Matthew T Grant

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. 200 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 their 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 (Facebook vs. Twitter, etc.) but utilize 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 their 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. [Quotable 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.

I’m in the middle of a bunch of projects right now.

One project has me writing about security in the cloud.

Apparently, security concerns are one major obstacle to adoption of the cloud, in spite of the many advantages this computing model offers. My client is trying to change all that.

Another project has me mapping out a strategy for a blog focused on outsourced (sometimes called “offshore”) product development (OPD).

While the offshoring of IT services is hardly new, for the last several years we’ve seen outsourcing move up the value chain to include what were once considered core functions like R&D and new product development. As you might imagine, there are myriad challenges associated with this approach. My client is trying to solve (some of) them.

In addition to the above, I’m doing content strategy (“what kind of content do you need to generate leads, close sales, and improve search rank?”) and development (actually producing the stuff) for an array of B2B firms.

Bigger-picture-wise, I’m exploring various business models for content marketing services. If you’ve got ideas about that, let me hear ’em!

PS. The title question of this post was posed by Irini Galliulin to Ensign Chekhov in the classic Star Trek episode, “Way to Eden”

Image Courtesy of Dollie_Mixtures.

In the olden days, the watchword was: “Content is King!” Thinking on this now, however, I’m not sure that that it was ever really true.

Certainly, if your site featured lots and lots of stuff that lots and lots of people wanted to read, look at, and/or share, if it was “explorable,” in other words, then it may have, at least for a time, stood shoulder to shoulder with its peers in the interwebs’ pantheon of much-favored destinations.

Still, though like any great house it may have owed its rank and status to the tireless service of its retainers, the site itself was the true lord and master; the content, on the other hand served as knight and page, courtier and courtesan attracting visitors to the gilded halls, making their stay enjoyable, and vanishing like the April snow when the favor of these visitors or the sovereign turned from them.

Which is not to say, of course, that content is unnecessary. On the contrary, the content on your site – and I’m thinking both of information generally (address, phone number, product descriptions, client lists, etc.) as well as articles, stories, reports, white papers, opinion pieces, user reviews, videos, podcasts, and consumable images (i.e., NOT stock photos evanescently embodying your brand’s look and feel), and so on – is your site for all intents and purposes.

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This Sunday past, Richard MacManus published an article on ReadWriteWeb.com entitled, “Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried.”

MacManus believes that Google et al. should be worried because ranking algorithms use in-bound links as an indicator of authority but, due to the rise of “content farms” such as Demand Media and Answers.com, which can effectively generate links to their own content at scale, the number of in-bound links may indicate little more than the ability for an organization to generate in-bound links.

A conversation that I had with two SEO jedi back in October at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer caused a similar thought to haunt the darkened corridors of my tortured mind. That is, it became clear to this novice that building links is, in part, merely a question of resources and effort. If, like the one jedi claimed, you have “guys in India” who can help by Digg-ing content and taking care of directory submissions, you’re gonna rank. If not, good luck.

Thought #1: If link-building is primarily a question of effort, then search results in Google primarily reflect this effort, rather than some quasi-meritocratic invisible hand.

In other words, the problem with this aspect of the link economy is that, in effect, people can print their own money. Now I ask you, how many “real world” economies could survive that kind of devaluation of its currency?

Still curious about the link economy, I hit the Googles and discovered a raging conversation about the value of links being waged from the content producer side. This dispute started with an article by Arnon Mishkin on “The Fallacy of the Link Economy” in which he argued, in effect, that links ARE content so that link aggregators should be paying the sources for these links.

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Doing some research on content marketing and how companies source or buy content and came across this concise (don’t let the slide count fool you), thorough overview of the steps involved in the creation and management of a solid content strategy:

It was produced by Melissa Rach at Brain Traffic. I like it because it introduces the skimmer to the doable nitty-gritty stuff demanded by the content strategy process while giving the aforementioned skimmer a healthy sense of its (almost) overwhelming complexity.

Good work, comrade!