AboutFace Media | Content Marketing

Part 10: Truth in Content

Part 11: Geniuses and Transparency

Part 12: Viral Videos

Content Marketing Part 12 – Viral Video And The Death Of The Clever Idea

Posted By Barry Poltermann / 22nd December 2010

Just have your video go viral and all your marketing needs will be fulfilled. Promise!* *Promises not to be construed as actual binding promises.

The False Prophet – The Viral Video

Everybody wants a viral video. There’s a CEO somewhere in the world right now slamming his fist down on a boardroom table and emphatically saying, “I want a viral video!” I imagine he’d be played by Ray Liotta and Katherine Heigl is the CMO in charge of delivering that mystical unicorn of marketing lightning in a bottle. It’ll solve everything!

Except it won’t.

And what does “viral video” even mean?

We’ve done a ton of speaking engagements at conferences all over the world on the subject of marketing in social media. We often ask the audiences what “viral video” means to them. The answers are surprising, sort of. Some people say it means a video that is viewed by an online audience of 500,000. Some say 500. Some say it’s just a video that is shared. After all these conferences and all these answers, in short, we can all agree that no one knows what “viral video” really means. It means something different to everyone. So if you’re Katherine Heigl and you need to deliver a viral video or else Ray Liotta is going to fire you, you’re likely thinking you’re in trouble right now. But here’s the secret – a viral video will not solve everything. It would most likely solve nothing.

The viral video has become some sort of mythical panacea. But it’s not.

Even if you produce a video that “goes viral” and a million YouTubers watch it, that doesn’t mean you’re helping move product, sell widgets, or repair a tarnished brand. It just means that a million people watched it and then probably forgot about it. It’s not a marketing strategy. It’s not a lasting positioning of your brand. It’s not U2, it’s Orchestral Manuevers In The Dark. It’s a one-hit wonder. It’s a flash in the pan that ultimately won’t help you beyond a small, short-lived spike in awareness or sales.

Look at the wildly successful “Will It Blend?” series by BlendTec. It’s a series of videos where Blendtec founder Tom Dickson puts unusual items into a Blendtec blender to answer the question, Will It Blend? The series has over 115m views on YouTube. Lightning in a blender? Not quite. It’s a series of videos. A series. Did it catch fire? Certainly. But it’s not one viral video – it’s a series of videos. Dickson said, “The campaign took off almost immediately.” Again, it’s a series, it’s a campaign. Don’t let yourself get sucked into the idea of “a viral video”. Dickson and Blendtec had a marketing objective (to promote and sell their blenders) and produced a series (campaign) of videos to support that objective. Whether or not the videos became a viral sensation, the campaign was designed correctly – it took aim at a goal and didn’t hang all hopes on one viral video becoming the next one-hit wonder. Blendtec made over one hundred episodes.

Another example would be Gary Vaynerchuck’s popular Wine Library TV (or The Thunder Show) series of podcasts and videos. Vaynerchuk, the author of Crush It! Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion, started making podcasts about wines he liked, disliked, loved and hated and then moved into video and built his brand and sales around the series. Again, it was a series. An on-going series. And it was (is) accompanied by Gary’s non-stop efforts in social media to support his show, and thus his brand. None of his videos would necessarily be considered “viral” if your definition is a million views. Yet aside from becoming something of a celebrity and best-selling author, his wine business has grown ten-fold as a result of his campaign, his series of videos.

Again – don’t get sucked into believing you need one video that is a smash hit and everyone everywhere is watching it on YouTube. You have a better chance of capturing Bigfoot, and you don’t need it anyway. It’s actually a better strategy and will yield better results to plan a campaign and a series of videos. If one gets a million views, great, but remember – one-hit wonders fade away. Longevity is the key to accomplishing marketing goals.

This is an excerpt from a speaking engagement AboutFace COO Denise McKee did earlier this year.

>>DENISE: Okay, this is a little tip I use for people, especially if you’re just evolving a content, a video content strategy. Think in terms of trying to start out with something a little more evergreen than something that has a definite stop expiration date on it. The reason I say this is that when you’re first getting into this, your organization, whether it be corporate, non-profit, whatever, it’s new. This is a new area. And getting things processed and getting things approved – you’ll find once again because video is the hot thing, you’re going to find that lots of people want input. So give yourself time to get those approvals. Whether it’s internal approvals, could be legal approval, all of those things. If you start out with your very first thing being a drop-dead date you may easily find yourself with content that’s expired, that’s already old news. So if you’re just starting out and you do not have the mechanisms in place necessarily for all of the approvals ad processes that have to go through to launch video content, give yourself a break with something that if you miss it by two weeks, it’s still useful.

