Guest Posts

The Future of Content Part 1: with Clay Morgan

As content continues to become an ever-important staple for businesses of all shapes and sizes, I thought it’d be interesting to share some thoughts on what the future of content might look like.

However, instead of?sharing just my own thoughts, I wanted to bring you what the future of content looks like for some of the folks I look up to and respect in this space.

Starting today, this series will bring you some of the web’s most critical thinkers when it comes to content – hopefully you’ll enjoy reading as much as I did, and these thoughts will spark ideas of your own on what the future of this thing we call content looks like.

Today’s thoughts come from Clay Morgan, Vice President of Operations at Arment Dietrich.

Content and Standing Out from the Crowd

In one of her recent speeches, Gini Dietrich said there are about 152 million blogs.

That?s just blogs.

It doesn?t include news sites that are generating tons of content or the millions (billions?) of websites that have some type of content on them. That means standing out from the crowd is going to be more and more difficult.

I think there will be increased focus on how the content is presented, and I?m talking beyond design.

Is it written, and if so, long form or short form?
Is it video or audio?
A slideshow?
Infographics?

Something I think about is songs. I can?t sing, but children?s television has successfully delivered good content via songs for decades.

Should people look at packaging their content as other forms of art? Photography? Illustration? What about fiction writing? After all, children?s authors have used fiction to teach children for decades.

The point is, whether we see it or not, I think we should really get creative in our approaches when it comes to presenting our content.

Content and Distribution Channels

Right now as I write this, the girls are in Vacation Bible School.

When I was a boy, our content was basically a handout or two. This week, the girls get the hand outs, but they also have video, music, skits, talks, crafts projects that reinforce the content, and a range of multi-media approaches to deliver content.

The content is being delivered in many different ways, and they are ways to which the children respond. Just something to think about.

The second thing I think (or hope) we?ll see is an increased focus and an increased sophistication in terms of distribution. There are large companies telling people that if they create a landing page or a blog, and post x amount of content each week, they will organically gain more sales leads than they know what to deal with.

Funny how ?organically? and ?magically? sound very much alike.

Organic growth is the result of strategy, planning, implementation – in other words hard work. There are no magic bullets and if you want your content to get to the right people, you have to hand it to those people.

I think we will see more people realize they need more sophistication and more strategy when it comes to distribution, if for no other reason there is so much content being developed.

Content and the “Smaller” Blogger

It is going to be critical for small bloggers to think about distribution.

They will need to be very strategic in the use of SEO, email marketing, RSS feeds, social media, and other tactics in order to break through the domination of content offered by major bloggers and companies with deep resources.

The idea of organic growth through this type of strategic approach always reminds me of my aunt.

She?s quite a successful romance novelist. She works with a major publisher and has a real following. She?s one of the ?hot new stars? in romance fiction and an ?overnight success.? What she tells people is it took her 10 years of hard work before she became an ?overnight success.?

Organic growth always has hard work behind it. Always.

About Clay Morgan:?Clay Morgan is the vice president of operations for Arment Dietrich and is based in Nashville.

He believes if you can?t deliver content to the right people, and if you can?t make money off it, content will never be king…or queen.

He?s a husband, foster father, and has two cats and an unexpected fish. You can read more from Clay on Spin Sucks, or connect with him on Twitter and/or Google+.

image: Emerson

How to Build the Trust You Need for an Engaged Community

This is a guest post by Martin Edwards.

Building an online community takes time.

You’ve worked hard, you’ve built a good-sized following, and the likes are growing nicely.

But something?s not right.

You post links to your content regularly and even pay for ads to keep the likes building.

But no one is visiting your sales pages.

Signups on the email list are sluggish.

You?re tweeting your heart out but no one seems to notice.

Why doesn?t your ?community? seem to care about your brand?

What You Have is Not a ?Community?

Social media can help you build a huge collection of people around your brand.? You?re plugged into the global market, after all. What you?re hoping for is a crowd of devoted fans who will share your message with the world.

People can be quite obliging with the like button in return for a free T-shirt, but they may well be wearing your competitor?s T-shirt tomorrow.

You can get followers. You just follow a bunch of people and they?ll follow you back. You?re impressed with the number of key influencers with a Klout score to die for in your network.

