It’s the first Saturday in May and that means one thing: It’s Derby Day.

And what a wonderful, strange, and glorious day it is — a day full of mint juleps, pomp and pageantry, more preposterous hats than you can shake a jockey at, and, oh yeah, a horse race that lasts two minutes.

What has always amazed me about the Kentucky Derby is how something so small gets blown up into something so big. As far as sporting events go, horse racing is absolutely at the back of the pack, and the fact that you can take a long swig of bourbon and miss the entire thing would seemingly be a big strike against it, too.

But the magic trick of the Derby is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If it were just about a horse race the audience would be a jockey-sized niche (last jockey joke, I promise), but the Derby is about so much more. It’s about the build up, the tradition, and the fashion (did I mention the hats?).

That’s why there will be 8.5 hours of Kentucky Derby coverage on NBC and NBC Sports Network today, why 14.5 million will tune in, and why the Derby is the only annual sporting event that draws more women viewers than men.

It’s a remarkable work of showmanship, really, and there are definitely a few branding lessons content marketers everywhere can learn from it.

 3 Branding Lessons Content Marketers Can Learn from the Odd, Irresistible Majesty of the Kentucky Derby

1) Know Your Audience Segments

One of the secrets to the Derby’s longevity and success as a brand (today marks the 139th running) has been its ability to gather a variety of distinct, otherwise incompatible groups under the same figurative tent.

For example, it appeals and caters not only to this audience:

But this audience, as well (ah, the infield):

Those are two vastly different Derby experiences (the stands and the infield at Churchill Downs may only be separated by a narrow track, but they’re a world apart). Yet, somehow, both are offered at the same time, and incredibly, everyone walks (or stumbles) away happy.

Your company likely has more than one type of customer and buyer, as well, and messaging that resonates with one may not be effective or appropriate for another.

Take a page from the Derby — segment your audiences, find out what appeals to each, and offer them different experiences, accordingly.

Related content from the OpenView team:

Tien Anh Nguyen has a great post on segmenting your website to appeal to the right audience you might find useful and Brandon Hickie has put together a series on developing buyer personas that’s a must-read for B2B marketers.

2) If You Want to Stand Out You Have to Get Creative (& Visual)

All eyes may be glued to the horses (bad word choice) for the two minutes they’re racing, but for the rest of the time the Derby is a zoo of strutting peacocks vying for attention. If you want to stand out you better come dressed to impress (or in the case of the infield, show up not really dressed at all).

Just as in the world of marketing, competition is fierce and the bar is constantly being raised. Every year at the Derby the hats get bigger and the infield costumes get more and more wonderfully bizarre. The best find a creative way to be memorable, and as a content marketer that’s your task, as well. Never settle for dull when you can go big and bold.

Related content:

Looking for real-world marketing inspiration? Check out our list highlighting 10 examples of the most creative B2B marketing tactics online. And for an example of a truly visionary content strategy, see my look inside GE’s ecomagination content factory.

3) Make It All about Audience Participation

The beauty of the Derby is that so much of the focus really isn’t on the race, itself, but rather on the audience. And so many of the focal aspects are things we can all participate in from home, too.

Crazy hats? Check. Mint juleps? Double check. Racing the horses? Okay, no, but we can sure gamble on them!

As an event it perfectly captures the three core things YouTube’s Kevin Allocca says are responsible for viral success:

1. Tastemakers (Yep, there’s Zooey Deschanel in a funny hat.)
2. Communities of Participation (the masses are muddling mint as I type)
3. Unexpectedness (that guy who ran across the port-o-potties in the infield was wearing what?)

Keep that in mind next time you’re generating a big piece of content. Make it about your audience, not about you. And make it something they can share, participate in, take ownership of, and make their own.

Enjoy the Derby, everyone. I’m off to place a bet on Goldencents. I’d be a fool to go against Rick Petino at this point, plus my original favorite, Fear The Kitten was scratched (who saw that one coming?).

Companies of all shapes and sizes are turning to blogging to drive traffic and establish connections with their prospects and customers. And they’re counting on their employees to make it happen.

Maybe not all of us were born to be bloggers, but the truth is blogging doesn’t need to be a major time-suck, and it certainly shouldn’t be daunting. In fact, anyone can write engaging, effective blog posts in less time than you think.

Here are a few tips to help you simplify your blogging process and learn how to write a good blog post sans the stress.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Nothing is more debilitating than staring at a blank screen or an empty page. Why do that to yourself when you don’t have to? There’s no reason why you should be starting from scratch with every blog post you write.

Here are two tips to help you get a better jump-start on your posts:

• Keep a list of ideas and headlines at the ready: This should be something you’re constantly building on to take advantage of the moment when inspiration strikes. See my previous post on building a pipeline of blogging ideas for five great sources to keep up with and draw from.
• Use a template: Develop a few of these for different types of posts — see a list of 52 (!) options here — or keep it simple and base one off a previous post you’ve written with a good structure you liked. The point is to avoid that blank screen. Working from a template allows you to ease back into writing by replacing text and filling in blanks.

Break it Down

Carlton knows what his audience wants — to see him BREAK IT DOWN.

Setting out to write a blog post is something that sounds simple enough, but we all know how easy it is to get stymied and bogged down, especially if we’re expecting to go from nothing to the final draft of a literary masterpiece with no steps in between. For the vast majority of us, that’s not how writing works (also, come on, it’s a blog post — it’s not going to be perfect and doesn’t need to be).

For your next post, try something different — don’t think about writing a full post, don’t even think about writing a full sentence. Just focus on drawing up an outline, something as simple as this:

• Intro
• Headings/Sub headings
• Bullet points
• Conclusion/Call-to-Action

Start with headings that are clear, concise, and capture the main themes of your post (ex: in this post the headings are Don’t Reinvent the Wheel, Break it Down, and Other Tips).

From there, add a layer of detail by including bullet points under each heading. Boom. You have an outline. Now all that’s left is filling in the details, adding a few sentences for each point.

Note: Neil Patel has a terrific post on this process titled “A Simple Plan for Writing a Powerful Blog Post in Less Than 2 Hours” that you should absolutely check out.

I really can’t overemphasize the importance of using headings, bullet points, and numbered lists to break up your text and break down your ideas into digestible chunks. If you take nothing else from this post, please remember…

The beauty of this practice is not only does it streamline the writing process for you, it also streamlines your audience’s reading experience. You should always pack your posts full of engaging and helpful content, but above all you should make sure your posts are also easily scannable. With just a quick glance your readers should be able to immediately understand what your post is about and quickly find the info you promised in the headline.

Other Tips

• Keep it short and sweet: Have you seen how much content is out there? Do you know how busy and overwhelmed everyone is? Unless you’re getting paid by the word do yourself and your readers a favor — make your points and wrap it up.
• Use images and video: Not only can these be extremely helpful in explaining complex concepts and immediately conveying a point, they also inject a little life into your posts by making them more visually appealing and engaging.
• Don’t get bogged down by trying to make it perfect right out of the gate: In my experience, this has been one of the biggest hurdles for getting blogs done quickly and consistently. I’ll turn it over to Neil Patel and another great blogger, Angie M. Jordan, who both have terrific advice for all us perfectionists and sufferers of writer’s block out there.

“Don’t worry about making things perfect, or using correct spelling or grammar, just write. And if you happen to have writers block in one of the outlined sections, skip it and go back to it.”

— Neil Patel, from “A Simple Plan for Writing a Powerful Blog Post in Less Than 2 Hours”

“Keep it simple when writing a blog post, write what you know, what you are passionate about sharing, and what is relevant to your readers. Be honest, be open, be yourself. Not only will it make your writing more interesting, it will allow readers to connect with you and your writing.”

— Angie Jordan, from “How to Write a Good Blog Post…Without Pulling Your Hair Out”

Are these tips helpful? What tactics have you developed to make your own blog writing process easier and more efficient?

It’s been a tragic, frightening, and surreal week in Boston, overwhelming in so many ways. The immediate aftermath of chaos and confusion following the Marathon bombings has been slowly transitioning into something else now. Interspersed among the images and stories of pain and suffering have been inspiring images and stories of the best of us responding to the worst.

One message that has resonated and been repeated and shared over and over comes from a quote from Mister Rogers:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

Looking for the Helpers

The outpouring of help and support in the wake of the horrific events in Boston on Monday has been remarkable. Here are five examples of how the tech world has responded — small, encouraging reminders of the good we’re capable of in the midst of (and in defiance of) all the bad.

1) Google Person Finder

In the confusion during the immediate aftermath of the bombings, many runners and spectators were separated from and unable to contact their loved ones. With cell phone service impacted, friends and family throughout the country were unable to reach them, as well.

As Jason Corrigan reports in an article for Search Engine Journal, Google responded by activating Google Person Finder, an open source web application the company originally developed following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

“After the two bombs detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon,” Corrigan writes, “Google Person Finder immediately began tracking over 5,000 lost individuals.” That allowed people like Kelly Manning of Saratoga Springs, NY, to track the whereabouts of her daughter Samantha following the explosions until she was finally able to connect with her over the phone.

2) Airbnb and HomeAway

As Brian Patrick Eha reports for Entrepreneur.com, both peer-to-peer apartment-sharing platform Airbnb and vacation-rental company HomeAway set up web pages to help those stranded or in need of emergency accommodations find places to stay in Boston, while also waiving fees and encouraging Boston hosts to share their homes.

3) Technology Underwriting Greater Good (TUGG)

Boston’s tech community (and others around the country) has rallied behind a fundraising effort by TUGG, which works with technology companies, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists to volunteer and make grants to local nonprofits, and Fundraise.com to help support programs working with victims of the attacks.

The response to the campaign has been incredible. By early Wednesday morning over $100K had been donated, and as of this writing the total is over $150K. Click here to learn more, make a donation, and spread the word to others.

4) The Cambridge Innovation Center and Workbar

As Curt Woodward reports for Xconomy, both the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) and co-working space Workbar have offered space to local businesses in the Back Bay that have found themselves temporarily displaced due to office damage or road closures at the crime scene.

RU a Back Bay startup without a place to work? CIC is offering refugees free space this week, fcfs. Call to arrange: 617-758-4200

— Timothy Rowe (@rowe) April 16, 2013

5) EvidenceUpload.org

There is no denying the anger, frustration, and fear knowing that the person or people who did this are still out there. As a community, we can try our best to heal and eventually we can move on, but we need answers. By this point, a suspect (or suspects) may have been identified, but Boston Police and the FBI have made it clear that they need any and all tips and evidence witnesses can provide.

According to Kyle Alspach, writing for the Boston Business Journal, the site EvidenceUpload.org has been launched by a handful of Boston-area startup entrepreneurs (including individuals at Appsembler, PostMob, and BetaLab) as a way to help witnesses to Monday’s bombings upload their mobile device images and video to investigating law enforcement officials more easily.

Personal Note

My wife works at Boston Medical Center. Over the past few days she has been amazed not only at the incredible poise, responsiveness, and coordination of the medical professionals, but also the poise, courage, and selflessness of the patients, themselves. Many have a long road of physical and emotional healing ahead of them, and yet one after another they have expressed how thankful they are of the support, how lucky they are that things weren’t worse, and they insist that doctors and staff should focus on the ones who are in worse condition and who need more help than them.

With that kind of reaction, “victims” seems like the wrong word. They are survivors. And somehow, remarkably, they are finding it within themselves to be helpers, too.

Do you know of other ways the tech world has responded in support for those impacted by the Boston Marathon tragedy? Share your notes and stories below.

Soundtrack for this post: “You’re the Best” by Joe Esposito

This year’s NCAA championship tournament is officially underway, but at OpenView we’ve been reveling in the wonderfully strange and obsessive affliction of March Madness for a week now. Last Friday we launched our first annual Cultural-Fit-ology tournament, pitting 16 of today’s top tech companies against each other to determine who has the best company culture in tech. The winners of the Final Four matchups were just determined this morning, and the championship match is currently live (vote now!) to crown a winner on Monday.

So far the tournament has been a big success with over 1,000 votes pouring in to decide who has advanced and who got sent home packing. Both the voting and the competition have really heated up as the tournament has progressed, and today’s final has the makings of a barn burner. But why did we decide to do this? What are we hoping to accomplish with it and how did we put it together? Even more importantly, what could we have done to make it even better?

Those are questions I’m hoping this blog post can help answer.

First Question: Why?

I generally think the best answer to this question is “why not?” but in this case a slightly more detailed response revolves around two primary points:

1. Brackets rule
2. Company culture is incredibly, frustratingly, wonderfully nebulous

Brackets rule

There’s no denying it. Everyone loves a good tournament, but in addition to that there’s also something inherently satisfying about brackets, themselves. Maybe it’s the symmetric order it allow us to impose on an otherwise complex and confusing world. The simplistic beauty of breaking things down to either or. Or maybe it’s just that we love putting two things together and deciding which wins.

The point is the concept of brackets is something we can all get behind, and lately their popularity has exploded past the confines of college basketball and sports in general. Two shining (dork-tastic) examples: Grantland’s “Smacketology” — a tournament determining The Wire‘s greatest character — and “This Is Madness” — The Star Wars Character Tournament (currently underway, so vote now, even if it is obvious Boba Fett is going to win).

That’s the other beauty of brackets — you can set one up around just about anything. Even complex concepts, which brings us to point #2:

Company culture is incredibly, frustratingly, wonderfully nebulous

Nearly everyone agrees company culture is powerful and important, but try asking someone to explain what it is in 160 characters or less (Not a bad idea, right? Give it a shot #CultureIs). It’s easier to talk about what it does or doesn’t consist of. But as far as defining exactly what good company culture is, it’s a little like defining love or porn or a great idea you can’t believe hadn’t been thought of before: you know it when you see it.

Hosting a tournament to determine which company has the best company culture in tech may not help us pin down a concrete definition directly, but it does give us an opportunity to get a conversation going around what particular factors we value higher or find more central to a strong company culture than others.

Second Question: How Did We Build the Tournament?

There was certainly a method to our March Madness, though the methodology behind choosing the field of 16 and establishing seeding was admittedly fairly loose (see more below). We relied heavily on resources like Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work list, but also took into account the level of focus and attention placed on each contender’s company culture and policies, both by the media and the companies, themselves.

In the case of the two finalists, HubSpot’s dedication to formulating, packaging, and publicizing its unique company culture (see the recent of the release of the HubSpot Culture Code) helped to make it a clear #1 seed, while SEOmoz’s dedication to transparency and the rest of its guiding principles (see the TAGFEE Code) has been well-documented by its CEO Rand Fishkin, and put it ahead of other perhaps more well-known and further established companies that didn’t make the cut.

Every bracket needs to be divided up into “regions,” and in this case, drawing the lines based on geography made sense. In the end, this didn’t result in the cleanest or evenly balanced divisions — any of the Silicon Valley companies could arguably been a #1 seed in their own regions, and, yes, I know, “Rest of the West” is a bit of a stretch — but it provided a structure that at least made sense and delivered some great Round 1 matchups (Google vs. Apple; Amazon vs. SEOmoz in the “Battle for Seattle”).

