed,” new technologies, media channels, platforms, and social networks continue to pop up and present new challenges for businesses. These demands require a renewed focus on holistic content models, and strategies that scale and optimize the right content to the right channels while measuring its impact. 

This necessitates a shift from the old, linear “Create, Approve, Publish” model of moving content to just the corporate site. Marketers and content owners now require a model that extends in either direction. 

The new content life cycle is, in fact, a virtuous circle: 

• The process, conceivably, starts with planning, before moving into the management phase of content creation.
• From there, content still needs to be created, approved, and published, of course, but our jobs do not end there.
• Once published, the value of that content needs to be measured and (based on that measurement) further optimized.
• Of course, the strategy will likely need to be adjusted based on the relative success (or failure) of that content against its original goal, before being fed back into the planning process for the next wave of content. 

Once a plan like this is put in place, there is no longer a beginning or an end to the content life cycle. Of course, a particular piece of content has to start somewhere, but the overall content strategy needs to be constantly in motion.

Although the corporate website remains critical for establishing a strong, recognizable brand, as we move forward, the process of creating meaningful and engaging conversations across the social channels where your constituents are interacting has a growing impact on whether or not you will achieve your business goals. 

Content strategy in action

Lancaster Bible College (LBC) is an example of an organization that is thinking about its content strategy in ways that will increase business results. When you consider the staggering number of colleges and universities on the web, recruiting efforts can be challenging for a small, faith-based college in Lancaster, Pa. To remain competitive and ensure that prospective students are attracted to the school, it’s crucial for LBC’s marketing team to have control over the delivery of fresh, timely, and interactive content that they can push through the content life cycle and make accessible across various web channels.

LBC’s old web content system had many limitations that prevented the school from powering content quickly to its site and building a presence in the social channels populated with prospective students. LBC needed to revamp its content life cycle and empower content owners to react nimbly to the rapid changes of the web. By empowering the marketing arm of the organization with new web content management technology that removed the historical content bottlenecks, LBC’s marketing department and administrators can now create new content and publish it instantaneously without IT involvement.

LBC has extended its content ownership to more people at the school, enabling them to stay timely and competitive, while removing its reliance on limited IT specialists and/or outside consulting services to publish and make changes to the site. 

LBC is capitalizing on this new strategic approach to marketing on the web by streamlining many of the costly and time consuming phases of the content life cycle, and focusing on what matters most — creating meaningful and relevant content to broaden its online reach, enrich social engagement, and improve business results. 

Four content imperatives for the new content reality

As we awaken to the new realities of content, here are four ways to rethink your content execution, and take advantage of the new content life cycle. 

1. Structure your content marketing strategy as a holistic system that allows you to connect more effectively with various stakeholders across a number of social channels, drive conversation, and influence customers. 

2. Open up content contribution to more users across the organization, providing more opportunities to connect with and engage customers in social channels, and extend your online reach. Be sure to remove any technology or process roadblocks that inhibit the expansion of your contributor pool — the more people who are able to contribute easily, the more content you will have to push across your channels. 

3. Deliver fresh, compelling and timely content that engages users and keeps visitors returning to your site, and then be sure to extend that content into your social channels. It’s no longer required to use your corporate sites as the centralized point of engagement; push your content out to the edge of the network and transform your website so that it serves as another node on that network. 

4. Be sure you are listening to the online conversations of your target audience, and optimize your content and content strategy based on the insights you gather from them. Set goals for expected outcomes with your content, just as you would with a traditional marketing campaign, and track and measure the results fervently. To complete the cycle, constantly test new ideas, and dump what doesn’t work while further optimizing what is working. 

If your organization is still questioning whether you should be doing more on the social web, it’s time to step back and look at your content life cycle through this new strategic lens. As more companies start to adopt a more holistic approach to their content marketing strategies — by ensuring delivery of rich and engaging content on both their site and to social channels — they will drive results, and be better equipped to handle whatever comes next on the web.

Taking even one of these four simple steps outlined above will better position your content and instantly make your content strategy more valuable. But don’t wait to get started! The faster you get rolling, the faster you will start to see results.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

Brody Dorland asked for a breakdown of how agencies and brands differ when it comes to outsourcing. To address this great question, we broke down the survey questions and compared the responses from agencies to those from brands. Here’s what we found.

Agencies are using a greater variety of tactics

Agencies have a higher rate of adoption for almost all content marketing tactics (except eNewsletters and press releases). Some notable differences:

• 97% of agencies use social content compared to 88% of brands.
• 87% of agencies use blogging compared to 69% of brands.
• 79% of agencies use video compared to 68% of brands.
• 58% of agencies use images/infographics compared to 48% of brands.
• 53% of agencies use digital white papers/eBooks compared to 42% of brands.

