The jumping-off point for our interview was that “social at the core” position. I wanted to know what that meant, and Glenn explained that, in a nutshell, it doesn’t make sense for an agency to offer “social” as a capability to its clients (as in, “We can also do print!”). Instead, social needs to be integrated into everything a digital agency has to offer and that “every skill set, every area of expertise” needs to have social built in.

Because social media brings with it an expectation of authenticity—when engaging with a company via social media, I assume I’m engaging with the company and not their agency—I also asked Glenn how this plays out in the real world. Who manages Facebook pages? Who Tweets? Who creates content? And so forth.

As is the case whenever one asks questions like this, the answer was, “It depends.” Depending on the client’s sophistication with social media and their internal readiness to engage at the levels expected by their audience and customers, Glenn’s agency will be involved, to varying degrees, in training and helping the clients develop systems and resources where necessary. The key, he said, is that you have to be “above board” and make it crystal clear who is doing what on behalf of whom.

Helping companies integrate social media into their digital campaigns and online presence brings with it a certain level of intimacy with the client and even requires the agency to make recommendations, not just about marketing and advertising but also about internal operations, processes, and businesses goals. For this reason, the rising demand for social media engagement highlights another step that agencies are taking—and must take—towards becoming true business partners with their clients (and even, at some level, competing with business consultancies).

In the last part of our interview, we discuss this aspect of the evolving relationship between agencies and their clients, and Glenn insisted that, whether an agency is enabling social media campaigns or helping a client with more traditional forms of advertising, its contribution has “to drive brand and classic brand/purchase funnel metrics, and it’s got to drive the business.”

Because if you aren’t helping your client achieve business objectives, then you’re not really helping your client at all.

If you’d like to read a detailed description of how the Digital Influence Group has put these ideas into practice with their client Glidden Paint, as well as listen to this podcast episode in its entirety, you may do so here.

I also encourage you to check out past episodes or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

So, how have you seen social media change the agency/client relationship?

If these companies take a look at their analytics and see that fewer than 10% of visitors to their site are visiting via a handheld device, Tim pointed out, then they really won’t see the need for creating a mobile version of it.

And who can blame them? Just because the technology is available and relatively easy to deploy, if it doesn’t match the behavior of the audience, it’s not worth the investment.

Of course, as that percentage inches towards 20%, more and more companies will start taking notice. If 1 out of 5 visitors to your site were met with a frustrating experience, that could begin to pose problems, right?

How to avoid those problems, and why now is a good time to experiment with mobile were some of the topics we covered in the most recent episode of our Marketing Smarts podcast. As Tim put it, “This will be the primary device that consumers will use to initially find you and interact with your and you better prepare for it today.”

If you don’t, he adds, “You’re going to be quite figuratively caught with your pants down.”

What does such preparation for the rapidly approaching mobile moment look like? It means putting in the effort to ensure that when customers are coming at you with a smartphone or a tablet or whatever, that you are providing them with a positive mobile experience, the elements of which Tim described as follows:

1. Make Sure They Can See It

Mobile screens are small, so your fonts need to be legible, your images need to be recognizable, and your content needs to accessible without unnecessary pinching and squeezing.

2. Get It to Them Fast

Aside from ensuring that your site or page loads quickly, Tim also recommends getting visitors to a decision point as quickly as possible. Do you want them to subscribe to something? Make it easy to do so. Do you want them to get in touch? Use a prominent “Click to Call” button. Do you want them to take a survey? Make it short and sweet. Never forget, it’s a mobile moment; make it easy for the mobile user to get what they want and move on.

3. Budget for All Platforms

While Tim recommends that you practice due diligence and prioritize the platform you want to start with—based on user behavior—the adoption landscape is continually shifting, and you need to be prepared to eventually have versions of your site, landing pages, and apps for iPhone, Android, and in the not-too-distant future Windows powered devices.

4. Be Useful

Finally, if you are moving beyond mobilizing your Web properties and venturing into app territory, you have to ask yourself, “Are people really going to use this in a crowded sea of app upon app?” If your app doesn’t solve a problem that your customers have, or solve it more efficiently than the options they already enjoy, then they just won’t use it and the money you invest in it will be wasted.

Those are just some of the lessons offered by Tim in this episode of Marketing Smarts. We also talk about QR codes, stupidity in the use of emerging technologies, and, believe it or not, Billy Ray Cyrus! If you’d like to hear the episode in its entirety, you may do so here:

So, what, if anything, is stopping you from maximizing the mobile moment?

The main problem is simple: You and your competitors basically sell the same thing. This means that your point of differentiation will have little to do with your product and everything to do with creating an aura around that product that others find fascinating.

One way to do this, according to this week’s guest on Marketing Smarts, Sally Hogshead (our SocialTech keynote speaker), would be to offer a $500 cup of coffee. The $500 cup of coffee would make your shop fascinating because it activates several fascination triggers that Sally describes in her book, Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation.

First of all, the $500 cup of coffee activates the “mystique” trigger: “Why does it cost so much? What could possibly be in it? Is the sugar actually crushed diamonds? Is the cream really liquid gold?”

Second of all, it activates the “prestige” trigger: “Well, if they serve a $500 cup of coffee, they must attract a rather high-rolling clientele. I wonder who I’ll meet at the shop?”

Thirdly, this holy grail of java might trigger the “passion” trigger, creating a heightened desire for the coveted $500 cup. “If it costs $500, it must taste amazing!”

Finally, since there is something undeniably decadent about it, the $500 cup of coffee would trigger the “rebellion” trigger, for in the days of the Occupy movement, dropping five bills on a cup of joe definitely sends the signal, “I don’t care what anybody thinks about this! I’m going to do it!”

What about the remaining three triggers? Well, if you got the message out that you put as much care into brewing your $2 cup as you do the $500 cup, with the same focus on quality and consistency, then you’d be pushing the “trust” trigger.

If you set a limit on how many $500 cups you were willing to serve—”Only three left!”—you’d be working the “alarm” trigger.

And if you could make the claim that you were both the inventor of the $500 cup of coffee and that studies had proven it 2,000 times more powerful than a regular cup, you’d be playing with the “power” trigger.

That, in a nutshell, is how you might apply Sally’s approach to the puzzle of brand differentiation. However, as Sally explains in this podcast, things get a lot more interesting when people begin thinking about how her lessons could be applied to their own lives. After all, as a study she conducted along with the folks at Kelton Research showed, people would be willing to pay, on average, $288/month to be the most fascinating person in the room!

What make fascination on a personal level so interesting is that, as Sally demonstrates, we are hard-wired to be fascinating (as well as to succumb to fascination). In other words, it should come naturally to us. The sad part is it doesn’t.

Why not? Well, according to Sally, we tend to lose touch with our “unique fascination strength” as we grow up. Thus, becoming fascinating means rediscovering those things that made us (and potentially make us) fascinating in the first place.

As Sally puts its, “The goal is not to learn how to be fascinating; the goal is to unlearn how to be boring.”

If you’d like to unlearn how to be boring, and learn how to become more fascinating, please feel free to take Sally’s F-Score Personality Test and check out our entire conversation right here:

Of course, you can also listen to this and past podcasts in iTunes. If you do so, feel free to leave us a review over there!

Finally, if you would like to see Sally live, then come on out to SocialTech 2012 in March in Seattle!

Julien Smith, author of The Flinch and co-author (along with Chris Brogan) of Trust Agents, is pondering a question in this week’s episode of Marketing Smarts. I am curious to know why he thinks that so many books, supposedly about marketing and business, seem more focused on self-actualization and personal empowerment.

“At the core of it,” he says, “after talking about it in so many different ways, you just realize that the only thing that really remains, that stands as an obstacle in front of people, is people … Each person is their own largest obstacle.”

It’s an interesting notion: There are a finite number of proven marketing strategy and tactics; it’s not hard to find out what they are. Because everyone has the same tools at their disposal, success or failure depends on one’s willingness to put in the effort, apply them, and do the work. Therefore, effective marketing books need to focus on enabling the will (Julien calls it “[creating] the emotional state that will make the thing work”), rather than detailing step by step what needs to be done. (After all, you can get that stuff from the web!)

That being said, Julien points out that, in some cases, “People really do want to be told exactly what to do.”

I lived the truth of this last statement years ago when in charge of a new employee training program. I discovered that, when you are starting a new job, you don’t want a general framework in which you can figure things out on your own (and thus armed, “sink or swim”). You want someone to tell you what works and to help you organize your time and activities until you’ve your footing in the new role.

Finding your footing, however, is just the beginning. As Julien and Brogan emphasize in Trust Agents, the only way to “get to the next level” is to stop working strictly by the rules of the system and to start figuring the system out … so you can hack it.

Hacking the system—what they call “making your own game”—doesn’t mean ripping people off or taking advantage of others. On the contrary, it means finding points in the system that allow you to use it in ways for which it wasn’t initially intended.

