Scenario: It’s the week after you’ve attended a conference. Sitting at your computer you come across a stack of business cards, folks you’d like to keep in contact with—(ideally to create and maintain a relationship). You jot off a series of non-pitchy, follow-up emails—albeit there could be sales potentials but the relationship is what you are focused on. This is what you get back:

Bill

I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

-Anon

No email response. No reference to the conference you both attended, just a simple LinkedIn invitation. You believe there is value in the relationship, so you click “Accept” and realize you are one 500+ people in this persons network. Whoanh Whoanh.

Many of the people using LinkedIn and other social networking/community sites are digitizing the card dispenser/amasser strategy akin to conferences, by trolling for contacts. There are some people/firms who don’t take individuals/companies seriously unless they have a magic number of contacts in their social network. And what originally started out as a global conversation has quickly degraded into a broadcast. “It’s not what you know but who you know” has taken on a life of it’s own, and in some cases not for the best.

When you have 2149 contacts in your social network, how many of those people do you really know? Are you building those relationships or are they notches in your networking belt?

A community usually works together to embrace the well being of the group. A network is a connection, lacking an emphasis on how strong or weak that connection is. A community (virtual or real) is comprised of a coterie you could turn to for advice and assistance. Your network consists of folks who are more apt to wonder what is in it for them. My neighbor Jeff knows a great mechanic—that’s my community. My mechanic—that’s my network. Can they be one in the same, yes, but it takes work.

Targeting your audience. It’s a simple concept but one that is often done poorly.

This weekend I caught a reflection of the inside of fly on my Lucky Brand Jeans it reads “Lucky You”. Funny and bit risqué, but definitely memorable and a good example of content placement. The designer jeans business is driven by fashion which is driven by sex appeal and Lucky made a remarkable play with this.

Later in the day, on a weekend warrior Lowes run, I passed a homemade sign on the side of the road that read “Childcare Available”. The sign was one of those wire stakes in the ground jobbers—but this one was ultra special. It was stenciled with silver spray paint, on cardboard, at a busy intersection. This sort of advertising breaks all the rules—poor design, lack of a targeted audience and shoddy execution. The childcare business more than most industries is built on trust and I would bet the farm the company who made these signs didn’t receive a single call.

I can hear the conversation now.

“The economy is down, we need more sales and we can’t afford to do more advertising.”

“We’ll let’s stay late and make some signs.”

Three cans of spray paint later the company unknowingly branded themselves as sloppy, dangerous and uncaring—not the kind of people you want handling your children.

Is your organization thinking creatively about content or haphazardly tossing signs on the side of the road?

1. Producing relevant content and without taking design into consideration.

-Stock photography that looks stock does absolutely nothing to promote authenticity—in fact it degrades it.

2. Putting multiple people in charge of your content marketing strategy without direction or oversight.

-Too many Indians equals a watered down content marketing strategy, and too little input equals words on a page without a clear call to action. Your content strategy should be your marketing department’s number one priority and your top team should be managing it, or managing the vendor who is managing it.

3. Creating a content marketing strategy without looking at what your competitors are doing.

-Although there is never a guaranteed blueprint for success, you have to perform due diligence before investing time and money towards content. To really hit it out of the park, you should be looking at what the most successful companies across all markets are doing. Subscribe to Ad Age Daily for a taste of what market leaders are up to.

4. Using the same format over and over.

-Unless you are the New York Times, the “wall of words” approach probably isn’t the best strategy, so mix it up. How-to’s, charticles and Q & A’s are all effective ways to engage readers through memorable content.

5. Telling your story instead of letting your customers tell it for you.

-New customers don’t trust you, but they do trust your current customers. Offer happy customers free services or products to participate in an interview or case study. Create a community or forum from which you can cull great stories.

6. Blogging, every once in awhile.

-Your blogging strategy should drive your content marketing strategy. People want to do business with people, not monolithic corporations, so show potential customers who you are and what you know. (Google likes new content, too.)

