Content Marketing » market conversations

Extending, Communicating, or Reinforcing Identity: a Thought on Quiz Marketing

Garrett French — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:20:28 +0000

I’ve been talking quiz marketing with Ben Wills of Ontolo. Here’s what he said today that really perked up my ears: “I think that an angle to consider is how the quiz can extend, communicate, or reinforce the person’s identity.”

What this thought did for me was crystalize how I think I’ll write quizzes in the future. First it will be to outline “identities” within a market segment. Secondly to find ways that the quiz’s results, as Ben puts it, “extend, communicate or reinforce the person’s identity.”

This is something I’d been working towards, and grasped intuitively, but Ben’s putting it so plainly helped me to reframe my approach. At least abstractly… the abstract often goes out the window when it comes time for the reality of Making Something Work ;)

His point is solid though – if the quiz results don’t resonate in some way with an aspect of the taker’s identity (or desired identity) then there’s no way in hell they’ll be posting their results anywhere. Also… we need to build in badge markup for different sites (MySpace, Facebook, forums, etc…).

>> Update: Jeremy Luebke of Xeru Internet Marketing asked for an example… here’s what I mustered up.

My quiz-making process before Ben’s email:
Think of a fun quiz idea that might get woodworkers to take the quiz (one of my main categories is woodworking).

My first quiz was “what power tool are you…” A personality quiz that didn’t get much traction. Why? Too many questions + the woodworking demographic didn’t seem compelled to identify with their power tools like I thought they would. Especially not from the angle of the Briggs-Meyers personality test I based it on.

My second quiz was “are you a cheapskate woodworker?” Being a cheapskate is a good thing in some market segments, and there’s a “waste-not want-not” mentality that’s strong with most woodworkers. This has gotten a bit more consistent interest. Ben’s email helped me understand rationally what had been kicking around in my subconscious…

My thinking after Ben’s email:
AHA! What are other aspects of my woodworking segment’s “collective personality?” What do woodworkers typically strive for in their work (and therefore their identities…). How do I create quizzes in which the results/badges will give them a totem to show/prove that they are indeed this good aspect?

It’s almost like… how can I reinforce to members of my market segment that they are indeed what they think they are? And then, how can I help them communicate this to others? Finally, the extension part… am I helping them discover some hidden, unknown aspect of themselves?

I spend a great deal of time in woodworking forums, and an increasing amount of time on other woodworking blogs, so I will be reading more closely now in hopes of better grasping what shapes their personalities.

From a link-building perspective my hope is that they are so enamored of the result they got that they are willing to post it. The one “in-the-wild” posting we’ve had for the cheapskate quiz was from a woodworker who got the “Cheapskate” result. There were 3 results total, including “Frugal” and “Quick-Spend”.

Previously I’d thought that I needed to “flatter” the quiz takers with the results. That’s not enough though, and Ben’s email helped me jump that track. Though, as I mentioned earlier, all this is conjecture + theory and that often goes out the window the minute pen hits paper (or fingers hit keyboard, whatever ;).

>>Update 2:
I realize that one aspect of my quiz-writing philosophy has gone largely unwritten… You must create quizzes + results badges within the context of your market. Erm, that means stuff like this eco disaster survival quiz building links for mobile coupons is a no no in my book. I’m not as likely to build links as quickly, nor as widely, but the upside is that I’m creating engaging content for my target demographic.

Quiz Marketing for GarrettShirts.com

Garrett French — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:26:41 +0000

I don’t have any link building results to show yet… Just quiz results ;P

“What Super Berry Bun Bun Are You?”

My Result

buny beper

Check out the buny beper t shirt!

You are buny beper! You are enthusiastic and energetic and you focus on getting things DONE. You value the intellectual input of buny pupu, as well as the good will that buny beru brings to projects. Buny bubu is too distractible for you and you avoid buny susu because that sadness just slows you down.

What Super Berry Bun Bun Are You?

This badge is the culmination of my interest in using quizzes for engagement and targeted link building efforts. Quiz Commander, the quiz-building software I designed and nursed through development is in (very) limited beta. If you’re interested in trying it out for yourself or a client send me an email: gfrench@gmail.com.

Other quiz marketing posts:
Personality Quiz Marketing for Links, Leads and Consultative Sales
Some Thoughts on How to Write Personality Quizzes for Link Building

Creating Linkable Content through Group Interviews, Contests and Surveys

Garrett French — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:51:44 +0000

If you’re responsible for link-worthy website copy your antenna should be up at all times for methods to create content that will incite your “linkerati” to link to you.

Here are my favorite tactics for creating content and links – some of which I’ve tested, some of which I’ve observed in action.

1) the Group Interview
You will be blown away by Sugarrae’s Five Link Development Experts: A Group Interview.

And not just by the content. The mechanics of this content creation idea are so clean that they can be lifted out and fit into almost any industry and they work especially well if you’re not a subject matter expert.

