Content Marketing » social media

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.

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…)

Jim Lanzone: Searchers Aren’t Passionate Enough for Personal or Social Search

Garrett French — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:31:53 +0000

Greg Linden posted on a conversation between Jim Lanzone, Steve Berkowitz and John Battelle at the web 2.0 conference.

In his wrap up of the interview Linden said that the most interesting part for him was when Lanzone and Berkowitz answered questions about personalized search:

“Steve entirely focused on privacy issues. He argued for giving users detailed and complete control of their data. Steve claimed this was being customer-focused, but I felt he was focusing on entirely the wrong customer.”

“Jim also had an unusual focus, saying that “users don’t customize”, “users are lazy”, and “the majority of people won’t do it.”"

(does this smack slightly of Larry Ellison griping about his users all the while salesforce is eating his lunch? this video is of SalesForce president on that Ellison anecdote. it’s halfway through.)

I chose to write this today because I’ve had similar conversations in the past with Jim Lanzone regarding social search.

In fact, just before I went to moderate a panel conversation with Steve Mansfield of social search engine PreFound I wrote a long argument to Lanzone in favor of social search.

I wanted him to shred my position so I could be a strong counter point at the panel conversation.

Here’s a rough argument for social search (not personalized search, though they should be intimately connected) becoming mainstream. When I wrote this to him seven months ago I told him I would not share that I was corresponding with him mostly because I wanted to protect his negative views on users. He’s obviously not trying to hide how he feels about users now, so here’s my position:

first: do you agree that the majority of people (the mainstream), no matter how lazy, have something in their lives they’re passionate about?

do you agree that people create networks surrounding their passions so that they can relate (generate and share and consume content) around these passions?

do you agree that this particular passion drives that person to certain activities online?

do you agree that these activities will include measurable elements that could determine the value of certain web pages, videos, news stories to a given passionate segment?

Through these “relatings,” links, emails, blog comments, friend requests, friend comments, specifications of friendship levels (all of which users HAPPILY PERFORM on MySpace, they’re doing HARD WORK that NO ONE has tapped yet) I believe that social/personalized search engines will be able to increase search relevance to specific networks of users.

Further, social networks are self-policing, making it difficult to target SEO tactics at them, making this data critical in my mind to determining keyphrase relevance.

second: Mainstream Search
You hold that mainstream searchers are lazy and are not going to do the work it would take to personalize their results.

I hold that they already do this work willingly, and that it’s up to relevance scientists to help users take advantage of this work.

It’s up to… !!!!!SEARCH ENGINES!!!!! to help users create the networks and the content that will both reward them with connections with those who share their passions and, ultimately, offer up results that are personally relevant.

Search Engines must create useful systems by which users generate personal relevance algorithms by doing activities they’re passionately connected to and already do in other places on the web.

I would agree that only a small portion of overall users are going to participate in social networks. But I find it HIGHLY LIKELY that Yahoo’s going to learn a great deal about network relevance from MyWeb and that it will find ways to apply this learning to Yahoo’s main search engine.

If I know, as a user, that Yahoo employs relevant social network data in its SERPs I’m now seeing an algorithm that’s intimately connected with those who are participating in its content. I’m seeing search NOT as something determined inside a white box, but as something that evolves based on the participation of influencers important and relevant to what I’m searching on.

I believe that this would increase search share. (assuming of course that it actually succeeds in increasing relevance :)

Ask:
Your drill-down feature is why I remain so fond of Ask. Imagine a drill down feature influenced by social networks relevant to the specific search term.

That’s exciting to me because in my fantasy I could search for “good movies” and know that stuff like “Grizzly Man” and “the Squid and the Whale” are going to show up… even if they’ve only been out for a couple days in theaters.

Gaping holes I recognize in this argument:
Lack of social network data.
Lack of social networks passionate about a broad enough range of subjects to make them relevant to mainstream search.

That was a long ass email and he never wrote back. He was ascending the Ask throne at the time. And, well, answering long emails can be tedious.

Anyways, I still think Ask is strong, but they’re going to get left even more in the dust by not embracing methods for putting more control into the hands of their most passionate users. TV ads won’t do SHIT for you without passionate users ;)

update:
Here’s Google’s Craig Silverstein talking about Google Health, a verticalized Co-op iteration built in part by passionate experts.

social media marketing

Garrett French — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 15:47:08 +0000

Ben Wills proposes that there are five pillars of social media marketing.

I suspect there may be more, or that there may need to be some pillar rearrangements. Regardless, Ben’s analysis is a fantastic starting point for those seeking to offer social media services.