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?

I just stumbled on this video:

It really nails what the content marketing movement is all about. You can listen to the entire 43 minutes, but the good stuff is at the 5-min mark and again at the 16-minute mark. After that you become an unwilling participant in a wine-tasting/bluster-fest. This was probably great if you were at the dinner but leaves me a) jealous, because of the wine they are drinking and b) dizzy due to the erratic camera movements.

My favorite lines—

5:00 “Putting out great content is just the beginning. You’ve got to touch the community and become a part of the conversation.”

16:00 “This is thousands of dollars of advice for free.”

The experts/drinkers in the video are:

Gary Vaynerchuk—WineLibrary.com

Kevin Rose—Digg

Tim Ferriss—4Hourworkweek.com

Robert Scoble—Scobleizer.com

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

Last week I got tagged by Joe Pulizzi from Junta42 to reveal “8 things you didn’t know about me.” So, without further adieu:

1. I have had three exactly cell phones my entire cell-phone career. Only the most recent phone has been a flip phone.

2. Before I met my wife eight years ago, I didn’t own a television. Today I own two.

3. I have the uncanny ability to guess which Borough a New Yorker is from and can correctly identify, within four towns, anyone residing from my home state of Massachusetts.

4. In my 20s, I had a business reproducing Frescoes and lived in Italy for a summer. Some of the Frescoes I designed/produced made it into the Vatican gift shop and the Ringling Museum of Art.

5. I once held the official/unofficial title of “Magic Pony” while working at the MIT startup, Z-Corp. With the exception of co-founding Eat Media, it was the most thrilling, educational and fascinating experience of my life. Watch my former boss, Tim Anderson, make a canoes out of rattan chairs and microwaves into welders here…

6. When I first took a job at a NYC dotcom, I had nowhere to live, so I slept at the office and showered at the gym. My first big task as director of technical projects? Find the CTO a stand-up Spy Hunter video game. Those were the days.

7. The composer Charles Ives is one of my heroes. Sadly, when his former home went on the market in Irvington, NY, I was 7 or 8 hundred thousand shy of purchasing it.

8. A friend of mine is a big wig at the NBA. I asked him to get me into scrimmages at IMG Academies in Bradenton, Florida, where the pros play in the off-season. He said, “You’re fun to watch play and could hang for a few minutes but you don’t stand a chance.” (I still foolishly think I could run the point for a few teams.)

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.