So why isn?t anyone even sharing your content?

It?s your ?community.? You built it; you own it; so why can?t you influence it to do your bidding?

Tinu Abayomi-Paul?s recent post The Value and Meaning of Community in Marketing explained why attempting to command a community is fraught with pitfalls.

Real people can be cynical, critical, capricious and fickle.

One foot wrong and it falls apart.

The fact is, in the cold light of day, you can?t own a community.

What you have probably isn?t even a community.

Likes and follows do not a community make!

The Crucial Insight That Holds the Key to Influence

To influence your community, you must build trusting relationships with the influential leaders of other communities.

Your community is not just your immediate fans. It?s far more than that. Understanding what actually creates a community will help you share your message several layers deep into the social ecosystem.

Think network rather than broadcast.

Just before you go rushing off to grab the latest Klout scores of everyone you know, you must understand how the complex trust structure of community decision making holds the key to influencing them.

Online Communities are Complicated

When we look at online communities, we tend to be looking at interest groups that are led by an authority.

The members of a community refer to authorities when they make decisions.? They calculate the level of trust they hold against the risk from the consequences of getting the wrong advice.

When trust exceeds risk, these authorities will be influential.

In the world of social media, these interest groups can be created at a moment?s notice by a trending hashtag for instance.? An authority may be influential for a few days when the conditions are right, but as the context changes, attention moves elsewhere.? Perhaps a development reveals an ulterior motive.

Trying to pin down this complex, constantly shifting pattern is a challenge.

An authority only becomes an influencer if they can create the desired action.

The ?Paths of Influence? That Lead to Your Sales Funnel

So identifying influencers is not just a matter of looking for authorities with a large number of followers. You must study the deeper structure of their trust community.

For a large campaign, you could analyze the conversations around a particular buying decision and try to target only those who are open to influence. With current Big Data analysis tools, this is feasible if expensive and a tad intrusive.

As a more sociable alternative, you can look at the behavior of your audience. Those that engage with their audience and share your messages may well have the desired influence further down the path. There will be several people who overhear a discussion, read a post and put in an order or they may just re-share your message. You are revealing these paths of influence by testing your community?s reactions to various stimuli.

An influential leader may be a useful starting point, but the real influencers will almost certainly be further along the path of influence.

Wouldn?t it be nice to create these paths rather than having to find them?

The Secret Sauce That Creates Paths of Influence

In our social media connected world, the way we do business is changing rapidly.? You can make thousands of connections and build them into trusting relationships. You can present your brand to the world and make it easy for people to buy. You remove as many of the disruptors from the sales funnel as you can.? At the end of the day though, you can’t possibly cover all the bases.

Fortunately there is a way of amplifying your efforts so that the people who want to buy can put their hands up, the ones that want to share have the support and motivation they need and you get a community to work with.

Teamwork!

Talk to people, engage and collaborate.

That is what the social bit in social media is all about.

People like to test their trust bonds in safer waters. Every opportunity you get to prove that you and those around you can be trusted, the stronger those bonds will be.

The following are a few examples that will help you get people joining in:

Start a Twitter #tag group, set up a blog to go with it and have set times for participation.? The blog will help crystallize the best contributions and provide topics for discussion. Get people together to share their knowledge. To see an example drop in for a virtual coffee at #elevensestime sometime.

Invite specific people to write guest posts for your blog; they will bring all the people they know to read, comment and share.

Set up some collaborative games ? Firepole Marketing recently mounted a successful scavenger hunt that encouraged entrepreneurs to cooperate on many of the challenges. It was a free and public learning experience and really consolidated their community.

Publish interviews with some of the people who are most active in the communities you want to work with, and set up a Google hangout once a week to discuss a live issue.

All of these activities will build the trust that establishes your authority, but more importantly they will build the authority of the people around you.? These are the ones with the right attitude. These won?t be the big shot celebs — they?ll be too busy being awesome elsewhere.

No, these are the people who engage with their communities.

They won?t necessarily be in the market to buy your product, but they will share your branded content if it covers an area of interest they are comfortable with.

Publish or share a wide range of content and these people will come to you.

Make it easy for anyone who has an interest in your content to get to the edge of your sales funnel and your community will do the rest.