7. Interviewing customers and not re-purposing the audio from the interview into a podcast.

-Audio is easily captured during an interview via digital recorder or conference call recording. You can highlight one great answer or post the entire interview. We call this a two-for-one. (Story and a podcast.)

8. Tossing new tools (Podcasts, Video, Wiki’s and widgets) atop an unclear content strategy, or shaky infrastructure.

-Implementing a wiki, case studies and a handful of widgets is not going to unleash the customer floodgates. You have to have build your content strategy from the top down, and from the inside out. Seth Godin’s book Meatball Sundae describes this in detail.

9. Telling people what they already know.

-Don’t repeat what is already common knowledge. I quote and reference many authors, content marketers and executives but I don’t always agree with everything they say, and I say so. You need to make your voice heard. Don’t be gray—it doesn’t look good on you. Be orange instead.

10. Talking to too broad of an audience at one time.

-If your content marketing plan involves a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to connecting with prospective customers, stop. Go back to the drawing board and start over. Successful marketing only works when your message is targeted. If you are creating content targeting middle-aged drivers and teens, chances are you are going to fail miserably on both fronts.

Last week, SAP held an invite-only three-day global online marketing event. (Sadly, I wasn’t invited, but David Meerman Scott was, and he writes about it here.) This virtual event was said to include online communities, virtual conferences, expert content—the works.

It seems every other day I read about another “Can’t Miss Event of the Year in Online Marketing,” but I have “Can’t Missed” every single one of them, despite impressive panelist offerings from Web 2.0 wiz-kids to traditional print legends to design/advertising superstars. So here I sit in NYC, with the MinOnline Digital Media Summit happening less than a mile away from me tomorrow, without a ticket to the ball. The reasons for me not attending are two-fold, but both hinge on trust.

1) Conferences, for the most part (with the exception of SXSW), suck. I’ve been on both sides of them: The “stand at the booth for three days with an unnatural grin plastered to my face until my cheeks ache” side, and the “sit in a huge lecture hall, load up my bags with tchockes and network until I don’t like who I’ve become” side.

2) Conference content is much better suited for the web with me as an active participant. Let me watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it.

When looking at conference agendas I can’t help but think:

Is it a community or congregation?

Is it a back and forth interaction, or a sit and listen?

Is it information that I could have procured from the author/speaker’s book, or was it interactive and off the cuff?

In order to get me to purchase a $700-1,300 conference ticket, I need to be provided some sort of guarantee that my attendance is going to be worthwhile.

Am I going to learn something of significant value?

Will I make a useful contact or sale?

Are the speakers/organizers going to answer questions that help me get to the next level?

For some, conferences are successful, useful and exciting. I’m not trying to denigrate the conference world—it surely has its place. What I am trying to say is, there are some among us who are interested in the content but not the excited about the limited delivery options. Because in the end it’s all just content, and information delivered and received (live) from the mouths of the informants is not necessarily different from a well-produced webcast of the same event. Or is it?

So how about you? Where do you stand when it comes to conferences?

So your CEO approved the budget for you to launch a new content marketing plan. Whether you’ll be hiring an in-house editor, or working with a content management company, there’s a lot to do between now and three months of content from now. Here are 5 tips on how to get organized, because the sooner you get your editor up and running, the sooner you can get back to the 4,000 other marketing projects on your docket.

1-Find your voice and stick with it.

Chances are, your company already has a corporate voice, whether it’s whimsical/friendly (Jet Blue), sharp/modern (Glaceau) or serious/informative (Honeywell). Now it’s your job to ensure all of your collateral maintains that voice, from the corporate blog to the case studies to the cocktail napkins at your next big event. Nothing says “what they heck are they talking about?” like a funny newsletter linked to a dry corporate website.

2-Outline your content plan.

Will you publish four new articles on your site each month, or ten? Will your customers receive four magazines a year, or six? Does your email newsletter go out every Tuesday, or every other Thursday? We’re big on consistency, and so are consumers, so create some rules and stick to them. Even better, make sure everyone in the company receives a copy, so the next time your sales director wants to blast your entire email list about an upcoming trade show, you can hand him a copy of the content calendar and let him know the date of your next opening.