The Raw Mechanics:

1) Ask five experts in email what are the two hardest questions they would ask other experts.

2) Send your list of ten questions to each of the experts. Edit their responses into a monster article.

It helps if you’re known or in the community. If not you might should target lesser-known experts or prominent forum members.

The incentive for the contributors here is demonstrating value with notable peers on a site with guaranteed distribution and great link value.

I will definitely be looking for ways to fold this concept into my ongoing content creation efforts for clients.

2) the Contest
One of my favorite examples is Andy Beal’s first SEM Scholarship contest.

Update:It appears that Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Contest 2 launched today!

Here are the mechanics of his first contest (I haven’t studied the second yet):

1) recruit influential and savvy industry experts to judge your contest

2) recruit sponsors to provide the valued prize.

3) distribute through your network – your blog, the recruited experts, your sponsors perhaps even, your blog contacts – the news of your scholarship contest.

4) make your contest require the submission of content for publishing to your site.

5) hope that the judges can make the time to judge and ensure that the contest entrants are judged by quality-qualifying metrics.

What made his concept so brilliant is that it benefited so many people simultaneously. Here’s an excerpt from my write up of his tactic where I describe who benefits:

1) Andy receives links from SEM bloggers and possibly some news stories for his remarkable contribution

2) Contest winners get prizes and industry attention

3) Industry gets new articles

4) Andy earns excellent content for Marketing Pilgrim by paying with distribution and his “personal brand” relationship

5) Current SEM industry experts get opportunity to reinforce their noteriety + learn new ideas

6) Andy reinforces his role as industry leader/godfather by being a moderator and supporter

Again for this one it helps if you’re already known and notable in your industry.

Andy I’d value a comment to let me know the results of this contest – and whether you’ve got anymore in the works :)

2 1/2) Contest Concept 2
Here’s another contest concept for those who are just getting started with establishing your reputation, this one from Existential Ventures. I call this one the Butt Booty Naked Stripped Bare Link-to-Me Contest. Transparency’s always cool with me and I think I can make his contest mechanics work for some of my clients :D

Here are the mechanics as far as I can tell:

1) Identify your favorite/influential/target bloggers (aka linkerati, or Likely Linkers or Lincolns) in a space.

2) Send them emails describing your contest, whereby if they comment in the contest thread they get the equivalent of one entry to win, and if they link to you they get the equivalent of TEN entries to win.

I like the simplicity of this one. If your incentive is right you should get lots of links. If you’re not careful though it could get ugly… I can imagine in one of my primary spaces, where forums are far more prevalent than blogs, that we would have to be careful not to encourage our potential customers to “spam where they sleep.”

It’s not going to brand your expertise the way Andy’s contest concept 1 above does, but it will definitely get you and your site off the ground.

Perhaps, Broc, you’d comment this post to tell us about the goals and results of your contest so far?

3)Surveys + Research
Surveys – if you can find distribution required to get a decent sample – are a great way to create interesting content, especially if you work in some research that give the actual results more substance.

The keys to surveys are good, exciting and interesting questions that will make great action-oriented titles. Further, I suggest you get started with your surveys in forums. Read my Guide to Creating Link Worthy Content Through Forum Participation for the process.

Further, forums are a great place to test how exciting or interesting your chosen subject is and will tell you in short order whether or not you’re on the right track for a larger link bait piece.

Here’s my mechanics for surveys:

1) Ask questions in forums – without asking too often – and see which ones start good conversations. Be upfront that you plan to potentially “cover this thread” in your blog… otherwise it’s no go and forum members will shun you or boot you when they find out what you’re doing.

2) When a forum thread blows up and a lively conversation starts and everyone’s submitting, say, the best deal they’ve ever gotten in their lives, you’ve got a winner.

3) Wait for the thread to cool and then tabulate your results. Consider participating in more than one forum and posting elsewhere when you get a live one.

3 1/2) I have not tested this, but I think that you should consider buying PPC ads to get more people to take your survey. The more voters/contributors the more weight your finished piece will have.

4) Write your article based on your results and add research + great links out to make the article more of a resource.

5) Contact your bloggers to let them know what you’ve written – if they’re sharp they’ll recognize that by linking to your article they’re in effect linking to these forums which is good for community. Plus your resource is so dang good that they’ll feel compelled to link anyways right? ;)

Extending the survey + research concept:
For added weight for your surveys you can start by asking them of established bloggers.

Here are the mechanics:

1) Ask an established blogger to first answer your question/s. Something like: “what is your fondest memory relating to this topic that’s contextually related to my sales cycle?”

2) Offer to mention that you will be linking to this blogger from your survey points, whether that’s only on your site or also in the forums you participate in.

3) Further, you could combine this with concept 1 above and discover the 10 best questions from your 5 experts and then bring these questions to forums for answering, pulling in more traffic, potential links, and better content through crowd wisdom.