So Let?s Get Together and Build That Community

Community spirit is a wonderful thing. There?s a world full of examples of people working together to make a difference. Some are genuinely altruistic; others sponsored by brands for the publicity but still doing a service to the community.

It?s up to us to decide what we are comfortable with.

It?s easy to be cynical.

People may doubt your motives as the brand at the center of an initiative, but authentic collaboration and a willingness to share the risk by engaging with your audience will win your community?s affection and trust.

People may say,

Real marketing is about targets and ROI.

or,

There isn?t the budget for this sort of approach.

This is true. It?s going to be tough to measure in the short term.

The real value of collaborating with a trusting community will, like a fine wine, take time to be appreciated.

And just like a fine wine, it is well worth the wait!

About the author: Martin Edwards is a web developer and social media consultant with The Canonbury Consultancy, helping writers, entrepreneurs and start-ups build lean & agile businesses using the wealth of low-cost tools that are now available online. You can get to know more about Martin at his blog MartinSocially.com and on Twitter, G+, and LinkedIn.

image: Kurt Qvist

How Visual.ly Can Help You Measure Metrics That Matter

This is a guest post by Stew Langille.

Content marketing is mainstream. From infographics, articles, and videos to images, whitepapers, and web experiences, 90% of marketers now use content to build their brands and help achieve their business goals, according to the CMI.

Yet, fewer than half of marketers believe their content efforts are effective. That?s quite a large confidence gap, but one that is easily explained.

Despite its widespread adoption, content marketing remains a relatively new practice. Content marketing requires experimentation ? in messaging, format, and frequency?to see what resonates with a particular target audience or best achieves a specific business goal.

At Visual.ly, for example, we help some brands tell their stories through videos, others through micro-content like Vine clips and .GIFs, and still others with data visualization in the form of presentations, infographics, and web experiences.

Depending on your brand?s specific goal, the best approach may include all of the above.

Measuring Content

Beyond its relative newness, content marketing has also suffered from a lack of universal performance metrics.

Do we judge a piece of content?s success by the number of tweets, shares, likes, or some other metric entirely? Even so, we struggle to place accurate value on how much a ?like?or a tweet is worth to a brand?s bottom line.

Until recently, even aggregating this information to arrive at overall counts has been a difficult task. Many marketers and PR professionals regularly cobble together data from a set of sources, including Hootsuite, Google Analytics, and good old-fashioned Google search, in order to piece together a story around their content?s performance.

And once that data is pieced together, communicating the results to internal and external stakeholders becomes similarly challenging.

We saw this issue firsthand at Visual.ly.

Clients routinely struggled to measure the return on their content investments?within a given campaign and as compared to past initiatives.

New tools like Visual.ly?s Native Analytics aim to address these challenges, helping marketers track content performance (e.g., shares, views, distribution channels) across the web, as well as provide insight into which audiences are most influential in amplifying the impact of a particular piece of content.

While marketers have historically looked at absolute counts as the definitive measure of their success, at Visual.ly, we?ve seen that pockets of users can drive outsized results for brands.

By surfacing the demographics, key interests, and online behaviors of a brand?s key influencers, analytics platforms can help marketers tailor their efforts to engage these audience segments.

The Return on Content

We took this approach with Bravo and The Huffington Post last fall, when we helped create an infographic?guide to New Orleans cooking to support Bravo?s premier of Top Chef New Orleans. The piece was designed to engage entertainment and food enthusiasts, and drove thousands of social shares, tweets, and likes in the process.

For Turner Media?s Bleacher Report, a sports news and entertainment site, we created a single interactive map that was flexible enough to be customized and incorporated into nearly 200 different articles ? each generating deep engagement among a specific fan subgroup.

The total impact was staggering: combined, these tailored pieces drove more than 2MM pageviews.

Only once performance data is readily available in a single platform can the true work of optimization can begin. Not only can marketers tailor content to key audiences who will drive their message forward, but they can also start to examine which metrics drive their business itself.

For example, a product launch?s success may most directly correlate to social sharing rates, or it may tie to the quality and volume of press pickups. Once marketers have this knowledge at their fingertips, they can start to optimize their content campaigns to maximize the metrics that matter.

And isn’t that what really matters?