To illustrate, Julien uses the example of people like Brogan and Robert Scoble “hacking” the social web by accumulating hordes of “friends.” The guiding assumption of most social platforms, at least in the early days, was that people would only connect with actual friends—people they really knew. By expanding the definition of “friend,” as some pioneers did, in a way the system allowed but didn’t anticipate, some people were able to create surprisingly large and complex networks, and then use these networks to achieve unprecedented power.

What does such power look like? Julien describes the people who have achieved it as, “almost like ‘Ghost in the Shell‘ type, really powerful, highly leveraged individuals that can go anywhere, can get anything for free, and they can make tons more money than anyone could ever make, without batting an eyelash.”

The technology produces this power—”The internet really does change everything”—and once we realize this power is possible, the only real question becomes: Will this new power be used for good or evil?

If you’ve read Trust Agents, you’ll recall that the authors go to great and frequent lengths to explain that they’re not talking about gaming people, taking advantage of them, or ripping them off. As they state early on, “In this chapter, we’re talking about taking advantage of systems, not people,” and then later acknowledge ” … how tricky it is to write about this stuff without running the risk of sounding like leveraging your relationships is the equivalent of using people.”

To navigate this trickiness, Julien says that he asked Dan Ariely at one point, “How do I talk about the social norms and the fact that they’re exploitable while saying, ‘I’m not unethical and I don’t intend to take advantage of people’?

I think that the only way you can do that is a) by actually being ethical, but also b) by realizing that it is not unethical in itself to take advantage of a systemic weakness just because others ignore or don’t see it. You might even go so far as to say that you have something like an ethical imperative to act on your insight once you’ve had it.

“Systems are exploitable,” Julie insists,”If you don’t exploit them, it’s almost like you’re wasting your life.”

Now, if you’d like to immerse yourself in such ethical conundrums and even uncover the “secret message” of Trust Agents, check out the podcast in its entirety here (or in iTunes):

If you’ve read a business book that has changed your personal life as well as your professional life, I’d love to hear about it!

Podcast Transcript: Marketing Smarts, Episode 15 featuring Julien Smith

But does any of this stuff solve other people’s problems? Does it solve the problem of the journalist who needs more content for her site? Does it help the email marketing manager improve delivery rates? Does it enable the purchasing manager to understand the steps she should take to select the best solution for her company (even if that best solution is not yours)?

The sad truth is that the vast majority of marketing materials we push out there are self-serving and don’t really address the problems of others. Putting it another way, our stuff may be useful to us as marketers, but it’s not really useful to anyone else.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that marketing can’t be useful. On the contrary, the fact that so much marketing is—for lack of a better term—useless presents us all with an opportunity to rethink our marketing efforts and focus on creating truly “useful marketing.” I’d even go so far as to say that, in order to raise the bar, we should adopt this phrase as a replacement for “content marketing.”

Producing content is easy, after all. Producing useful content is a challenge.

What got me thinking along these lines was a presentation by Laura Fitton (better known to the world as Pistachio) I saw in October. The theme of her talk was “being useful,” and at one point she asked the audience if they considered their marketing “useful.” Very few did.

I invited Laura to join us on the Marketing Smarts podcast to explore this idea of useful marketing as well as get her opinion on how well (or poorly) companies are using Twitter at this stage of the game. If you’d like to check out the podcast, you can do so right here:

So how do you know if your marketing is useful? Laura suggests two litmus tests:

1. Would people pay for it?

“I always challenge marketers to make all their marketing materials so useful that someone would actually pay for them,” she told me. She encourages marketers to ask themselves, “Before I put up this blog post, do I think people would pay for this? Is it that good?”

2. Will it help people kick ass?

Laura applies Kathy Sierra’s credo that user experience designers should “Give users a way to kick ass” to the marketing world and invites us to ask of our marketing, “Will the person who tunes in [to a webinar, for example] be able to do their job better? Or will they just know more about your product?” If it’s the latter, you have more work to do.

As it turns out, Laura’s take on the current state of brands on Twitter reflects the same idea: Be useful. In her eyes, many brands are still hosting/producing “selfish” Twitter streams to the extent that they just tweet out their own press releases and links back to their sites.

What’s the alternative? Taking the time to consider all the information that your audience is looking for and figuring out a way to get it to them.

“Even if you don’t generate any original content,” she says, “but you do a fantastic job of curating all the stories and events and news and resources that your target audience would need, you’re going to attract a really good, engaged following.”

As I mentioned, you can listen to the podcast above or subscribe in iTunes.

Also, if you happen to know Alec Baldwin, let him know that we were talking about him a lot in this episode and would love to hear what he thinks about useful marketing or, well, anything!

Finally, who do you think is producing the most useful marketing nowadays?

The question makes sense because mobile marketing seems to be most effective when it’s built into a store experience or focused on coupons and discounts for consumer goods. While such tactics could be applicable to the trade show environment, trade shows are not at the center of B2B marketing. So, B2B marketers are left thinking, “This sounds cool, but it’s just not for me.”

Reflecting on the question, I’ve often wondered if there were some other way that B2B marketers could be thinking about mobile and, specifically, if it didn’t perhaps have overlooked or untapped applications within the enterprise itself.

For example, what if B2B marketers were using mobile apps to provide sales folk, who may well be delivering presentations to prospective clients via an iPad, access to critical or “just-in-time” information while they’re at the client site?

Or, because getting sales people to input data can be notoriously difficult, what if they had an app that allowed them to connect to the CRM on the go or in real time so that data capture wasn’t an afterthought or, worse, totally neglected?

It turns out that I’m not the only one thinking about apps in the enterprise and, in fact, they’ve been around for a while (at least at IBM). To get me (and you!) up to speed on the potential for apps in the enterprise and the rise of the internal app store (or “catalogue”—apparently Apple has a trademark on the term “app store”), I invited Cimarron Buser of Apperian to talk with me on Marketing Smarts.

To hear what Cimarron has to say on the subject, I invite you to listen to the podcast here:

As our conversation highlights, there are at least three things you should take into account when considering how you might leverage mobility within the enterprise in support of your marketing efforts:

1. It’s Only Getting Easier

Many enterprise tools, such as Salesforce, already have a basic app that you can deploy internally. Now, even more importantly, the tool makers are also developing and promoting APIs that greatly simplify the process of building custom apps.

2. Employees Expect Mobile Support

As we move deeper into a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and mobile-optimized workplace, Cimarron says, employees “come in expecting to connect to the corporate email, to the corporate calendar, and they want applications to make their life easier.” What’s more, employees are used to the app store metaphor and the process of installing and configuring their own apps, which means that they need a lot less hand-holding than in the olden days (like, five years ago!).

3. The Possibilities Are Endless

In addition to the functional apps you’d expect to find in the enterprise (email, CRM, etc.), there is an unending amount of content that could be delivered via an app (videos, PDFs, demos, etc.) or “appified.” These possibilities point to new ways that marketing and IT can collaborate within the enterprise, first in terms of helping identify good app candidates, and then in terms of naming, branding, and promoting internal apps.

So, is your company taking advantage of internal mobility? If not, how could apps help you do your job?

If you like what you hear on the podcast, or even if you don’t, please feel free to leave a comment or a question. You can also leave a review for this and other episodes in the iTunes Store. Thanks for listening!

Things haven’t changed that much in the intervening years. Just this month, Forbes magazine proclaimed, “Innovation Saves the World,” and Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland insisted, “Less regulation, more innovation key to job growth.”

Innovation has long been cloaked in an aura of hype and has, therefore, always filled me with skepticism. It caused me, under the influence of innovation myth-buster Scott Berkun, to write: “No matter how ubiquitous the invocation of innovation, actual innovations are fairly rare, and, as far as success in business is concerned, rarely necessary.”

Of course, it’s not always clear that the organizations and leaders who claim and call for innovation actually want it. As a matter of fact, if you judge them on their behavior, rather than their “messaging,” it would seem that they are more bent on preventing the emergence of the truly innovative than promoting it.

The person who has most recently highlighted this apparent conundrum is Professor David Owens of the Owen (no relation) Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. In his book, Creative People Must Be Stopped! Six Ways We Kill Innovation (Without Even Trying), he identifies six distinct categories of constraint—individual constraints, group (or cultural) constraints, organizational constraints, industry (or market) constraints, societal constraints, and technology constraints—that hamper creativity and the innovation it can spawn.

Now, Dave (as I’ve always known him) did not write this book to help individuals and organizations better constrain innovation. Instead, as we discuss in this episode of Marketing Smarts, he wanted to provide a diagnostic framework that one could use to identify the specific constraints at work when innovation appears to be stymied within an organization or when a product, which on the surface appears genuinely innovative, never takes off.

Whether you are trying to foster innovation in your organization from the top down, introduce a new idea from the bottom up, or teach an entire market how to “think different” about a particular product, it’s important to have a clear idea of the specific limitations that you will be facing.