>>DENISE: A really good example of a site that does a lot to keep itself vibrant and refreshed is Etsy. How many people know Etsy? It’s become, it’s actually just a brilliant, brilliant idea. It was developed as a site where artists and crafters – and I mean crafters, not refrigerator crafters – crafters could go to sell their artwork. Sort of like an online art fair. They’ve done a really really nice job of continuing to expand their content and their offerings to their community. So they have this blog, they have how-to’s, they have a series of videos, they have over fifty videos that profile different artists within their community. This is a really really good example of content that is developed for that community. I mean she discussed a lot of the things that I think a lot of the artists have – where you’re balancing how do I follow my passion, how do I make a living? And the fact that she basically discovered this through trying other things that didn’t work. So using this as a really really nice example of how to create content for your community.

The Death Of The “Clever” Idea

We all have a tendency to fall in love with the idea of a viral video. We also have the tendency to fall for a “clever” idea. This usually comes in the form of a thought or sentence beginning with, “You know what would be so cool…?”

Please – do not fall in love with a clever idea.

Here’s another excerpt from Denise McKee:

Don’t let the killer idea destroy all that is good in the world. Very often, that’s what starts it all off. I’ve got this great idea. This is gonna be so cool, we’re gonna do this, okay. This is going to be great, it’s going to catch on. Okay, that’s great, but does it speak to your target audience? Is it something that’s gonna appeal to them? Or is it just appealing to you?

Clever ideas, cool schticks, mind-blowingly neato gimmicks are all well and good and fun to come up with – but they very often will not produce the results you’re after. It’s a one in a million shot, kid. If that. What Denise is getting at here is that it is incumbent upon all of us to make sure what we’re offering by way of content is useful or entertaining to our target audience. We’ve all been involved in too many campaigns, online and off, where the goal was forgotten in service of the super-rad clever idea that started the whole thing. If the clever idea will actually offer your target audience something they value, kudos. But most often it doesn’t, the whole point of the campaign is lost in the haze, and heads roll when results are sub-par.

Don’t fall in love with that seductive clever idea.

Part 10: Truth in Content

Part 11: Geniuses and Transparency

Content Marketing Part 11 – Truth In Content

Posted By Barry Poltermann / 16th December 2010

Truth In Content

Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” isn’t enough when you’re making content to disseminate in social media. That concept still flies for politicians whose “candid” remarks have been scripted and scrutinized agonizingly prior to being uttered on the supposed fly, but if you’re trying to engage and converse with potential customers on the web, they don’t even have to set their BS detectors – their BS detectors are finely tuned and always on.

If you want true, meaningful success with your content, it needs to be truthful through and through.

I mentioned one of my clients, Kmart, earlier, and this is a perfect time for a brief case study on the content we produced for them.

Kmart’s problem when we started was that their products were perceived as… well let’s just say, poorly. Too many of their target customers wouldn’t even consider going to a Kmart store to check out the new clothing line. Same thing with their home décor products – your linens, your rugs, your lamps, and etc.

The message Kmart wanted to get out was that they knew what you thought about them, and that they had listened and changed. They had hired a slew of designers from high-end and quality operations like Tommy Hilfiger, Kenneth Cole, and Pottery Barn. They had committed to better design and higher quality products at the same affordable Kmart prices. And it was true – their product had vastly improved. But no one knew it. Everyone was still going to Target to pay slightly more for the same quality.

The goal was to go step by step to change the perception.

Step 1 – to play upon and leverage the target market’s disbelief They wanted to say, “Hey, we know what you think, but you might be surprised…”

Step 2 – show that they really had changed. “Here are our world class designers and here is the new KMart line.”

Step 3 – convert non-believers into the faithful.

Step 4 – keep it going with new content to continue to expand the base of the converted.

This was the core of the Kmart Design campaign. And as you can see from the numbers and the reaction from the netizens, Kmart’s goals were accomplished.

So how do you make that crucial first step – create curious disbelief, in this case – happen?

Content.

Truthful content.

We at AboutFace produced a series of short documentary videos where we followed the new breed of KMart designers as they passionately worked to make a better product. The audience got to know the designers, got to know where they came from, and got to know why it was important to them to be able to make great product available through KMart at affordable prices.

The videos never shied away from the skepticism the audience was sure to have. It was warts and all. It was based on the premise that we, the audience and the Mart itself, all know the reputation, but these designers are here to change all that. See if they can.

Here’s an excerpt of two of KMart’s top designers from one early video.

JUNE: “When Lisa called me to join her here [at Kmart], I had two concerns. One was who we would be able to recruit based on KMart’s recent history.”