There you have it folks – creating linkable content through group interviews, contests and surveys. There are far more methods than these of course. You’ll read more like these in the future from Conversations Monetized… along with an upcoming guide to the mechanics of incenting content submissions and links!

I’d love to hear your thoughts or ideas related to creating content – send them to GFrench@gmail.com. Oh yes – and I’d be happy to discuss with YOU how Bold Interactive can help you create link-worthy content for YOUR site :)

Build Community First, Monetize Last

Garrett French — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 16:12:46 +0000

A video of a Stanford presentation by two of the founders of Threadless got me challenging my assumptions for community marketing this morning.

Based on watching this I recognize that what I wrote about here: The Community Correspondent: a Guide to Creating Link Worthy Content Through Forum Participation is more about skimming off the top of a community rather than building community.

Further, because I’ve not created incentive for community building in this particular project I will have to continually work outside of the system to keep generating content myself. It’s hard work writing massive articles – it’s going the long way around to generate community-oriented content (but still a great place to start learning…).

The Threadless founders focused on having fun and building applications that they would want to use and that resonated with their friends.

This feels alien to me, as someone who’s always looked for ways to help others monetize their own projects, but it brings back a recurring dream of mine – the idea of creating hundreds of little seeds and spreading them to the winds just to see what happens. The idea of a concept a day for a year – concepts folded quickly and launched like paper airplanes.

When I interviewed Garrett Camp of Stumble Upon for SEJ (SU Defined and Marketing with SU) I found a similar approach – they built for their community first and STILL don’t give a big crap about monetization. They funded themselves for a good bit and paid bills through donations in the early stages.

If your site/business can motivate people to DONATE to you then you’re probably on the right track.

This video is 45 minutes long. I got a nice kick in the pants from it and I hope you do too.

Thanks to exploding-boy I learned how to turn of the obnoxious visual editor and embed this video directly for you :) – Turn Off WordPress 2.0 Visual Editor

I spotted this video on Karl Long’s TCritic.

The Community Correspondent: a Guide to Creating Link Worthy Content Through Forum Participation

Garrett French — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:29:55 +0000

My primary marketing project right now is an affiliate site with a known brand that targets a passionate hobbyist and professional community. Many amongst this community are active in the roughly 10 online forums of sizes ranging from 700 to ~17,000 members.

Over the past two months through my strategic participation in two of these forums I’ve generated brand awareness, created content that’s won valuable links from important sites and blogs in the space, increased targeted organic search traffic to our site and developed an unexpected fondness for the community as a whole.

In researching to round out my thinking on this piece I found Jake McKee’s blog, CommunityGuy. He worked with online communities that formed around his employer, Lego. My approach to community is directly in line with his, but my primary intention was to create a sustainable and community-centric content stream to help thicken a formerly thin affiliate site.

In Lessons in Branded Content Creation Through Community Participation I wrote about what I learned from recent forum criticisms. This article covers with far more depth the approach to community interaction that I’ve taken for this project, with an emphasis on sustainability through aligning the content creation process with my community’s values.

Here’s what’s covered:
1) Forum Content Distributor vs. Forum Correspondent
2) Guidelines for Gaining a Workable Level of Acceptance
3) Your Value Proposition to Forum Participants
4) Getting the Conversation Rolling
5) The Unexpected Benefits
6) The Continued Dangers
7) Six Closing Remarks

1) Forum Content Distributor vs. Forum Correspondent
My participation is far more involved than simply distributing content through forums, that is, publishing blog post links directly in forums where I know my target market congregates (though I have done this).

Instead I try to be more of a forum correspondent and make connections between our site visitors and forums as well as BETWEEN the forums themselves, which are often siloed.

When a thread I start gets popular in one of the forums I know I’m on to something that I can turn into a popular article, and something I can request links to from bloggers and other websites.

All of this content goes into our biweekly email newsletter too.

In many ways this is something of an extension of the kind of editorial work I did at WebProNews, where I sought always to generate content through audience interaction and connecting questions with experts.

2) Guidelines for Gaining a Workable Level of Acceptance
The hardest part for me is remaining hyper conscious of the fact that I’m a marketer and will always be perceived with a level of mistrust. I’ve gotten seriously flamed on at least three occasions so I want to start with some basic guidelines for people who are interested in generating content and community in this way.

a) Contact forum owners first.
I emailed forum owners and in one case called a forum mod to ask for permission to post in their forum. Winning approval from mods and owners doesn’t mean you’ll be welcomed with open arms by the community though. Cover your bases anyways.

If they don’t respond then take a shot at starting a thread – some forums are very Second Life in their attitudes regarding marketers and leave it up to the marketer’s ability to gain community acceptance.

b) Be prepared for the first round of bristling anti-marketer reaction.
If anyone makes valid criticisms of you, what you’ve said in the forum thus far, how transparent you are about your intentions, the font on your website or how you have a stupid name then address them point by point.