“The world behaves as if creative people must be stopped,” Dave explains, “and if you know that, you can become strategic about it … If I have a good idea, and I know how it’s going to get killed, I can actually take evasive action!”

Coming back to the title of the book, I asked Dave if creative people should sometimes in fact be stopped. After all, company resources are often limited and focus is frequently key to success. Can you really have creative people running around and mucking things up?

Dave conceded that some types of creativity (“blind creativity that doesn’t try hard to understand the world in which [it's] intervening”) should in fact be stopped. But he added the following caveat, “If you make something, you change the world in some way; it’s really an intervention in the world. If you do that carefully, responsibly, you should not be stopped.”

I invite you to listen to my entire conversation with Dave, in which we discuss everything from the ways that NASA frustrates potential innovators to the reasons why the Segway never really took off. Here it is:

If you’d like to learn more about how to promote creativity within your own organization, you should check out our interview with Alicia Arnold on Marketing Smarts or her Take 10 on generating big ideas in small, easy steps!

What constraints on innovation or creative thinking do you often encounter?

“That person ends up turning around and saying, ‘No.’”

Reminiscent of Steve Job’s famous dictum that “Focusing is about saying no,” one can say that social media strategy, if not born, is at least best expressed in this “no.” You say “no” because you have a clear sense of what does and doesn’t belong in the social media channels you’re using. And you have that clear sense because you have developed and articulated a social media strategy.

Of course, as Shannon is quick to point out, the conversation doesn’t and shouldn’t end there! Instead, because you have a strategy and you want to help, you turn around and say, “I could just tweet this announcement, but it would be better if we thought about how we could generate conversation around things related to this product.”

And so engagement grows.

Shannon compares the process of applying social media strategy in this way to the use she makes of the editorial policy at the blog she manages, A Healthier Michigan. The stated mission of that blog, which is sponsored by Shannon’s employer, is to “help everyone in Michigan get healthier from the inside out.” Accordingly, the content combines a focus on healthy living with a focus on life in Michigan. This mission serves as a yardstick when deciding what and what not to publish, particularly when others are pitching them.

So what is a “social media strategy” exactly?

To Shannon, it’s two things. On the one hand, it answers the question, “What is my brand’s role in this place with these people?” It expresses the “how” of social media for your organization: How are we going to approach social channels? How will the brand live and breathe there? In what spirit? With what tone?

On the other hand, and as a practical manner, social media strategy addresses the question of organizational alignment. Specifically, your social media strategy describes how social media will be used to support the strategy of your department (communications, PR, what have you), and, more broadly, the overall strategy of the organization.

Once the strategy is laid out, it becomes possible to integrate social media into the plans of an organization at the outset—as she puts it: “when products are designed, when communication strategies are put together”— rather than as an afterthought.

If you’d like to hear my entire conversation with Shannon, in which we also talk about the key to effective content marketing and the art of “being human,” I invite you to do so here:

Of course, if you want to never ever miss an episode of Marketing Smarts, you should subscribe to the podcast in iTunes! If you enjoy the podcast, please leave us a review there. If there’s someone you’d like to hear on the podcast or an issue you’d like us to address, leave a comment.

Thanks for listening!

Transcript: Marketing Smarts, Episode 11: Shannon Paul

That got a laugh, but it didn’t actually stop business owners and the proverbial denizens of the legendary C-suite from asking marketers to justify the time and effort they sought to devote to social media (nor do I know if any marketers every had the chutzpah to respond to Meerman Scott’s bon mot).

Businesses have finite resources, and it’s not unreasonable for people to ask how the use of these resources will benefit (or harm) the company. Businesses also have traditional ways of demonstrating the return on the investments they make in employees, equipment, advertising, and a lot of other stuff that companies have been doing for a long time.

So, what is the key to showing the value of social media efforts in terms that business deciders will understand? According to Nichole Kelly, head of Full Frontal ROI and guest on this week’s episode of Marketing Smarts, the key is translating social media metrics into “core metrics your company is already measuring.”

This means, to put it simply, don’t talk about @mentions, retweets, and likes. Talk about cost-per-click, cost-per-lead, customer retention, lifetime customer value, and so on. In other words, talk about metrics that people already understand.

The challenge is that, while strides in this direction have certainly been made, it is not always easy to connect the dots between social media activity and business results. This doesn’t mean that you just give up and start talking about pants! It means instead that you make an effort to tie your social activities into your CRM, and you measure.

Of course, you don’t measure in isolation.

“If you just measure cost per lead for social media, it doesn’t really tell a story,” Nichole cautions. “But if you start to measure cost per lead [in social] against online advertising, traditional advertising, PR, etc., then you start to see a really interesting story. Costs tend to be lower.”

One other challenge that Nichole mentions arises when you take into account that, especially in the B2B space, a good deal of the sales process takes place in the untrackable offline world. For this reason, she insists, you need to “talk to sales” (as well as putting specific questions in your CRM) and find out what impact the content your creating is having. If you want to establish how, if it isn’t exactly making the sale, your content is at least enabling, you have to ask, “How did this help?”

In the end, measuring social ROI isn’t just about freeing budget or justifying your salary, Nichole says. It’s also about making sure that the value of social as a channel gets due respect within the organization. If we aren’t proving our value in this regard, she suggests, “We start to become servants to other departments, rather than our customers.”

You can listen to my entire conversation with Nichole, in which we also spend some time talking about monetization of content and the possibility of getting people “to pay us to talk about ourselves,” here:

You can also subscribe to Marketing Smarts on iTunes and, if you like what you hear (and even if you don’t), leave a review there!

Transcript: Marketing Smarts – Episode 10 – Nichole Kelly

And yet, to most inhabitants of the modern world, rhetoric is a medieval oddity, an ancient artifact.

To remedy that situation, Jay, this week’s guest on Marketing Smarts, has written two books. The first, Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion, lays out the basic principles of rhetoric as taught by the Greeks and Romans, and practiced by politicians, marketers, and others (often unconsciously) to this day.

The second book, Word Hero: A Fiendishly Clever Guide to Crafting the Lines that Get Laughs, Go Viral, and Live Forever, shows how to put these principles into practice and use language in a way that is both memorable and engaging.

So, how can the teachings of bygone rhetoricians help us nowadays? Well, Jay points out, the Greeks believed that rhetoric basically consisted of three tools:

1. Logic—Using the beliefs and expectations of your audience to your persuasive advantage, as Jay puts it.
2. Emotion—Changing the mood of a person or getting them to desire a particular goal.
3. Character—Getting the audience to like and trust the speaker based on the image he or she projects.

Interestingly, Aristotle thought that character was the most powerful tool in the rhetorician’s magic bag, and Jay has found it’s also the tool that most appeals to marketers. In fact, we can see brand loyalty—our willingness to buy the latest iPhone from Apple whether it works well or not—as the result of a successful deployment of this device.

So how do we get an audience to trust us?

As it turns out, the Greeks also thought there were three ways to do that. (They LOVED things in threes!)

The first involves a demonstration of practical knowledge. We trust the brain surgeon who has performed 200 operations more than the recent med school graduate because practical experience counts for something. He doesn’t just know—he knows how to apply his knowledge to specific situations.

The second method for building trust is to show that you are a “disinterested” party. Doing so indicates that you have the audience’s interests at heart, and you can thus endear yourself to them. A good example of this is content marketing that helps you solve a problem without selling you anything.

The final and most powerful method was called arete, by Aristotle; we call it “virtue.” Using this method, you communicate to your audience: “We share the same virtues and belong to the same tribe.”

The key to virtue marketing is creating a sense of community (of belonging) around your brand or organization. “What sort of man reads Playboy?” was the 1950s version of this and becoming a Deadhead the 1960s version.

You can also pursue this virtuous path by showing that your company already belongs to a community of shared values and that you are doing your best to live up to those values. Depending on what you think of Google, its “Don’t Be Evil” motto (with its implication of “We’re not Microsoft”) could serve as a good example of this latter approach.

Long story short: Marketers need to study up on their rhetoric. And if the above has not convinced you of that, consider the words of John Quincy Adams:

“Take from the relics of ancient oratory those unresisted powers which mold the mind of men to the will of the speaker and yield the guidance of the nation to the dominion of the voice.”

I mean, come on, who doesn’t want some unresisted powers?

If you would just like to listen to this one in its entirety, you may do so here:

If you want to make sure you never miss an episode, go right ahead and subscribe to Marketing Smarts in iTunes.

Transcript: Marketing Smarts, Episode 9, Jay Heinrichs

An idea zombie is an idea which has died but lives on, plaguing the living. For example, there’s the idea that, as a non-profit—or any organization for that matter—you can succeed simply by broadcasting a message to the world and asking people to buy a product or give you money (or whatever).