KIM: “I started out at the GAP, worked at Baby GAP, Nickelodeon, Ralph Lauren… Kmart was a new opportunity, it was almost like a startup. I just liked the challenge of trying to revamp their line.”

Notice the words “recent history” and “revamp their line”. These are two people who are employees of KMart, talking in a video that is going public, and they’re being very clear about KMart’s reputation – in a video approved by KMart brass and legal team and all.

That’s it – that’s the tone. It’s honest. It’s truthful content. We didn’t have to make anything up or ‘spin’ it to convince.

Honesty is the best policy out there today. It’s not that the people who make up the audience of social media are cynical, it’s that they’re post-cynical. They can see spin, or downright BS, coming a mile away and rather than scrutinize it or get analytical or angry about it, they simply zone it out and move on.

Truthful content gives you the chance to give these post-cynical potential customers the chance to give you a chance. Don’t lie to them or try to put one over on them. They’ll know immediately and never give you a second thought.

Truthful content is your hook. Not every brand has to overcome a negative reputation, but that doesn’t mean every brand should pretend skies are clear when it’s clearly drizzling rain. Be honest about your brand in your content and good things will happen.

–

Part 10: Truth in Content

Content Marketing Part 10 – Genuiness And Transparency

Posted By Barry Poltermann / 18th November 2010

Nixon - Not a great example of Genuineness or Transparency.

Genuineness And Transparency

Genuineness and transparency are key in this hyper-connected era for any brand to foster trust, loyalty, or even be given the opportunity to be heard by potential customers.

Let’s look at two opposite examples.

Ford Motor Company was in a lot of trouble around the turn of the Millenium. Their product was suffering terrible backlash from customers and industry pundits, their stock price was down, and their formerly great American brand image was rusting away. They knew they were going down unless they turned it around somehow. Ford did turn it around. They started by admitting that they had been slipping, big time. They then improved their product behind their energetic CEO. And they let the world watch them do it. Ford launched a net-based video campaign called Ford Bold Moves. It was ahead of its time in that it let a documentary crew follow their CEO around, assessing and admitting to the shoddy shape of things. The crew had all-access to the problems the company had in the boardroom, in the customer service centers, and on the assembly lines. They copped to the truth – we have screwed up bad, but we’re trying to turn it around. The campaign itself was indeed bold. It was unflinching. It was hugely successful to anyone who watched in that Ford came across as owning up to its mistakes and willing to work hard to win back its former glory, its former great product line, and its former or simply disaffected customers. The Bold Moves campaign had the unfortunate distinction of being so far ahead of its time that it predated the explosion of social media, specifically the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, and micro-blogs like Twitter. Had Ford known what we know now, the sheer number of people who would have seen the campaign would have exploded, too. Alas, Ford was genuine and transparent when most companies would have been battening down the hatches and hiding from their own customers. This spirit of genuineness and transparency helped save a company on the rocks and turn them back into an American powerhouse.

Now let’s look at the more recent BP oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. What BP did was nearly the polar opposite of what Ford did in the clutch. BP shut out the public completely. They got their PR company into overdrive and tried to spin the story. The public knew they were lying about the extent of damage that was being done, about the amount of oil being pumped into the water and onto the beaches almost from day one. Their CEO acted brashly and dismissive, downplaying the disaster even as CNN showed experts and images to contradict BP’s claims all day long. Only after months of backlash, or rather an outpouring of hatred, did BP admit what was really going on and take steps to correct their behavior. That CEO subsequently lost his job and BP reported a massive loss, devastating its stock. And as of this writing, that is only the beginning. This is a company that may never recover from their lack of genuineness and transparency. That is not to say that if BP did an honest series of videos documenting their efforts their company would have chugged on through the crisis, but it would well have helped their image and perhaps avoided the numerous boycotts of their products. BP had the opposite spirit Ford did at a crucial moment in their history, and it’s likely they won’t exist as a result.

So what do those examples tell us? In a world this savvy to corporate spin, and especially in the realm of social media, it is paramount to be genuine and transparent. We don’t buy the apologetic ads BP started running three months into the spill. And so we don’t buy their gas anymore. We’re too well educated to PR to be fooled. If you want to market your brand today, crisis or no, you must go at it with G & T in mind, or your audience will smell the falseness of it out – like smelling a rat – and they’ll click off. Or worse.

Customer Company Pact WIKI

Want further proof that customers are looking for more from the companies that they patronize these days? Check out the Customer Company Pact that’s been launched, where else, online.

This Pact is very much in the spirit of G & T.

