Is it ever OK to lie with your content?

Quick answer: Yes, but only if you are very good. More on what “good” means in a second.

Back in July, spy photos and brief video surfaced on several automobile enthusiast websites. Depicted was a prototype Porsche station wagon, known in automotive parlance as a shooting brake.

The photos and video caused a sensation and spread throughout the enthusiast community, driving loads of comments on blogs and rampant speculation as to when the boys from Zuffenhausen were going to release the official car to the public. The Frankfurt Auto Show? Tokyo? People wanted to know.

The questions continued to pour in. Did this mean Porsche was abandoning it’s oft-maligned SUV, the Cayenne? Was this new shooting brake, clearly based on the entry-level Cayman, going to be Porsche’s only venture into the world of station wagons? Was Porsche going Volvo on the world, and completing its sellout?

The company had nothing to say. And if the voices clamoring in the blogosphere had calmed down for just a minute, they might have heard the faint sound of snickering.

As it turned out, Porsche’s shooting brake was a fake. The whole thing was dreamed up by the then soon-to-be-unemployed staff of Top Gear America as a parting gift to the show’s many fans.

Most people hate being duped, but in this case, there was no backlash against the show. Accumulate enough goodwill in a community and you will be forgiven the occasional whoopee cushion on the chair.

If you were inspired by the Top Gear crew’s antics and are determined to set the world afire with your own tall tale, here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to be good and do it right..

1. Execute. The only way you have even half a chance is to come up with something clever and then make it sing. It ain’t going to work if people don’t believe it.

2. Don’t mess with people’s emotions in a negative way. I think we can all agree that the Balloon Boy fiasco—originally dreamed up as a publicity stunt—managed to generate only the wrong kind of attention once the truth came out. Nothing that ends with a criminal investigation is worth it.

3. Enhance your cool. Some people don’t react well to being pranked. There isn’t much you can do about this, but you are required to have a sense of humor when dealing with those who don’t.

4. Don’t forget your audience. The Top Gear stunt worked well because the automobile enthusiast community is used to manufacturers trying to hide new models (often in plain sight) and used to manufacturers building show cars that never make it to production. Plus, these are enthusiasts; they love to talk about cars, the good, the bad and the ugly.

5. Be prepared for blowback. Some people, bless their gullible hearts, won’t understand the joke and may begin acting on some of the falsehoods you’ve laid out. Years ago, I wrote a newspaper column, published on April 1, which stated that the legislature had just passed a law changing Daylight Savings Time to mean a two-hour forward leap instead of the customary one. Despite naming my fictitious governor’s press secretary Jacques Strap and despite reminding readers to look carefully at the dateline of the newspaper, we were deluged with calls wondering when this was taking place. Exercise your power judiciously.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

OK, so let’s say you are managing a website. It could be as simple as a blog written by one person on one general topic or something complicated that weaves massive amounts of content into an eCommerce matrix. Either way, it’s a large interconnected web of content—your content ecosystem.

Bottom line: your content already rocks, but it’s not bringing in the readership and without the readership, you are failing to deliver what you promised the CTO (sales leads, widget sold, butts in seats, whatever metric you are beholden to) when you were given control of the site.

So now what? How do you spread the word? How do you evangelize for your content without being obnoxious?

New school versus joins old school
This is going to require a blitz that’s at once comprehensive and low key. It’s going to require the latest social media savvy as well as traditional marketing tactics.

Navigating social media
Do you have a Facebook page? Are you still using MySpace? Who’s tweeting about you? Have you snagged the obvious domain names and Gmail accounts for your brand? (For a mighty herd of social media marketing tools, go here, or for a counterpoint on the value of social media for business, go here.)

Social networking
Facebook is growing explosively and has recently accelerated past MySpace in several key user metrics. Continue to ignore Facebook at your peril. This is not to say that Facebook in three years won’t be in the same tailspin that MySpace is currently experiencing, but you can’t afford to give those years away to your competitors.

Content promotion tactic: Establish a Facebook page. Do not let anyone who doesn’t have a personal Facebook page operate it. Give the operator free reign to update the page with the appropriate multimedia content and use the status update as an additional outlet to promote new content on your main site.

Micro-blogging
Twitter is something that makes no intuitive sense to many people before they start to use it. Once they do, however, its utility as an instantly updated and instantly responsive news and information kiosk becomes abundantly clear. How is your brand being talked about on Twitter? Are you tweeting, or has some impostor hijacked your brand for nefarious purposes? If your brand has yet to be sucked into a Twitterstorm, consider yourself lucky and be prepared.

Content promotion tactic: Establish a Twitter identity for your brand. The person in charge of your Twitter account should already be a Twitter user as they will know the etiquette as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the medium. Encourage them to start tweeting, but more than anything, encourage them to listen, monitoring what is being said about your brand and using Twitter to respond to customer relations issues. A little good will is going to go a long way. Then start using Twitter to promote your content.