Your customers, your donors, expect something different from you. They expect an interaction. This is what social media hath wrought. Facebook and Twitter have taught people to expect  a conversation, a back and forth from brands and organizations. They want to feel like they’re talking to people and being spoken to as people.

If you’re just pushing out a message—an “ask”—they will tune you out.

The fact that this idea is a zombie, however, actually presents non-profits with a unique opportunity to change the way they build relationships with their constituents, and more importantly, an opportunity to rethink this relationship itself.

John suggests that the “concept of generosity” serve as the basis for this transformed relationship. Specifically, he says, non-profits should consider what they can give to their donors and supporters, how they can help them, and, ultimately, how they provide these folks with something they want and seek.

But what do people seek from non-profits? To help others, certainly, but John thinks that there is something else, something more personal that people seek: ”They want to feel like they’re living a valuable life.”

Non-profits have a unique advantage when it comes to meeting this need,  John says, something “that for-profits don’t have: the ability to create meaning for people in their lives.

“Non-profits have this incredible opportunity to make people feel, ‘Yes, I’m actually contributing to the world in a way that’s going to change it permanently.’”

One of the most interesting ways that social media helps facilitate this sense of meaning is by allowing people to share their experiences and interact with others. (John cites the example of Epic Change and Tweetsgiving). When non-profits provide a platform for people to express themselves and, at the same time, contribute to the solution of real problems in the real world, they create a mutually beneficial bond with their audience—a bond that will result in both donations and an ongoing commitment to the cause.

If you’d like to hear more details and more examples of how some non-profits are building such bounds, check out the podcast with John Haydon here:

Of course, you can also subscribe to Marketing Smarts in iTunes and never miss an episode!

John Haydon taught a class on Facebook as part of our Social Media Marketing Fast Track as well as a class on social media integration as part of our Websites That Work MarketingProfs University course. He also produced a Take 10 on adding a Like box to your website.

Transcript: Marketing Smarts – Episode 8 – John Haydon

These are:

1. IT needs to move further out of the business of managing and implementing all technology in the organization.
2. Marketing needs to lead its own technology, and part of the department has to be technologists.

As far as the first point goes, Scott envisions a role for IT focused on technology governance—ensuring that the organization is using technology wisely with an eye to efficiency, stability, and security.

On the second point, in Scott’s view, marketing needs to lead its own technology because technology has become core to what we do as marketers. Indeed, as he has written elsewhere, “Software is now the interface by which marketing sees and touches the world.”

I asked Scott what he meant by that last statement. He drew an analogy to science.

While science originally relied on first-person observation to understand and interpret the world, technological progress as led to a situation where, increasingly, scientists understand the world, especially those parts that are too small or too far away to be directly observed, via the data provided by their instruments.

The modern marketer is in a similar position, trying to understand the behavior of customers and prospects by looking at the dashboard—a dashboard that gets more and more complex and rich in data as the tools improve and as more customer behavior becomes trackable.

There is a problem inherent in this development, however. Sometimes, as Scott put it, we can get “so caught up in the data that we de-prioritize human interaction.”

I believe that this is one reason that Scott didn’t say that marketing needs more technology, but, rather, more technologists. As the technology becomes more useful and more powerful, we need more humans who not only have a deep appreciation and even intuition for how we may best employ it, but also know how to “configure, alter or create” it.

Indeed, human intervention is required at many levels. “Optimization software helps us test,” Scott points out, “but there’s nothing about software that’s going to generate useful tests!”

Similarly, when it comes content marketing, Scott opines, “Technology can help with production, analysis, testing, etc., but the technology can’t generate meaningful content for us.”

In other words, the technologization of marketing, if I may call it that, doesn’t and can’t mean that marketing becomes truly automated. (Scott calls “marketing automation” an oxymoron.) Instead, it means that marketers adept at using technology are and will continue to be at a distinct advantage.

And the real leaders will be those who understand how technology can help create the most rich and compelling customer experiences.

If you’d like to hear the entire conversation with Scott, you may do so here:

Of course, you can also subscribe to Marketing Smarts in iTunes and never miss an episode!

Transcript: Marketing Smarts – Episode 7 – Scott Brinker

If you’d like to learn more about Scott and the work he and his company do with landing page optimization, check out his upcoming PRO Seminar, “The Next Generation of Landing Pages: What’s New, What’s Hot, What’s Working.”

Once you know what you want them to say, the challenge is getting them to say it!

As the founder and CEO of several tech start-ups, Nichole—who Fast Company named one of the most influential women in technology in 2011—has long been involved in helping companies harness social media to drive word-of-mouth marketing and to get “more social signals about my brand” circulating on the Web.

In the process, she has become very familiar with the three phases of social media adoption that most companies go through.

Phase 1 involves listening to the many conversations that are taking place online.

In Phase 2, companies begin building out their online presence on Facebook, Twitter, and myriad other social platforms.

Phase 3 is the most challenging because it calls for encouraging and influencing social advocacy: Get your customers to produce content on your brand’s behalf and recommend your products and services to their social graph.

What makes Phase 3 so critical is the reality that, as Nichole says, “the reach-and-frequency mechanisms” on which marketers have relied for decades “are no longer functioning as they used to.”

As a result, marketers seek new approaches and new models for campaigns and engagement, models that effectively enlist customers in the process of driving awareness, generating demand, and developing next-generation products (through contests, for example, that ask customers to submit designs and ideas for new offerings).

In this podcast, we talk to Nichole about her years in the start-up trenches and how emerging technologies are allowing companies to successfully plug into their customers’ referral networks as well as create programs that invite customers to put their own “fingerprint” on the brand.

She also leaves listeners with an important, cautionary reminder: Don’t ignore your own website and email programs as powerful social media tools. Facebook and Twitter are great, but you actually own and control these platforms where you already have strong connections with your customer base. Use these platforms to involve your base in your social marketing efforts!

You can hear the podcast in its entirety here:

Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts Podcast on iTunes and never miss an episode!

Transcript: Marketing Smarts, Episode 6, Nichole Goodyear

If you would like to learn more about the many ways that companies are using emergent social technologies to achieve a wide variety of business goals, check out these many articles, Take 10s and PRO Seminars on the topic of social media.

That can be a complicated process, but one that Spiral16, a web and social media monitoring tool, was built to facilitate. It’s also a process that Aaron himself has been involved with since the days that he served as a “content meatshield” for the (now defunct) site Transbuddha, a self-styled “repository and showcase for those wonderful and compelling nuggets of media that pepper the information highway like so many two-headed cows and 20-foot spiders.”

During his Transbuddha days, as Aaron describes it, he learned how content spreads across the Web as well as how to interact with people online. Today, he applies these lessons to the work he does as Spiral16’s data and analytics manager.

In this episode of Marketing Smarts, we talk to Aaron about what makes content popular (the big thing that people often forget, he says, is that “a lot of it is pure luck”), how effective algorithms are at parsing the Web’s information (turns out that, somewhere along the line “you need a human brain” to make sense of what you find), and how best to connect with the people who are actually talking about you on the Internet (the precious “signal” so easily lost in the “noise”).

On this last point, Aaron is adamant: Developing connections means remembering that all content on the Web is produced by “someone sitting at a machine carving out their world.”

Unfortunately, he adds, ”To the suit who wants to push product, that voice on the Internet is just a distribution method.”

To learn more about mining the Web for business intelligence, the seasonality of content, and how we consistently bring technology down to our level (rather than letting it elevate us), give our entire conversation a listen. You may do so here:

You can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts Podcast in iTunes.

You can also download a transcript of this episode right here: Marketing Smarts-Episode 5-Aaron Weber of Spiral16

If you’d like to learn more about connecting with customers via social platforms, you might want to check out this recent PRO Seminar, “How to Strengthen Customer Experience on Four Social Media Platforms.”

When a young Alicia Arnold heard those words, they didn’t sit right with her. After all, what about stools that you see in diners that have just one leg and are flared at the bottom?

Alicia, who serves as senior vice president of Digital at Hill Holiday, eventually grew to see her own natural inclination to question conventional wisdom (“Everyone knows stools have three legs!”) not only as a sign of her nascent creativity,  but also as an important component of the creative process as a whole, a process she has committed herself to studying, practicing, and, above all, teaching.

In the most recent episode of our Marketing Smarts Podcast, we talked to Alicia about her new book, Creatively Ever After, and the many myths surrounding creativity. At the center of our conversation was one myth in particular: Creativity cannot be taught. It’s important to dispel this myth for several reasons.

First of all, as businesses increasingly become publishers, marketers (and others) feel more and more pressure to create interesting, engaging, and useful content. They also need to figure out ways to re-imagine the content they have produced and are producing. To do this well, you need to develop your creative skill set and apply it to the content challenges your company faces.

And of course, as soon as you are talking about a “skill set,” you are talking about something that can be taught!

Second of all, no one can do it alone. “Creativity takes teamwork,” as Alicia puts it.