Once the bracket was in place all that was left was to create profiles for each company and it was off to the races.

Third Question: What Could We Have Done Differently?

We had a lot of fun with this tournament and judging by the response, many of our readers enjoyed it, too. We absolutely want to do it again next year, and we have nearly a full 365 to come up with ways to make it bigger and better. There are three areas I think we can make some exciting improvements in and I would love any and all input and recommendations.

Selection

How could we improve the selection process? Widen the field? Open it up to nominations?

Match Schedule

This year we held voting for all eight first round matchups on one day, the four Round 2 matchups another day, and both the Final Four and the Championship matches on their own days. Does that schedule make sense? Would it have been better to break the first and second round matches up?

Layout, Features, and the Bracket

Is there anything you would have enjoyed seeing included or in addition to the company profiles? Would it be good to include additional guest commentary and predictions? Would you have preferred an interactive bracket and/or the option to make your own predictions?

Thank you for any recommendations you can offer, and if you’ve already voted in this year’s championship, thank you very much for participating, as well!

Note: We will be announcing the winner of this year’s tournament on Monday.

Soundtrack to this post: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (“Ode to Joy”)

How would Detective John McClane run your content strategy? With a bang.

With the release of the fifth installment of the Die Hard franchise coming to a screen near you this Thursday (Happy Valentine’s Day, honey!), what better way to celebrate than imagining what it would be like if everyone’s favorite disgruntled, wise-ass, nigh-indestructible cop was in charge of taking your content marketing to the next level.

After all, as someone who has routinely saved the world, survived countless explosions, changed the action film industry as we know it, and had us all rooting for him every step of the way, we could certainly do a lot worse. Here are four lessons you and your team could learn from the McClane school of content marketing:

WWJMD? When the Going Gets Tough Don’t Just Sit There, Blow Stuff Up

Is your web traffic flatlining? Your click-through rate headed south and your social media outreach going nowhere? Let me ask you a question — do you think if you were John McClane you’d be standing around crying about it?

Hell no.

You’d do something about it. You wouldn’t take your time planning out what you could be doing, you’d jump right in and start doing. You’d try new things and improvise. You’d think outside the box. Actually, no — you’d blow up the box and find a way to use the splintered pieces as a weapon.

How are you going to know what new tactics and formats will work for you unless you get out there and try them? See what sticks, learn from what doesn’t — the important thing is that you get results and iterate from there.

Remember, John McClane doesn’t run away from fires, he starts them.

Know How to Deliver a Message (and a Good Catchphrase)

Hans Gruber: [Reading what McClane wrote on the dead terrorist's shirt] “Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho.”

Say what you will about his cavalier approach, but John McClane knows how to get his message across. Whether it’s “negotiating” with terrorists or finding a way to enlist the help of LAPD’s finest, he’s direct, to the point, and incredibly effective at getting your attention.

If McClane was running your content creation you better believe his titles/headlines would be brief and pack plenty of punch. He’d also completely dominate your social media feeds, churning out viral one-liners left and right.

Twitter, Facebook, you name it, the secret recipe for success is the same: Keep it short. Keep it simple. Make it catchy as hell.

140 characters? McClane only needs 29: Yippe Ki-Yay, mother…

Make it Personal

For as brash and badass as he is, McClane has a soft side, too. Or as the site Vote John McClane puts it, “He wears his heart upon his sleeve, when he’s wearing sleeves.”

The reason we root for him is that we can relate to him. Unlike many of the action heroes who came before him, McClane is flawed and he’s vulnerable. He’s the underdog who gets the crap beat out of him constantly, and we’re not always sure he’s going to win. But he never even thinks about giving up and when he finds a way to beat the odds it’s not just his victory, it’s ours.

If he were in charge of connecting and engaging with your audience he’d drop any false pretenses and give it to them straight — this is what he cares about and what he believes in, and he’ll never stop giving it his all.

That’s called authenticity. It’s what earns you trust and lays the groundwork for a long-lasting commitment. And it’s definitely not something you can phone in.
Let your guard down, share what you’re passionate about, make genuine connections. People have developed BS-meters for a reason and, for marketers, the only way to get past them is to be truly different.

Come Back for Sequels

Repurpose. Reuse. Recycle. That’s the name of the game when it comes to keeping that content pipeline filled, and of course Detective McClane knows a thing or two (or five) about that, too.

Sure, leave your audience wanting more, but then by all means, give it to them. And don’t be afraid to lean heavy on the same tried and true recipe they’ve enjoyed before.

You know what they say — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So, go ahead — dust off your old blog posts, revisit that early report/case study. The great thing about quality content is that it always has something to offer. The best — like John McClane (not to be confused with Bruce Willis) — never gets old. That’s what makes it classic.

Here’s to another Die Hard. Now go out there and create some kick-ass content.

Soundtrack for this post: “Time Trap” by Built to Spill

It’s here! That strangest of American holidays. The day when we, as a nation, turn our collective attention to a small town in west-central Pennsylvania and watch in anticipation as a particular pampered furry marmot is pulled from his resting place in a fake tree stump atop Gobbler’s Knob to deliver his forecast of the future.

Groundhog Day.

And as if things couldn’t get any weirder, February 2nd always puts me in the state of mind to consider what it would be like if I were trapped in a time loop, forced — like Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray in one of his best movies, Groundhog Day) — to live the same day over and over. Nothing changes, everything plays out the same.

This year, it’s specifically got me thinking about how easy it is to get stuck in a figurative time loop at work. You get caught up in a routine, it becomes standard operating procedure, you get a little complacent, and then it becomes difficult to break outside the cycle and reprioritize or take on something else.

It’s a dangerous pattern to fall into, especially for marketers. Our profession is constantly evolving, and we need to be able to rapidly adapt along with it. Trying the same old tactics over and over again isn’t going to lead you to new and improved (or possibly even the same) results.

Breaking Out of Your Content Marketing Time Loop

In a previous post, I laid out my content marketing resolutions for the year, and the last, but maybe most important one, is to “always be trying something new”. Establishing a core strategy of tried and true content tactics is great. So is developing a reliable, consistent delivery system and building a loyal core audience. But in order to really move the needle you’re going to have to reach new audiences and produce higher impact content. And that means trying things you aren’t already doing.

Whether it’s experimenting with a new delivery channel, testing out a new tool or service, or switching things up and trying new formats, always have one new thing that you’re focusing on. Give it a shot, monitor the results, and iterate accordingly. It’s the only way you’ll escape the Content Marketing Time Loop of stagnant traction and diminishing returns.

Phil Connors Provides an Illustrative Example

The only way to alter a reoccurring scenario:

Is to try a new approach:

Happy Groundhog Day, everybody. (Spoiler alert: looks like Punxsutawney Phil did not see his shadow this morning, so early spring here we come!)

What new things are you going to try to break out of your own content marketing time loop?

If you’re like me and you’ve set blogging goals for yourself in 2013 (or you’ve had blogging goals set for you — welcome to the team, new OpenView hires!), it’s important to set aside a little time into developing your game plan for actually achieving those goals.

Over the next two posts I’ll provide a list of helpful tips for building a pipeline full of blogging ideas and establishing a simplified blogging process that cuts down on the time and stress that can go into writing and posting.

This week, let’s start with a list of sourcing suggestions that can serve as great resources for coming up with blogging topics and ideas.

Go-To Sources for Blogging Ideas

Conference & Event Schedules

I love this one. Our newest addition to the marketing team, Luis Fernandes, looks at conference speaking schedules for topics. Then he uses the event hashtag to help promote the post once it’s published — brilliant!

Ex: The latest in MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing World virtual conference series in on content marketing (Feb 8th, if you’re interested). Looking at the agenda, I can see that two topics worth writing about are: 1) The ongoing shift towards more visual content; 2) Creating content that stands out now that the content marketing arms race is heating up.

Note: For the influence marketing folks out there, this is also a great way to do influencer research.

Social Media

Find out what your audience is reading/sharing/talking about now. Use a #hashtag in Twitter to focus on a wide or particular topic (ex: #content, #inboundmarketing, etc.) and see what’s trending. Reoccurring themes are bound to crop up and give you new ideas.

LinkedIn Groups are another great source to get a feel for what topics are driving conversations and to see what real-life questions and challenges your audience members are actually dealing with. Do you have your own solution or a different take to add?

Keep Up with What Others Are Writing About

Few things get the creative blogging juices flowing than being presented with examples of other blogs to react to. If you’re not already, subscribe to RSS feeds for popular blogs in your space. Keep a spreadsheet of popular/trending topics. Respond to other writers’ posts and/or put your own spin on them.

Other great sites to search are Reddit and Alltop and KISSmetrics founder Neil Patel recommends routinely checking out Technorati.

Your Day-to-Day

You really shouldn’t have to go too far to find topics worth writing about. What’s an issue you’re currently dealing with or a problem you’re trying to solve? Chances are that so are others, and by blogging about it has multiple benefits. Simply putting it into a written form can help you break the situation/concept down, and sharing it with others can not only provide them with help and insight, they can then add their own thoughts/solutions to the mix.

Finding ways to turn your work into your writing can also do wonders for simplifying your blogging process. Why make things difficult when you can kill multiple birds with one stone?

If you’re creating a presentation or even just taking notes or sending an email on an interesting topic, think about how much of that material you could incorporate into a blog post. You obviously might need to be careful in terms of proprietary info and avoid using specifics, but you should always think about ways you can apply your effort to more than one use (Ex: This post developed from an email I sent to a member of the Labs team offering tips for generating ideas).

Facebook Graph Search?

I don’t know about you, but I’m personally still trying to get my head around Facebook’s Graph Search, which, depending on who you talk to, is either the social giant’s game changer, a misguided dud, or a disruptive threat to everything from simple search to online dating.

But, if at its essence, what Facebook Graph Search is about allowing users to search using their friends’ likes as a filter, then that has huge implications for both marketing to those users and — in terms of content — simply discovering what particular types of content and messaging is gaining traction within particular groups.

Sounds like a potentially incredible blogging/content sourcing resource to me. But Facebook Graph Search was just announced on Tuesday. There’s obviously much more to come.

Bonus Tip

Keep your posts short and sweet. Try cutting down anything over 500 – 700 words, and if there’s a lot of really valuable content you don’t want to trash, consider turning the post into series. That allows you to go into more depth on select topics and cuts down on the number of new ideas you have to come up with!

Speaking of — next week I’ll share more tips for simplifying your blogging process, including ways to save time with your formatting, distro, and promotion.

In the meantime, here’s a nice list of 52 Types of Blog Posts to get you thinking.

What sources do you use to discover new blog ideas? Share your tips below!

2012 was a banner year for content marketing. If your company wasn’t one of the ones buying in and making the push to become a thought leader by acting like a publisher then unfortunately you’re one step behind. That’s bad news, because if anything, the competition in 2013 is about to heat up.

Or, as Marcus Sheridan puts it, get ready to say hello to the content marketing arms race.

As content marketers, we’re all going to have to step it up this year, and now is our chance to set ourselves up for success with New Year’s resolutions we can actually achieve and keep.

It’s a great opportunity to hit reset and start fresh — to dump old bad habits and develop new constructive ones. With that in mind here are five content marketing resolutions I’m making that can help all content slingers improve this year.

1) Be More Consistent

Audiences love great content, but it’s difficult for them to naturally develop into followers without some sort of consistency on your part. You should make it clear when and how often they can expect content from you, and then you should stick to that schedule. It’s the difference between achieving a sporadic chain of one-hit wonders and seeing real traction.

Avoid reinventing the wheel every time you publish. If you show up more consistently so will your audience, and you’ll build off a rising baseline rather than starting from zero every week.

I certainly wasn’t consistent last year, and I aim to change that in 2013. I’m going to do my best to establish and maintain a weekly publishing rhythm.

2) Give What You Would Like to Receive

We’re all constantly looking for ways to get our readers engaged with our content — asking them (and other marketers/influencers in our network) to leave comments, share the post with a tweet, etc. But do you do the same for others at least as much as you ask? When was the last time you left a comment on another person’s blog?

Our idea of engagement shouldn’t be confined to our own sites and social accounts. Getting involved in a community means reaching out and taking part in the conversations you didn’t start, showing up and participating on sites that aren’t yours.

One of my hopes for my blog this year is that it inspires more people to leave comments. In order to see that happen I’m setting out to be more engaging and really hone in on the topics people care about. But I’m also making it my goal to be more active in the online community by commenting and sharing more, as well. If I want to encourage readers to be more active on my blog, it’s only fair that I become more active, myself, right?

3) Reconnect with Your Audience

With the new year it’s a great opportunity to hit reset on your assumptions about your audience, as well. Forget what you think you know and go out and connect with them again. Find out what their big interests and concerns are for this year.

• What trends are they going to be keeping an eye on?
• What are their goals?
• What are they setting out to achieve?

The answers may not be the same as last year.

As a marketer, you should have your finger on the pulse, and in order to do that you have to reach out.

For me, that means having more discussions with fellow marketers, starting with those at OpenView’s portfolio companies. I want to get a better feel for the challenges they’re facing, the opportunities they’re excited about, and what they’re working on day-to-day.

4) Be More Transparent

I often find that the best content, the stuff that really hits home and connects, is material that’s tied to a real-life issue and provides an actual example of dealing with that issue.

A piece of advice we hear about all the time is “Write what you know.” I think we might do well to expand that to include “Write what you do.”

Make your content real. Bring it down to earth. Make it relatable and make it applicable.

That translates to authenticity. And that’s the #1 ingredient required for making an online connection.

5) Always Be Trying Something New

Your goals for 2013 shouldn’t be simply to recreate your successes from 2012. You’ve got to raise the bar and accomplish even more, and the only way you’re going to do that is by experimenting with new tactics and tools.

You can’t keep trying the same things over and over and expect a different result (as Einstein put it, that’s just crazy). But not only that, with more and more companies jumping on the content bandwagon and the competition for your audience’s attention heating up, you can’t expect to do the same things and get the same results you’ve had in the past, either.

In other words, you’ve got to up your game. And unless you grew a third arm or conscripted a small army of content marketing elves over the holidays, you’re going to have to find the right tools that allow you to extend your capacity while still managing to maintain that loose grip you have on your sanity.

Pick five new things you’re going to try over the next few months. That can include:

• Experimenting with a new content format
• Trying a new distribution channel (Slideshare, anyone?)
• Even simply switching up your approach

Shake it up. See what sticks. Find the right tools that help you streamline your efforts.

It’s going to be an interesting year for content marketing. Looking forward to taking it on together!

What are your marketing resolutions for 2013?

Believe it or not, 2012 is winding down, and that means it’s end-of-the-year roundup time (the most wonderful time of the year)!

Sites all across the internet are publishing their best-of lists and taking a look back on the year in review. I’m doing my part by contributing four quick reviews of the B2B content marketing blogs I enjoyed most (and that you should start reading now).

B2B Marketing Insider — Michael Brenner

Presumably, at some point, Michael Brenner has to sleep. When he finds time, though, I have no idea.

