His message lacks sugar coating, and it may be tough for some marketing departments to swallow: If you haven’t adopted the new rules of marketing, you’re on your way to becoming obsolete. Scott talks with SAP INFO online about the power of Google and how companies should stop begging for attention.

Click here to read the interview

In 1980 The Circle Jerks recorded the song “Deny Everything”. The San Francisco based company Pure Digital Technologies, maker of The Flip, has incorporated this strategy into their customer service.

“I’m innocent
until I’m proven guilty.
Deny everything, Deny everything.
I’m being framed
it’s all a set-up
Deny everything, Deny everything
I’m just a spoke in the wheel
just a part of the puzzle
a part of the game.
I’m being framed
innocent
until I’m proven guilty.
Deny everything
Deny everything
Deny everything
Deny everything”

I like many other people saw the wonderful video by David Pogue about The Flip and was intrigued. Shortly after watching the video I hopped online and purchased a shiny white one from TheFlip.com. Two days later I purchased a second one at Best Buy. (I had a conference to attend and ship time wouldn’t have it to me by my departure date.)

Initially the camera worked great but on the second day it wouldn’t allow me to delete videos. Actually, it would allow me to delete videos but it still thought the camcorder was full after deletion. In between conference sessions I called customer support—5 times. Each time they gave me a different thing to try, none of them worked. Each person I spoke with said they had never heard of my issue and that there were rarely any problems with The Flip. Once I arrived home, failing to record the conference highlights as I had hoped. I called customer service again to say none of the solutions they offered worked. They started me right back at the beginning of the troubleshooting chain, having me repeat what I had already tried. Finally, after a tremendous waste of my time, they stated that they would take a look at it—if I paid to ship it back to them. Their product is broken after 1 week and I have to ship it back to them?

Since I had the second Flip I purchased from Best Buy I returned the broken one and asked for my money back. No go, but I could get a new Flip in exchange. After one use with the new one: Record, Save, Delete. I ran into the same issue. 3 more calls to customer service and I am still waiting.

Had I gone to Amazon and done a check on the Flip I would have read all about their dreadful customer service and MAC support.

$350 dollars in camcorders

$70 in accessories

10+ calls to customer service (2 pending)

On my most recent call this morning I got someone new.

She asked what OS I was using (the first time that this question had been asked).

“Leopard,” I replied.

“Oh, it doesn’t work with Leopard,” she answered.

Maybe they felt they were “proven guilty” or perhaps the customer service rep was a fan of early punk rock. Either way—branding, customer service and content marketing are a closed loop that has to work in harmony. No harmony here I’m just Flipped Off.

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?

Recently I got one of those inspirational signs as a gift and had a content marketing epiphany. Caring is sharing, so here you go:

Gift Store Wisdom—To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.

Content Wisdom—To Google you may be one website, but to a consumer you may be the website.

Gift Store Wisdom—You always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Content Wisdom—You always miss connecting with 100% of the customers you don’t talk to directly.

Gift Store Wisdom—The road to success is always under construction.

Content Wisdom—The content you created last week/month is still relevant but not enough to feed Google—it’s always hungry.

Gift Store Wisdom—Never too busy to be beautiful.

Content Wisdom—Content and Design are not oil and water. Make your content pretty—your content will thank you.

Gift Store Wisdom—Map out your life. But do it in pencil.

Content Wisdom—Have a starting place to measure from and then measure, test and start over.

Gift Store Wisdom—To play it safe is not to play.

Content Wisdom—Content Marketing and Advertising that inspires you to act is rarely safe. Look at all your favorite campaigns (advertising, marketing, content) and send me a link of all the safe ones.

Gift Store Wisdom—Age isn’t important, unless you are cheese.

Content Wisdom—Send your best Content Marketing equivalent to ian(at)eatmedia.net

-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.

Junta42, run by the Content Marketing ringleader/champion and tireless cheerleader Joe Pulizzi, published the latest release of the Top Content Marketing Blogs today. The Eat Media Blog jumped up 10 spots to number 20—if this were 1986, then we effectively went from #30 “Venus” by Bananarama, to #20 “Higher Love” by Steve Winwood. So, while I am extremely proud to now be numerically associated with an ex-member of Blind Faith instead of a Euro-pop group that included “Banana” in the group’s name, there is still a ways to go. (Ironically, Bananarama most likely out sold Blind Faith by a landslide.)

In all seriousness, the Junta 42 Top Blogs List includes some very talented writers, online marketers and social media experts, and we are honored to be in their company. And though we didn’t break the top 10 in this go-round, honestly, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have been incredibly busy here at Eat Media and haven’t been doing a good job of drinking our own content marketing Kool-Aid. Remember, in the Content Marketing world if you aren’t updating, you’re backtracking.

Never a sore loser, I do thank Joe for not ranking Eat Media at #15, because then we would have been associated with Falco, and the god awful song, “Rock me Amadeus.”

Congrats fellow Junta42 Top Bloggers.

Stay Tuned,

Ian Alexander
VP of Content, Eat Media

For those that think that shortcuts are okay, here’s another recent example of content and contact. Eat Media, (along with a number of other people) recently received emails from a graduate student attending East Carolina University interested in having us participate in a marketing study. More than a few things went south with this project.