About the author: Stew Langille is the CEO and Co-Founder of Visual.ly, the world’s marketplace for visual content, and a serial entrepreneur. Langille helped unleash the power of visual storytelling and infographics while VP of Marketing at?Mint.com, and subsequently, Director of Marketing for Intuit’s Personal Finance Group. Today he is bringing the same concepts to new visual formats like video, presentations and interactives, while continuing to push the boundaries of how visual content can improve and sharpen storytelling. Visual.ly’s marketplace serves as a critical global hub matching Fortune 500 brands, startups and publishers with the world’s best creative talent. Langille was also CMO at iKobo, a pioneer in online money transfer and currently serves as an advisor to 500 Startups.

The Value and Meaning of Community In Marketing

This is a guest post from Tinu Abayomi-Paul.

When you hear the word ?community?, even in the present context of social media and marketing, what comes to your mind?

Do you see faces of people you know, admire? People with common interests that you share? Or do you see nothing? Perhaps a faceless blob of usernames?

In the colloquial sense of the word, I belong to many communities, some of them overlapping. Yet it?s starting to worry me, this context of community when framed by the language of marketing.

Particularly in the case where companies identify a demographic and someone at the top executive level mandates that the company needs to ?own? that market, via a sort of hi-jacking of that community.

I Belong to Communities

They can?t really be ?hijacked? or ?infiltrated?. However, they can be led, and their loyalties can be won, but this has to happen as a natural result of a kind of partnership with them.

How well this task is carried out has direct bearing upon whether these communities develop into rabid fan bases (see Apple) or just a group of people you?re tracking who barely move the cash needle (see any company that competes on the basis of price instead of value).

They are made up of people I go out of my way to advise, assist, appreciate and attend to when I can ? not just when it?s required by the community manager/leader hat I have on that day. And I worry about this concept because there?s this false impression that a community is an entity that can be owned.

Like a thing.

Instead of a gathered group of humans.

This is a special problem of people who are asked to be community managers or leaders. More often than not, we rise through the community to come to lead it, even if it happens to also be a job title.

And as such, we have a sense of belonging to it ? it?s what makes us ideal candidates, the rare individuals that had already started to lead the community before someone realized that giving them some monetary incentive could benefit them.

Parties of Trust

Whenever I?m asked to assume these duties, I make it clear that I can see both the side of the company that needs a return on its investment, and the community, that has certain needs and desires that must be fulfilled. And that these two things don?t need to be at odds if both parties are willing to trust me.

Yet at the same time, I notice that at some point, we?re also expected to have a standoffish, doctor-patient type of relationship with the people we may call peers, acquaintances, even friends. Not just by the companies, but by the community ? for example, when settling disputes between members.

It can suddenly become an uncomfortable spot to be in, given that it?s only a matter of time before you are asked by the corporate body that funds the extra fun of the collective, to do something you believe to be against the best interests of the community.

Block a user from talking instead of letting controversial discussions play out.
Take a beloved resource you collectively built for years away from the people who made it successful.
Act on some marketing initiative before enough trust has been built for it to take proper hold.

Especially in social media, the way communities are increasingly treated as commodities is a step backwards. What is the point of social media? On the community level, isn?t part of it to create relationships? Of course there?s no illusion that a brand is going to be BFFs with its adopted collective.

But a community manager can often leverage a fledgling connection on Twitter into an alliance between two companies. Anyone in sales will tell you that buying is about relationships. It always has been ? social media certainly didn?t invent this, but it highlights it. So much is based on that.

And so many incredible, profitable partnerships can result from them.

Something as simple as a retweet can lead to a guest post by a respected thought leader. The smart ones will then willingly bring their community to where their work was published.

One simple example ? but try letting your community champion repeat that process once a week for a year, and track how much the additional exposure leads to sales from that new audience.

The Patience of Community

Here?s the catch: that can only happen if your company can develop the patience to let whoever coordinates with your group of enthused, active people plant the seeds that result in those successes and let them grow. No one digs up an acorn every few weeks to see if it has become a mighty oak yet.

It has increasingly become my experience that it?s not that social can?t be effective for attracting new clients, or retaining the existing ones. It?s really that we business owners lack the patience it takes to truly grow and create a business rather than a series of one-off sales.

If we can?t measure a success 2.1 seconds after an action, it?s seen as useless and thrown away.