In addition to being the author of B2B Marketing Insider, Brenner is the co-founder of the social news site Business 2 Community and the Senior Director of Global Integrated Marketing and Content Strategy at SAP, where he started and continues to manage Business Innovation, a SAP-branded content hub devoted to providing curated and original business solution content. Of course, he blogs regularly for that site, as well.

While Business Innovation is certainly worth checking out, B2B Marketing Insider is where you’ll find Brenner really opening up and talking shop, offering his insights on the latest trends in content marketing (based on no lack of firsthand experience).

What more can I say? The guy’s prolific and he’s definitely worth following. He eats and breathes content marketing. And if he does ever sleep, I’m sure he dreams content marketing, too.

Favorite posts:

The Content Marketing Bucket List

6 Steps to Executing a Content Strategy

Marketing Interactions — Ardath Albee

Ardath Albee is on a mission. I don’t think there’s a stronger advocate out there calling for marketers to cut the crap and make it about the buyer. Sure, plenty of experts out there are talking about the shift from traditional push marketing to inbound and content-focused approaches, but very few (if any) are able to break it down on both a conceptual anda functional level quite like Albee. She challenges marketers to get real. Case in point: the terrific series she devoted to debunking marketing buzzwords.

Marketing Interactions is a blog I routinely count on to put things into perspective and bring content marketing theory down to a practical level. Albee can speak authoritatively on essentially any B2B marketing topic, but she’s absolutely the go-to resource for anyone seeking help in developing effective buyer personas and mapping their messaging to their buyers’ journey.

Favorite posts:

Format Is Not a B2B Persona Question

Debunking B2B Marketing Buzzword: Engagement

TopRank Online Marketing Blog — Lee Odden

You really can’t talk very long about B2B online marketing without Lee Odden’s name cropping up. For over a decade Odden’s TopRank Online Marketing has been consulting companies on how to increase traffic, sales, and brand awareness, and the TopRank Online Marketing Blog has become a go-to, one-stop-shopping resource for marketers looking for the latest content marketing, social media, and SEO tips, tactics, and advice.

One of the things I love about Odden is that he’s not just a content marketing advocate, he’s also a seasoned practitioner who’s been doing it every day for years. He’s able to give such amazing blogging advice because he’s written over 2,500 posts, himself. Whatever online marketing issue you’re currently struggling with or even just curious about he’s been through, and his eagerness and dedication to sharing all that he’s picked up along the way has earned him and his team a loyal and growing following.

Favorite posts:

Optimize Your Content for Better Discovery, Consumption & Engagement

Storytelling, Positioning & Personas for More Effective B2B Content Marketing

ChrisBrogan.com

Speaking of loyal following, social guru and best-selling author Chris Brogan certainly knows a thing or two about developing one of those, as well. Brogan has become widely known as an influential social media and online community expert, and I think a big part of his appeal is his openness and emphasis on being genuine. At the risk of using a buzzword, it’s all about authenticity — if you want something to be discovered and shared, make sure it’s worth discovering and sharing.

Those searching for nuts-and-bolts how-to advice may often find themselves looking elsewhere, but for high-level insights on some of the key concepts behind content marketing, there are few better.

Ex: One of Brogan’s tenets is that your focus should be on what you and your buyers are passionate about, and that you should tell stories that matter. Say what you will, but there’s something undeniably appealing about the simple straightforwardness of that approach.

Favorite posts:

Tell Your Buyer’s Story

How Do I Get People to Care About What I’m Doing? Tell Bigger Stories

What marketing blogs did you love reading in 2012? What others should I add to this list?

If case you haven’t heard, TED is busy celebrating a massive milestone: over one billion TEDTalks have been viewed around the world.

That’s one billion “ideas worth spreading,” and to mark the occasion TED has teamed up with Mashable to host TopTED, a series that invites top visionaries, celebrities, and innovators to share their own lists of the must-watch videos that have impacted and inspired them.

So far the series includes curated favorites from the luminaries such as Tim O’Reilly, TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen, JESS3 co-founder and COO Leslie Bradshaw, and Peter Gabriel, too.

A big fan of TEDTalks, myself (who isn’t?), I couldn’t resist diving into these lists and revisiting a few of my own favorites, as well. Below are five TEDTalks for content marketers, offering insights on what it takes to connect with your customers, become a key influencer, and create content that becomes part of something big.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit on making a splash with social media

The tale of Mr. Splashy Pants, a humpback whale propelled to fame and saved from harpooning thanks to the efforts of Greenpeace and Reddit users, is an incredible example of what’s possible when your audience is engaged.

What’s the recipe for engagement, you ask? In this very funny (and brief) talk, Ohanian explains it’s a winning mix of a) being genuine with your campaigns, and b) encouraging your audience to take ownership and run with them.

Key takeaway for content marketers:

“You no longer control the message. And that’s OK.”

Seth Godin on the tribes we lead

At its core, what Seth Godin’s classic talk (closing in on 1 million views, itself) captures is the major shift in marketing from traditional, mass push methods to a more influencer-based approach.

As Godin points out, while some believed the internet would make us more homogenized by enabling us all to be better connected, what’s actually happened is that individuals are now able to better connect with others who share their specific passions and interests — resulting in the formation of a myriad of distinct silos or tribes — than ever before.

The message for marketers is this: the key to connecting with today’s consumers isn’t about trotting out a product and its features, it’s about tapping into what specific groups of people are passionate about and helping them connect with one another. In Godin’s words, it’s not about mass production or mass selling, it’s finding the true believers.

As an example he points to TOMS Shoes, which for every pair of shoes purchased donates a pair to someone in need. With TOMS, you’re not just buying shoes, you’re buying the opportunity to share the story behind the shoes, Godin says. And you become part of that story. You join a movement.

Key takeaway for content marketers:

Before launching a campaign ask yourself three questions: Who are you upsetting? Who are you connecting? Who are you leading?

Morgan Spurlock on brand marketing & branded content

In typical Spurlockian fashion, this talk utilizes a mix of witty humor and playful snark, and the documentary filmmaker’s examination of branding is just thoughtful enough to win you over (even if it doesn’t compel you to watch the full feature film that it promotes).

While attempting to sell the branding rights to his latest documentary, Spurlock examines what it means to give products and companies a sense of identity, and what goes into establishing and shaping perception around a brand.

Key takeaways for content marketers:

1) When you actively avoid taking risks you’re steering yourself toward failure; 2) If you’re in marketing and you don’t have a quick, clear response to, “What are the words you use to describe your company? Your company is _____,” you probably have a branding problem.

Kevin Allocca, YouTube’s trends manager on why videos go viral

If it’s insight into what makes a video go viral you’re looking for, you simply can’t beat a guy who watches YouTube for a living.

For Kevin Allocca, the secret recipe for viral success can be boiled down to three things: 1) Tastemakers; 2) Communities of participation; and 3) Unexpectedness.

Like Godin, Allocca stresses the importance of the role leaders and influencers play in making their followers aware of content. Paul “Yosemite Bear” Vasquez may have uploaded his now infamous “Double Rainbow” video in January 2010, but wasn’t until a tweet from Jimmy Kimmel later that summer that the video caught fire and received over 23 million views.

Allocca also calls on everyone’s favorite 8-bit sugary breakfast snack/feline hybrid, Nyan Cat to make the point that it’s not the content, itself, that drives its popularity, but rather the participation it inspires in the form of parodies, remixes, and repurposing. In that sense a video can go from being a stupid joke to something we can all be a part of.

The final element in a winning viral mix is unexpectedness. After all, with 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, how else do you expect to stand out?

Key takeaway for content marketers:

Whether it’s the most bizarrely entertaining music video of all time or an unexpected (and surprisingly catchy) twist to a local news story, the content that breaks through is most often the content that takes us by surprise and compels us to respond.

Dan Cobley, marketing director at Google, on marketing lessons from physics

Who knew Newton’s second law, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the second law of thermodynamics were really all about branding?

Okay, maybe they explain some other things, too, but as Cobley reveals in this video, physics actually can shed surprising light on some of the fundamental principles of marketing.

While it may remind some of us why we avoided the subject in college, Cobley’s talk also reminds us that the best insights often come from unexpected places. By drawing clever connections between two seemingly disparate subjects it encourages us to step outside our comfort zones and individual expertise to broaden our understanding and perspectives.

Key takeaway for content marketers:

The biggest marketing insights may hit you when you aren’t thinking about marketing.

Bonus: Simon Sinek on the importance of answering “why?”

Great suggestion from Doug Kessler in the comments (Thanks, Doug!). Sinek’s talk underscores the importance of not getting too caught up in the “what” we do and instead focusing on the “why?”

Key takeaway for content marketers:

Again, as Godin stresses, it’s far easier to connect with customers over things you’re both passionate about than over a list of features and specs.

Do you have a favorite TEDTalk? Please share it below!

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” — Mark Twain

A letter to the Twinkie on the occasion of its “death”:

Dear Twinkie,

You and I were never especially close. Despite growing up in a typical ’80s home stuffed with every other heavily processed and commercialized snack imaginable, your appearances on our shelves were noticeably few and far between. I think even then, over 20 years ago, you were already perceived as a bit of a throwback — a fixture of my parents’ childhoods and nostalgia rather than my own.

Still, as dated as you always seemed to me, there’s no denying you were also a constant, as timeless as many believed your shelf life to be. Over the years there has been something vaguely reassuring about that. And so I admit it – like so many others who have mourned your loss this past week, it’s only now that you’re gone that I realize I’m going to miss you.

But I think even more than your preservative-packed filling, it’s that reassurance we’re all truly mourning. That, and — strangely enough — a sense of ourselves. As ridiculous as that might sound, the fact is that over 82 years you managed to firmly lodge yourself in the arteries of American culture as a beloved (if beleaguered) brand. Like the black sheep at Thanksgiving, you may have been the butt of our jokes now and then, but deep down we’ve always been oddly fond and protective of you. After all, you may have been a cheap and excessively sweet purveyor of empty calories, but you were our cheap and excessively sweet purveyor of empty calories, damn it.

That’s why, also like so many others, I refuse to believe you’re going away for good. You’re simply too iconic. You hold such a curiously sticky place in our hearts.

As the frenzy that’s erupted with the announcement of your demise, followed by consumers’ “run on Twinkies” and the White House petition to “nationalize the Twinkie industry” indicates, you’ve got plenty of legs left, and if another company doesn’t take the opportunity to revive you, well, I’ll be shocked.

That said, I think there are lessons to be learned from Hostess’s mishandling of you, and pointers for those who want to take advantage of all the current momentum to relaunch you with a branding bang.

Twinkie Brand Strategy Lesson 1: Don’t Let Them Try to Make You Something You’re Not

Twinkie, you never were a gourmand’s dream, and that’s okay. You weren’t competing on quality. Likewise, those 100 calorie packs weren’t fooling anyone. If people wanted a healthy option they were going to go with something else.

When it comes to junk food, you’re Exhibit A. You were never going to escape that image. Rather than try to replace it, why not embrace it? While the other giants of fast food were struggling to give themselves a healthier makeover what did KFC do? It doubled down.

People love you for who you are. In fact, at state fairs nationwide , your popularity has reached new heights by diving to new, deep-fried depths of delicious unhealthiness. Why not run with it?

Twinkie Brand Strategy Lesson 2: Realize When Your Target Audience Has Changed

This ain’t the ’50s or even the ’80s. We’re in the midst of a healthier food movement and nutritional awareness is at an all-time high. Of course parents aren’t going to let their kids eat boxes of you. Why not stop marketing to them and start redirecting your messaging to focus on the nostalgia you generate in older groups and the curiosity you inspire as a cult favorite/snack food oddity in others?

A Modest Plan for Your Relaunch

Whatever company ends up buying the rights to your brand has a major opportunity to revitalize it via customer engagement and content marketing. Before they fire up the delivery trucks, make sure they’ve considered the following.

Step 1: Start a “Save the Twinkie” campaign

• Create an interactive campaign website and utilize social media channels to encourage people to join the cause and get involved by posting stories, photos, and videos celebrating the Twinkie and calling for its rescue. Find ways to adapt and keep most popular features going even after campaign is over.
• Take the opportunity to try new messaging, reaching out to the new audiences listed above.
• Bring a celebrity endorsor to rally the effort. A humble suggestion.

Step 2: Thank America with a “Free Twinkie Day”

Holidays and free stuff are two things we can’t get enough of. And companies know that when you combine the two by celebrating a “Free _____ Day” the result is typically a long line of customers winding around the block.

In addition to media attention, celebrating a “Free Twinkie Day” to thank America for helping bring back the Twinkie is an opportunity to boost customer engagement and loyalty by driving home the point that they spoke and were heard, and that they each played a part in bringing the Twinkie back.

Step 3: Maintain engagement

As Timothy Halloran writes in his own goodbye to the Twinkie for the HBR Blog Network, “the strongest brands are the ones that can engage us deeply…. While Twinkies did not establish a passionate, marriage-like relationship with consumers, it created something in many of us that, when we heard of its demise, made us make a run on local grocery stores to grab one of the last remaining boxes.”

To image Twinkies could ever inspire profoundly deep customer engagement is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but the brand certainly won’t be starting from scratch, and a relaunch could absolutely provide an opportunity to reconnect and establish a stronger, more active relationship with its customers.

What do you think? Will the Twinkies brand be picked up? How would you handle a relaunch?

For too many marketers, SEO is something that other people do — it’s either outsourced or perhaps relegated to an in-house specialist. That’s unfortunate because SEO should really inform your overall marketing strategy in addition to vice versa. The more informed your entire team is, the easier it will be to fully integrate your digital marketing efforts. And in this day and age that’s paramount to success.

What’s the best way to educate your team, encourage their engagement, and put them on an accelerated learning curve? Why to break down their misconceptions about SEO and remove the (largely perceived) barriers to entry, of course. And the best way to do that? Point them to resources that are not only informative, but also accessible. It certainly doesn’t hurt if they have a healthy dose of engaging personality, to boot.

These SEO experts will be the first to tell you SEO doesn’t have to be left up to the likes of them. They come from entrepreneur as well as SEO backgrounds, and they’re no stranger to having to quickly pick up and master competencies outside their areas of expertise. That’s what makes them so effective in writing to a core SEO audience and more general readers, alike.

What I love about each of these three SEO expert bloggers is their ability to get down and dirty with advanced SEO techniques in one post, while pulling back and taking on bigger-picture marketing issues in the next. They’re bloggers who should absolutely be on your must-read list for valuable SEO, marketing, and entrepreneur insight.

Rand Fishkin, Co-founder of SEOmoz and Inbound.org

Blog: Rand’s Blog

When it comes to SEO advice and news it doesn’t get much better than SEOmoz. The SEO software company serves as a model for building audience engagement, having developed a vibrant online community around its company blog and even more so with the addition of its YouMoz blog, featuring user-generated content (when your users are engaged to the point they’re creating a wellspring of high-quality content for you, you’re doing something right).