Since the Pact was launched, hundreds of companies from around the world have signed on. The successful ones will honor the spirit of G & T.

Content Marketing Part 9 – Content Marketing Defined

Posted By Barry Poltermann / 5th November 2010

Lauryn Hill sang that "Everything Is Everything". We'd argue that "Content Is Everything", but we probably wouldn't get a hit song out of it.

Content Marketing.

At AboutFace, we are content marketers. What does that mean? First let’s define content in the context of social media.

Content is anything you put out there. Sorry to be vague, but it’s true. Every Facebook status update is a form of content. Every Tweet. Every picture you upload to Flickr. Every video you blast out through TubeMogul. It’s all content. And it all adds up to who you are and what you’re about.

Great, so content is everything. So then content marketing is… what?

Content marketing is a comprehensive, strategically-managed approach to producing content (again, Tweets, blog posts, videos, everything) and disseminating that content all throughout the social media landscape.

You want to have a cohesive brand across all the outlets and channels where users, potential customers or clients, will interact with you. So it’s not good enough to have a website, you need a Facebook page, a Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and any other number of accounts and presences. Remember – the fish are already out there swimming around, it’s your job to go get them, wherever they may be.

Marketers need to be publishers — create great content and get it out there in the most impactful way possible. That’s content marketing.

A Little Note On The History Of Content Marketing

It’s not a new concept. Airlines have been doing this to us all for decades. They just haven’t been doing it online.

Ever flip through that airline magazine in your front seat pocket? An article on some Hollywood actor answering softball questions is usually the cover story and lasts about a page. Then comes the genius part – just lots of articles about places you’ve never been. Best food in Amsterdam – page 11. Intriguing nightlife of Berlin – page 20. The picturesque beaches of the French Riviera – page 32. And the spiritual landmarks of Tibet – page 47.

The articles are usually rife with beautiful photography. Completely enticing everything. The airlines want you to want to go there. They don’t need to tell you how many direct flights they have to and from your home airport daily. You’ll get to that on your own. They’re playing the nice guy just by whispering in your ear about these amazing places that, yes, you, too, can visit. (Except on blackout dates.)

And every major airline does this, in nearly the same format, and has been for years. So maybe you read about Morocco on Delta and ended up flying British Airways to get there. Too bad for Delta, but they’ll get you when you decide to go to Argentina. So as long as all the airlines are helping to get you flying, they’re increasing their potential market and it will eventually come around, back to their airline.

The Mad Men would be so proud.

Advertising Is Content. Content Is Advertising.

In an article for iMedia, King Fish Media director of marketing and research, Gordon Plutsky, had this to say about content marketing:

Content marketing has become one of the most important trends in the field, especially as mass markets dissolve and media choices multiply ad nauseam. Smart and savvy companies have positioned themselves as authoritative experts and trusted sources of information by creating their own content. These companies understand that when they become the media, they strengthen their bonds with their customers.

So, okay, content is important. Extremely important. You might say content is the whole ballgame, and it almost is. But let’s examine why.

According to iMediaConnection, the average clickthrough rate of banner ads across the web is currently 0.2% – 0.3%. That is amazingly low. But let’s be honest – most of us don’t even see them anymore. We know they’re there, but what we’re looking for when we click open a new page is something in the body of that page. So we simply tune them out. Unless they’re one of those annoying ones that pop up over the body of your screen for ten seconds or whatever and you have to sit actively disliking them (and likely by transference whatever it is they’re selling) until they roll back into being plain old, highly ignorable banner ads. That, my friends, is bad content. But it is still marketing.

The goal of content marketers is to do pretty much the opposite of that annoying banner ad. At AboutFace we do documentary videos that tell compelling stories. We won’t force you to watch them. We want you to want to watch them. That is our content. That is also our marketing.

Now we all engage in other content dissemination whether we know it or not. As we’ve said before, every Tweet, every status update, every blog post is content. It is also all marketing.

Think of it this way. If you follow Dave The Financial Advisor on Twitter and he is constantly Tweeting about financial issues relevant to you, your location, or your tax bracket, you’re going to start to respect him. You may even trust him. If he’s doing so in a thoughtful, insightful way, that is. And that is, on a very micro level, Dave advertising Dave The Financial Advisor.

If Dave is, on the other hand, chattering on about how he got hammered in Cabo for all two weeks of his vacation, you’re unlikely to consider him a solid choice should you want to hire someone to be in charge of your kids’ college fund. Cabo Dave has just, through his Twitter content, whether he knows it or not, marketed himself right out of the running for new business from you and probably most other people who are seeing his Tweets.

So, as you can see, even on that small of a level, Tweets, content is advertising in this new space.