According to her, the creative process consists of at least four different abilities:

1. The ability to clarify a problem or situation (which usually involves asking a lot of questions)
2. The ability to come up with new ideas (or “ideate”)
3. The ability to develop ideas into workable solutions
4. The ability to implement these solutions and make ideas a reality

Because  most people turn out to be strong in one of these four areas, and because very few are equally strong in all four, creative solutions generally require a group effort.

Moreover, Alicia has found that as people become aware of these different aspects of creativity, they not only begin to appreciate their own role in the creative process, but they also start to see how one might harness the creative capabilities of diverse individuals across the organization (rather than assuming, as many do, that creativity is the special purview of just one department).

This leads to point three: Unleashing the creative capabilities of individuals across your organization can actually transform it.

In the podcast, Alicia tells a story about teaching a certain project manager, who was very good at asking clarifying questions, how to understand the ways in which she was, without even realizing it, practicing a form of creativity. A few weeks later, this woman came back to Alicia and said, “People say I’m different now, that I’m more fun to work with.” Can you imagine the impact if people said that about everyone working for your company?

If you want to hear more tales of creativity unleashed, and how Alicia has gotten people to experience their own creativity, you can listen to the entire podcast right here:

(Of course, you can always subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.)

Transcript: Marketing Smarts – Episode 4 – Alicia Arnold

To learn how companies from IBM to Garden Fresh Restaurants have found creative ways to improve the effectiveness of their marketing, become a PRO member and check out these case studies.

The friendly folks at PJA Advertising + Marketing interviewed Tim in two recent episodes of This Week in Digital Media, during which he and the show’s host, Mike O’Toole (who has made a funny video or two of his own), discussed how to “mine the absurdity” in order to come up with creative concepts, why “the truth is what’s funny,” and, of course, how to approach the question of humor’s ROI.

On this last note, Tim made two interesting points. First, he encouraged people to keep expectations low by keeping the investment low and, rather than shooting for the moon in terms of viewership, looking for small wins like getting 4 or 5 influencers to mention your video in a blog post or a tweet.

Secondly, Tim reminds us that, no matter how many viewers we get, we don’t actually know who is viewing our work and, more importantly, we don’t know exactly how the experience affected them. For this reason, he recommends approaching your video with the goal of “entertaining people and generating a little good will.”

In other words, video, humorous or otherwise, can help you connect emotionally with your audience.

But is this emotional connection what most companies are really after?

In the MarketingProfs “How 2″ segment that we contributed to Part II of the Washer series, I refer to an ANA survey which pointed out that, while most companies say they want to connect emotionally, most of their messaging sticks to a rational/functional script that leaves emotion entirely out of the picture.

The lesson here: If you really want to emotionally connect with your audience, you really have to want to emotionally connect with your audience!

The other thing I emphasize is that you need to have staff who are truly focused on creating and maintaining these types of connections with your customers. Danny Meyer, creator of the acclaimed Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan, understands the importance of people-driven experience marketing and that’s why he hires people who “derive pleasure from giving pleasure, those who watch, listen, and proactively respond to what customers are saying during the entire process, ensuring a consistent, topnotch eating experience.”

Are those the kind of people you’re hiring?

If you’d like to read more about building strong emotional connections with your customers, we recommend the following articles from our archives:

• “Most Brands Don’t Make Emotional Connections“
• “What’s the ‘Return on Sound’? Build Long-Term Emotional Equity by Applying Sound Strategically“
• “A Just Cause: Creating Emotional Connections with Customers“

Note: This Week in Digital Media airs every Thursday. On some of those Thursdays, we add a “How 2″ segment: two minutes of practical advice taking from the pages of MarketingProfs. The topics we have covered so far are “Social Media ROI” and “Getting the Most out of LinkedIn.” Check out PJA Radio and watch for a new How 2 in the coming weeks!

Is that what your sales team says about the folks in marketing? Do you harbor your own negative thoughts about your counterparts in sales? Ever wonder how you might get these two hearts to beat as one?

For insight on how one might enable and encourage sales and marketing to work together effectively and productively, in this third episode of the Marketing Smarts podcast, we took up that very topic with Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot.

The root of all discord in the relationship between sales and marketing is “a broken definition of a lead,” Mike insists, which means that taking a close look at your business and clearly defining “sales qualified leads,” is the first step towards putting the relationship on a more harmonious footing.

Once you’ve all agreed on what a lead is, you need to set specific goals on how many of these marketing is going to produce every month, every quarter, every year. At the same time, the sales organization has to commit to marketing that they will follow up on leads with a certain frequency within a specific timeframe.

In other words, the collaborative definition of a qualified lead needs to be reinforced by a reciprocal accountability as to what happens with leads once you have them. Interestingly, at HubSpot, this accountability is formalized via Service Level Agreements (SLA) set up between sales and marketing.

The third pillar of a good working relationship between sales and marketing is measurement, and specifically, frequency of measurement. As Mike points out, you don’t want to find out at month’s end that you only generated 800 leads when the goal was 1,000. Measuring on a monthly or even on a weekly basis will not give you enough time to course correct if things are getting off track.

The sooner you know if you are in danger of missing your goal, the better. For this reason, Mike measures his team’s progress on a daily basis. Doing so allows him to stay agile, re-prioritizing and re-focusing activities in real-time to catch up when it looks like lead production is lagging.

Finally, Mike stresses, as in any relationship, communication is key and so, naturally, there has to be solid communication between sales and marketing for things to work properly. In Mike’s case, this starts at the top with monthly meetings between the sales and marketing management teams, but it doesn’t stop there. Ongoing communication between sales and marketing translates into greater customer insight and can serve as the source of new ideas and new marketing initiatives.

We cover this and much more in the current episode of Marketing Smarts, so you might want to give it a listen, which you may do here:

Of course, you can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes!

Transcript: Marketing Smarts – Episode 3- Mike Volpe

Looking for more advice on lead management and lead generation? Check out our Take 10s on lead generation and get actionable know-how on topics like developing a lead management process for your company, creating lead nurturing programs, and even fixing the Web forms you use for lead capture. Watch these Take 10s now for $10 a piece, or get the entire series (and more) free with PRO membership. PRO members, watch them on the go using the MarketingProfs mobile app.

One approach that is attracting a lot of attention is “Agile marketing.” Borrowing some precepts and practices from the Agile Software Development movement, Agile marketing provides a methodology for planning and executing work that is adaptive, responsive, and driven by close collaboration and frequent communication between team members.

In this episode of Marketing Smarts, we talk with Frank Days, an enthusiastic practitioner of Agile marketing who is also the author of the Agile Marketing Blog and co-host, along with John Cass, of the Marketing Agility podcast. Days defines the Agile method, discusses why more and more marketers (particularly in the tech sector) are “going Agile,” and recounts his own experience putting the Agile method into practice.

Why does Frank find Agile marketing so appealing? First of all, he feels that it is the most appropriate approach to projects, such as content marketing, which are non-linear by nature and require the ability to respond quickly to the unpredictability inherent in social media.

Second of all, with its emphasis on daily meetings (“scrums”) and ongoing communication, the Agile method promotes alignment of team members and encourages them to focus on the things that matter right now.

Finally, and most importantly from a productivity standpoint, Frank says that, with an Agile approach, “In general, you get a lot more done.”

If you’d like to hear our entire conversation, you may do so here. Otherwise, feel free to grab this and other episodes from iTunes.

Oh, and if you’d like to download a transcript of this podcast, you may do so here: Marketing Smarts-Episode 2-Frank Days on Agile Marketing

Lou is a colorful character with a classic (East) Boston accent and a wealth of down-to-earth advice for anyone running a business. In this podcast, we covered the following topics:

1. Teamwork

When people talk about “teamwork,” they often focus on everyone pulling together and helping out when others are struggling. Lou points out that, while helping others or picking up slack may be admirable, teamwork is actually about knowing your role, executing your role to the fullest, and making sure you take your role to the next level. If you’re the quarterback, teamwork means being the best quarterback you can be.

2. VP of Synergy

To be an effective leader and make sure that everyone is executing on their role, you need to know what everyone can do, what they’re actually doing, and where they’re running into trouble. For this reason, Lou suggests that every business needs a “VP of Synergy,” someone who understands, at ground level, what is actually happening in the business and can connect the dots so that obstacles and issues are addressed and so that the organization is continually improving and executing on its mission.

3. The Goal of Business

Everyone is in business to make money (or “dough,” as Lou calls it). But making money isn’t the goal of your business and shouldn’t be your primary focus. “It’s not about more money overall,” Lou says. “If you do your job, that will come.” Instead, Lou encourages everyone to remember that the real business you are in is helping your partners do business and helping your customers achieve their goals.

4. Positions of Power

Being in a position of power doesn’t mean that you are king of the hill and can lord it over others; it means that you have the power to get things done. If you have a good understanding of what others can do, and have put in the effort to build strong relationships with them, you can often get done with a phone call what it might take someone else weeks to do. That’s real power.