It only makes sense to include co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin on this list then, right? The guy’s a prolific blogger and by this point, practically synonymous with SEO. But the reason his personal blog might be a bit of a stretch is that, most of the time, it’s not really about SEO. In fact, it’s more about what it’s like to start and run a company — topics include funding, scaling, branding, hiring (and sometimes having to fire) team members, and more personal subjects like work/life balance.

Why you should follow:

So, ok, not strictly a SEO blog, but a fantastic resource for founders and anyone who works at a startup/expansion-stage company. Rand’s dedication to transparency results in some invaluable insights into inner business workings and bigger-picture entrepreneur issues, and when SEO does come up, you can rest assured you’re learning from one of the best.

Favorite posts:

It’s Not Just Technical Debt; Everything Gets Painful & Slow as You Scale

What I Wish I Knew Before I Started My Company

Neil Patel, Co-founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics

Blog: Quick Sprout

Neil Patel may not be the most humble (check out his Twitter bio) but he’s also got a fair deal to brag about — he was named one of the top influencers online by the Wall Street Journal and a top entrepreneur by Entrepreneur Magazine. All by the time he was 21. What I love about his blog, QuickSpout.com, though, is his no non-sense approach to breaking down SEO and online marketing topics that have the potential to be extremely complicated, and churning out posts that offer clear and practical tips you can put to use right away.

Why you should follow:

Neil has a great sense of what SEO issues marketers are really grappling with day-to-day, but in addition to the with-you-down-in-the-trenches advice he can also zoom out and speak to bigger-picture issues from the vantage point of an experienced co-founder and entrepreneur.

Every time I visit Quick Sprout I find something worth following up on and implementing. If you haven’t already, check it out to see for yourself. Just don’t try emailing him.

Favorite posts:

The Massive Guide to Getting Massive Traffic

7 Lessons My $1.8 Billion Competitor, Omniture, Taught Me Over the Last 7 Years

Jason Acidre, CEO of Xight Interactive

Blog: Kaiser the Sage

Back when I was first becoming involved with OpenView’s SEO efforts, I was searching everywhere for practical SEO advice that was the right mix of approachable and substantial. It was easy for a lot of material to go over my head, but I also wanted to dive deeper than a lot of the basic intro “You should pick and use the right keywords!” type of advice allowed. I started noticing a kind of strange name popping up in my searches and on Twitter, and once I looked into it further it wasn’t long before I was reading Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage’s blog regularly.

Why you should follow:

For me, as a non-expert looking for quick and dirty tips to help me get up to speed quickly, the Sage was and still is an invaluable resource. The focus of Jason’s blog posts is often on link building, and I can’t recommend the blog enough if you’re looking for detailed info and actionable tips on the subject. But he also zooms out to explore other topics such as user experience and inbound marketing, and does a great job of covering how they overlap and intersect with SEO.

Favorite posts:

Link Building in 2012: Scalable Link Building

How to Maximize Your Evergreen Content to Fuel Business Sales and Marketing

There are a ton of great SEO bloggers and resources out there, and this is obviously just a small sampling. Where else should marketers go to pick up accessible, actionable SEO advice? Who else is producing great SEO/online marketing content?

This brief interlude from blogging metrics and content marketing strategy was inspired by a surprisingly thoughtful and courteous employee at TD Bank.

For the last few weeks I’ve been writing about the challenges of measuring a particular form of customer engagement — audience engagement generated by a company’s corporate blog. This week I want to shift gears from measuring customer engagement to a lesson in generating and fostering it.

A month ago, my girlfriend and I got married. Initially (and very briefly), we had planned on having a traditional wedding, but after realizing the amount of time and money that would go into it, we decided the better decision (for us) would be to elope. So we both asked for a day off of work, and on a Friday morning in August we went to Cambridge City Hall and walked out 20 minutes later husband and wife.

It was beautiful weather, not a cloud in the sky, and we hopped in a rental car and drove to Maine for a great weekend free of all the stress that would have accompanied a big wedding. It was perfect. But we knew we had to enjoy and make the most of it, because despite our best efforts, we weren’t off the hook entirely. Our families would understand about not having a ceremony, but there was no way they were going to let us get away with not having some kind of celebration.

Wondering what this has to do with fostering great customer engagement? We’re getting there…

Even though we bypassed planning a wedding, we still had to plan a party. And what started out as a simple cookout in concept eventually turned into what would essentially be a reception, complete with place cards, catering, and tent rental. So much for saving time and money. Nicole and I realized we were going to be cutting a lot of checks, and that caused us to navigate one of marriage’s first great challenges: deciding whether or not to open a joint checking account. We decided to go for it, and quickly determined we’d go with her bank over mine.

That’s how, on another sunny Saturday, we found ourselves sitting in a TD Bank, opening a joint checking account, depositing close to the minimum amount required to get started. As far as the bank was concerned, we should have been at the bottom of the customer priority totem pole. But the employee who set us up was helpful and polite, the whole process was incredibly simple and quick, and before long we were on our way. All in all, it was a routine and fairly unremarkable visit.

Then, a few days later, we received a card in the mail — a hand-written card — from the employee who helped us. In it she thanked us for our business, but she also congratulated us on our marriage and wished us the best with the upcoming party. I had honestly forgotten all about telling the employee what was going on, but here she had taken the time to follow up by sending us a thank-you card, even going to the trouble of personalizing it with an incredibly thoughtful hand-written message.

I was blown away. I mean, we had already chosen TD Bank. She didn’t need to win our business. We’d also signed up for the most basic checking account we could get. That kind of follow up is rare in any industry, and I’d never expected it from a bank.

I don’t know if the note was a singular above-and-beyond gesture by one employee, or simply standard protocol, but either way, it was a low-cost initiative that made a big impact on me and the way I view the company.

The Morale of the Story

In all our scrambling to be at the forefront of marketing innovation, to be the first to get our heads around the hottest trends, clever new tricks, the latest platform or tactics, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that, even in this new era, connecting with customers doesn’t necessarily have to be cutting edge or complicated. Sometimes it’s the simplest measures that are the most effective.

I’m not sure whether TD Bank has a great presence on Facebook or Twitter. I don’t know whether they have a content marketing strategy or whether there are any other creative or innovative measures they’ve taken to engage target prospects and foster customer engagement. What I do know is at least one employee there knows who to rock it with a good thank you card. And that’s something that certainly did not go unnoticed.

Can blog analytics truly identify audience engagement? What metrics really signify a piece of engaging content? Is it the most viewed, the most shared, or is it content that successfully compels a reader to take the next step down the sales funnel from awareness to conversion?

That’s the question I’ve been grappling with in my latest series of blog posts:

Defining Audience Engagement: What Marketers Talk About When They Talk About Engagement

Measures of Engagement: What Corporate Blog Metrics Should You Really Be Paying Attention To?

It’s also one we deal with weekly here at OpenView as we look back at the week’s Blog and Labs site content and choose the best to include in our weekly Viewing Value newsletter. By “best” we don’t necessarily mean most popular. Rather than settle for logging into Google Analytics, sorting posts by pageviews, and calling it a day, we prefer to dive a little deeper. That’s not to say we dismiss total number of pageviews, it’s just that we’re often more interested in determining how “active” each view is.

To do so, we typically look at a combination the following blog analytics and metrics:

Average Time on Page

For our purposes selecting articles for the newsletter, we’re looking for posts that were most actively read, not just clicked, and average time on page can be a good indicator of that. One post may have twice as many views as another, but if the average visitor bailed after just 12 seconds they clearly determined it wasn’t worth their time to read. Not exactly a success story.

But low average time on page isn’t always a bad thing — in the cases of landing pages, for example, it may be a good sign that visitors didn’t spend a lot of time mulling over whether to download an eBook or sign up for your email list. It can also obviously be impacted by the length and format of the content on the page — a two minute video vs. a 20 minute podcast, for example. For our purposes here (choosing articles to include in our newsletter), we really just look to make sure average time on page for a typical post is at least 3 minutes or above. That gives us the indication that the majority of visitors agree the post is worth reading (or at least skimming).

Bounce Rate

According to Google, bounce rate is defined as “the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.” (For more see KISSmetrics’s infographic “Bounce Rate Demystified.”)

“A measure of visit quality,” that’s what we’re after, right?! Well, not so fast — it turns out it’s incredibly easy to misinterpret bounce rate, and it may or may not reflect the quality or relevance of any particular post (sigh, if only it were that simple).

In theory, the way it works is that a visitor arrives on a post on your site, finds the content relevant and interesting, and then continues on to another page for more information. If the visitor decides the content in the post isn’t relevant to them, they bounce. But what if that post gave them all the information they currently need? They could be extremely satisfied with the post, and yet because they exited your site without visiting any additional pages their visit counts as a bounce.

As Tom Ewer, Chief Blog Officer of ManageWP puts it in his great post “5 Reasons Why You May Have Your Approach to Analytics All Wrong” (also referenced in Part 1 of this post), “Say you have a subscriber – an ardent fan of your content – and they receive an email notification of a new post on your blog. They click the link, read the article in full, then get on with their day. That counts as a bounce – and yet the visitor was thoroughly engaged.” (Side note: One approach we’ve taken to lower our bounce rate is to make sure we include links to additional content our visitors might be interested in and establish clear next steps for them to take to learn more and/or get more involved.)

While, on its own, bounce rate may be a shaky stat to look at, combined with average time on page we’re generally able to determine what posts are a) actually being read, and b) leading visitors on to additional content on our site. And those are type of posts we’re looking to share with our newsletter subscribers.

Additional Factors: Social Shares, Comments, and the Human Element

Of course, attempt to measure quality with quantitative measurements and you’re bound to come up short. Compared with stats like page views, average time on page, and bounce rate, some might argue that social shares are ahead by leaps and bounds when it comes to determining the perceived value of your content. After all, a “tweet this” or a “like”can essentially be equated with the visitor vouching for a post, asserting that it has some value and that it will have value for others, as well.

Likewise, a comment is a direct confirmation that a visitor has engaged with your content and has taken action in response to it. The comment may not always be positive, but in any case it indicates that the content merited a reaction.

How much are the various types of social shares and/or comments worth? It’s difficult to compare them to each other and, and while you can always track the referral traffic they generate, it’s still impossible to produce a clear answer to a question like, which post was more successful — the one with 2,000 hits or the one with 52 tweets and six comments?

Warning: Sometimes Focusing Too Narrowly on Your Blog Analytics can Cause You to Lose Perspective

With all of these metrics yielding such spotty results at best, perhaps it’s permissible to allow slightly more old fashioned method of measurement into the mix: editorial judgment. Yes, it may be notoriously fickle as well, but there’s something to be said of its longer track record of reasonable success.

Marketers can spend such a great deal of time chasing stats and data down the Google Analytics rabbit hole that they sometimes forget they come equipped with a natural gauge and divining rod of their own. The best refine it by developing an understanding of their audience, and by becoming attuned to their interests and needs. How can they do that? By the most tried and true method of all: asking them.

Like a good pair of binoculars, the right blog analytics and metrics can help you clarify and bring things into focus, but it takes a developed understanding of your audience and a firm grasp of your blog’s purpose to know where to point them in the first place.

How do you define and measure engagement? Do you think it’s simply another buzzword or something worth striving for? I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

If you enjoyed this piece you may want to read the other posts in the series:

• Defining Audience Engagement: What Marketers Talk About When They Talk About Engagement
• Measures of Engagement: What Corporate Blog Metrics Should You Really Be Paying Attention To?

Measuring Blog Engagement

If you’re putting in the time and dedication it takes to publish a corporate blog you’re undoubtedly interested in monitoring the results of your efforts. In short, you want to know whether or not your content is “working”. But how do you determine which blog metrics provide the best answer?

Unfortunately, as I discussed in my previous post, “Defining Audience Engagement: What Marketers Talk About When They Talk About Engagement,” there’s no universal definition for what it looks like when content is “working,” or what that even means. The term currently being tossed around by marketers is “engagement”. We all want our content to engage the reader, to be the epitome of engaging. But what exactly does that mean, and how do you measure it?

One approach is to acknowledge that when we say a piece of content is “working,” or that it’s “engaging” our audience we’re implying there’s a sense of action — the content is causing something to happen, or, more specifically, it’s causing the reader to take some form of action.

One of the keys to measuring engagement, then, is to first determine what that desired action is. In other words, what is it that you want your content to accomplish? In the case of your corporate blog, you need to have your answer firmly established before you even think about publishing your first post.

If, on the other hand, you haven’t determined specifically what you want your blog to do, you’re naturally going to have a difficult time measuring its performance (not to mention justifying its existence).

As Tom Ewer, Chief Blog Officer for ManageWP puts it in his great post, 5 Reasons Why You May Have Your Approach to Analytics All Wrong, “Understanding what you want from your blog is the key to effectively using analytics. Until you have figured out what the point of your blog is, you are floating without a paddle. It may sound like a silly statement, but do you really have a perfectly-formed idea of the reason for your blog’s existence?”

Measuring Quantity: Corporate Blogging Conversion Rates

If you have a clear desired action, measuring engagement is easy — simply monitor conversion rates.

Developing a series of blog posts that encourages readers to download an eBook or sign up to receive your newsletter or additional information? At the most basic level you can monitor the posts’ success by dividing the number of visitors who opt in by the number of unique visitors, total. In his Inc.com post, “2 Web Metrics Every Entrepreneur Should Know,”

Jeff Haden explains this calculation gives you the Desired Action Percentage (DAP), which is essentially just conversion rate (luckily, we’re not talking rocket science here). With a baseline number in hand you can now make adjustments and try out various calls to action, measuring the impact and effectiveness of each.

But what if you’re not immediately concerned with conversion? What if one of your goals is to simply determine how “engaging” your corporate blog content is? Additional calls-to-action aside, you’re really just interested in finding out which topics are resonating and which posts are “clicking” with your audience — is that really as simple as counting up pageviews? Unfortunately, no. If fact, it’s here where things can get really tricky.

In my next post I’ll dive into the murky waters of bounce rates and dwell times, return visits and inbound links, all in an attempt to pin down what truly signifies audience “engagement” once and for all.

Engagement.

It’s one of the biggest marketing buzzwords of them all; the term du jour for inbound marketers, social media mavens, and content gurus alike. Marketers everywhere tout it as the golden ring, the key to conversion. But what exactly is it that we’re all grabbing for? Does anyone know what audience engagement definitively looks like?

Round and round we go on the content marketing carousel, monitoring metrics and tracking interactions, keeping our eyes peeled. Wait, what’s that? I think I caught a glimpse of something behind the page views. No, look! Over there, a flash of case study downloads and retweets. Look now, a signup to our newsletter and a fresh thread of comments on our blog. There it goes! Engagement — did you see it? That was it, right? Wasn’t it?

To trade in one metaphor for another, in the alchemy that is today’s customer-centric marketing, engagement is the essential but mysterious chemical reaction that turns base awareness into sold. There’s much talk about it in excited and reverent tones, but few are able to explain exactly what it is let alone fork over a tried and true formula for success. Maybe it’s because there are too many variables for a one-size-fits-all formula for audience engagement to exist. Or maybe someone has figured it out and they’re just keeping it to themselves (if that’s the case it’s never too late for them to change their stingy ways in the comments section below).