Now look at it from a much larger brand’s perspective. One of our clients at AboutFace is KMart. We have made scores of videos for a new effort of theirs called Kmart Design. The idea is to showcase Kmart’s commitment to great design on a budget anyone can afford. Part of the plan is managing the Kmart Design Twitter account and content, as well as that of Facebook. Our social media partners, along with key designers and management at Kmart, post and Tweet about our Kmart Design videos and Kmart Design happenings, sure.

But we also post and Tweet nearly as much, if not more, about other relevant design articles, photos, and trends. Why? Because it’s what our customers and potential customers want. They want to know about the new hot styles coming out of fashion week. And it makes us not only helpful, but trusted. We’re not just trying to shove our advertising down their throats. We are like them. We care about this stuff. We’re offering them value. We’re offering them information. And we’re being seen as experts in the field… which makes them more likely to trust us and, ultimately, to buy from us.

The point is, even when we’re not offering up our videos or articles on Kmart products, we are still putting content out there into the community. We’re still advertising the Kmart Design brand. And we’re fostering a community where we have back-and-forth with our customers, because we’re seen as honest, mostly unbiased lovers of fashion and style and design.

We’ll get into the community aspect of content marketing later on, but you can see where this is going – everything you put out there is content, and all of your content is marketing. So make sure it’s good marketing and not that intrusive banner ad your potential customers will have to sit through. Because, for the most part, they won’t.

–

Content Marketing Part 8 – Other Forms of Content

Posted By Barry Poltermann / 27th October 2010

The "C" is for "Content", and also for "now we're Cooking with gas!".

ARGs.

ARGs, short for Alternate Reality Games, are campaigns in which users are invited to play a game, usually with elements of play both online and in the real world. There is often a mystery component to ARGs, and also often a tie-in to a good old-fashioned prize for winners at the end of play.

The upside to launching an ARG is that the good ones are often great at generating press for the brand or product being promoted. The downside is that they are often complicated and expensive, with a lot of moving parts, and tend to have a limited audience of hard-core gamers.

I was lucky enough to be intimately involved with several ARGs back in the mid-2000s, including one for the release of Microsoft’s X Box 360. We were working for a brilliant and trailblazing marketing firm called 42 Entertainment, and the campaign 42 created was called the “Hex” 168. Hex was a contest where users were tasked with creating photos or videos under certain rules to submit and winners won a coveted X Box 360 before it was released to the public, as well as got to attend the exclusive release party.

I was one of the directors making videos to show the kind of rules-in-action to serve as a guide to the users. We also shot a behind-the-scenes documentary on the campaign that aired on MTV. We were doing things all over the country that would seem very strange if not tied into a Microsoft promotion. For example, we hired one of the world’s foremost experts in creating crop circles to, well, create a crop circle in the shape of a the Hex from a field in Oklahoma. You could just about see it from space. And we were all along shooting the behind-the-scenes of this kind of wacky, fun cross media marketing effort.

In the end, user response was… interesting — we got lost of photos and text entries, but videos were few and far between. What videos we did get were generally solicited by us by calling everyone we know and telling them that “you got a good chance, there are hardly any entries.” Now, mind you, the prize was an all expense trip to the middle of the desert to go to a giant launch party and get to play the X Box 360 before the game was released.

The campaign did get some good press, some bloggers were very excited, and we definitely engaged hard-core gamers who were willing to go very far for a shot at the new X Box, but why didn’t we get more video entries?

But then, the strangest thing happened: The behind-the-scenes documentary about the Making Of The Hex Campaign was seen by MTV and they decided to run it. It was compelling and fun and showcased Microsoft’s passion for their product. It was genuine. The documentary was a sort of add-on to the campaign. And MTV ran it as regular programming, not as an ad. So, while the centerpiece of the project was the ARG, it was the “making of” (which was an afterthought) that became arguably the most successful component of the campaign.

42 Entertainment has done numerous successful campaigns, before and since Hex. The Dark Knight campaign they did is of particular note for being superb and successful. But as a footnote here, as far as my personal journey from traditional marketing to the new model goes, the unexpected success of the behind-the-scenes documentary component of Hex was a light bulb moment. “Why was it so successful and well-received? And what does that mean?” We’ll come back to that later.

Live Events.

Coca Cola sponsors a Black Eyed Peas concert and streams it live on the web. Either users watch it for free or pay a small ticket price. BEP comes out and kills. I drink a Coke Zero, lose interest after “My Hump” and go to bed. You get the just of this Live Events thing. There’s not a ton of variance other than in the amount of self-promotion the brand does (meaning, ads or no ads?) and if there’s a fee paid to watch. Like with the stalwarts of the traditional marketing model – sports, concerts, and other live-essential events – there will always be a place for these as long as enough people like one thing enough to make it worth an advertiser’s money to reach them.