If you want to get the whole story in Lou’s own words, check out the podcast right here:

You can also download a transcript of the podcast here.

But how do you do video right? And once you’ve created your videos, how do you deploy them for maximum impact on your business?

Well, you could (and probably should!) put a lot of thought into affordable equipment, thoughtful preparation, and tying your efforts to measurable results. But if you already have a camera (can I see your phone for a second?) and have something you want to capture, and you’ve got a place to publish it on the web that will drive traffic or attract “likes” and “shares” or encourage people to download your most recent white paper and so on, then maybe you should just focus on shooting your video in a way that will rock instead of, well, “not rock.”

To get some quick tips on doing that, check out this video by Steve Stockman, who wrote “How to Shoot Video that Doesn’t Suck” and who will be kicking off our upcoming Video Marketing Made Simple course with a PRO seminar on October 13:

So, what’s the best (or stinkiest) corporate video you’ve ever seen (or made)?

Want to learn even more tactics and techniques from the people who are in the forefront of the video movement (like Steve)? Register for Video Marketing Made Simple now and save $100 using promo code VIDEOFIX. (Save even more if you’re a PRO member!)

Marketers (B2B marketers in particular) can take advantage of LinkedIn in many ways, from leveraging the power of LinkedIn Groups (which allow you to contact other group members directly, even if they are not yet part of your network) to demonstrating your expertise via LinkedIn Answers to undertaking targeted promotions through your company page.

During our recent B2B Forum, the folks from PJA encouraged the assembled masses to stop “dating” LinkedIn and get engaged already! They further explored what that might mean on their Web Radio show, This Week in Digital Media, in an episode entitled “LinkedIn: An Exciting Place for B2B Marketers.”

In addition to real-world case studies and an overview of best practices for making the most of LinkedIn, this episode also featured a segment produced by MarketingProfs that we’re calling MarketingProfs How2, two minutes of advice and insight that should help people improve their marketing effectiveness.

This installment of “MarketingProfs How2″ focused specifically on ways to optimize LinkedIn profiles for search (you are allowed three outbound links!) as well as pointing out the power of LinkedIn Groups for lead generation. You can check out the entire show on the PJA Radio website. If you’d just like to hear our “How2,” you may do so right here:

What makes live events so great? Three things stand out:

1. The Power of Presence

You can always share content via a blog post or a download from your website. If you want your sharing to feel more interactive, you could produce a webcast and get your interaction fix via the chat function. Still, a webcast can sometimes feel like a phone call into the void; you’re talking and you hope somebody’s listening, but you just can’t be sure.

When you present live, on the other hand, you know exactly how well, or not, your message is getting across. You can see it in people’s faces, the way they nod their heads (or nod off), and the way they take notes. You can check in with the audience, you can invite them to interrupt you, or you can incorporate them into your presentation. Presenting live creates a different energy than presenting remotely and gives you a chance to really connect with your listeners, not just with your USB port.

In addition, when you bring people together for a live event, you give them a chance to interact with each other. And when people make meaningful connections at your events, they start thinking about you in a different way. You stop being a vendor or sponsor and become a facilitator of community, a connector, a hub. This not only encourages people to see your brand reflected in the company you keep (“I met a lot of cool people there”), it also gets them to look forward to (and talk about) attending your next event.

2. Full Plate

Let’s face it, asking people to attend a five-hour webinar is a non-starter. Invite them to a half-day “summit” featuring continental breakfast, coffee, cookies and brownies, and you’ll get a completely different reaction. Not only will this appeal to the natural, human inclination to get out of the office and eat sweets, it will give you the opportunity to offer your audience more than 45 minutes neath a headset.

Instead, you can bring them a variety of speakers addressing a range of (ideally related) topics. Moreover, by inviting others to present at your event you strengthen relationships with existing or potential partners while providing a kind of cover for your own time on the mic. No one is going to attend an event that sounds like it’ll be little more than a dog and pony show. If, on the other hand, it sounds like a lot of ground will be covered and one of the presenters just happens to be the host, expectations immediately change.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that after your guests speak you can get up and do a product demo. Instead, you should follow the example of ten24 Web Solutions’ Anna Barcelos and Brad Gustavesen and give an informed and practical presentation on a topic of interest to the audience on which you happen to be experienced experts (in this case they spoke about the challenges of optimizing email for mobile devices).

3. Content Breeds Content

The final reason that you should consider a live event is that it not only allows you to present your stuff in a setting that is better than desktop-to-desktop and curate content “live” by showcasing good speakers, but it also gives you the opportunity to produce more content!

In addition to the slides you’ll post for download on a landing page devoted to the event, you’ll have a recap on your blog (along with some follow-up posts), videos of the presentations themselves, and off-the-cuff interviews with attendees. You’ll also get mentions on the blogs and websites of the other presenters, attendees, and even invited media <ahem>.

Long story short, a live event is veritable content cornucopia!

Of course, the question didn’t pop into my head out of the blue. It was sparked by a comment Brian made regarding the Web. Specifically, he said that Internet-based businesses needed to “go big or go home” because the Internet is starting to look like a “winner take all” marketplace.

Conveniently, he could point to his new investors as two examples that proved his thesis: Salesforce dominates the CRM space, and Google is, well, Google. HubSpot would like to follow in their footsteps and become, as co-founder Darmesh Shah put it, “the single emergent platform provider” in the marketing automation space. When you are THE platform for a specific kind of service, essentially, you’ve won.

While understanding the ambition and appreciating its audacity, and even seeing how it might unfold in the case of HubSpot, I keep asking myself if the statement is really true that the Web, or at least the world of Software-as-a-Service, is really “winner take all.”

At first glance, I would say this is more or less true. Granted, the Web is a big place, and taking it “all” is a practical impossibility. However, within certain limits the Web definitely looks very “winner take most.” Are there other search engines? Yes. Do people use them? Yes, millions do. Are they Google? No.

The fact of the matter is that when you become the dominant service provider online (THe place for search, THE place for auctions, THE place for community, etc.), you will tend to stay dominant and even grow inexorably through sheer force of inertia. The more people use your service, the more valuable it becomes; the more valuable it becomes, the more people are attracted to it. It’s a virtuous circle.

But is such growth and dominance perpetual? We have in our memory once dominant (or, at least, very big) players who have shrunk or vanished. Netscape. AOL. MySpace. What is to prevent Facebook or Google from suffering their same fate?

A couple things, actually. On the one hand, Facebook, Google, eBay, LinkedIn, YouTube, Amazon, and Twitter have enjoyed a very different kind of success than that of those they vanquished. In other words, their fates have already diverged. On the other hand—or really the same hand—their sheer size and reach make it, with each passing day, more difficult for upstarts to dislodge them.

Still, Web consumption habits do change and fragment. Remember, the Web itself is continually growing as more nations and communities come online. Thus, even the success of the companies named above has to be relativized. Facebook may have 500 million active users (depending on how you define “active”), but with close to 2 billion people on the Web, that’s still leaves 75% of users off Facebook. To think about what that means consider this: There could be a “Facebook” out there with 1 billion users that you’ve never heard of. Seriously.

But here’s where I think Halligan has a point. Think back to the way Microsoft Office became the dominant “productivity” suite. It all started with the ubiquity of devices (PCs) running a certain operating system (Windows). Since “everyone” had these devices, everyone had Office. And if you wanted to work with or even communicate with a business, you had to have Office too, even if you were running Macs. The size of the user community drove more and more people  to join the community out of necessity. Even now, with numerous word-processing alternatives out there, the docs that people share with me are Word docs.

The Web is the new “ubiquitous device” and just like people only needed one word-processing program and one spreadsheet program, they only need one search engine, one social network, and one micro-blogging platform and, perhaps, one marketing automation suite. And the more people flock to one particular solution, the more that solution becomes the ONLY solution.

So, you can see the power and the allure of creating a platform, rather than a mere application. Indeed, it’s the same logic that drives Amazon, Apple, and others: Why be a shop when you can be the marketplace? Why limit yourself to making money off transactions that you alone conduct when you could get a cut from every transaction?

Yet, at the same time, the fact that others choose to build for your platform or sell via your marketplace points to the most significant way that the Web is not, after all, “winner take all.” Why not? Because every platform creates a new “all” with new opportunities for building apps, communities, ecosystems and even, if the word makes sense, “meta-platforms.” (Facebook, as a kind of alternative Web sitting on top of the traditional Web, is a perfect example of the latter.)

In other words, the Web may look like a zero-sum game from moment to moment—and there are undeniably winners and losers—but the Web’s very openness, and specifically the openness created by emergent platforms, means that the sum is perpetually growing and there is always more “all.”

What do you think?

Here are the common points of pain that my patients shared with me as well as the remedies I prescribed.