What does “engagement” even mean?

Winning miracle formula aside, at this point I’d settle for a simple, solid definition. Unfortunately, scouring the web for it is a little like visiting grandma at the nursing home — what you find are a bunch of meandering answers and a lot of “Depends”.

B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee shares her frustration with the term in general in her recent post, Debunking B2B Marketing Buzzword “Engagement”. “What does engagement mean?” she writes. “I hear it being used in reference to clicks, email opens, page views, time spent on page, new followers, retweets, and a variety of other point-in-time activities.”

Albee isn’t alone. Likewise, in her post, The Social Metric Myth, for Digiday, Giselle Abramovich asks, “What is “engagement” anyway? The definition would be different for all brands. For a link that, let’s say, Adobe posts on its Facebook page for a free trial of Photoshop, engagement would mean clicking on the link and downloading the trial. But for a video that a brand like Club Monaco posts on Facebook, engagement may mean video likes, views, shares and comments.”

I followed up with Giselle via Twitter and she confirmed what’s so tricky about pinning “engagement” down. It loosely implies some kind of action or involvement on the part of the reader/visitor, but until that action or involvement is specifically defined, “engagement,” itself, could mean anything (or nothing).

Next, I decided to put the question to B2B content marketers Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at Eloqua, and Amanda Maksymiw, Content Marketing Manager at Lattice Engines.

It’s no surprise they came back with two different answers, but it’s interesting to note just how different they are. On one hand, Joe’s response hits the nail on the head of the sentiment I was trying to express above: Engagement is the reader/visitor doing the thing you want them to do. A piece of engaging content, therefore, is something that successfully inspires the action it was designed to instigate.

Amanda’s response, however, hints at another way of thinking that’s also just as true (if less convenient for marketers looking for easy metrics). Engagement isn’t necessarily always about what you want, it’s also about what the reader/visitor wants and what they walk away with. This gets to the core of why the concept of audience engagement can be so difficult to define — let alone measure and formalize. A customer may read a blog post and receive a nice amount of value from it. And in that sense, they may find it truly “engaging.” But unless they somehow indicate that, the company has no way of knowing it for sure.

What Marketers Talk About When They Talk About Engagement

For the most part, therefore, definitions of engagement tend to emphasize further action. In other words, what many marketers talk about when they talk about engagement is a measurable form of follow up.

As Albee puts it, “Engagement is about what comes next. Are [customers] interested enough to click, read, and respond when you send the next email or publish your next blog post?”

In a great post titled What Is Engagement and How Do We Measure It? CEO of Social Media Explorer Jason Falls describes his own web-wide hunt for a definition of engagement, sharing the following definition from Lee Odden, CEO of Top Rank Online Marketing:

“Linking, bookmarking, blogging, referring, clicking, friending, connecting, subscribing, submitting inquiry forms, and buying are all engagement measures at various points in the customer relationship.”

Falls, who was exasperated with the term back in 2010 (he must be beyond fed up with it now), can’t resist throwing his own multi-part definition into the ring:

What successful engagement means to me is this:

Did you get something from your audience that can make your business better?

That can mean profits. You sold stuff = Successful engagement.

That can mean ideas. You got feedback on your product or service you can use = Successful engagement.

That can mean referrals and recommendations. You got customers to tell other people you’re cool = Successful engagement.

That can mean digital merit badges. You got people to link to you, follow you, Re-Tweet you = Successful engagement.

What these answers indicate is that engagement is clearly what you make of it. As Giselle noted, it’s different for every brand, for every campaign. That’s because it’s dependent on the individual piece of content and what it is you want it to accomplish. If you’re looking at your content and wondering how you can measure how engaging it is you’re in trouble. Every form of content you publish should be designed with a clear follow up action in mind, whether that be signing up for your newsletter or RSS feed, downloading an eBook, driving traffic to another page, sharing the content with others, requesting additional information, or closing a deal.

Unlike the vague notion of engagement, in general, those are specific things that you can measure to determine whether your content is accomplishing what you’re setting it out to do.

Come back next week when I’ll tackle measuring audience engagement in more depth, highlighting the most important metrics to track to determine whether your content is “working.”

It’s that time of year again — the dog days of August — and the OpenView team was eager to escape the heat of the city for the calmer shores of Sebago Lake in Maine, the setting of our annual offsite.

Check out some of the great pics from the outing below!

Per usual, Captain Scott Maxwell steers the OpenView crew with a sure hand. “Steady, lads, I sense valuations ahead.”

Director of Content Strategy Kevin Cain is surprised and pleased to discover this jet ski runs on valuable, engaging content.

Talent Specialists Katy Smigowski and Meghan Maher show they’re just as good at holding on as they are onboarding and recruiting.

Not even a little rain could dampen spirits, especially when afterwards we were treated to a very special omen: Double rainbow all the way!

Forget London. In the spirit of the Olympic Games, Executive Coordinator Rebecca Jacobs and Director of Talent Diana Martz went head-to-head in a trampoline jump-off. Both received gold-medal scores from the judges.

The evening wound down with s’mores around the campfire. Already looking forward to next year!

Hungry for s’more photos? Check out more pics from the offsite on OpenView’s Facebook page.

By now, it’s common practice for many B2B companies to have a corporate blog as a part of their content marketing strategy. It’s a great way to draw traffic to your site and connect with your audience in a meaningful way, but only as long as you can a) make the primary focus of your content helping and informing them rather than simply pitching your product/service, and b) make your blog posts as easily findable via search as possible. Accomplishing the latter is all about optimizing blog keywords – both choosing the right ones and using them effectively.

While some may argue that sharing content via social media has become just as — if not even more — important than optimizing it for search, the fact is both SEO and social are crucial for enhancing discoverability (case in point: OpenView’s blog traffic is currently split almost evenly between social and search). It should be pointed out, however, that while social can be responsible for giving content an incredibly solid initial boost of traffic, optimizing it with the right keywords is what will ensure it receives a steady stream of views over the long haul.

Choosing Your Blog Keywords Wisely

As Michael Brenner, author of B2B Marketing Insider and Senior Director of Inbound Markeitng with SAP, advises, choosing the right keywords is all about getting inside the minds of your buyers – not just in understanding what they are looking for, but knowing exactly which words and terms they are using. Ex: If you are selling athletic footwear your customers are more likely searching for terms like “men’s sneakers” or “men’s tennis shoes” rather than “athletic footwear”. Note that it’s much more effective for you to optimize for keyword phrases of two or three words rather than one general keyword (such as “shoes,” for example).

Watch this quick video from Google for tips on how to choose the right keywords straight from the search engine’s mouth. It’s primarily referring to keyword research for ads, but the majority of the tips apply to any keyword optimization:

You might be well served to create a blog keywords glossary that groups the keywords you want to compete for into specific categories, using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to gauge the competition and number of searches for each keyword/keyword phrase to determine the best options. SEOmoz also offers a terrific keyword tool that I find to be more helpful than Google’s — providing more in-depth ranking analysis — and much easier to use. The downside: It’s only available to PRO members.

For more on choosing the right keywords for your company, download OpenView’s free eBook, Better Keywords, Better Customers: A Business Guide to Keyword Generation.

You Certainly Have a Way with Keywords

Once you’ve determined which blog keywords and keyword phrases you’re going to utilize, it’s time to start putting them to action. If you’re using WordPress to publish your blog I highly recommend this free WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast, which makes on-page SEO incredibly easy. It automatically keeps track of how many times you’ve used your chosen keyword/keyword phrase in five key areas:

• Article Heading (Title)
• Page Title (or SEO Title)
• Page URL
• Content
• Meta Description (appears in the snippet preview)

As Lee Odden notes in his post “Where to Use Keywords in Corporate Blog Posts,” while it’s always important to use your blog keywords as close to the beginning of both of your titles (heading and SEO) as possible, there can and should be some differentiation between the two. Your heading should be focused on grabbing the attention of a real, live human reader – “feel free to use puns, metaphors, or be ironic,” Odden writes. In other words, this is where you have the chance to be creative and compelling.

Your SEO title, meanwhile, should be as short, literal, and to-the-point as possible. After all, search engines really don’t have any appreciation for puns, no matter how clever. The same goes for your page URL – typically, it should match this title rather than your heading.

For example, for my previous blog post, I went with the title “Content Factory Best Practices: Field Notes from a Search for the Best Content Factory Online” for the heading, or on-page title, but for the SEO title and URL I simply used “Content Factory Best Practices”.

It’s also important to use your keyword(s) in the meta description, which preview text that will appear below your title in the search listing.

As for utilizing keywords in the body of your content, while there is no definitive answer to the question of how many times should keywords be used, there is certainly such a thing as going overboard. An optimal keyword density is generally considered to be 1 to 3 percent by many SEO experts, but I personally wouldn’t recommend going over 2 percent. For an average-sized blog post of 400-600 words that means, ideally, a keyword should appear at least four times but no more than twelve.

Equally important as your keyword density – and perhaps even more so – is your keyword placement, at least in regards to two prime locations: the first line/paragraph and subheadings. Your keyword(s) should appear in each whenever possible.

Finally, another key opportunity to use keywords is in anchor text for outbound links. Don’t make the mistake of attaching a link to the words, “click here.” Instead, be descriptive. For example, here is a quick and helpful guide to keyword research from SEOmoz to check out.

Always remember that your corporate blogging needs to be compelling to both readers and search engines. That means striking a balance between readability and SEO, because as Odden puts it, “omit one and you lose the other.”

Do you have any additional questions regarding keyword research and/or optimization? Any additional tips or solutions to share? Please do so in the comments below.

You may also be interested in some of my previous posts on corporate blogging:

• Business Blog Basics: 5 Tips to Take the Stress out of Writing Your Company Blog
• Tread Lightly and Don’t Carry a Red Pen: Tips for Editing a Corporate Blog
• Keys to Corporate Blog Promotion and Measuring Performance

And you can also follow me on Twitter @jonathanscrowe.

Over the last few weeks I’ve scoured the Web for the best content factory online, a search that eventually led me to three innovative brands engaging in creative content marketing strategies and issuing content that sets them apart from the rest. Let’s take a look at the elements of content strategy these companies have mastered, and how you can adopt their content marketing best practices to transform your own digital content strategy.

Pure ecomagination: Inside GE’s Visionary Content Strategy

My search began with a look inside GE’s ecomagination.com, the corporation’s microsite and brand concept devoted to imagining, discussing, and building innovative clean tech solutions, where I found stunningly visual, high quality content built around larger issues, rather than individual products and services.

Searching for the Best Content Marketing Examples Online: Eloqua

From there I visited another highly inventive content creator, marketing automation SaaS company Eloqua, which utilizes a winning mix of award-winning content and content marketing strategy to engage with visitors and guide them through the sales funnel progression to become customers.

Search for the Best Content Strategy Online: HubSpot

Finally, I turned my attention to another B2B marketing software company whose name seems to pop up in nearly any discussion regarding content and inbound marketing: HubSpot. With its well-stocked “hubs” and kits providing its audience with plenty of resources on a variety of topics, and not to mention one of the best marketing blogs in the biz, HubSpot produces a plethora of content aimed at guiding visitors down the funnel to the next stage of the sales process.

What were the qualities that made these three examples stand out?

Elements of Successful Content Strategy

Get Visual

Each company realizes that the Web is becoming more highly visual with each passing day, and that in order for their content to connect with their customers, first it has to grab their attention. While ecomagination makes use of vivid photography, Eloqua and HubSpot have also both invested in creating a signature design style that’s easily recognizable and makes their content more compelling.

How you can do it, too:

1. Use more images on your web pages and in your posts
2. Work with an outside designer to create templates for your higher impact content such as eBooks, reports, etc. (Ex: Eloqua’s work with creative agency Jess3)
3. Experiment with data visualization and video

Get Interactive

The best content marketers know that getting content to a customer is only the first step. After all, content isn’t an end in and of itself, it’s a means to conversation and conversion. Therefore, truly successful content factories aren’t built simply for output, but rather for input from customers, as well. They have to have the ability to generate and host discussion.

Ecomagination features a series called “thinktank”  that encourages online engagement by posing weekly questions to ecomagination’s followers and posting the best of the replies from Facebook and Twitter. HubSpot is well known for its interactive webinars, and Eloqua boasts a community site called Topliners that provides questions, answers, and discussion via variety of forums, even ranking users based on participation.

How you can do it, too:

1. Start off small by writing more open-ended posts posing questions as well as invitations to join the discussion
2. Use polls, quizzes, other interactive formats to encourage participation
3. Bring the interaction happening via your social media channels to your site
4. Create a forum where customers can post and respond to questions and answers

Develop Content for Every Stage of the Buying Process

There’s a reason why the most effective content factories produce more than one type of content — customers can respond very differently to a particular piece of content depending on how far along they are in the buyer journey. If they’re just starting out, the goal of your content should be to raise awareness and establish thought leadership. Once they view your company as a trusted resource only then should you begin offering content that provides details regarding your product/service solution.

Eloqua and HubSpot both do this particularly well by offering compelling content that gets visitors to their sites, and offering them more detailed content that can guide them forward and result in sales funnel progression, as well. Meanwhile, ecomagination does a remarkable job of appealing to larger environmental issues in order to build broad customer advocacy for the brand rather than for an individual product/service. As a result, it starts off with a far bigger audience of people who are interested in clean technology, rather than simply the specialists interested in, say, new turbine engines. From there, it can guide visitors towards additional content that can help them progress down their respective buyer journeys.

How you can do it, too:

1. Make sure introductory content focuses on the customer — his or her interest, concern, and/or pain point — rather then your company and solution
2. Be sure to include calls to action at the end of each piece of content, directing the customer to the next piece of content that corresponds with the next stage of their buying process

As Shane Snow, founder of Contently, wrote in a guest post for Fast Company, “The secret to using free content as a business driver is to be the host of the conversation your audience cares about, not the subject of it. Great content transforms advertisers from interruption to destination.”

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series searching for the best content factory online. By following the content factory best practices demonstrated by the three companies we profiled, you’ll be able to connect with more customers and accelerate their progression through your sales funnel.

To recap, here is the three previous posts that appeared in this serious, list in the order in which they appeared:

Pure ecomagination: Inside GE’s Visionary Content Factory

Searching for the Best Content Factory Online: Eloqua

The Search for the Best Content Factory Online Continues: HubSpot

Of course, Eloqua, HubSpot, and ecomagination are just three examples of content factories doing content marketing exceptionally well.

What are other companies we can learn from? And what best practices am I leaving out? Looking forward to your thoughts.

This is my third entry in a series devoted to discovering the best content strategy online.

So far my search has led me to GE’s highly touted ecomagination.com, the corporation’s microsite and brand concept devoted to imagining, discussing, and building innovative clean tech solutions, where I found top quality and visually imaginative content that lived up to the name, and marketing automation SaaS company Eloqua, widely heralded for award-winning content marketing that’s as visually stunning as it is perfectly suited for its audience’s needs.