Video Podcasts.

These babies are easy to make, inexpensive, and a good source of vitamin C (“C” is for “Content”). Basically, video podcasts are a form of branded content, but most center around a topic of interest, perhaps even a timely, hot-button issue, in a certain field. For example, if Toyota did a series of podcasts this past year entitled, “We Are Very Sorry About Our Shotty Brakes, Steering Wheels, And Other Stuff, Too”, they may have saved a portion of their television ad budget where they espouse “Nothing is more important than your safety” by actually addressing the issues and advising customers on how to best proceed.

Come on, Toyota! No one in this sophisticated, media-savvy world believes the “Safety” television commercial campaign. It’s not helping your brand image any more than BP’s desperate campaign featuring Gulf natives who work for you promising they all want to clean up the spill. A better approach for either brand would be to address the issues head on, honestly, admit wrong-doing, and outline how it won’t happen again. A video podcast would be a perfect place for that. Control the content and the message but be honest and genuine.

Critical hypothetical examples aside, video podcasts are just videos about certain topics that are put out online and work very well across social media.

What do all of these example have in common? In every instance the focus is on creating useful, engaging or somehow valuable content for customers and brand advocates.

And all of this valuable content can provide fuel for your for social media marketing, the new marketing, permission marketing, or whatever buzz word-label you want to put on it. It doesn’t seem too daunting, right?

Good. So heed the call. You can’t beat it, so join it. At AboutFace, my company uses a specialized form of content (vitamin C) as the centerpiece of our marketing strategy. Content into social media equals success. If you do it right. We use short-form documentary video.

But you needn’t create mini-docs. You can do just about anything that your customers will find value in. Ask yourself this question: Will my customers ‘like’ this? Imagine them clicking that button on Facebook. They don’t typically ‘like’ your ads, do they? There are exceptions, of course… but usually ads are intrusive and ‘dis-liked’. All of the above content areas make friends and create connections.

Now I’m going to give you the why and the how of what we do and how we’ve done it successfully in this new social media-obsessed world. Because, by the end of this series of blog posts, you’ll be able to do it, too.

Ford Fiesta Movement Concept Explained

Posted By Ryan Dembroski / 15th October 2010

I still get a ton of questions about the basic concept behind my participation in Ford’s Fiesta Movement.
Here’s a newly released video that explains Ford’s thinking. They’re pretty open about what millennials thought of their brand and their cars – frankly, before my experience I was definitely one of those detractors.

If you look really carefully you can see my smiling face in the video – if you find it let us know where in the comments section!

Content Marketing Part 7 – Barriers To Moving Away From Traditional Models

Posted By Barry Poltermann / 6th October 2010

No army has ever breached the walls of Helm's Deep... until Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers. If Orcs can break down barriers, so can all of us!

Barriers To Moving Away From Traditional Models

A lot of marketing types have heard the statistics about declining television viewership and the like and seen the writing on the wall. And a lot of those same marketers have declined to break away from the dying traditional models. Over the years, the biggest impediment to changing over to the new (and inevitable) ways have been: Measurement; Uncertainty Of Results; Belief that the audience “isn’t there yet”; and, the old classic, Fear. We’ll take them on in reverse order.

Fear.

Yes, it’s scary to leap into the unknown. You’ve known one way to do something for so long, and now you’re faced with the prospect of having to do it another way. Well, evolve or become extinct. It’s that simple. Anyone can be scared. It’s natural. But as we’ll see here or in a myriad of other publications and studies, you have to jump. And we’re here to help you fly, rather than plummet to the cold, hard ground below.

Belief that the audience “isn’t there yet”.

In 2007, broadband in the home passed a critical milestone by reaching over half of all homes in the US. PewInternet reports that overall broadband penetration in US homes grew to 63% in March 2009, and US broadband penetration among active Internet users grew to 94.65% in May of 2009. There are hundreds of millions of MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. YouTube plays is the second-biggest search engine and plays untold hundred-millions of videos per month. One of my employees at AboutFace has a ninety year old grandmother who claims that the family computer is haunted. Pretty much everybody else is already online. And online a lot. Your audience is there already, you just have to find them and give them something they want.

Uncertainty of Results.