Social aggregation
Search engines are just one gateway to online information. While SEO is important for now (but is likely to be made irrelevant by semantic search very soon) there are ways to avoid the deep dark pit of the Google algorithm and promote content through other types of search.  Social aggregation sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon and Delicious all offer some variation on the theme of sharing stories.

Content promotion tactic: Post a story to Digg and get some colleagues to Digg it. If it’s good content, it will gain its own traction and move up the list. Don’t overdo this. Same deal with StumbleUpon and some of the others. Be selective and use your best content.

Old School
Yes, you still need to be writing SEO friendly copy, entering appropriate and comprehensive metadata for each piece of content, sending out email newsletters, blogging, posting videos to YouTube, posting photos to Flickr and more. No one said all this free promotion wasn’t going to be time consuming.

Happy curating. Your content ecosystem will be all the healthier with a little care and feeding.

—Jonathan (@bentpiton)

Photo by baxterclaws

We are devouring so much media these days: websites, emails, newsletters, TV, radio, print (albeit dwindling), online videos and social media. With this avalanche of content you’d think that we would be less detailed about picking up on the nuances, less effected by poor communication and design, but I find the opposite to be true. The more media I consume the more neon orange and off-putting the really bad content becomes and the more pastoral and engaging the well written/designed content becomes.

Here are a few examples of messages I recently received that turned me off:

WHERE’S THE BFF

“Hi Ian,

I’m thrilled to personally invite you to Mediabistro Circus 2009, Extraordinary Impact: Where Media Meets Technology. An impressive roster of new media MacGyvers will share ingenious ways to make the most of limited resources in a challenging economy.

At Mediabistro Circus, you’ll learn how to:

Turn your passion into a business with Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek
Give your brand personality with Gary Vaynerchuck, host of Wine Library TV
Build relationships that power success with Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone
Create a journalism of engagement with John A. Byrne, executive editor, Businessweek.com
Create your own social network with Gina Bianchini, founder and CEO of social networking platform Ning.com. And we’ll have entertainment, valuable opportunities to meet your colleagues, and some fun surprises.

One especially good bit of news is that we’ve reduced the ticket price this year to make it easier for you to attend and learn from these inspiring innovators. The early-bird 2-day pass for one person is $695, and the group rate is just $245. Register now to lock in these deals.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Laurel
Laurel Touby
founder & cyberhostess | mediabistro.com”

Communication Next Time

While I appreciate the “personal invitation” once I scroll past the fold I realize I am really not that special. “Personal invitation” is camouflaged marketing lingo for there is a field in our database named FirstName. If this was indeed “personal”,  Laurel Touby would have sent me an email not mailer@mediabistro.com. It is these small things that differentiate building real trust and just asking for the sale.

Next time just send me, and the other 100k people in your database, a more informative email and skip the personal business, it’s not personal, it’s business—and I understand we’re not bff’s.

WHERE’S THE DISASTER?

I, like much of wired America, order many things from Amazon. I have very few complaints—except this.

It wasn’t raining on January 27th; it was neither too hot nor too cold. Everything was perfect about the day except I needed dual monitors to get started on a content migration project and needed (4) Tritton TRI-UV100 SEE2 USB 2.0 SVGA Adapters and they weren’t in the office when I arrived. This created a wee bit of stress that was further amplified by the lack of knowledge concerning a potential “natural disaster.”

This got me:

a. Worried about the UPS driver.

b. Wondering if a tornado was headed towards me.

c. Wrestling with navigation at weather.com (which actually is a disaster).

Communication Next Time

Next time tell me my package is running late and give me a realistic date of when it’s going to arrive— “Delayed”, is just fine.

For the past few weeks, my existence has consisted of eating, sleeping, working and daydreaming about a tortoise. Discouraged by my new landlord’s no pet policy, a tortoise seemed a perfect low-profile pet candidate. My imaginary but soon-to-be pet tortoise is a girl and has a name—Priscilla.

To the best of my knowledge, a tortoise doesn’t bark or meow or chew up the baseboards. Best of all, tortoises are herbivores, so Priscilla won’t require any mashed up meat from a can.

After a week or two of dreaming about Priscilla, my fantasy was interrupted by a harsh dose of reality: tortoises hibernate. For several months. All winter long. I decided that Priscilla can not be, because when she hibernates, I will miss her too much.

If Priscilla were a website, we’d tell her that a hibernating site is a site no one wants.

We’d say, “Priscilla, before you become part of the world wide web, you need to get this through your exoskeleton:”

• What is going to keep your audience engaged and coming back and wanting more?

• Will your content hold your audience’s attention with it’s every move?

• Will your audience be unable to resist photographing it to document every new development and forwarding updates to family, friends and everyone and anyone else in their contact list?

Don’t let your content curl up for a couple of months and go to sleep while your audience checks back, obsessively at first, looking for any sign of life, then frequently, then seldom and then, maybe . . . not at all.