This week, I’m turning my attention to another B2B marketing software company whose name is never far from any discussion on content marketing: HubSpot.

Bearing the torch for inbound marketing — the concept that marketers should earn or “publish your way in” by producing valuable content that attracts customers — HubSpot has developed into a prolific producer of free online resources including webinars, eBooks, reports, a weekly video stream, and a company blog that was named #2 on the Top U.S. Social Media, Internet Marketing & SEO Blogs by Cision and ranked #22 in AdAge’s Power 150 list of top marketing blogs in 2012.

Spot On: HubSpot’s Prolific Use of Content to Identify Leads and Guide Prospects Down the Sales Funnel

While its content may not be quite as visually arresting as ecomagination’s or Eloqua’s, HubSpot makes up for any lack of initial wow factor with the breadth, sheer volume, consistency, and organization of its offerings. Visitors to HubSpot’s website can navigate individual pages — appropriately called “Hubs” — supplying comprehensive lists of resources devoted to a variety of topics, including lead generation, social media marketing, business blog marketing, web analytics, and many more. The inbound marketing hub, for example, provides lists of featured blog articles (organized by subcategories), webinars, eBooks, reports, videos, and infographics on the subject, as well as links to tools and additional resources, as well.

Taking this helpful one-stop shopping organizational approach one step further, HubSpot also provides downloadable kits for various subjects, which can include multiple eBooks, videos, and presentations as well as templates and checklists to help get its audience started on different campaigns and efforts. While the kits are all free, HubSpot does require you to provide your email address and company information in order to download them, which provides the company with valuable fuel for its lead generation.

Another highlight of HubSpots organization and display includes its use of skill-level tags to indicate whether content is most appropriate for beginners in a subject (Introductory), marketers with some basic experience (Intermediate), or experts who are looking for an advanced, in-depth understanding of a subject and/or advice on how to teach it to others (Advanced).

While mofu (middle of the funnel) content may be the star of HubSpot’s website, the company does make good use of content designed to drive traffic, as well, and has had success with several viral videos such as this classic by “Sir Convert-A-Lot,” which I’ll leave you with until next week when I’ll conclude the series with a wrap up of the three content factories we visited, and a recap of the best practices you can adopt to build or improve your own successful content marketing strategy.

Factors that Make HubSpot’s One of the Best Content Strategy Examples Online

• Hubs and kits make the site a one-stop shopping destination for a variety of resources on individual topics
• Interactive webinars encourage participation and engagement
• Award-winning blog
• Always leading visitors further down the sales funnel: traffic generating content directs visitors to the site, top of the funnel content (TOFU) guides readers to middle of the funnel content (MOFU), and so on

Additional HubSpot Links:

Steve Gershik interviews Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, who offers additional insight into HubSpot’s content factory.

HubSpot Attacks Middle Of The Funnel On Its Quest To Dominate The Marketing Software Industry

From Business 2 Community, another take on HubSpot’s content factory and content marketing done right.

Daily Disruption profiles HubSpot cofounders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, offering insight into the launch of the company and its content factory.

Last week, I kicked off a series devoted to finding the best content marketing examples online, examining several companies that have each developed prolific and innovative content strategies that have, in turn, placed them at the forefront of the content marketing revolution.

The thinking behind this series is that by examining the best content strategies in action, startup and expansion-stage companies can pick up on successful models and tactics they can implement when building/developing their own content strategies.

My search began with a look inside GE’s highly touted ecomagination.com, the corporation’s microsite and brand concept devoted to imagining, discussing, and building innovative clean tech solutions. Some of the best practices I highlighted that help make ecomagination stand out include:

• A heavy emphasis on making content visually compelling
• A well-structured layout that invites user segmentation
• Interactive features that encourage user participation
• Top-quality content from professionals and experts
• A focus on building conversations around the larger issues/concerns customers are passionate about, rather than individual products

Joe Chernov, Eloqua

Eloqua: Delivering the Right Content to the Right Audience at the Right Time

This week, I’ll be profiling marketing automation SaaS company Eloqua, widely heralded for its award-winning content marketing and an emphasis on design that helps set it apart from its B2B rivals. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Joe Chernov, the company’s VP of Content Marketing, and Jess3, the creative agency specializing in data visualization that Eloqua has partnered with to produce many of its infographics and videos, Eloqua has become nearly as synonymous with high-quality innovative and visual content as it has with marketing automation.

That’s fitting considering the priority the company puts on its content, and the success of the results. “If we launch a new product, we can expect a handful of articles to cover the news. But a compelling piece of content can generate hundreds of articles and blog posts,” Chernov told Esteban Contreras in an interview for Social Nerdia.

Content Strategy Best Practices: Emphasis on High Quality Design

A good case in point is Eloqua’s infographic, “The Blog Tree,” which depicts the individual popularity and subject areas — as well as overall interconnectivity — of today’s most successful marketing blogs. According to a post by Ambal Balakrishnan for the ClickDocuments Connect the Docs blog, “The Blog Tree” boosted Eloqua’s “average blog views by a factor of 40, collected 175 inbound links, inspired more than 700 tweets and 2,500 Facebook page impressions, and turned at least 49 viewers into sales opportunities or closed deals.”

The beautiful design doesn’t stop at infographics — Eloqua has partnered with Jess3 on videos, presentations, “Grande Guides” (designed to be read in ~15 minutes, or the time it takes to drink a grande cup of coffee), eBooks, and, more recently, interactive data visualizations such as it’s virtual enterprise tool which allows users to tour a virtual office, focus in on their particular role, and access content and solutions relevant to them.

Content Strategy Best Practices: Emphasis on High Quality Design

Content Strategy Best Practices: Managing Content Like a Product

To produce that level of content you need a well-managed content strategy running at full steam, and in some ways at Eloqua content creation and publication follows a production process that’s similar to the process used to develop and launch the software.

“I think of each piece of content as a product,” Chernov told Social Nerdia. “And we run a PR campaign around every single one, much as we would run a PR campaign around a product launch. I also believe that co-creation is a key to distribution. The more people that feel “ownership” of a piece of content, the bigger the distribution channel is on day one.”

Co-creation played a major role in the creation of Eloqua’s Social Media Pro Book, which won a DemandGen Report “Killer Content” Award thanks to an innovative creation process that included collaboration between 20 social media experts and resulted in an authoritative resource addressing the biggest topics in social media. “We were able to assemble a supergroup of contributors by making the project rewarding (each contributor received his or her own avatar), social (everyone was free to share their avatars ahead of time), and collaborative (contributors could be interviewed, contribute a column, or submit other content assets),” Chernov explains. The numbers speak for themselves: the Pro Book has received over 82,000 views on SlideShare.

Content Strategy Best Practices: Effective Content Organization & Navigation

With all this great content on the site, there’s the potential for it to get lost, but Eloqua does a fantastic job of organizing content into different categories in its “Eloqua Library,” and presenting it in clear and informative ways. Each category has a short overview, and each piece of content that appears underneath it is given a corresponding icon that indicates what type of content it is — video, article, quick guide, etc. — and its length (in pages or minutes) is listed, as well. The is great for visitors who are looking for particular types of content, or who simply have a short amount of time on their hands and need to get to the most basic information fast.

Throughout visitors’ navigation of the site, they are constantly provided with opportunities to move deeper into Eloqua’s sales funnel, from initial awareness to consideration to close. And content is the vehicle (see below). Articles point visitors to Grande Guides, which they can download by registering. Infographics guide them to more in-depth eBooks. Videos to evaluation tools.

Content Strategy Best Practices: Eyes on the Prize: Generating and Nurturing Leads

In addition to getting shared and increasing Eloqua’s brand awareness, these top-of-the-funnel initiatives also serve to fuel funnel progression. In other words, while Chernov is busy churning out beautiful content, he never loses sight of the larger goal of generating and nurturing leads. But by engaging with prospects in this much more authentic way — by appealing to their desire for compelling, informative, useful, and, yes, fun, content (in other words, making it about what they want and need rather than making it all about Eloqua) — the company is building a community, differentiating itself from its competition, and experiencing success.

“We try to create content that is designed to help our audience stay current with their changing world, and we do so without any hidden agenda,” writes Chernov. “We hope the person will later come back to us when they are ready to buy, but we don’t obligate them to fill out a form to learn from us.”

Factors that Make Eloqua One of the Best Content Marketing Examples Online

• Incredibly visual: creative and high-quality design is a differentiator
• Organization: the company’s website provides multiple navigation schemes to guide visitors to content appropriate to them
• Engagement: emphasis on interaction, community, and getting content shared
• Next Steps: content consistently encourages sales funnel progression
• All about the user

Come back next week when my search for the best content examples online continues with a profile of marketing software company (and prolific content producer) HubSpot. And in the meantime, please add your own thoughts and questions about what makes a great content strategy to the comments section below. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on what company you think has the best content strategy out there.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be embarking on a search to find the best examples of content strategy in action, examining several companies that have each developed prolific and innovative content strategies that have put them at the forefront of the content marketing revolution. Along the way I’ll provide an in-depth look into their content strategy structures and tactics, and will highlight the secrets behind their success.

I’m kicking off the series with GE’s highly touted ecomagination.com. Simply put, the website is an engaging and visually stunning illustration of focused, compelling content strategy at its best. It seems like a great place to start.

Content Strategy Examples: GE’s ecomagination

• ecomagination is GE’s microsite and brand concept devoted to imagining, discussing, and building innovative solutions to today’s environmental challenges

Rather than simply using the site’s content as a vehicle to promote GE products, ecomagination instead gears its collection of articles, reports, interviews, and infographics towards providing a forum for its audience to discuss and learn more about a larger area of interest — in this case clean technology and sustainable infrastructure. In that way GE’s content marketing strategy is perhaps a great illustration of what Shane Snow, founder of Contently, had in mind when he made the following recommendation in a guest post for Fast Company:

The secret to using free content as a business driver is to be the host of the conversation your audience cares about, not the subject of it. Great content transforms advertisers from interruption to destination.”

Content Strategy Best Practices: Effective Content Organization & Navigation

Content on the ecomagination front page is organized into features and short reads arranged by date, and older content is accessible to users via categories that allow invite users to segment themselves per their interests and needs:

• The Analyze category for those who are interested in the facts and figures behind the latest clean tech findings and developments;
• The Invent category for those who want to learn more about the newest cutting-edge green innovations and solutions from entrepreneurs, startups, and established companies;
• The Commit category for who are looking for examples of companies that are making a difference and ways they can, too.

Each entry under the sections listed above are depicted as small images — titles only appear as you scroll over — further underscoring the GE’s emphasis on keeping the site very clean, basic, and, above all, visual.

Content Strategy Best Practices: Engaging Top Tier Influencers & Contributors

In addition to articles written by a staff of both freelance and full-time contributors that includes award-winning journalists and industry experts, ecomagination also features both video and written interviews as well as more interactive content in its Green Room, including a live experts feed that invites users to “get to know the bright minds at GE” via streaming tweets from key GE employees. There’s also a series titled “thinktank” that encourages online engagement by posing weekly questions to ecomagination’s followers and posting the best of the replies from Facebook and Twitter.

Content Strategy Best Practices: Interactive Content

The parade of visually striking content continues on ecomagination’s Showcase page, which, in addition to case studies and reports, features one of the site’s coolest forms of content: its data visualizations, interactive infographics that – like the majority of ecomagination content — speak to the interests and concerns of ecomagination’s audience without overtly pitching GE products.

“The products are never front and center, or pushed in the consumer’s face,” writes idio’s Dini Muana, referring to ecomagination. “Instead, the content focuses on the reality and aspirations of the target market, with tangible ideas and concepts that can be used in everyday life, and inspiration for living better lives. It can spark differing viewpoints about an idea or motivate someone to do some “good” in the world and through that, [share] the content further.”

What Makes ecomagination One of the Best Examples of Content Strategy in Action

• Emphasis on visual

• Well-structured

• Interactive, encourages participation

• Content centered around large issues/concerns rather than individual products

• Organization allows for customer segmentation

• Top-quality content from professionals

According to Katrina Craigwell, Digital Marketing Manager at GE, shareability is in fact one of the marketing team’s top priorities when developing an individual piece of content, but the team also takes care not to lose sight of broader user experience and navigability of the site as a whole.

We’re working to map user paths from one piece of our content to the next to see how we can help guide different users along the right narratives, as well as understand how far our content is being shared, by who and in what context,” Craigwell explained in a recent interview for Forbes. “At the end of the day, if the content isn’t good enough for the end user to want to share it with a friend or colleague, we haven’t quite succeeded.”

That kind of commitment to a larger goal and vision combined with incredible attention to detail is what makes GE’s ecomagination a contender in the search for the Web’s best content strategy. While we all regrettably can’t be privileged enough to have access to a GE-sized budget, ecomagination nevertheless provides a standard you should aim for, and an example of what you can hope to accomplish once you have a content strategy up and running at full speed.

Come back next week when I’ll profile marketing automation and demand generation company Eloqua’s content strategy. And in the meantime, please add your own thoughts and questions about what makes a content factory great to the comments section below. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on what company you think has the best content strategy out there.

Let’s say you’re a product manager for a expansion-stage company. It’s hard work and long hours, but you’re working on a great product and the company’s growing. Only now, as part of that growth effort, the company is establishing a content marketing strategy, which is all fine and good except for the fact that you’re being asked for help. Compelling content doesn’t make itself, after all, and besides, who better to write about your product that you?

A few weeks later, you’re busy trying to keep up with the deadlines and tasks that were actually listed first in your job description when the marketing department reminds you of that blog post you owe them (again).

It’s not as if you don’t want to contribute to the business blog, or to the content marketing strategy, in general. The marketing team did a great job of explaining the benefits of turning the company into a trusted source of information for your customers – how that drives traffic to your site and builds awareness of your brand. You see the value. You’re on board. You just can’t seem to get around to writing consistent blog posts and, besides, aren’t there higher priority items on your to-do list?

When it comes down to it, there are three stumbling blocks that tend to get in the way of churning out blog posts with the same effectiveness and reliability you bring to the other aspects of your job:

• Finding Time
• Finding a Topic
• Finding a Way to Make It Fun

Here are tips to help you accomplish all three.

Finding the Time

Tip #1: Two Birds, One Stone

Writing a business blog can be demanding, but it really doesn’t have to be that difficult or time-consuming. One key to making your corporate blogging life a whole lot easier — without taking a large chunk of time away from the million other things you’re supposed to be doing — is to try to bridge the gap between your other work and your business blog as much as possible. In other words, try to sync your blog posts up with your projects and responsibilities as much as you can. Ideally,  company blogging should flow from your existing work as much as possible. Here are a few ideas to try:

Case studies/reports: If you’re developing a report on a particular aspect of your company or product there’s almost no reason not to break it down into a series of smaller, individual blog posts. You can also try doing this with older reports that your company has on file. Just make sure to notify/ask the author and also confirm that there isn’t any material that shouldn’t be released. That said, in general, if your company is just sitting on content it should be put to good use.