Okay, so say you decide to enter the fold of social media marketing, throwing off the albatross of the traditional marketing model from around your neck. What if you go out and execute a campaign – you build a website, you open a Facebook account, you Tweet – and it doesn’t make any impact at all? You’ve left the traditional models behind only to find out the new models don’t work? Obviously, no one can say with 100% certainty that “this will work” or “that will not.” But the nice thing for anyone getting into the new models now is that they’re not that new. Others have tried things and failed before you. I’ve tried things and failed before you. And others will continue to try things and fail alongside of you. You have the benefit of their experience to guide you. And AboutFace is living proof that the new models can and do work.

Measurement.

There is a massive misunderstanding in the way many people look at measurement of social media marketing. Many people think it must be impossible to measure anything, or to learn anything from what you can measure. Frankly, the reality could not be any further from those assumptions. In fact, what you can measure, what you can learn, and how specific your tracking can get is extremely sophisticated, especially when compared to that of television commercials or periodical reader behavior/demographics. As a marketer with an arsenal of metrics tools, you’re not quite the NSA, but you’re not too far behind.

Still not convinced you’re ready to take the social media plunge? Good. I will now convince you.

–

Content Marketing Part 6 – Traditional Captive Audience Model

Posted By Barry Poltermann / 1st October 2010

Remember when Gwyneth's character in "Shakespeare In Love" lost her virginity to Ralph Fiennes' Shakespeare and exclaimed, "It is a whole new world"? Well, this is kinda like that.

It’s a whole new world.

The traditional broadcast, interrupt, captive audience model of marketing is no longer tenable. Marketers and brands lost control. The world has changed. Permission marketing is the new black and maybe that scares us. And there are all these millions of people out there, in the social media ether, that we could go after if only we knew how.

Joe Kraus, the founder of EXCITE, recently stated that “the 20th Century mass production world was about dozens of markets of millions of people. The 21st Century is all about millions of markets of dozens of people.”

It’s time to learn to ask for permission again. It’s time to learn to attack those millions of markets.

Content Marketing Part 5 – Online Marketing with Microsites

Posted By Barry Poltermann / 26th September 2010

Fishing is fun and metaphorical!

I Have A Website But Still Am Not Wildly Successful With My Online Marketing. Do You Think My Website Is Broken?

If you’re wondering if having a website equals successful online marketing, it does not. In fact, websites are cute little things, but they are actually a very small piece of what constitutes thorough, effective online marketing.

In a series of videos titled “Retail’s Digital Future” released on YouTube and elsewhere, a group of senior executives from Best Buy sat down to discuss their company’s efforts, as well as their more general thoughts and trend predictions. Here is one illustrative back and forth:

Ben: I think the key trend for us and for everyone is decentralization. There’s going to be no center.

Chris: The era of the website is over?

Ben: Yeah, I mean, realistically.

Kevin: Websites are done.

And here’s another byte on the one-website paradigm:

Michele: We would never build one store in the physical world. So it makes sense to go after this atomization of the brand – show up in more places. Eventually, bring our cart, or show up with our POS register in more places so it’s convenient.

Chris: Yes, in a relevant way.

Michele: Yes.

And one final bit on focusing on the greater web, not just your website:

Tracy: We can distribute and take our Best Buy brand and let people take it everywhere. That’s really interesting. So you don’t become a store of one, you become a store of a billion. You have a billion stores out there.

(Individuals quoted here are:

Ben Hedrington, Web Development, BestBuy.com

Kevin Matheny, Best Buy Sr. E-Business Architect

Michele Azar, Best Buy VP, Emerging Channels, Mobile Channel, Remix

Tracy Benson, Best Buy Sr. Director, Interactive Marketing & Emerging Media

Chris Barry, discussion moderator from Yellow Tag

The videos are available on YouTube.)

So what does all that mean? Flush your website down the drain? No, not exactly. What it means is that most big brands would think having a site with 20 million monthly unique visitors would be amazing. According to Compete.com, Best Buy has 17.35 million unique visitors. Target has 25 million. Wal-Mart has 33 million. But Facebook has 124 million. And they hang around for a long time and come back often. You going to ignore 124 million potential customers? Even if you’re WalMart, that’s still 90 million missed opportunities. I, for one, would hate to tell my boss that I screwed up 90 million times. Every month. YouTube has 104 million. See where I’m going with this? If you’re going fishing, wouldn’t you be smart to drop your line in the water rather than hope some of the fish end up hopping into your boat?

It also means that as technology continuously evolves, it’s getting easier to do all the things you thought was so spectacular about your website two years ago everywhere else. Our client Kmart recently launched a shop-by-video widget on Facebook, Kmart.com, and several other places. The widget brings the shopping cart to where the customers already live – on Facebook, on YouTube, across the vast vast universe of social media. The goal for most websites for as long as they’ve been around has been to get as many eyeballs on them and, in the case of brands, convert eyeballs to some action (like a sale, or a newsletter sign-up, or a “like”). But now you can do all those things “out there” in the wild of social media, and you can do it without your potential customers having to show up on your site at all. You’re able to cut out that step, making it easier and more convenient for your customers. You’re also able to fish in the pond they already swim in, without having to try to coax them over to your smaller pond.