Be laboriously and thoroughly transparent about everything you intend to do, especially if it involves republishing their thoughts on your own website. You may find that humor works well for you. I’m not typically funny when my continued participation in a key forum feels like it’s on the line so I lean towards transparency. It’s worked for me so far.

As has my willingness to make nearly immediate site changes based on valid criticisms.

In The Customer Interaction Manifesto Jake McKee writes that you must “learn to take a good beating.”

This goes at least double in forums, where folks aren’t necessarily your customers at all. Sometimes you’ll find that your greatest detractors will end up giving you the best suggestions though and can even end up as allies.

3) Your Value Proposition to Forum Participants
Why should they let you keep asking questions and publishing their wisdom on your site? Your permission and acceptance will ultimately be based on your willingness to promote and champion the community’s best interests. Period.

As a “forum correspondent” I looked at it as my job to understand, as quickly as possible, the values of the community and build content based on these values that still align with our marketing goals.

Your value proposition is that you’re helping care for and promote the ideas and feelings that are most important to their community.

In one case I found a forum member who’d written a how-to journal he offered to his community for free. I helped promote this by writing about it in our blog, email newsletter AND in other forums.

And finally there’s the simple fact that you’re driving traffic to their sites and letting people know through your channels that their forum is a great place. Individual members may not be particularly moved by this, but it’s worth mentioning.

4) Getting the Conversation Rolling
Once you’ve made a few friends by demonstrating how openly, honestly and levelly you can handle verbal assaults, it’s time to start asking questions.

I got rolling with questions from our site visitors… because I had no idea what the answers were. In fact, I started threads by posting the question plus the answer I had drafted based on Google research. Then I learned how off base I was after asking for critiques in forums.

This went quite well, and some ensuing threads became quite popular. That’s when I started asking my own article-oriented questions. Some that I found that worked were:

1) What’s the Best Deal on X that you’ve ever gotten?
2) In your opinion what’s the Most Dangerous X known to man?
3) Which practitioner of your art was the most influential on you?

All of these questions translated quite well into content that converted into links (after emailing link requests to bloggers) and has become trusted by search engines as well, considering the 25-35% increase in organic traffic we’ve seen over the past month.

Again I want to emphasize the importance of being transparent about publishing what’s said in a forum on your site. Though it may be well within fair use, copyright laws don’t mean jack snap to someone who feels like you’re profiting on his words against his will.

This is something I had to learn the hard way. Be upfront and overt that you’d like to republish ideas and quotes that come up in a thread you start.

5) The Unexpected Benefits:
a) An understanding key lingo and jargon – a window into community values.

b) I’ve found allies. These are folks who started out as strong, vocal critics. These are folks who defend me against others in the forum now. These are people whose suggestions I take above all others for future content ideas and they’ve been invaluable to me as participants in how I’ve shaped our content footprint.

c) A fondness for the community. This is one of the biggest benefits – it forces me to ask if what I’m about to write or post as a forum thread will really benefit my community.

d) A strong editorial sense of content that will be popular. I’m not a practitioner of the passion, but I’m starting to develop that crucial editorial sense of whether a subject will be a hit. This means that I’m more likely to write content that will generate links organically.

6) The Challenges
a) It’s always precarious, and a false move WILL bring you harsh condemnation. You’re a marketer – you have ulterior motives and some people will always criticize you. Accept this going in.

b) You may stand accused of taking advantage of unwitting forum participants to get valuable and unique content. This will actually be true unless you stay focused on championing your community’s values, its individual members and promoting the sites where they congregate.

c) It takes a long time and a lot of hard work, especially if you’re starting from zero with industry or community knowledge. Even with community help and direct participation I still spend HOURS putting large pieces together and making them “sing” per Andy Hagans.

7) Six Closing Remarks
1) If you happen to have communities built around your brand I assert that much of what I’ve written will be useful to you, especially in regards to generating content through interaction and the general delicacy with which you must approach the initial conversations. Your marketing communications should be chock full of proof of your community interactions.

2) I mentioned nothing about mapping out your community’s habitats. I used Google and followed lots and lots of links on sites. I think Andy Beal’s Online Reputation Monitoring Beginners Guide is a great place to start ferreting out your community’s favorite hang outs if you don’t know already. If you’re starting from scratch you will just have to start pulling threads and see where they lead you.

3) To build our current blog contact list I looked in Bloglines at a popular blog’s subscribers. Then I looked at what else THEY subscribed to.

4) You don’t have to necessarily ask questions in forums either… you can simply provide forum coverage the way that SERoundtable does and generate a great sustainable content stream. In my current project I’ll be leaning this way more soon so I can lighten up my presence a little.