1. Promotion Begins at Home

The good news is that people are writing (although, as I’ll discuss in a second, there is pain here as well). The frustrating news is that people aren’t necessarily reading what’s been written. The good news (again) is that you can do something about that.

There’s plenty of advice out there on promoting your blog, but the sheer quantity can be overwhelming. The advice I gave was relatively simple: Start with what you got.

If you already send an email newsletter to your customers, use it to drive traffic to specific posts. If you have a website (wait, you don’t?), put a widget on the homepage listing recent posts. If you sponsor webinars and such, link to supporting posts in your invites, follow-ups, and on your landing pages. If you have LinkedIn or Facebook pages, post there. And so forth.

Whether you realize it, you’ve already built a publishing platform or network. Turn it on!

2. Content: Quality AND Quantity

Most people I spoke with had fairly modest goals for post frequency (to the tune of once or twice a week), primarily due to resource constraints. Frankly, the one or two people responsible for the blog can only churn out so much because they have other things to do. And while folks in the company may express interest in contributing, who has the time?

To get more posts up per week, I recommend broadening the range of content on your blog. Sure, everyone wants the killer 600-1,000 word post that sets the blogosphere on fire, but if that’s your constant standard, it’s going to be a hard slog. Instead, fill in the space between the blockbuster thought-leadership stuff with:

• Quick response pieces: “Blogger X wrote [pertinent quote]. We agree/disagree because [insert reason]. The question we have is [insert question]. What do you think?”
• Link lists: This Week in [Industry]; What We’re Reading; Our company in the news; Upcoming Events of Interest; Etc.
• Recruitment (Give your recruiters a post a week to highlight hot jobs, internships, etc.)

As far as enabling those in the organization to contribute, I find the quick interview to be one way to work around their time issues. That is, they might not have two hours to commit to writing something awesome, but they will probably have 20 t0 30 minutes to share their perspective with someone who can do the writing for them.

3. Making Your Blog Purpose-Driven

Thanks to the miracle of technology, you don’t need a purpose to start a blog; the blogging platforms just don’t seem to care. However, decisions regarding blog content, not to mention blog promotion strategies and everything else, will become a lot simpler if you can with confidence answer the question, “Why does your company have a blog?”

If that question gives you a hot flash, it may be comforting to know that you are not alone, but it is also important that you set about finding a purpose and quick.

There are many reasons companies blog:

• SEO (Blogs are, after all, a quick and easy way to add keyword rich content to your site.)
• Sales support
• Community engagement
• Branding
• A combination of these

There is no one right purpose—it really depends on your business model—and deciding on a purpose is just the start (fulfilling that purpose is where the real work happens). But if you are blogging without a clear purpose, how can you say with any certainty whether your efforts are succeeding?

In Conclusion

Blogging ain’t easy. But, if you have a clear reason for doing it, rely on a range of content-types, and use the tools that are ready at hand to promote it, it does get easier.

Now, tell me, where does your blog hurt?

Here’s my recap:

Ron Casalotti of Bloomberg Businessweek kicked things off talking about their Business Exchange social media platform: a people-filtered resource for business people. In order to encourage users to participate, he instituted a rating system for submissions, among other things. With over 40K registered users, BX serves as a folksonomy of topics that are of interest to Bloomberg Businessweek readers and gets used as a source of stories for print publication. It also helps direct content focus for the marketing department since they now know what readers actually care about.

Top Tip: Don’t get caught up in the numbers. Two-hundred active participants are more meaningful than thousands of passive followers on Twitter, for example. What really counts is building engaged relationships.

Deirdre Walsh, self-proclaimed “geek matchmaker” and Community & Social Media Manager for National Instruments was up next. The cornerstone of National Instruments’ community strategy are support forums, which have over 140,000 participants and 50% of all questions posted are answered by community members. The community is used extensively by the organization for product feedback, R&D insight, etc. National Instruments also puts a big emphasis on recognizing and engaging with community “rock stars.” One interesting point of measurement for Deirdre are “actionable conversations.” She also measures community growth and number of posts per community member.

Top Tip: Don’t get overwhelmed by the technical options (e.g., Facebook vs. Twitter) but use something like the P.O.S.T. method to develop your plan. In other words, treat social media as any other marketing communication function.

Next up was Mike Travis of Equat!on Research who spoke about the process involved in producing their “2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report,” a research study “by marketers and for marketers” which relied on crowdsourcing to determine survey questions. The strategy was to use the survey methodology itself to engage a community where Equat!on wanted to be better known. These efforts resulted in greater exposure, site traffic, and a five-fold increase in leads generated.

Top Tip: Crowdsourcing is a good way to get in touch with a community and actually become part of it, as long as you have something of value to add to the conversation.

Kirsten Watson, director of Corporate Marketing at Kinaxis, then spoke about her efforts to create a supply chain expert community. One key element of its strategy was to build a highly engaging, content-rich “home” for supply chain experts to learn, laugh (yes, there is comedy in supply chain management), share, and connect. Another key element was to leverage content to achieve SEO goals and beat out much larger competitors like SAP and Oracle. These SEO efforts pulled people primarily to the community and the Kinaxis blog, and only secondarily to the Kinaxis website. (Quote: “You can always buy traffic.”) Note: 20% of community members are customers and 80% are prospects.

Top Tip: Repurpose and reuse content whenever possible (“Create 10 things out of 1 thing”) while always thinking about SEO.

What followed was a Q&A session. Here are some insights and tactics that came out of that:

• Keep communities open, even to competitors.
• Post content to relevant LinkedIn groups (but don’t play where you’re not welcome).
• Link editorial content to keyword strategy.
• Involvement in social media sometimes means “listen and don’t say anything.”
• Use the many conversations happening around your brand as a driver of internal collaboration. (Deirdre called this part of her “Social Media Pangaea” vision.)
• If you have people in your organization interested in blogging, send them to “Blog College” like the folks at National Instruments do. Give people guidelines and frameworks and let them go.
• “Social media” is not a campaign or a program; it’s a tool.

Christina “CK” Kerley moderated this session extremely well keeping things focused and the whole thing highly information-rich.

That’s what Sandy Carter told me when I had asked her about the appropriate level of executive engagement in social media.

“It’s a question of credibility,” she explained, adding that it was “almost unethical” for executives to advocate use of social media and not be engaged themselves.

For her part, Sandy started a blog in 2005 because she saw the potential and wanted to lead by example.

And lead she did. Her IBM blog, “Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) — Off the Record,” eventually garnered a million followers, making her one of the highest profile B2B bloggers on Earth. (When I mentioned that I was not yet writing for a million people, Sandy was kind enough to say, “You’ll get there!”)

Lesson 2: Ask the right questions

“The question I get asked most frequently is, ‘How do I get started on Facebook (or Twitter or Second Life, etc.)?’” Sandy said, “It’s always something very specific. ‘I saw my competitor on [fill in the blank], how do I do that?’”

She continued by saying, “I think that people should be asking, first, ‘Where do I start?’”

The answer to that question begins with answering this one: “Where are my customers?” For example, IBM ran a B2B campaign on Facebook which failed. They ran it again on LinkedIn and it was a success. Why? LinkedIn is where you’ll find B2B folks ready to do business.

The other question that Sandy thinks people must ask is, “How does this fit in to what I’m already doing?”

“You can’t have someone on the side doing social media to see what happens,” she added, “it has to be integrated.”

Lesson 3: “Social media is not just about marketing”

Lesson 3 follows from Lesson 2. When thinking about social media and how you might leverage specific tools, you need to focus on the whole organization and not just a particular function.

“Social media is about social business,” Sandy insists, “and ’social business’ means leveraging social media within your entire business.”

“It’s greater than marketing,” she went on to say, “Social media can transform everything from service and support to inventory management. It can even be part of your commitment to corporate social responsibility. For example, holding virtual events in Second Life was one way we chose to implement our green strategy.”

Let’s Review!

Sandy Carter is an executive committed to social media in the enterprise because she has seen first hand how it can work.

Her experience has taught her that executives have to “walk the walk” if they want the organization to adopt social media technology, that getting social media right means starting with fundamental, business-focused questions, and that social media can and should be used across the enterprise, not just in marketing.

She’s also learned the most basic lesson of social media success: Listen.

“50% of social media is about listening,” she says, “So the ultimate question you need to ask is, ‘Have you listened?’”

Thankfully, John Overridex at Geek-o-pedia did and was willing to share them with us!

As you can see, three of his four resolutions – to be more focused in social media efforts; to integrate social media with “other tools in the marketing arsenal;” and to rely on more meaningful metrics – are essentially a recommittment to acknowledged best practices and are pretty much in line with what Jeremiah Owyang has identified as “social media trends for 2010.”

The fourth resolution however – to be continuously innovative with regard to social media tools and tactics – struck me as particularly forward-thinking and, well, novel.