Content Marketing Part 4 – Digital Advertising

Posted By Barry Poltermann / 23rd September 2010

Looking for love in all the right places.

May I Offer You An Ad?

If I want to buy a new 3D television, my first step is probably to go to Google and search for “3D TV”. The results I get back will probably have one or two featured ads at the top for 3D TVs at Best Buy or Sears or Wal-Mart. Then the body of the page will have all kinds of results for my search, from different brands, models, and customer reviews to a Wiki page about the technical aspects and history of 3D TV. On the right side of the page, there will be a whole lot more ads from companies trying to sell me their particular 3D TVs, but who don’t have the money to spend that the Best Buys of the world do – which is why these ads are smaller and in a less desirable location on the page.

So, in what Google will clock at around 0.25 seconds, I have a veritable dearth of information on my prospective purchase. I’ve got ads, I’ve got prices being compared, I’ve got product reviews, and I’ve even got the history of 3D TV should I decide to read it. I’m so happy with this system of search-results that I’ll probably click on an ad or two and check out what each store has to offer in price, models, installation, rebates, and accoutrement.

The point is, I wanted something, I searched for it, I got it. Simple.

Now imagine I’m looking to buy a 3D TV and I turn on my horribly embarrassing only-HD TV. I’m watching my favorite team play and, hey, a commercial about 3D TVs would be great for me. But instead it’s car and alcohol commercials, one after another, until I start to wonder how interesting The Most Interesting Man In The World would look as I drive my manly pickup truck over his booze-soaked body. As you can see, this experience is frustrating me to the point of homicidal fantasy of a fictional character. But why? Because I want to watch my team play and win, and I could sure use some information on 3D TVs, but this channel keeps interrupting my game with ads for things I have no current interest in. I have no control here.

So once the game’s over, if not before, I’m firing up my laptop or iPad or web-enabled mobile phone and taking control back. I’m going to search and get the results I want, and I’ll be not only willing to see the ads that come up on the page, I’ll be downright glad to see them and eager to see what lays within them.

Seth Godin coined the term “permission marketing” a decade ago. And the 3D TV example above is one way of looking at permission marketing in action.

Because I’m searching for “3D TV”, the retailers all know that I’m interested in that subject, and it’s an opportunity for them to offer me what they have. And because I’ve indicated by searching for that topic that I am, in fact, interested, I’ve given my implicit permission to allow these companies to market their products to me – provided they are products I’ve expressed interest in.

Permission marketing is a significant move away from the traditional “interruption” marketing, such as my frustrating experience watching the game and hoping for some info on 3D TVs. You can see that it is obviously more targeted, and more effective, just from thinking of a practical example such as the one above. From a sales perspective, if someone gives you permission to pitch them your wares, you’re a heck of a lot closer to closing them than if you’re cold-calling people who have no interest in your product or maybe just no interest in being sold to. Great salespeople do close cold-calls. But why spend the time and money on going after the fruit at the top when the folks who actively asked for information on your product are hanging so very low? The latter are cheaper to get to and easier to close. They are the guys who search 3D TV and click on the ads.

Interruption marketing is dying, as we’ve already seen. TiVo and the like are standing on the throat of interruption marketing, cutting off the air supply. Perhaps the only interruption marketing we’ll see on TV (or TV’s evolution to TV, web-enabled home computer, 3D home theater, butler-robot named Jeeves) in the future is commercials during live events where immediacy is essential – sporting events, awards shows like the Oscars, and big interactive spectacle television like American Idol. Otherwise, why would consumers choose to be interrupted with ads for products they may or may not need? We already know what we’re interested in much better than even the best research marketing firm, so let us seek it out. The only time that big brands will be able to mass-market to all those captive audiences with their interrupting ads will be when those audiences have no choice but to accept the commercials as part of the deal – again, at times when “liveness” is essential.

So, we better all get used to asking for permission to market to consumers, and also to cede control to them. We don’t have any choice, anyway. The audience is in control whether we like it or not.

But then where does the marketer go to do our marketing?

“Only 1.5% of the population is in the market for a new car or truck each month”, says Betsy Lazar, general director for media and advertising operations for General Motors Corp. But, she says, “about 70% of people in the market for a car go online, so it’s logical that we need to go there.”