The content below got us thinking, helped us help our customers and kept the office lively (especially on Fridays with the volume up).

Books:
The 4-Hour Work Week
by Tim Ferriss
(Crown Publishing)

The New Rules of PR and Marketing
by David Meerman Scott
(John Wiley and Sons)

Websites/Blogs:
Hubspot
The Web Strategist

Widgets:
Swicki
Twitter

Magazines:
Dwell Magazine
Good Magazine

Music:
Band of Horses
Juana Molina

The shower is one of the few moments during the day when you aren’t bombarded by sales pitches, logos and zippy one-liners. I call it “in the shower marketing”—messaging and brand building that pops up where you least expect it. After 15 years of using Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, I still occasionally read the label in the shower and pick up a little gem of advice before I start the day. And though no action can be taken then and there, I like the soap and I like the message so I continue to buy it.

At the end of the day, your customers have to not only like your product but your message, content and delivery—it’s just the way things are. If they like your soap and dislike your message/content they will more than likely try another brand. And if they like the message/content but hate your soap, then you have a problem of another fragrance to tackle.

When your customers are nearing a buying decision (or even after they have made a purchase), you can do one of four things:

Tell them how awesome you are and how much it will cost them to do business with you.

“Finally you have a choice. Switch to FiOS TV Premier for $42.99 a month.”

Entertain them and hope they remember you for it.

“Paparazzi not included.” (On a billboard US 41. Company name, forgotten. What they sell, unknown.)

Give them more information (content) about the product or service they are interested in, and let your customers speak for you.

The most obvious example for this would be Amazon.com, which shows you similar products/customer reviews/product discussions on the way to the checkout.

Another example would be the use of case studies used by companies such as Shipwire. The concept is simple—let your customer tell your story (with a little help from an experienced writer, of course).

Give them more information (content) and entertain them a bit (more content).

Spin the bottle around on a Revive Vitamin Water and you get this:

“If you woke up tired. You probably need more sleep. If you woke up drooling at your desk, you probably need a new job.”

Go to the Vitamin Water website and the same tone continues:

“Everybody loves a comeback story. The over-the-hill athlete. The long irrelevant rock band…Try Revive.”

Vitamin Water also has a little widget called “TryitCreator.” This little program gives customers the ability (albeit using Flash) to create their own Vitamin Water message and post it to a blog or MySpace. Is every customer going to use this? Probably not. Is it quirky, fun and does it reinforce the Vitamin Water brand? Sure does.

You never really know what you are going to end up with on a remodeling project. Once you open up the walls and ceilings (can of worms), a completely new set of problems have a way of presenting themselves. And once that ordeal is over, one of the most difficult decisions is envisioning the paint on the walls. Is the light going to reflect or absorb? Flat, satin or gloss?

Almost everyone I know has re-re-painted because the color “looked perfect on the chip and all wrong on the walls.” The paint manufacturer’s solution—provide an online color tool to assist consumers with a decision.

This may be one of the most obvious examples of content driving a sale. Even general contractors use Pantone swatches on the job, but at home while drawing up estimates they use online color tools. Homeowners still collect swatches like baseball cards, but more and more decisions are made with online color tools. Content that helps customers make a choice between product x or y, or in this case yellow narcissus vs. cozy cottage, is what the new content revolution is all about.

The Pro Tool:

Pantone.com - Since 1963, Pantone has established itself as the standard for innovative system of identifying, matching, and communicating colors to solve the problems associated with producing accurate color matches. This is a grid-based tool fashioned for the graphic design crowd who know need to calibrate printers, compare cotton swatches and determine paint colors down to specific Pantone numbers.

Homeowner Tool:

Behr.com – The Behr Color Smart tool allows homeowners to start their color tour by Pantone number, browsing all colors or through use of pre-selected inspiration images. This tool assists the color-overwhelmed with custom color pairings selected by designers. The Color Smart tool also allows users to upload their own home photos to view their actual rooms in various colors. Very cool.

Asides:

Once you decide on your colors, keep in mind that Home Depot utilizes a four-color paint system and will have more colors available than Lowe’s, where a three-color system is used.

Whether your company sells calculators or mattresses, there are just as effective opportunities to present content drivers en route to a sale as a color matching tool. Success stories, video podcasts, micro-sites, and other customer reference collateral all serve the same purpose. Keep your customers engaged and informed, and they will come back with your favorite color—green.

Being in the content creation business means the Fed-Ex and UPS trucks pull up every other day with an armload of books. Three months ago, with our shelves at the breaking point, we delivered an entire pickup truck of mostly new books to The Salvation Army. Last week we found our office shelves full again, so we took inventory and then we took action.

With all the books, magazines, and catalogs that arrive, we have trained ourselves to be expert snapshot readers, page glancers, and generally proficient at “judging a book by it’s cover.” With so many different types of media and so much information available, we have to filter our time, and our eyes, in order to focus on information that is relevant, informative, and well written. Sometimes that’s a decision based on experience, and sometimes on just a first glance.

The Design Makes a Difference

On the web, an article printed in Helvetica Light 10 does not make for good reading, doesn’t alias well and is going to stop me from getting any further than sentence four. On the other hand, a poorly designed book cover can be the difference between 50 sales and 50,000—or a book review vs. a last minute dusting and gifting.