3-Decide who makes the decisions.

Now that you have your content plan, it’s time to start filling in the gaps. At first, everyone from biz dev to IT will want to have a say in the master story list. But by your second month, you may be pulling teeth to get any responses to the next batch of story ideas. Determine up front who needs to give story ideas the green light, and who needs to sign off on final content before you press “publish.”

4-Create or update your style guide.

If you do have one, update it. If you don’t have one, gather those with buy-in and jot down some notes. Are you going to use serial commas? Is the tone of the interviews going to be more conversational or corporate? Will you follow Chicago or AP style, or some combination of the two? Do web addresses get www or http://? What gets bolded and what gets italicized? And what is the naming convention for your various products and services? These may seem like nitpicky things, but when you are in the midst of landing a national account or being acquired, you don’t want to look like an amateur.

5-Build a process for the handling the nitty-gritty.

When it comes to figuring out which file is the one the proofreader approved vs. the one management signed off on, we can tell you that email doesn’t work—which is why we use the online project management system Basecamp. MS Word’s track changes feature is great, but only if you have a system for gathering everyone’s edits on one doc. During important meetings, use a digital recorder to capture all the details, and work with a transcription service to convert it to text. It’ll cost you about a dollar a minute, but will pick up all those little details various members of the team may have missed or forgotten. Create a process and a chain of command and give your editor or writers feedback all at once. Nothing frustrates them more (and risks missing deadlines) than edits from the same organization that go against one another.

BONUS. And finally, our own pet peeve: Just say no to distracting widgets.

Twitter, Utterz and Sphere—the list goes on and on. Put the clamp down on the umpteen Web 2.0 widgets cluttering your site (or at least take them off your homepage and put them onto your blog—tastefully). When widgets are scattered across your homepage, it looks much too “flavor-of-the-day” and distracts from the overall design of your site. Rarely have we seen it done well (although Liveperson might be an exception). Before downloading the latest “nizzer-keen” content generating widget, ask yourself how its features align with your original content plan and how much control you have over the content it pulls in—you may not want that news about Britney’s latest breakdown on your corporate homepage.

After the wheel caught on and people realized they could get where they were going in a tenth of the time, they didn’t wake up and say, “Nahhh, let’s go back to walking.” The same can be said about content marketing.

Five years ago, a small number of people would have Googled your company before doing business with you. Today, anyone interested in your products or services is most likely going to see what’s been written about you on the web before, or after visiting your site. They are no longer interested in just your pitch.

What customers are really interested in is what additional information you bring to them. They want assurance that you, as a brand, are trustworthy and knowledgeable.

They want to know:

• What your customers say about you.
• If you’re up on the latest trends and news in your field.
• Where you stack up among your peers or in your industry.

Why is this important?

Here’s the big hammer (or the new wheel): Content marketing is not a trend. In another year, customers are not going to say, “No, I didn’t Google them. Who does that anymore?”

Instead, the companies focused on content marketing will be racking up sales while you are left wondering what the heck happened. Earlier this week during an Author Teleseminars, teleseminar, Seth Godin revealed, “Content marketing is the only marketing left.”

That’s it folks, that’s your new office—when people type your company’s name into a search engine, your bottom line is dependent on what returns, period. Wake up tomorrow, take half your marketing budget and spend it amping up your product, take the other half and dive into content marketing. It’s either that, shut down Google, or find a big wad of investment capital and pray for the best.

Here’s a few upcoming events to get you up to speed on Content Marketing:

CUSTOM CONTENT CONFERENCE

When:
March 9-11, 2008

Where:
Marriott New Orleans
555 Canal Street in the French Quarter

What:
The conference will bring together marketers, advertisers, and custom publishers. Attend and network while debating and exchanging ideas for leveraging custom content in today’s digital marketplace.

Register:

Register here

ONLINE MARKETING SUMMIT 2008

When:
February 21-23

Where:
Sheraton’s Harbor Bay International Flagship hotel in San Diego

What:
Session will Feature Speakers from Microsoft, LinkedIn, Cisco,
SEMPO, and National Public Radio

Register:

Register here