And yet, when I was in sales, it was routine for me to attend company-sponsored parties, and attend sporting events with prospects, not clients, to have lunch, meetings, phone calls for months before a sale was ever made.

In this instant gratification age, we need to remember that we have the unique ability to shift the investment that used to be wasted building relationships that never come to fruition into systems that work better and faster if we will simply resist the urge to snap to judgement, and wait for them to mature and ripen.

So my question to you is this: what can us successful community managers do to move the idea of community as commodity to a more realistic picture that reflects how community alliances can be a win for everyone involved?

Thought leadership and setting better expectations are two things that come to mind. But those assume you?re working with people who ?get it?. What if our peers are not? What advice can you offer?

Or perhaps you disagree with me. Can we shift this idea? Should we?

The comments are yours.

About the author: Tinu Abayomi-Paul is CEO of Leveraged Promotion, the first Hot Mommas Project Women’s Leadership Fellow, and a member of Network Solutions Social Web Advisory Board.

You can read more from Tinu at the Leveraged Promotion blog, or connect with her?on Twitter.

image: Gwendal Uguen

7 Ways to Run an Unsuccessful Mobile Email Campaign

This is a guest post by Matt Zajechowski.

Mobile gadgets are the preferred media for opening email and responding to mobile marketing. That?s true across demographics, but especially among the youth set known as Millennials and Generation Y.

As revealed in the infographic below from our client?Reachmail, among the general population, 75 percent are using smartphones regularly to manage email. Millennials? use of iPhones, Android phones and iPads to scour daily mail is as high as 80 percent.

Most don?t even re-check mail on desktops and are intolerant of marketers who don?t cater to the small screen revolution.

This means a great deal for businesses who don?t wish to lose the business of new clients or customers.

Specifically it means that advertising will become a game of who can satisfy the most mobile users. The companies with most the mobile-friendly promotions and resources win.

They win not just profit from increased sales and website hits, but they win the trust of the mobile public and perhaps even long-term loyalty from mobile shoppers.

Are You Satisfying Your Mobile Customers?

Basic satisfaction of mobile users involves having email marketing messages that can be scaled down to fit a smartphone screen or a tablet screen without losing its wow factor and effectiveness.

That means the ads are pithy and persuading.

They dazzle without relying on too much Flash animation or Javascript that can freeze mobile devices and take an incredibly long time to load.
They have images that are optimal for small devices ? between 360 and 480 pixels.
They have the good content early in the page or email, along with a call to action that can be read without tedious scrolling.

Often it means having online stores that can be navigated and searched without too much hassle for those using small touchscreens and tiny virtual keyboards.

Satisfying mobile users might mean connecting with mobile shoppers through store apps that take users directly to favorite products or recommendations, and then quickly and efficiently to checkout without wasted clicks.

Closing the Loop Between Mobile and Offline

Increasingly, being mobile-friendly as an email marketer also means merging offline deals with online finesse by using email to preview promotions later reinforced through text messages, geolocation-based shopping deals and scannable QR codes that allow customers to learn about sales, coupons or general brand information without having to type any URLs.

QR codes have been slow to catch on, but nearly 25 percent of people ? mostly in America and Germany — have scanned one while on the go and research from eMarketer suggests the codes will trend upward in the future.

In a survey of 2,000, at least 14 percent of Millennials in the U.S. admitted they scanned a QR code that was included in a marketing email, while 16 percent of those between 25 and 34 said they had done so.

Respondents were most likely to scan codes in magazines or hard copy ads sent by snail mail. However, that was often because those types of media have been more eager to embrace the technology.

In the future, online marketers must be dedicated to using the codes more and ensuring that the codes deliver mobile users to sites that are legible and enjoyable to use on a mobile screen.

Lastly, remember, many mobile users are quick and impatient decision-makers who won?t give an email or website the chance to satisfy them again if they encounter even one instance of a landing page or target page that fails meet mobile standards.

Start now by assessing your company websites, blogs, stores and email campaign designs to make sure they are ready for the continuing expansion of mobile marketing.

ReachMail

About the author: Matt Zajechowski is a marketing specialist at Digital Third Coast Internet Marketing. You can read more from Matt on the Digital Third Coast blog, or connect with him on Twitter @Savard1120.