Both groups rate content marketing effectiveness similarly

For the most part, agencies and brands agree on how effective content marketing tactics are. Two differences:

• 62% of agencies see good results from blogging vs. 48% of brands.
• 41% of brands see good results from eNewsletters vs. 29% of agencies.

Agencies are planning to increase their rate of outsourcing

Currently, brands are more likely to outsource all content types except for mobile and advertorials.

However, the gap between the rate at which agencies and brands outsource is closing. Whereas 64% of agencies and 71% of brands are currently outsourcing at least one content type, 70% of agencies and 71% of brands are planning to outsource at least one content type in the next 12 months.

Agencies and brands value similar attributes of content providers

For the most part, brands and agencies favor the same attributes when evaluating the services of a content provider. Yet, brands consider professional-level writing to be a more important attribute than agencies do (52% vs 44%). Brands also place greater value on hiring someone whose personality fits within the organization’s culture (28% vs. 15%). 

Which of these results do you find most interesting?

Apparently, on April 24, 2012 Google activated new ranking algorithm changes to take care of websites and blogs that indulge in:

• Excessive link building with no regard for quality
• Deceptive doorway pages
• Lots of keyword stuffing
• Publishing lots of meaningless content just to get traffic from search engines 

Which, basically, means all websites that don’t comply with Google’s SEO guidelines.

In terms of improving search quality, this is a good change. It is also good for businesses and entrepreneurs legitimately trying to get good rankings without the headache of competing with websites that try to game the system.

But, as happens with most “simple” changes like this, there has been some collateral damage. Although Google claims that the new update has affected just 3 percent of websites, there have been multiple declarations across the internet of it causing a bloodbath. People are even going to the extent of laying off their employees and considerably scaling down their businesses. 

Are you one of those negatively affected by the Google Penguin update? If you are, you can salvage the situation by taking corrective measures. If you’re not, you should also take preventive measures so that you do not get caught in the fray the next time something like this happens.

How do you do this? With effective content writing, of course.

What is effective content writing, and how does it help?

Effective content writing provides the true value. It is not done simply to improve your search engine rankings. Although there is nothing wrong in trying to improve your rankings, the problem comes up when you write and publish content for that purpose alone.

The days of cheap and low-cost SEO articles are rapidly going away — thankfully. With its successive updates, Google is trying to push forward content that really deserves its place in the ranking index. In turn, this means pushing down content that doesn’t carry much value: Content that just rambles on will not be ranked well no matter how brilliantly it has been “optimized.”

So how do you create effective content that Google and other search engines love? Here are a few things you can keep in mind while creating content for your website or blog:

• Use your keywords only when needed: Keywords are great, but don’t over-use them because this will make your content reek of spam. For instance, if I needlessly go on repeating “great content writer” everywhere on my website, not only will I fail to rank well for the phrase, I might even get penalized and removed from the rankings altogether. Use keywords but only when there is a relevant context. Don’t worry too much about keyword-optimizing your copy – just focus on quality and value.
• Make your content social: Create your content in such a manner that it gains some popularity on social media and social networking websites. This way you don’t have to depend solely on Google for all your traffic. Create compelling and meaningful headlines. Provide content that is bang on target. Develop an original style and focus on quality rather than quantity.
• Create a resource that is highly useful: An ability to write and publish content is a great privilege. There is so much you can teach and communicate to your audience. Make use of it. Whether you share your own information, or gather it from the internet, make sure you create content that addresses topics your audience is interested in and will have a use for. This will naturally make it irresistible for search engines, bloggers, and social media users, alike.
• Create content for other websites and blogs: Prepare an editorial calendar for writing articles and guest blog posts that can be published on websites and blogs other than your own. This helps you gain new exposure and earn quality backlinks – just make sure you only offer your content to trusted and reputable content publishers.
• Create engaging content for online forums and blog comment sections: Online forums are still alive and kicking, and so are blog comment communities. Great interactions go on at these places. There is a misconception that you interact on online forums and blogs just to get backlinks, and when you don’t get those link benefits, there is no use leaving comments there. Yes, sometimes you get some link juice, but even if you don’t, the added exposure you get — and the potential for greater traffic — is well worth the effort.
• Regularly publish a newsletter: Newsletter publishing still rules the roost, as evidenced by the many quality email marketing newsletter publishing services that have been cropping up. It is the best way of keeping in touch with your readers and subscribers, and once you have built yourself a mailing list of a few thousand subscribers, you can instantly broadcast your ideas and offers to these people without having to rely upon search engine traffic.
• Maximize your conversion rate: Re-examine your content and see how well it is working to convert your website visitors into customers. A higher conversion rate can compensate for low traffic periods, so look for ways to measure, analyze, and improve your content wherever necessary to make sure that those who do find your site (through search or through other means) are getting what they want from the experience. 

All the points mentioned above will not only help you improve your search engine rankings, they will also strengthen your overall online presence — both on your own blog or website and across the web.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.