A few problems:

1. They trolled my email from MediaBistro.

2. They cc’ed everyone on the list, leaving email addresses in plain sight, thus creating a privacy issue.

3. There were numerous spelling and grammar errors in the emails.

4. This was the first contact I ever had from East Carolina University and they wanted something. The lack of professionalism and authenticity forced me look up whether or not East Carolina University was even a real school.

5. No CAN/SPAM considerations were in the body or footer of the email.

6. Different fonts sizes were used in the email, on the same line.

7. The survey was unbranded.

8. “The investigators will be available to answer any questions concerning this research, now or in the future.” This sentence confused and scared me, “investigators?”

9. The first email link to the survey was a login page.

10. There were no design elements on the survey.

The graduate student in charge of this project had the opportunity to generate some amazing data and converse with some incredibly talented people. But instead, the student used a sloppy, shotgun approach to a strategy that required accuracy, intelligence and finesse. Needless to say I won’t be participating in the survey and I have scratched East Carolina University off my son’s short list. In the real world, vendors are fired over issues like this and potential customers are turned off.

We all make mistakes and I am sure the graduate student will never make this one again—let’s all learn from her mistakes. In other inbox news, Seth Godin had a similar issue yesterday. See his blog for an example on how to handle a newsletter Oops. And if you want see how big brands like Pottery Barn handle email campaigns, check out the newsletter/email perfection of Smith and Harmon.

“People working together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext (online) documents.”
This was Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the web when he created it 19 years ago. (No, Al Gore did not invent the World Wide Web.) Recently, the world has gone giddy over social media and Berners-Lee’s vision has come full circle—empowering people by sharing information in Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications.

Successful Web 2.0 and 3.0 (and whatever 4.0 turns out to be) initiatives have to focus on gathering people and knowledge through trust and authenticity, because only from that place will sales and market share increase. I recently interviewed Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone and he spoke brilliantly about the powers and pitfalls of networking. Many of the concepts he talks about in his book revolve around conferences and in-person meetings, but they can easily be transferred to content marketing (CM). Here’s my adaptation on how Ferrazzi’s “Don’t Be This Person” networking tips can be applied to a content marketing strategy.

THE WALLFLOWER:

In-person this is the guy with the limp handshake.

CM equivalent—Online this is the company that is doing nothing to ensure Google knows who they are. Their website and content does nothing to differentiate them from the crowd.

Wallflower Action Item—Hire an outside firm to critique your site. Some charge as little as $250 to assess your content and SEO. Play Boggle with your competitor’s collateral—if they have a phrase in their messaging, cross it off your list. Narrow your message down to the terms and phrases unique to your company then start re-writing your copy or hire a content marketer to help you create a content strategy and execute that strategy.

THE ANKLE HUGGER:

In-person this is the codependent BFF (best friend forever) you just met at the conference an hour ago.

CM equivalent—Online this is the company that won’t stop contacting you. Emails, newsletters, pop-ups and “important updates” fill your inbox and browser daily. And the worst part is, it’s the same information over and over again.

Ankle Hugger Action Item—Abusing a customer’s opt-in is the fastest way to rack up opt-outs. Short-term, screaming for eyeballs may get you some attention. Long-term it will get you a one-way ticket to the junk mail filter. Give your potential customers relevant, REASONABLY consistent content and they will come back more often and better prepared to buy.

THE CELEBRITY HOUND:

In-person you can find him expending all of his energy trying to meet the most important person at the conference.

CM equivalent—Online this is the organization that aligns themselves with every new widget and technology in town, in hopes that they generate new business by being on top of the newest trend.

Celebrity Hound Action Item—Maybe I’m beating a dead horse on this issue, but if organizations spent as much time on their content strategy as they do trolling social networks, accounts receivable would thank them.

THE SMARMY EYE DARTER:

In-person she is looking for an exit out of your conversation because she sees someone else she wants to talk to, and when she’s talking to him or her, the cycle repeats.

CM equivalent—Online this is the organization that changes focus too often and never lets its customer wrap their head around the message. Usually, you leave these sites thinking, “What do they do?”

Smarmy Eye Darter Action Item—Changing things up is great but don’t be so clever that you forget to tell people what you do in a non-marketing, non-uber technical, non non-linear manner.

THE CARD DISPENSER/AMASSER:

In-person he passes his card out like it was a cure for cancer.

CM equivalent—Online this person prides himself on his 500+ contacts he never contacts. Or it could be the company with thousands of emails in their database who never reach out to their customers except to say, “Pay up.” There are no shortcuts to building relationships, it must be real, your contact must not be self-serving and (if it’s content related) it must be spell-checked.

Card Dispenser/Amasser Action Item—If you start a relationship with a customer, partner or associate, foster that relationship. Ping them semi-regularly just to say hello and make your contact personal when possible. I recently signed up at Creative Good and got a personal letter from the founder (not auto-generated). He asked what I did, why I signed up and we ended up exchanging a few emails afterwards. In this case, one focused piece of content (email) returned one elated soon-to-be customer. The sloppy shotgun approach content marketing and customer contact will never beat a strategy that includes accuracy, relevant content and authenticity.

Tim Berners-Lee is still fighting to keep the web as close to the vision he had for it in 1988. Do your part with authentic content.

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?

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