–Wendy Joan

PS. I’ve just learned that not all tortoises hibernate. And even the species that do can be kept awake if they find a good domestic setting. Which just goes to show that even if your content is suiting up for a long winter’s nap, there’s still time to change it’s natural instinct to ensure it never hibernates again.

From the “It’s-never-too-late-to-learn-a-new-trick” category, the Vatican has launched its very own YouTube Channel.

It’s pretty basic so far, but you can have it translated into Italian, German or Spanish. Currently, there are only 18 videos on the site and they are almost all of Pope Benedict XVI speaking, but the potential for the site is amazing.

There are links to Radio Vaticana, the papal state’s radio service, Centro Televisivo Vaticano, the Vatican’s television station, the Vatican’s official website and the official website of the Vatican state (in Italian only).

On the YouTube channel, I’d like to see way more from the history side of things, as well as a video library of Pope John Paul II’s greatest hits, but it’s early in the process.

What happens next will say a lot. Launching a social media portal is one thing; nurturing a social media portal is another. How much are you investing in the care and feeding of your social media assets?

— Jonathan

I’ll admit it: I’ve never been big in to “community.”

Chamber of Commerce meet-and-greets give me hives, street fairs scare me and I’m still high-fiving myself for never attending a city commission meeting despite my years as a city magazine editor.

So as a lifelong non-joiner, all the emphasis on creating online communities leaves me a bit skeptical. I’ve already shared my dedication to BabyCenter, and Saturday mornings wouldn’t be the same without Ohdeedoh or Apartment Therapy.

I consume their content. I post the occasional question or comment. I feel good about myself when the editors select my question for their “Good Questions” series. But do I need to hang out in their forums and make a slew of new BFFs? Not so much.

Just because users aren’t contributing to your online forums or “connecting” with one another doesn’t mean you’re not offering a meaningful user experience. Some products and services are more apt to attract “joiners and contributors” than others. The correlation between joiners, active community members, purchasers and content (custom and UGC) is not always easy to distinguish. Check your analytics.

Remember in school how the teachers made you break in to small groups? Some of us hated breaking in to small groups, and when it comes to online content, some of us just want to hear what the teacher/editor/experts have to say and move on to the shopping cart, or in search of more information. Give us relevant content and we will come back again and again.

—Britta

There are plenty of compelling reasons to have original content on your web site, but if you need one more kick in the tail during these challenging economic times, here it is: advertising is most effective on sites that have original content.

Sites with original content perform better than portals. Sorry, Yahoo.

Sites with original content perform better than ad networks as well. Sorry, ValueClick.

So what are you waiting for?

If you want stronger brand awareness, better retention of you brand’s message and have more people who intend to make purchases form a better opinion of your brand, get cracking on the content.

— Jonathan

I know, I know. Your mind is reeling at the mere mention of the word Baconnaise. Yes, some mad culinary genius has combined the two greatest burger toppings on earth and come up with the spread of the gods.

No doubt that some of us had thought about making a bacon-flavored mayonnaise at some point in our lives, but only one man was crazy enough to follow through and make it happen. That man is now delivering a unique and seriously addictive product. A burger without Baconnaise seems naked by comparison.

Delivering the content marketing version of Baconnaise has to be our top goal for 2009. Each of us has to be thinking about spreading the Baconnaise on thick this winter. What will it take to deliver this level of unctuous porcine goodness?

Creativity.

There are a lot of other ingredients, but creativity is the top one. We need to be able to have the vision to say to ourselves, “Mayonnaise is already pure fat, so let’s add some bacon to it.”

Double-down on the heart-attack quotient, if you will.

It has been said that it’s the rare person indeed who can take the hitherto unknown and render it blindingly obvious.

Here’s to seeking that sort of inspiration in 2009.

— Jonathan

It’s alarming to see how many brands my four-year-old son already recognizes, even out of their normal context.

The first one I can recall him parroting back regularly was, of course, McDonalds. No surprise there; Chicken McNuggets are the only meat product he consumes. (And, he only ate his first one because I tricked him by telling him it was a cookie.)

He’s never been formally tested, but my son must have outstanding vision because he can spot the Golden Arches from miles away. We can be motoring along and I’ll hear from the backseat, “Daddy, there’s McDonalds.” Sure enough, in a few minutes, one will appear on the horizon.

But he also knows the signs for WalMart and Publix, two stores we shop at each weekend. He knows Starbucks, Home Depot and Lowes. Amazingly, during the Eagles-Vikings game last weekend, he noticed that the halftime show was sponsored by Lowes,  seeing the tiny logo in the corner of the screen, something that had flown right past me.

The cynic in me also notes that he recognizes every Sesame Street character, especially Elmo, Grover and Big Bird, as well as Sponge Bob Squarepants, and anyone who doesn’t think that those critters are also brands is seriously deluding themselves.

What does all this marketing mayhem mean to a toddler? It’s really hard to say. On one level, he’s still at the age where he won’t remember anything and tomorrow is impossibly far away. On another, I can’t help but fear that now that the marketers have their meathooks in him, they are never letting go.

— Jonathan