There is certainly a lot out there that hasn’t been tried, but there’s also a lot that just hasn’t been tried everywhere yet. When seeking out new uses of social media, Overridex reminds us, a tactic which might be old-hat in one industry could be cutting edge in another.

That means you’ve got to find out what others are already doing elsewhere and use their experiences to rethink your own approach. The trick is, of course, to never stop finding out what else other people are doing. They can always teach you something.

While seconding this resolution, I would also encourage folks to take this re-thinking at least one step further. Yes, do as Overridex recommends and continue to invent new uses for your current social media tools (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn). This is certainly a good idea and the potential of these tools is far from exhausted.

But don’t forget that it’s not just about using old tools in new ways, it’s also about discovering and using new tools.

Accordingly, I hereby resolve in 2010 to discover me some new social media tools and put ‘em to work.

And what is your social media resolution?

Note: I’m currently editing the pre-game blog for MarketingProfs upcoming SocialTech 2010 conference. When I’ve got posts like this that are of more general interest, I’m going to share them on the Fix. – Matt

While I live-blogged a number of sessions – on creating effective webinar programs; on developing corporate social media policies; on using Facebook for brand recognition; on deepening customer relationships with Twitter; on SEO plus Social Media; and on the exceedingly clear thoughts of Dr. BJ Fogg – I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of the grander themes or gaudier threads that I noticed running through the event.
1. It’s the humans, stupid
Again and again I heard people talking about “personalizing” or “humanizing” social media efforts, which makes sense to me since I’ve always viewed blogs and such as “personal genres.” This humanization needs to take place both at the organizational level, by creating social media policies which encourage participation on the part of employees and other stakeholders, as well as on the tactical level. There needs to be a living person behind your blog or Twitter stream or what-have-you who will take the time to listen and respond to folks looking to interact with your brand or organization.
2. Personal Brand vs. Professional Brand
Of course, if you are asking people to put themselves into social media efforts, there is always the possibility that they will develop relationships with customers or recognition within a community that begins to outshine the connection to the brand. While many people raised questions concerning the proper mix of personal and professional in brand-related social media activities, the bigger fear seemed to be about retention. Specifically, they asked, “What happens when someone becomes so associated with the brand via social media that their departure leaves a gaping hole in your company’s online presence?”
3. Social Media is Growing Up
There was a palpable dearth of 101-type sessions on social media and its application to business. Instead, we were treated to a lot of pithy studies describing what real companies – Best Buy, Intel, Hansen’s Natural Soda, Pitney Bowes, SAS, etc. – have really done with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slideshare, blogs, podcasts, etc. Yes, Dell, Comcast, and Zappos all got mentioned, but it was clear that emerging social media technologies have not only entered the cultural mainstream but have become a permanent and rapidly maturing part of the commercial landscape.
4. SEO = Great Content + Grunt Work.

I got into a rather lively conversation by asserting in a loud, boorish tone that “SEO is a scam,” a conversation in which I was duly schooled but which also clarified my understanding of how optimization happens. In fairness to me, there were plenty of folks who were warning attendees against “SEO snake oil,” but they contrasted such efforts with the legit, white-hat things that people can, should, and must do to optimize their content for, as Liana E. Evans sagely pointed out, “Optimized content is king.”
That being said, I discovered that there are certain link-building activities – directory submissions, Digg-ing, even blogging – that approach data entry in terms of complexity (ie., “not very) and labor intensivity (i.e, “very”). Hiring an intern or “some guys in India” to do this for you isn’t scammy, at the end of the day, but it’s not brain surgery either and reminded me that search engine rank not only reflects quality of content but also quantity of effort.
5. States Rights
Finally. while discussing the assassination of President Lincoln with Apogee’s Bill Leake, I considered for the first time the effect that the 17th Amendment had on states’ rights. This amendment “… restates the first paragraph of Article I, section 3 of the Constitution and provides for the election of senators by replacing the phrase ‘chosen by the Legislature thereof’ with ‘elected by the people thereof.’” (read more). The result of this shift, which made senators beholden to their constituents rather than state governments, was the further consolidation of federal power at the expense of the states insofar as senators no longer needed to concern themselves with pleasing their respective state legislatures and could focus on perpetuating their own careers through the maintenance of voting blocks representing diverse local and private interests.
I never really thought about that before. But then again, I’m a damn Yankee.

5 x 4 = 20; 20 x 4 = 80; 80 x 12 = 1000(ish). Boo-yah!
He then designated a site manager whose job it was, in part, to ensure that the writers were meeting their weekly/monthly quota and that each post was optimized for search.
Finally, to help drive traffic, he was having links to each post placed on relevant (and reasonably trafficked) Facebook and Yahoo! group pages as well as sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and reddit.
With regard to the actual content of the pages he told me, half-jokingly, “As long as the posts are optimized, I don’t care what’s in them.”
That really caught me up.
While I’ve been blogging for a long-time, both personally and professionally, I had never thought about this activity in such black-and-white, bluntly numeric terms. Being old-fashioned (I’m a digital immigrant, not a digital native, alas), I fear I have too frequently agonized over the quality, novelty, and readability of my posts and almost willfully refused to play the numbers game. Naturally, having the above approach laid out for me, I felt somewhat the fool.
After the bruises to my tender ego had faded (somewhat), I had to admit that, given the nature of the business in question, this “by-the-numbers” method made sense.
Here’s the thing. The company’s success was built on relentless and ubiquitous television ad campaigns in which the main message was essentially, “Call 1-800-…. to see if you qualify for $$$.” The reason this has worked is almost purely statistical. The people they are looking for constitute a tiny fraction of the population (for argument’s sake, let’s say .1%, though the actual number is far smaller). Assuming that these folks are fairly evenly distributed but otherwise difficult to locate, odds are that if you expose one million people to your message, then you will reach 1000 of them (at least statistically).
You can essentially do the same thing online (or can you?) by churning out pages of optimized content and aggressively cultivating off-page links. The beauty is that via judicious selection of the sites where your links appear, you can more effectively target your efforts and, ideally, shift your odds from 1 in 1000, say, to 1 in 100, for example, and at a cost far below that of broadcast media.
Does this mean that the quality of content, its relevance to the needs and interests of prospective consumers, its “intrinsic value” in other words, doesn’t matter? Yes and no.
If your message is simple (“Do you have problem X? If so, call this number to get $$$”) and customer acquisition is mainly a question of getting that message in front of as many people as possible, then what’s actually on the page, content-wise, as long as it is generating page-views and, more importantly, leads, only matters functionally.
If, on the other hand, content is what you are selling (rather than whatever it is your content has led the viewer to see), then “content matters” and needs to be either informative, instructive, useful, or entertaining. It can’t just be the stuff that got you there.
Now, I do believe that given the importance of link-building to this strategy quality will influence and even determine whether or not your posts get Dugg by other Diggers or picked up by a site that has tons of traffic or actively shared by interested humans. This will also especially be the case if you are competing for links on a particular site.
Nevertheless, if you can propagate links cheaply or for free and you just need to attract clicking eye-balls, then that is what your content needs to be good at.

While I appreciate that in his book, Brands that Rock (2003), Blackwell compares Neil Diamond to Velveeta Cheese (though I’m not sure to whom that is more unfair), I think, first of all, that few companies actually sell what rock bands sell (an experience, an attitude, an identity, oh, yeah, and music) and, secondly, that fans are over-rated, especially when compared with paying, return customers.
Let’s face it. “Fandom” has been cheapened by platforms like Facebook that allow you to be-fan everything from Michael Jackson to toast. Beyond that, though, fans don’t necessarily pay the bills. As one of my guitar idols, Matt Pike of High on Fire told Rolling Stone after they had praised his epic Art of Self Defense, “Goes to show that you can have fame and still have no money.”
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that fans can be a great marketing channel, especially once you’ve handed them the other end of the funnel, but, when push comes to shove, you don’t need people who find your offering remarkable and accordingly remark about it to others. No, you need people who are hooked on your stuff and can’t live with out. In other words, you don’t need fans, you need junkies.
The good thing about junkies is that they will seek you out. They really, really, really want what you got. They are also willing to pay and, bad for them but good for you, they are not always very discerning when it comes to quality. On the flip side, the bad thing about junkies is, well, they’re junkies, which means they can be unreliable and, what’s worse, broke.
The other bad thing is that the junkie economy is kind of sketchy. Since the revenue is pretty much guaranteed, the business attracts unscrupulous competitors who may use violence as a differentiator. Oh, and there are a number of governmental bodies who take an intense interest in this particular sector and regulate it VERY aggressively.
Look, I’m not telling you to start selling heroin (which the Bayer company already tried a hundred years ago) or any of the other addictive substances that are surefire moneymakers (sugar, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, sex, etc.). I am merely suggesting that you think about making your product or service something that your customers and clients view as vital, something they depend on, and, moreover, something they simply cannot imagine living without.
After all, if they could live without it, if it is something that they don’t really need, why are you selling it in the first place?