Presentations: Similarly, if you’re already putting work into developing content, why not kill two birds with one stone? While you’re preparing your slides put together a post on the material. You may also be able to create a follow-up post that addresses any questions you received. Nothing’s stopping you from drafting posts that summarize and provide your take on colleagues’ presentations or company workshops, either.

The point is to squeeze as much value from the work you’re already doing as possible. But there’s also added benefit to it, as well. Blogging about what you’re currently working on gives you a chance to think more critically about what you’re doing. It can help you step back and consider things from a distance, perhaps even enable you to see things from another perspective. Writing down your processes and solutions also ensures that they are documented, so the next time a particular issue or project comes up you and/or your colleagues will have a guide or resource in place to make things easier.

Tip #2: Make a Habit of It

Take 15 minutes at the beginning of your day to devote to writing. Start out by just jotting down and keeping a log of ideas. If you get on a roll then keep going. If it’s not happening then stop once the 15 minutes are over. But no matter what, take the 15 minutes.

Finding a Topic

Tip #1: React to Something

The second major stumbling block employee bloggers often run into is one that torments anyone who works with words – writer’s block. The key here is that you shouldn’t worry about coming up with a brilliant and completely original idea for every post. There are plenty of ideas already out there, and reacting to and building off of them is far easier. Try one of the following jumping-off points, keeping in mind your audience’s interests:

• Industry news
• Product/service guides and reviews
• Examples of other companies, products, services, websites, blogs, and individuals who influence you and are making an impact on your industry

Tip #2: Write Something that You Would Be Interested in Reading

You’re hoping to write about something your readers will be interested in — well, what would you like to read about? Is there a particular problem you’re running into that you’re interested in finding a solution for? Write about it and ask your audience for answers. Or did you recently come across a new really cool tool that makes your job easier, or did you catch wind of a potential game-changing new company or platform? Tell your audience about it.

A common misconception is that employee bloggers strictly have to write about their company’s product. This can result in posts that are essentially sales pitches and are full of bad ad copy and. That’s certainly not what customers are interested in getting from a blog. Stephanie Tilton, principle consultant of Ten Ton Marketing, suggests thinking of common interests you share with your customers and coming up with ideas for topics from there. It’s all about engaging, not simply broadcasting a thinly-disguised pitch.

Finding a Way to Make It Fun

Tip #1: Don’t Be Afraid to Give Your Blog Personality

Blogging is only a chore if you think of it that way. It’s crucial to find ways to have fun with it, otherwise you’ll always dread your deadlines and you’ll never be truly invested. Think about what it is you love about other blogs or websites and try to incorporate a little bit of that into your own business blog. Find a way to incorporate a line from your favorite movie or a sweet graphic or photo. It’s your blog. Run with it. Focus on the aspects of it that you enjoy and you may just find yourself looking forward to the next post.

If the tips above aren’t enough to get the creative juices flowing, you can discover more ideas for blog post topics in OpenView’s free Ultimate Guide to Corporate Blogging eBook. And for the Content Directors and Managing Editors out there, here’s a link to my posts on Editing a Corporate Blog and Corporate Blog Promotion.

Admittedly, I’m late to the SEO wake, which has apparently been a highly-attended on-again, off-again affair for years now.

The latest shovel of dirt tossed on top of SEO’s coffin came courtesy of The Atlantic’s Scott Havens, senior VP of finance and digital operations, who, in an interview with Mashable’s Lauren Indvik, was quoted saying, “Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media… Truly [our writers] are not really thinking about SEO anymore. Now it’s about how we can spin a story so that it goes viral.”

My guess is the writers at The Atlantic were never actively trying not to spin a story so that it goes viral, but that’s really beside the point. The bigger implication of Havens’s statement is that the writers at The Atlantic no longer think it’s worthwhile to take SEO into consideration when writing their articles. That’s a pretty bold brush-off, and the fact that it comes from a publication that, according to Indvik, has seen rapid growth, increasing its web audience from approximately 500,000 to 13.4 million monthly visitors since 2008, is a bit of a slap in the face for SEO advocates.

But if the aim of Atlantic writers is no longer to get the attention of search engines, what’s their new focus? Well, to get the attention of their readers (duh), but also to get them to share it.

No sooner has SEO’s body been laid to rest, than its brash younger cousin SMO enters stage left. Eager for a turn in the spotlight and its own line of clever t-shirts, social media optimization is not alone, a long line of advocates quickly group behind it, rallying round a cry of “Search is dead! Long live Social!”

SEO’s followers rise to defend their fallen champion’s honor. Mass dorkery ensues and many an ego is bruised on message boards across the web.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering if I’m missing something. Why all the fuss? Does SEO really have to be dead in order for SMO to be a key focus? Aren’t the two actually not that mutually exclusive?

I think what web folks and content marketers can sometimes lose sight of is the fact that none of these strategies are goals in and of themselves. The point isn’t to be good at SEO or SMO. The point is to be good at them to improve your content’s discoverability. They’re both simply means to an end.

The trick is that the path to discoverability is constantly shifting and evolving with changes in technology and readers’ habits. Therefore, strategies for achieving discoverability need to evolve, as well. Indeed, SEO has. It’s actually leaning closer to what we think of as “social” every day. With Google’s algorithm placing more and more emphasis on inbound links the two are more closely connected than ever. In fact, to paraphrase Russell Jensen, a commenter on Indvik’s Atlantic article, since getting likes, tweets, and diggs provides inbound linking, doing social is doing SEO.

In other words, if you are making an effort to get your content shared you’re also helping your SEO cause at the same time.

In that sense, inbound link building provides a nice middle ground between social and search. In the scenario above, it’s the common theme that heals a divided web. It allows both sides to link arms and march together as one, united under the banner of discoverability.

Or maybe it’s just a great way to drive people to your content.

Now onto the useful portion of the blog post!

Here are a few examples of tactics you can use to build inbound links:

• Guest Posts: In addition to blogging for your own site, try your hand at guest blogging by connecting with writers and editors of other similar industry blogs and offering to contribute some of your best material (and link back to your site). Not only does this help to introduce yourself to a new audience, it also gives you the opportunity to build relationships with industry influencers. Better yet, try to get one of your articles picked up by a major industry site/publication.
• Get Controversial: One way to get folks to share and link back to your content is to spark some controversy. Take a side and start a debate. Just make sure your argument has substance and you’re not simply being obnoxious.
• Write Catchy Headlines: According to Indvik’s article, this is an area The Atlantic is focusing on in order to help their content go viral. Unfortunatley, when pressed for the secrets to writing a good headline, Bob Cohn, editor of The Atlantic Digital isn’t incredibly helpful. “A great headline is just a great headline,” he says. Make it short. Make it witty. But don’t force it with a bad metaphor that doesn’t completely fit.
• Conduct a Roundtable or Build a Top List: A good example of this is OpenView’s roundtable on the most common content marketing mistakes. We asked four expert influencers to weigh in and offer their advice. It gave them a chance to promote their own content and expertise, and it also resulted in exposure for OpenView because they each told their followers about it and directed them back to our site. You can see a similar benefit by creating a “top 10” or “best of” list of influencers, companies, products, or practices and informing the folks who make the list of their proud achievement.
• Get Active in Forums: It’s not enough to post content, in order to connect with your audience you need to join larger conversations. Leave comments on industry blogs and forums. Get involved with LinkedIn groups. Ask questions and offer solutions, linking back to your content when appropriate.

For more ideas for building inbound links, HubSpot offers a fantastic 10-step guide. Tellingly, they call it a guide to “Social Link Building.” The dividing line between search and social is getting increasingly blurry all the time. Or maybe it was never really there at all…

Editor’s note: To get more tips on improving your content marketing strategy (and helping your company grow) sign up for the OpenView newsletter.

Image provided by: nationaal archief

Last week I kicked off a discussion on editing and maintaining a corporate blog by offering a few tips on what to consider before picking up the red pen. To recap, the goal should always be to help employees publish the best blog posts possible, but while that certainly means cleaning up posts in terms of grammar and punctuation, it also means ensuring that their own unique voice and style comes through.

Readers will come to your company blog for the content, but it’s your employees’ unique personalities and individual expertise that will keep them coming back as routine visitors. That’s why it’s crucial to encourage employees to get fully on board with the company blogging effort. It’s your job to keep them invested and motivated throughout the entire process – publishing an entry is just the first step.

Posting is Just Half the Battle

The internet is a crowded place, and it’s all too easy for content to be relegated to some forgotten corner to collect dust. Instead of waiting around for your audience to stumble across your latest blog post in a search, why not take a more proactive approach by finding ways to direct them to it? Better yet, why not encourage your employee bloggers to actively promote their fine work, as well? Here are three ways they can help the cause while also building a larger following of their own:

• Get personal with social media: There’s no reason promotion of your company’s blog posts should be limited to the corporate Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. Urge your employees to broadcast their posts via their own individual social media channels, and encourage them to share their colleagues’ posts with their networks, as well.
• Respond and refer: Another way to for employee bloggers to broaden their audience is to identify influencer sites and get active on comments sections and message boards, referring back to their posts (or colleagues’ posts) when appropriate.
• Share the love: When the muses have been particularly kind, employees might consider submitting their post to a third party aggregate site. Each site has different requirements and procedures – make submitting easy on employees by getting in touch with the site’s editorial contact and determining the best process for submitting guest posts.

Rally the Troops by Sharing Results

Done right, blogging is a lot to ask from an employee. As with any project that requires significant time and effort, it’s important that they’re able to see and understand the return on investment. Therefore, you need to have a system of measurement in place that allows you to share and discuss with employees their blogging performance and results.

Google Analytics is a free tool that can provide you with detailed information on your site’s web traffic, including the number of unique pageviews for each post. Though you may want to establish initial benchmarks and set expectations beforehand, it’s a good idea to share this information with employees on a regular basis, highlighting the bloggers and posts that are performing best. In the best cases, not only will that encourage a little healthy competition, it will also provide you with valuable feedback on which topics your audience is most interested in, and you can direct not only your content marketing outreach but also your business strategy, accordingly.

Editor’s note: To find out a whole lot more about blogging, check out OpenView’s eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Corporate Blogging. And to get more tips on improving your content marketing strategy (and helping your company grow) sign up for the OpenView newsletter.

Image provided by: ploughshares

So you’ve decided to launch a content marketing strategy. Congrats! That’s great news, and smart thinking on your part – for several reasons. You’ve done some careful research, planning, and coordination, and now you’re ready to start churning out the content. (Where does that come from again? To refresh, here is a list of common types of business content that can bring value to your company.)

For this post, I’d like to focus on one of the first initiatives many organizations turn to – the company blog. In addition to content curation, which might be the easiest and most efficient dip you can take into the content marketing pool, blogging is a relatively simple and painless way to get great content in front of your audience. There are many, many resources you can turn to for advice on getting a corporate blog up and running, and there have been more than enough well-made arguments for why starting a company blog — especially one in which your employees are actively engaged and involved with — is a great way to connect with your customers and build your brand. Instead of rehashing that information here, instead I’d like to discuss tips, challenges, and strategies related to company blog editing and maintenance. After all, starting something is one thing, keeping it going is another.

Before getting into editing concerns, however, you should make sure you can answer the following questions regarding three key elements of your company blog:

Audience

• Who is your audience?
• What topics are they looking for your input on and what problems/issues can you help them in solving?
• What is the most valuable information you can provide them?

Function and Format

• How does your blog reflect your company’s story, culture, and values?
• How does it help you accomplish your company’s goals?
• How does your audience navigate your blog?
• How do they find individual posts on particular topics?

Roles and Responsibilities

• Who is responsible for posting content?
• Do employees write and post their own entries or is there an editor or administrator involved?

If you can answer all of these questions, you’re in good shape, and you’re ready to turn your focus from setting up a company blog to running it effectively and getting as much value from it as possible.

Everyone Needs an Editor

While structure and approaches vary from company to company, in general it’s good practice to assign editorial responsibilities and ownership of the blog to a single in-house or freelance managing editor. That way you can ensure that the blog maintains a consistent style and standard, no matter how many contributors to the blog there are. This is especially a good idea at companies where a large number of employees are submitting blog posts regularly.

Here are four key benefits editing should bring to a blog, from the most basic to more advanced:

1. Correct grammar and punctuation as well as clarification
2. Consistent style (both editorial style and formatting style; for more information see this post for tips on creating a content marketing style guide)
3. Additional context and cross promotion (using editor’s notes to introduce a series of posts on a common topic or theme, directing readers to connected posts and/or additional related content, etc.)
4. Improved SEO (assigning optimized focus keywords, tags, and meta data, etc.)

A good editor treads lightly. His or her goal should never be to rewrite a post, but rather to focus on limiting revisions and impact to providing the four functions above. It is important to preserve the author’s voice and style, so long as it doesn’t run counter to established house style.

Advice to Editors: We All Know What Assuming Does

When editing someone’s work, it’s always best to err on the side of caution, especially when making edits that might alter meaning. When in doubt, you should always run the proposed change by the author, or simply ask her to clarify what she intended. Tread even more carefully when editing material on a specialized topic or subject that you’re not familiar with. Asking questions ahead of time is always preferable to deliver an apology and submitting corrections, after the fact.

The same goes for major revisions such as changes to the title. In addition to ensuring that it is grammatically correct, there may also be SEO reasons for making a change – revising so that the title contains a valuable keyword, for example. The author will most likely recognize that as a valid reason for making a change (and be thankful you made it), but he may also appreciate you running it by him first.

Always remember that blog posts belong to the authors and that it’s difficult for them to be truly invested if they feel otherwise. Employees who take the time to submit blog posts often do so by putting aside other items on their already full to-do lists. The content they provide is what the blog lives on, and their individual voices and expertise are what keeps readers coming back. The true goal of editing should be to help employees feel more confident of their posts, knowing that a second set of eyes is there to help them make it the best informative and searchable content possible.

Next week I’m looking forward to continuing this discussion, moving on to a focus on performance tracking and blog promotion.

In the meantime, what are your blog editing suggestions? Do you have any particular do’s and/or don’ts to share?

Editor’s note: To find out a whole lot more about blogging, check out OpenView’s eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Corporate Blogging. And to get more tips on improving your content marketing strategy (and helping your company grow) sign up for the OpenView newsletter.

In a previous post on content curation, I referenced my favorite content marketing tip from Sales Benchmark Index CEO Greg Alexander: Stop worrying and give away your how-to knowledge. That’s powerful advice, and — as is often the case with the best words of wisdom — it may seem obvious to some yet counter intuitive to others. After all, if something has value, why give it away?

One way to think about the question of value in this context is to recognize that every interaction your audience has with your content is a transaction – they are giving you their time and attention and in exchange they expect it to be worth it. Considering they could just as easily be watching a bulldog ride a jetski, you really need to make sure you’re rewarding them with valuable information that can help them solve an issue, learn something new, or simply point them to additional helpful resources.