5) I left off a section for conversions. I currently aim for subscribers to our email newsletter and traffic from profit-generating search terms.

6) Are you looking for ways to generate steady, community-based content and become a more meaningful presence in your online communities? Send me an email for a free initial consultation: GFrench@gmail.com.

Lessons in Branded Content Creation Through Community Participation

Garrett French — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 02:41:41 +0000

I’m learning some great lessons on branded content creation and distribution right now thanks to my work with Adam Schultz and Bold Interactive and I wanted to submit them to you for use in your work and for your feedback.

These lessons became crystallized, back lit and tightly focused today after I posted in a forum that has been a key source of knowledge, traffic, community acceptance and links thus far. Though I’ve been very successful developing content here in the past I recognized today that false steps can open the banana can faster than a hungry monkey.

One key difference is that I opened a forum thread to DISTRIBUTE content rather than to ask a question and start to GENERATE content. I did ask a question at the end of the thread, but my intention was partly to get a quick shot of traffic which in my rear view mirror now looks like a bad idea.

But only because I didn’t follow my new rules :)

So today I wrote out some guidelines for myself for future content creation on this current project and wanted to share them. I think they’re a great starting point for the development of a branded content aka link bait aka flagship content conversation.

1) Content must arise from a community need or passion.
Ideally this arises through your conversations with the community – I suggest you lurk in target forums and slowly start to participate by asking questions.

Once you can post questions – survey types of questions that get people chatting with each other – that get LOTS of responses you’re hitting on a hot topic that you should develop into content.

Be wary of taking something that’s popular on your site and pushing it at the forum though – these may be the same audiences but you may find there’s a world of difference in what’s valuable in those two worlds.

2) Content must provide value to the community.
And don’t guess or assume that content will provide value, or that by assembling a list of resources that you’ve created value.

The piece I tried to push recently was a huge list of links to resources that my audience found worthless, sort of like if I gave you a huge list of directories to submit to that don’t pass link value.

Live and learn of course, but if you can, test your content ahead of your link begging blitz… or before you push it to an audience.

3) Content must incorporate, cite, interview and/or champion key members of the community.
Ideally you’re creating content through surveys, interviews or other quotations of your target audience. Get permission if you’re quoting individuals who aren’t marketers or who aren’t naturally inclined to being quoted.

People like to see their names in print, plus they’re more likely to support you in general if they were involved in some way in its creation.

When possible, be a champion for content that’s buried in some way in the forum (or blog), or not getting much distribution. Look for ways to help folks achieve publicity or distribution goals that may also be interesting enough to get others to link to you.

An interview or survey can add enough to your piece to really generate attention.

There are MANY verticals that don’t have their very own SERoundtables that cover forum discussions and there are MOUNTAINS of great content that’s not getting distributed.

You will have to “edit” it by organizing it and adding resource links… and you will be better served if you are a participant in the forum/community because you will be a little more trusted.

4) Content must incorporate the language of the community (but not too much).
You will learn how to speak like your market by interacting with them. Don’t over do it, but DO look for jargon or slang that you can start to pepper into your site, article titles, and even your paid search campaigns.

And always ask about terms you don’t understand – let your ignorance be your guide if you’re new to a space.

5) Ask for permission AND forgiveness.
Mea culpa, humility, proof of change – those are your only tools when valid shit storms start. And always be upfront and transparent about EVERYTHING.

One note – learn to determine the stark line between valid criticism, as strongly worded as it may be, and abuse. The necessary response to valid criticism is change.

The only necessary response to abuse – name calling, slander, even cruelty, is to get yourself and your brand away from that person and possibly the forum as a whole.

More to Come
In follow up articles I’ll be writing about content distribution, link begging for your work (phone calls are acceptable :), submission to appropriate social media and bookmarking sites for quick links and traffic trickles and whatever else has happened in the intervening weeks :)

Piper Jaffray Says Social Media Marketers are “Communitainers”

Garrett French — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:30:53 +0000

In a recent report that probably costs more than a nice used Saturn station wagon Piper Jaffray coined the term “Communitainment” to describe the:

trend involving consumers moving communication beyond a mere exchange of information to facilitate an exchange of content, ideas, and entertainment within an online social context.

I’m still grappling with how to describe the marketing services I practice, as they are part PR, part SEO, part community participation.

I won’t be selecting “communitainer” as a term to describe what I do, but thought I’d share the MediaPost article describing this “trend.”

I found compelling Jaffray’s description of “Usites” (MySpace, YouTube, etc…): “Usites are the Internet’s democraticized version of the reality TV trend with users placed in control of content creation.”

Mostly because that’s the best Jaffray could come up with to describe YouTube and MySpace. But also because it got my wheels turning just a little :)

One perspective they’re severely missing here – and this is because MediaPost and Jaffray are writing for the Fortune 500 – is how MySpace especially has become a marketing/communication platform for local underground or grassroots commercial enterprises. Such as Roller Derby, dive bars, tattoo shops and of course bands.