There are books like Made to Stick with bold cover art that draws you into the content. And then there’s the other by a so-called marketing whiz that lacks a visually engaging cover and sports uber-cramped chapters printed on a bright-white stock. Great content that goes unread sadly becomes kindling, or hopefully new paper. I read Made to Stick cover to cover, while the other marketing book (featured on many content marketing sites) went unread. Time will tell if I pick it back up.

With all the talk about content driving sales and corporations being more cognizant of the role of content, content producers, managers, and marketers should put more emphasis on the relationship between the writer and the graphic designer.

A Few Tips for Filtering Your Media

Catalogs—you get too many; we do, too. Find a good article here about Catalog Choice.

Magazines—hook up with a business or friend to exchange magazine subscriptions. Put an ad listing on Craigslist in the arts section—many artists use glossy magazines for collage.

Books—Donate to your local library.

There are only a few magazines that keep my interest from cover to cover: Esquire, Dwell , the New York Times Magazine and a bunch of indies we can discuss another day. The reason I am engaged from page 1 to page whatever is the content and the manner in which the content presented— Esquire especially. For those of you involved in print and the web, here is an interesting article in the New York Times about Business Week becoming more “weblike”…more

In business, over-committing is like driving an Ferrari with the parking brake on. You feel and sound like you are humming along, but in reality you are dragging the proverbial ass. Don’t let your marketing copy, success stories, case studies, and other corporate collateral be something you do in between meetings. Instead, make a smaller list. Prioritize. Delegate. Outsource.

In a recent interview we conducted with bestselling author Timothy Ferriss (of fourhourworkweek fame), he gave us this gem:

“One of the most important things is determining this: which activity is the one activity, if completed, would leave you satisfied with your output for the day?” …more

More great advice from David Scott Meerman, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly:

“A journalist skillfully creates interesting stories about how an organization solves customer problems and then delivers those stories in the form of ebooks, white papers, content rich web pages, podcasts, and video…more

I had to endure a week of translating eight hours of Marketing Speak into a coherent article this week and just about lost my mind in the process. It got me thinking about how the success of many organizations has relied on the daring, and sometimes eccentric, saying or doing what flew in the face of convention and how most just try not to ripple the water.

There is certainly the time and place to be innocuous and blend in, but not with content. Being brainwashed by terms like “best of breed” and “Best practices,” I wanted to share some (so called) “best” sites.

Best Stuff—speaks to a young audience but presents content in an unusual manner. I found myself clicking through a dozen or so “best stuffs” before getting bored. It struck me as a more visual version of tags but it does have corporate communication potential.

Best Buy—a primo electronics retailer (with the exception of their music department), but their website is all about product. SALE, 30% OFF, GIFT, all smacked me in the face when I reach the home plate, and not being a big fan of gradients, I got little antsy browsing. There is some UGC but it is buried and doesn’t have many reviewers.

Best Western—having stayed a few Best Western hotels in my day, I can say the following things: there was a bed, they had coffee in morning, and not any major problems to report. The majority of their website is marketing copy, but about 10 clicks in is a little section called “The Travel Mom” featuring Emily Kaufman. In this section, attractions local to Best Western locations are highlighted, and I began to feel like Best Western was showing me around town.

Next we will focus on the content brave.

There is a place for User Generated Content (USG). Epinions is a great example and Amazon is another. The echo of “write what you know” rings true on both of these sites and provides useful content assisting buyers on their way to the checkout basket. Then there are the content farms, more concerned with rising to the top of an SEO search than promoting your brand. A quick search for “content writer” in Google resulted in 293,000 results. The top return was a company asking you this:

“Have you ever wondered as [sic] what is the importance of writing articles to your websites? You must have come across many article sites specially designed to post the articles you have written. Why are such websites designed and what is their importance? Just go through this article and you would be in a better position to answer all the above questions.”

Not the sort of corporate editorial you want promote your brand, especially if it can land your company at the top of search engine results. Dig around the Internet and you will find companies paying “writers” $5-7 dollars for 500-word articles. We don’t know any professional writers who would work for this kind of pay.

Click here for a story published today by the Guardian covering low-quality articles produced by word farms. In addition, remember that SEO is an important part of your business and content management should consider SEO, but not at the expense of your brand and message.

We usually understand our value to customers, but we rarely take the time to speak directly to them. Instead, we try to speak to everyone, as if our message were a 7-11 open 24-hours a day. For late night munchers, we have Crunch and Munch in aisle 2; for early morning health conscious gym-rats, Luna bars near the front register; forgot milk for coffee in the morning guy, fridge 4.

When we take the time to target who we are speaking to, they speak back to us, in the way of sales. Target-Connect-Measure-Repeat. Everyone together now: Target-Connect-Measure-Repeat. Make it your mantra.

A good first step is identifying your target customer. I recently used this example for a client:

“They are a 40-year-old couple. She is an ad exec, he is an architect. He collects vintage sneakers and drives a new Land Rover but longs for a vintage one. She drives a Mini Cooper, runs every night after work with her Weimaraner and reads chick-lit.”

Make it realistic but fun and try to think of it more like an ad campaign than the foundation for an article or corporate collateral piece.