The last time I was at SXSW, it was year 2000. I convinced my ad agency bosses that as a copywriter on the Dell account, it was imperative that they send me AND my art director partner (the extraordinary Enrique Mosqueda) out to Austin to investigate all this interactive hoopla.

To put things in perspective, these were the days when we were making ads for PC’s that played music (replace your stereo!) and “Workstations” with “RDRAM technology, dual processor capability and a 133MHz front side bus.” (I can assure you no one in our company had the faintest idea what a front side bus was.)

At SXSW that year, there was a panel on something revolutionary called a Weblog. Epinions.com had just come out of preview mode. And panelists spoke of a future where Broadband would make it possible “to watch videos on our Palm Pilots and beam them to friends.”

And there was a group of cool kids who called themselves Content Strategists. These were the copywriters of the future, it seemed—the ones who would still have jobs in the foreseeable future. They lived in San Francisco, slept in late, worked from home or cafes, were incredibly well spoken and making tons of money. Some of them had blue hair. All of them wore jeans. (I have torn apart our office to no avail in search of my business card from 2001 with the title of “Content Strategist” printed in a glamorous shade of black. Enrique even jazzed it up with ironic lo-fi black square dots. No doubt it is in an old coin purse with expired credit cards, chinese fortunes and cute boys’ phone numbers pre-husband.)

Back in NY, agency folks from junior AE’s to group directors started jumping ship, trading the agency’s pristine environment of glass, leather and steel, where fresh flowers sat on reception desks of the agency’s 15 floors, for poorly ventilated one-room startups stuffed with desks, computers, bean bag chairs and boxes full of dotcom t-shirts. They traded print ads and press checks for banners and HTML, which they learned from Webmonkey cheat sheets.

Back then, we weren’t sure who would be left standing once the glitter inside the Silicon Alley snow globe settled. But we copywriters were adding “content strategist” to our business cards just in case. Even if we had no idea what it meant to be a “content strategist.”

Here we are 10 years later. I’m a partner of a content agency, which means I’ll be footing my own bill to SXSW 2010 (goodbye Driskill, hello Sheraton). Ian will be speaking about web content. And everyone will be talking about the iPad and its promise to bring our favorite magazines back from the dead. Looking forward to 2020, when all of next week’s excited chatter will seem just as archaic as that “front side bus.”

—Britta

Web 2.0 isn’t new and it isn’t revolutionary—there I said it. The underlying premise of Web 2.0 is very similar to what Berners-Lee developed the web for in the first place: to gather and share information from multiple sources, in multiple formats. The hype surrounding Web 2.0 just seems louder now that we have realized the web isn’t a billboard and a credit card swipe machine. Yet people are filling shelves with books about The New Rules, writing articles about Web 2.0 and even postulating about Web 3.0 in blogs. Knowing what the new rules are is fine and dandy but in my experience people aren’t struggling with the concepts, they are struggling with implementing the concepts

Yesterday I spoke on a panel at USF and I was struck by how many people are looking at Web 2.0 as a magical elixir. “Sprinkle Web 2.0 over your website and watch your sales charts to grow like Sea Monkeys.” Keep in mind that the guy who invented Sea Monkeys invented X-ray glasses, and the people pushing Web 2.0 as state of the art aren’t that far behind him. The solution is not the solutions: Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Wiki’s, Widget’s and Viral video—but rather the psychology of the people in your organization and their ability to adopt change.

Here’s the outline of my speech and a primer on the successes and struggles regarding the different stages of business.

Startup Implementation Success Points
—Most start-ups are beginning with 2.0 strategies out of the gate. Blogs/Forums and video’s are second nature to many new businesses and instrumental in why/how they decided to incorporate.
—Successful start-ups aren’t corralling people towards the checkout line but instead they are creating (and sometimes giving away) tools that create trust and establish communites.
—They realize the importance of relationships online and off. It’s not one or the other, it’s a combination of the two.

Startup Implementation Struggle Points
—Disregarding the importance of design. A good product or service coupled with terrible presentation is only overcome by tremendously hard work and luck. It can be done but why take that route?
—Struggling start-ups treat web 2.0 as end-all-be-all solutions and don’t adjust other marketing behaviors to work with web 2.0. This is what Seth Godin talks about in Meatball Sundae.
—The have a leader who is nose down, hoards information and are without a reliable (or can’t keep) a qualified #2.

Mid-Sized Implementation Success Points
—When mid-sized companies invest in solid management people and tools, they create a nimble environments allowing them to retain the creative atmosphere from their start up days.
—Mid-sized businesses often differentiate themselves with voice. A unique service or product these days is not enough, your branding and content has to separate you from the crowd.
—They listen to their competitors, employees and thoroughly evaluate their marketplace (online and off.)

Mid-Sized Implementation Struggle Points
—Mid-sized companies who try to be too corporate right out of the gate are sure to lose out on the incredibly talented Gen Y employees. That 25-year-old you just hired as a Marketing Manager grew up with MySpace and mobile texting, probably has a website she designed and coded and knows more about viral videos than you do.
—When the principals of mid-sized companies still try to do everything themselves, you’ve got trouble. Someone, somehow, has to get through to them that “no, it won’t get done exactly like they would have done it” but in order to grow (implement that new content strategy) they have to let go.
—The biggest struggle I’ve seen in mid-sized businesses is management fearing to change or do anything different than what got them to where they are.

Large Corporation Implementation Success Points
—C-Level executives empower and encourage management to be nimble.
—They are technologically agnostic (not locked into one vendor/CMS/Microsoft).
—They rely on outsourcing and stick with their core competencies.

Large Corporation Implementation Struggle Points
—They compete in The Org-Chart Olympics. No one knows who is in charge or what the most direct rout is to get things done and often different teams want different messages. This is usually caused by a lack of executive buy in, department infighting and general mismanagement.
—Large companies who burn through vendors have to: invest a considerable amount of time to ramp up with new vendors, usually provide rushed/incomplete project specs and fail to look at vendors as valued team-members.
—Upper management fails to realize that the bottom reflects the top. From creativity to attendance to attitude to commitment.

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?

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