I think local marketers too should pay particular attention to MySpace and video.

Chat Monetized: GChat Prompts Geo-Targeted AdWords

Garrett French — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:33:18 +0000

It’s neat to see this stuff in action… As a buddy and I planned a weekend meeting in gchat Google listened along and shot an ad at me:

Smart or spooky? Both. And quite potentially powerful considering the amount of usage that chat has.

Update:
It probably didn’t hurt that in my email I had a meeting conversation going too… so it makes me wonder if the ad was indeed triggered by the mellow mushroom and raleigh keywords or the raleigh meeting keywords, as both could be considered potential targets by the advertiser, Raleigh Take-Out.

A Market Conversation Strategy Guide

Garrett French — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 15:36:09 +0000

Driving Search Presence through Industry Participation

By Garrett French

Your market – whether you’re in biotech or biotech software development – is deep in conversation online.

Here�s what that conversation looks like:

Industry journalists documenting your marketspace through interviews with your peers and competitors and news analysis.

Industry practitioners, pundits, and your employees and coworkers publishing opinions, questions, advice and analysis in blogs, forums, social networks, podcasts and video.

Here�s who observes this conversation:

Your investors.

Your prospects.

Your employees and coworkers.

Your industry�s journalists.

Your colleagues.

Your competitors.

And typically these people are themselves participants in your market�s conversations.

What this article does, and for whom:
This article provides a thorough market conversation strategy outline for the enterprising DIY marketer, with an emphasis � at the end � on search engine presence.

I sought to estimate the amount of time each step would take so that you fully understand the investment that an effective conversation strategy requires. I wrote this article with startup B2Bs in mind.

The core concepts and practices have B2C applications though, which I will articulate in later articles.

Obviously, the more resources you can put into these efforts the better your overall results will be. I am available for consultation on any aspect of your strategy.

Article Outline:
The article follows the outline below (hours noted indicate approximate time it will take for you to implement these aspects of the project):

Create Media Map and Determine Key Media; Assess Your Organization’s Position (6 hours)

Assess Your Current Efforts (2 hours)

Assessing and Harnessing Employees’ Current Industry Conversations (2 hours + ongoing)

Establishing “Industry Participant” Responsibilities (2 hours + ongoing)

Search Marketing and Your Conversation Project (tips for optimizing your conversation)

The benefits of implementing a conversation marketing project for your company include but are not limited to increased mentions at all strata of your industry’s media, an increase in industry “expert” branding, an increase in your internal knowledge base, and an increase in your search engine presence.

1) Create Media Map, determine Key Media; Assess Your Organization’s Position (~6 hours)

List out the major industry media you can think of. This includes blogs (possibly of competitors…), news sites, forums, etc. Use your favorite search engine and terms you associate with your industry to build out this “industry media overview” list.

Include in this list the various niches within your industry’s media all the news and information sources you find critical to YOUR role in your company.

Now poll others in your company. As many folks as possible, with as diverse a cross section of job roles as manageable. Ask where they go to exchange and learn new ideas for making their jobs easier, to make themselves more efficient in their jobs, or to improve their work lives in some way.

And be sure to ask which sites about your industry they find the most exciting, where they think the newest innovations are discussed. These sites are not likely to be included in your overview list and will serve to illustrate emerging, up-and-coming media in your space.

Now, analyze these media in both alexa and pubsub. These two services will enable you to judge the level of influence, rising or falling, that these media outlets have in your marketspace.
Once you’ve gathered all your media sources, organize them by category. These categories will vary depending on your industry, but could include:

main stream (relative to your industry of course)

job-function-based categories

rising/falling/steady influence in your space

red hot emerging media (all marketspaces have these � it�s best if you buddy-buddy with these guys while they�re just getting their legs under them. Be a resource, etc� I will have a future article on this.)

The categorization you devise constitutes your industry media map.

Your media map will be quite useful too should you decide to buy online advertising, or when you have launches that you suspect are interesting to only a segment of your industry’s media.
Next assess your company’s presence in these media.

This is done quite simply by checking each site for mentions of your company or the names of people in your company (with a [site:siteurl.com keywords] search in your favorite search engine).

Create a list of your current presence in these media and the tenor or nature of each instance of mention.

Your company’s “key media” includes the sites from your industry media map:

that mention your company or your company’s employees by name

that ANYONE from your company has personal association with

that you’ve identified as influential

that you’ve identified as emerging influential

Your conversation efforts should focus on these identified key media, and in keeping an eye on emerging media that you should target.

2) Assess Your Current Efforts (~2 hours)
Now that you’ve created your media map, assessed your presence in this media and determined which are your key media, it’s time to align your current presence with your existing efforts and see how these relate to your marketing goals.