On one hand, there’s no denying online content is a consumer’s market, flooded with options and fierce competition. If you don’t deliver, your audience will have no problem finding another resource that will. But as far as motivation goes, that’s a bit negative, and the truth is it shouldn’t be the primary factor in compelling you to share your hard-earned wisdom and knowledge. It’s also important to remember that content marketing isn’t a one-way street, and providing quality information can lead to interaction and feedback, which, in the best cases, can result in new ideas, extended visibility, and influence for your organization, and customer conversion, as well.

Give it away, give it away now…but how much is too much?

Considering the benefits of sharing free information, the more difficult (and therefore more interesting) question is not “Should you share?” but rather “How much should you give away?” Or, as Jay Baer of Convince and Convert so memorably phrases it, “how far do you open the kimono?” In a presentation Baer gave with Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, at Blogworld LA this past November, he tackled this question with six examples of companies that offer varying degrees of access to content, from no free access — the “Closed Kimono” approach — to complete access at no cost — the “Full Monty.”

If your company ties its content to revenue, then potentially “cannibalizing your ability to monetize your expertise,” (as Baer puts it) by giving too much information away for free is a valid concern. Many companies choose to address this by offering free content as teasers and launching pads to direct their audience to paid content. This can be a tricky approach, however, and much of its effectiveness is based on the quality of the free content. If the company adopts the attitude that its free content is lesser content, its audience will quickly pick up on that, and there’s no chance they’ll be convinced to spring for the paid stuff.

With that in mind, here are a few things to keep in mind when offering what we might refer to as gateway content:

Don’t leave us hanging.

There’s a reason why good book reviews aren’t structured like the book reports you gave in grade school. No one wants to hear, “…And if you want to know how it turns out, you’ll have to read the book!” Likewise, no one wants to spend the time reading an article or blog post only to be left with an ad directing them to paid content rather than a conclusion. To that end…

Make sure you’re allowing format, not quality, to determine whether content is free or paid.

If you’re looking to promote a report or case study that you plan to charge your audience for with free content such as a smaller article or blog post, don’t simply comb the source material for second-tier information you’re comfortable giving away. Instead, try to isolate sections of the material that focus on and fully explain a single angle or aspect of the study, and can therefore function as a stand-alone blog post. In other words…

Don’t think of your free content as a preview for a movie, but rather a single released from an album.

Each piece should be fully-formed and able to stand on its own. It should also serve as an indication that there is more to consider on a topic, and that there is additional — and equally great — content available as further reading. That said…

Make sure the connection between free content and paid content is a smooth and natural one.

A good example is Baer and Pulizzi’s presentation, available on SlideShare, which concludes with an ad for a testing plan to help companies determine which stage of “kimono-opening” — how much content they should give away — is right for them. The connection between the presentation and the paid content flows seamlessly. The audience has been introduced to a concept, and now they’re offered additional paid content to help them apply that concept to their own efforts.

Going back to Alexander’s advice, “Knowing what to do and how to do it does not mean it will get done. Your readers will still seek your assistance with execution.”

That said, any content you direct at your audience (free or paid) should always provide them with value. If its only purpose is as a stepping stone to additional content, chances are not only will your audience choose not to take that step, they might quit following you all together.

The decision of how much content to give away can be a complex one. What conclusion has your company come to? What factors have weighed in on that decision? Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments section below!

For more great tips on improving your content marketing (and growing your business) — yes, this blog post is a form of gateway content, too — sign up for the OpenView newsletter.

Facebook’s blockbuster acquisition of Instagram is a $1 billion-sized indicator of just how integral images are to the present and future of social media. As further evidence we need only look to exhibit P(interest). Photo-sharing has been incorporated into nearly every aspect across all of the major social media platforms. Thanks to the rise of smartphones and the improvement of connections and services, it’s easier to create, post, and share quality images than ever before.

Which begs the question: if images are so easy to utilize and so central to users’ content consumption, why are so many content marketers still so bad at or hesitant to use them?

One answer may be that up to now, they haven’t been a priority. As Matt Rhodes points out in a recent post for The Customer Collective, “many [brands] have focused on engaging people through words.” Written content is also the foundation of SEO strategies, which often involve creating blogs and forums and sharing links back to their site. Images, of course, provide less of a benefit, Rhodes argues, and image search is significantly more difficult and less reliable.

But if the goal of content creation is to engage, then the power of images is impossible to ignore. In my previous post on content curation, I neglected to mention one very important step in our process: before posting a summary we always find an image to accompany the written content. The same goes for any article or blog post that we put on the site. While it can occasionally be time-consuming, finding the right image can help draw attention and illustrate a point more quickly and effectively than any description. On the flip side, a bad image can also turn away your audience just as efficiently.

With that said, here are a few tips to help you successfully use images to bring your content to life:

1) Strive for a Pairing That’s Greater than the Sum of Its Parts

Ideally, an image work will together with a corresponding headline or caption to convey a particular theme or message it might not otherwise illustrate on its own. As with with any partnership, both sides should carry equal weight.

2) Don’t Take Things So Literally

Images can be very effective at illustrating concepts, but determining exactly what that concept should look like can be tricky. That’s where stock agencies can come in handy.

Image searches can be temperamental, and each archive or service has its quirks as well as strengths. If you get stuck trying to figure out how best to illustrate an abstract concept you might find it helpful to at the very least get ideas from resources like Getty Images and Corbis Images, which are better suited for that type of search. Once you see their suggestions you can always try more specific searches elsewhere (ex: a finish line rather than the broad concept of success).

3) Avoid Overused Stock Imagery

No one wants to read the same article over and over again, and likewise, if you’re using the same image to depict teamwork or leadership as everyone else, no one’s going to be interested, either.

Flickr can be a great alternative to well-troden stock photo websites. Just make sure you only use Creative Commons-licensed images, you pay close attention to any restrictions, and you attribute accordingly.

4) Don’t Bother Looking for the Perfect Photo – It Doesn’t Exist

Can’t find the perfect image that’s in your head? That may be because it’s not out there. Any time you sense you’re grinding your gears, it’s always best to move on. There are plenty of fish (and pictures of fish) in the sea.

Images provide your audience with their first and often most lasting impression of your content. You owe it to your content to ensure it’s a good one.

For a more complete rundown on using images in your company’s blog posts — including more info on copyright regulations — I recommend this extremely helpful guide from TentBlogger.com. For more on the growing importance of images in social media marketing, in particular, head over to Jeff Bullas’s blog to read this guest post by Christine Kane.

It all comes down to the value of the content you’re offering your customers, and to that end my favorite tip Alexander offers to B2B companies is, “Give away your how-to knowledge.”

I couldn’t agree more. So in the spirit of that advice, here is a run-down of OpenView’s content curation process, with tips as well as a list of tools and other examples of curation models from around the web below.

Step 1: Define & Conquer

Any curation process should always begin with your audience. Once you identify what kind of information your customers are looking for and what issues and topics concern them most, the next step is to organize that information into clearly defined categories. Not only will that help you refine your own search for external content to post, it will help your audience navigate your site and discover posts on the subjects most relevant to each of them, in particular.

For example, OpenView arranges its content into three general categories: Company Development, Customer Development, and Product Development. Within those categories, content is further organized into various topics that are of interest to expansion-stage technology companies. As we’re searching for external content to share we keep these categories in mind in order to assure we find not only the best, but the most relevant articles for our readers.

Step 2: Go Out There and Grab Some Content (Or Better Yet, Have It Come to You)

Once you’ve determined the type of content you’re after, the next step is going out and finding it. This is where thoughts of combing through the internet single-handedly can be daunting, but the good news is, with all the tools currently available, there’s no reason go it alone.

I personally use Google Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds from my favorite reliable industry publications and blogs, and then set aside only the most promising articles I believe will be of interest to our readers. There are scores of additional content curation tools available — for starters, you might refer to this helpful list of the best free online tools provided at the iBlogZone by DiTesco.

Another option that has obvious benefits but may not work for everyone is to get other employees involved. At OpenView, my colleagues recommend interesting articles and content they come across throughout the week, categorizing them and posting them to a central document. I then determine which suggestions are the best/most appropriate to follow up on each day. This approach allows my coworkers with expertise in other areas point me to content and sources I may not be familiar with.

Note: To Share or Not to Share

Since not all content is created equal, when it comes to curating, filtering for quality is key. You should make sure all topics covered are relevant to your audience, that any content you decide to share is from a reputable source, and that you’re avoiding advertisements or PR pieces, no matter how well disguised. Remember, the goal is to become a resource they can trust to provide them with value.

Step 3: Before You Post, Determine What You’re Bringing to the Table

The best content curators provide more than just links and copy-and-pasted content. They summarize. They add their own take. They frame content in such a way that calls out its relevancy to their audience. And if they’re smart they cross-reference related content the reader can access, as well.

Perhaps even more so than finding the right content, it’s this step of making sure you’re adding value that has the potential to be the most time-consuming. Indeed, curating can be a full-time job. The time you spend on it will be dictated largely by how many entries you post and how often, but whatever you decide in this regard, the important thing is to be consistent. Once you’ve determined your workload and frequency, one way to streamline the process is to settle on a standard format for your curated posts and then create a template that either you or a freelancer can follow (for more on working with freelancers click here). When you have a post that you are proud of, be sure to credit the original source with proper citation. Then all that’s left is to tag it / place it in the appropriate category so your audience can find it easily.

But your job’s not done yet.

Step 4: Get Active

Once your curated content has gone live, then the real work begins — promoting it and engaging with your audience. Reaching out to them via social media and providing them with a comments section (that you actively respond to) is a must. After all, curating is all about connecting. With that, I’ll take my cue and hand it over to you for your thoughts. But first, here are a few additional links to more helpful examples and discussion regarding content curation from around the web:

For an even more substantial overview of content curation, check out Beth Kanter’s terrific “Content Curation Primer”. And for more advice on how to become content curation royalty Sean Carton will set you straight over at ClickZ.com.

The advice in this post largely pertains to doing curation yourself and posting directly to your company’s website. For more on enterprise content curation tools, see this great post by Susan McKittrick at the Content Marketing Institute.

Robin Good has a lot of interesting things to say regarding the importance of your visual delivery of content curation, and what’s in store for the future.

And for more of the best curation discussion in a curated format, head over to Aggregage Central.

Have more thoughts or suggestions for best content curation practices? What are your favorite tools? What sites do you think offer current examples of curation at its best? And what is the next step in curation? Eager to keep the discussion going below.

imagecredit: SimonBlog

In this 2-part series I’ll provide notations on curation — first laying out the case for why it’s a great opportunity for those prepared to do it well, and then providing examples on how to do just that (including our process at OpenView).

Though not really a new concept, with an unprecedented abundance of new content being made available every day, the role of curation is arguably more important than ever. Not only does it provide individuals with a welcome gateway and filtering service, it can also provide significant added value to those who offer that service, as well.

The Case for Curation

In my first post for OpenView, I discussed the importance of connecting directly with your customers in an age when there’s no lack of competitors vying for their attention. One of the best ways to do so is by engaging them with compelling original content geared toward their interests and needs. But for marketers with time and resource constraints, and for companies that perhaps don’t have an effective content marketing strategy in place, content curation can be an easy and efficient way for them to dip their toe into the content marketing pool, and get in the habit of interacting with their customers in ways that are meaningful and rewarding — for both parties involved.

Two Misconceptions: Those Who Can’t Create Curate and You’re the Only Person with Something Original to Say

At its best, content curation is a far cry from what we might refer to as content regurgitation. A simple list of links it’s not. The best curators bring value to their audience by combing through a plethora of content to provide them with the best of the best, providing summaries of that information in order to make it as easily discoverable and digestible as possible. On top of that, they add their own individual take and perspective, utilizing their familiarity with their audience’s interests and needs to establish why the content is relevant and applicable to them.

In that sense, another way to think about content curation is comparing it to networking. Not only can it help members of an audience engage in a larger conversation by connecting them with the latest ideas and innovative leaders in their field, it can also connect them — through comment fields, etc. — with each other.

That means by taking content curation seriously you can provide your target audience with immediate, accessible value. And since one good deed deserves another, in turn, you’ll quickly find that curation can generate internal value for your company, as well.

Curate It, and They Will Come

While pointing visitors to your website elsewhere might seem counterproductive at first, reliably directing them to quality content that both helps and informs them can in fact help to establish your company (and individual employees within your company) as a trusted resource and thought leader in your industry. In other words, it can help build your brand.

And since every curated post provides you with the opportunity to improve your SEO, over time, curation can actually drive more visitors to your company’s website. While they’re visiting, there’s also no reason not to promote and direct them to original content of your own, especially when it ties in to the topic of the article you’re curating. Establishing a template to include links to internally generated “further reading” or “related content” at the bottom of your posts is a good practice that can provide your audience with additional information while also driving traffic to other content on your site.

Curation As Education — It’s a Two-Way Street

Through my own involvement with OpenView’s content curation efforts, I’ve experienced another added benefit of curation, directly — I’ve learned more about the topics I’m connecting our audience to. Since taking over editorial oversight of our Daily Summary Articles, I’ve been exposed to a wide variety of information and strategies pertaining to expansion stage technology companies that I wasn’t familiar with — on topics like lead generation and qualification, recruiting, product design and launch, market aspirations and strategy, and corporate development.

For marketers, curation can be a great way to get up-to-speed on their company’s focus areas, no matter how technical or specialized. It’s also a way of quickly determining key influencers in the industry they should engage with.

Now that you’re sold on the case for curation, the next step is addressing how best to get started or improve on your existing content curation procedure. That’s what I’ll be addressing next week, providing a detailed run-down of our process at OpenView as well as a list of curation tools from around the web.

imagecredit: AP photo

For six years I was an editor at a non-fiction trade book publisher, where I worked with an array of terrific authors, first in developing and editing their manuscripts, then guiding them through the production process all the way to publication. While it was often the early work that I enjoyed most—helping an author sharpen her concepts, establish her focus and themes, develop a compelling narrative—the truly rewarding moments came after the book had landed on the shelves (or, yes, when it became available on Amazon), when I could see feedback from readers, and proof that it had successfully connected with its audience.

Helping authors reach their readers was extremely satisfying, but over the past few years I think everyone can agree that the game has changed. With digital innovation breaking down production and distribution barriers, and with social media making it easier than ever for individuals to share and connect, more and more authors are discovering they have the tools and ability to do this effectively, themselves.

And they aren’t the only ones.

One of the things I’m looking forward to most here in my new position at OpenView is discovering how best to help companies take the plunge into publishing and to start connecting directly with their audiences, as well. After all, every company has its own story and expertise, and finding a compelling way to deliver it can be a highly effective way of not only attracting and retaining customers, but also establishing a trusted brand.

My hope is that this blog will develop into an active and open discussion about content creation and marketing — not just what it is and why it is important, but how you can go about developing and implementing a content marketing strategy that works best for you.

In addition to sharing my own thoughts and advice, I’m eager to discuss ideas and questions from others — from practical suggestions aimed at helping companies get started to unique takes and opinions from established experts.

Looking forward to opening a dialog and getting started!

Do you have any thoughts to share about developing an effective content marketing strategy? Any questions or roadblocks holding you back? Any suggestions for those getting started?