Your �official� efforts include any kind of marketing or PR you’re currently engaged in. These efforts could include your company’s blog, your website itself, any ads you’ve purchased or participation in industry conferences.

Put your list of these efforts beside your presence in your key media and determine – as precisely as you can manage – how these efforts affect your specific online marketing goals, with special emphasis on key conversions you’ve identified as goal-reaching conversions.
Some goals/conversions could include:

Investor inquiries

Prospect inquiries

Partnership inquiries

Interview requests

Mentions in key media

Email addresses gathered

Keep your goals and conversions in mind as you develop the rest of your conversation project.

3) Assessing and Harnessing Pre-existing Employees’ Industry Conversations (~2 hours + ongoing)
There’s a high likelihood that your employees already participate in one or more of your industry’s key media. Assess who in your company’s participating and where through a poll, informal or otherwise.

Clarify upfront that you’re identifying who’s already leading your company’s industry conversation efforts and indicate that you’re seeking their advice and guidance on your overall project.

Assert that you – the assessors – think participation of almost any kind is a positive thing for your company and you want to understand how their participation benefits them.

In your assessments find who’s giving advice in their respective spaces, from forums to blog commentary to their own personal blogs. Keep a sharp lookout for who’s providing useful information to their communities.

Ultimately you’ll be building a single hub – in the form of a section on your site or possibly as a part of a blog – that aggregates all your employees’ (most positive) industry-related participation. This hub should be organized, and you’ll find likely organizational structure from the categories you determined in your initial media map.

This participation hub should be on or near the press clips and press releases on your site, and as your conversation efforts become more crystallized this hub will include blogs and articles of your company’s key industry participants.

In this particular piece it’s highly important that the only rule of employee media participation be that, “it benefits the company.” You will have to assess for yourself what is and isn’t material to your competitive advantage, though be sure to embrace transparency as far as you’re able.
Despite effects on enthusiasm towards participation you may find it necessary to create an employee guideline for industry conversation.

Make clear your reasons for imposing restrictions, ie, show how not following these restrictions could hurt your company. Most importantly though, be willing to make adjustments through intelligent debate with your internal industry participants.

4) Establishing “Industry Participant” Responsibilities (~2 hours + ongoing)
Create amongst those in your company who are already industry participants a loose affiliation through the information hub on your website. It may be helpful further to identify someone internally who serves as a sort of editor for the hub section of your site and organizes and arranges it.

Encourage these individuals to increase their involvement and give them paid time to engage in these activities to make them more official roles. Encourage them especially to participate with your pre-identified key media – so long as it makes sense in regards to their job function.

Distribute their knowledge internally through your company “editor”, and look for opportunities to increase their involvement in product development. Industry participants are often highly ambitious “change seekers” who can contribute positively to your company’s development and direction.

Channeling information from your industry participants into an informational email newsletter for investors and clients is another excellent way to emphasize the level of contribution your company has in the industry.

Having these conversations is important, but you will get far more value from them if they are displayed/published/aggregated in an effective and compelling manner.

Work with your key participants to establish general guidelines and best practices for anyone else in your company who participates – or would like to participate – in online media conversations.

5) Search Marketing and Your Conversation Project
As a non-techie SEM content strategist I break search marketing down into two loose categories � on-site and off-site.

On-site search marketing includes building search presence through things like adding new pages of content, arranging site architecture and link structure, optimizing page tags and ensuring that your site is as usable as possible.

Off-site search marketing includes building search presence through, in a word, links.
Your industry conversation efforts will deliver the highest search marketing value to your company if you observe the following general rules.

To derive the greatest ON-SITE search marketing value from your industry conversation efforts you must:
a) Create a hub section or page on your site that aggregates your industry conversations.

b) At the top of this section include a blog that’s updated daily by your “company editor.” The purpose of this blog is to highlight especially interesting or relevant bits of conversation you’re having online, and to serve as a more general company news resource for journalists and investors.

c) Link to this section from your home page. Include post titles and links from your company editor’s blog. Especially brave companies may consider making the conversation-hub section their home page.

d) Encourage article and white-paper writing and syndication. Include a writing directory in the hub section of your site.

Assuming there are no technical issues barring your site from search engine indexes, these efforts will enhance the likelihood that your site appears when people search on keyterms that relate to your business.

Further, if you’ve determined the terms that are most likely to lead to conversions on your site then you can encourage your publishers to use them in written conversations.

To derive the greatest OFF-SITE search marketing value from your efforts you must:
a) encourage your participants, when they post anywhere off of your site, to link back to your company’s site. What page on your site they link to will depend on your overall search presence goals and the nature of their participation.

Worthy pages for linking include key resource pages on your site, your site’s home page, the home page of your info hub. If you’re targeting a specific conversion page on your site then you should make this clear to your participants and ask that, when possible, they use this link.

b) Ask that participants identify that they’re from your company when they leave comments on the blogs of others, in industry forums, or in any kind of online participation they’re doing (including sites like MySpace). And especially in their personal blogs if they have them. Be specific about how you’d like the company referred to.

c) Arrange to publish your articles in your industry’s media – especially if you can get links from key media sites. This builds your company’s brand and drives your search presence. Be sure to reserve the right to publish these articles on your site too if they’re accepted.

d) Have your participants alert key industry bloggers/participants when you write new articles or have new resource offerings.

e) Involve your key industry participants in spinning big company news to various levels of your industry. How does your new product relate to the various levels of conversation that are happening in your industry?

Get your team together and let them figure out which aspects are the most exciting and let them reach out to people they think would be interested to have them discuss your new product.

Craft and release a press release that includes links, quotes and contact information from your conversation crew plus a more traditional company contact.

This encourages links from all media strata in your industry.

Get Engaged: Start Your Market Conversation Now!
This article is an outline for implementing a strong market conversation strategy at your company.

Your market conversation strategy can drive results similar to traditional PR and marketing efforts at a substantially lower upfront cost. They do, however, require an ongoing investment of employee time and effort.

A strong conversation strategy plus strong marketing and PR efforts is best. However, it’s ideal that you START with developing your conversation strategy and let your findings and experiences there guide all your other marketing efforts.

That’s what makes startups especially good candidates for market conversation strategies.
If you follow this article’s core concepts and apply them to your unique industry you’ll see an increased presence in the media, an increase in perceived expertise, a growing intra-company knowledge base and an exploding search engine presence.

More importantly � and less measurably � you�ll find that your company becomes an increasingly important player in your industry. You’ll find that surprising and disruptive opportunities emerge that would never have been there if you hadn’t been engaged in the conversation.

About the Author:
Garrett French is a partner in Bold Interactive, an online marketing firm specializing in conversational marketing tactics. Reach him at 919-696-4225 or gfrench@gmail.com.

Market Conversations and the evolution of an SEM journalist

Garrett French — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 15:26:59 +0000

Today’s my birthday. That’s why I’m doing what I like most – defining the shape of a marketing practice :)

I did the same for article marketing about two years ago at MSI. My ideas – which formed initially in my work at WebProNews – gradually grew into a service that was rolled out (in atrophied but well intentioned form) to around 20 clients and towards the end of my time there I started working to improve the quality of the offering through strategic, highly targeted articles and distribution.

I also laid out my concepts on market conversation strategy, which has the DNA of my practice as I currently conduct it: A Market Conversation Strategy Guide for B2B Startups. (It’s behind MarketingProf’s pay wall.)

Very recently I’ve been working with Ben Wills to more clearly define some of the granularities of Social Media Marketing. Social Media Marketing, as I’ve discussed it with Ben, differs to some extent from how I currently practice conversation marketing concepts for my clients.

Vertical Market Conversations + Ecommerce
Because integrating a vertical social network into an ecommerce framework certainly relates to social media marketing, but it’s not marketing – it’s not quite a business model too. It’s following in Amazon’s footsteps and enabling your site visitors to add the value of their personal experience to your website. But think niche Amazon + social network built around the individual products.

Market Conversations as Market Relations
Like SEO, there are things you do onsite and things you do off site. They should integrate as much as possible.

Onsite stuff includes stuff like creating a blog, writing articles, writing white papers, creating video and other media. It can also include creating a framework with which visitors interact with you and other visitors.

Onsite stuff must be optimized for distribution in search results, other blogs, forums, social media sites like Digg, etcetera.

Offsite stuff includes stuff like blogger relations – establishing connections between bloggers and the brand shapers within your organization. Offsite includes publishing your articles in appropriate places, as well as having done your research homework and knowing which communities are likely to link to the content on your site.

Market Conversations as… Conversations
You know those folks preaching about reputation monitoring? Well, you should be listening to them preach, and most importantly, you should be listening to what your markets are saying about you in particular and their needs as they relate to your products or services.

Conversations work like this: You listen. You ask questions and listen some more. Then you respond and start listening all over again.

At the recent MPlanet conference I covered for MarketingShift it seemed that fortune 100 marketers are struggling with their place in their companies as online marketing moves increasingly into the hands of their customers.

Much of the directional advice involved moving into more business decision directions through better analytics. That’s good stuff. One thing I didn’t hear mentioned was that marketers have to become better listeners – listening well is the first step of a good conversation whether with your best friends or with a market – no matter where that market lives.

Fortune 100 marketers know this already – that’s what keeps market research firms and anthropologists in business. Still, these firms don’t help in understanding HOW to respond, through what channels, or how to maximize message distribution.

It’s my birthday…
…and I don’t know how to smoothly end this post. So it’s going to end with a jarring thud and the promise that I’ll give YOU a gift for my birthday :) (in next post…)