Is content driving your media strategy or dragging it down?

Lots of journalists have a hard time distinguishing what is good content (in other words, stuff that people will read and watch) and what they actually produce.

Facebook recently announced it would be "punishing" users with bad content by driving it out of friends and followers news feeds. Reports are coming in that most marketers have no idea if their content is actually effective.  More experts are saying there is an extreme disconnect between "best practice" SEO and good content.

And it goes beyond marketing.  Lots of journalists have a hard time distinguishing what is good content (in other words, stuff that people will read and watch) and what they actually produce.  A couple of weeks ago the president of a large media company told me in frustation that his advertisers what to tell one story and his journalists want to tell another.  But the readers are asking for something altogether different and he can't get his team or sponsors to understand that.

Joe Basques and I just finished a Hangout where we take a look at the problem.  Questions and comments welcome.

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New Series: Six tips for getting your audience engaged

Content creation is a big problem for modern corporations.  Not only is it hard to find people inside of the company walls to create it, making it effective is almost impossible.  Sure you can publish something that gets lots of views, but most of those views go to spider bots, not human beings and when you look at the time spent by actual people, finding them spending more than a minute on your site is like finding gold in the kitchen sink.  But there are ways to fix that.

For the next couple of weeks we'll be sharing some approaches that will increase the involvement (also known as engagement) of your audience.  Some of these (like today's) may seem counterintuitive, but in the way the 21st century media works, it is crucial to learn how to create content engagingly.  Today's tip is:

Pursue brevity

Online content tends to be interruptible even when it is great content.  You have about 10 seconds to grab their attention until the next email pops up on the screen.  Some studies say 700 words for most blog posts, and 2,000 words for technical articles, is the upper limit of word count before readers lose interest.  Our experience at Footwasher Media finds it’s best not to push those limits, so my advice here is: The shorter your content the better your engagement will be. 

We recently completed a short project for a major technology corporation.  We advised them on the kind of content to develop for their community and they accepted most of what we suggested, but they balked at the length of the content developed.  We suggested content be no longer than 500 words,and  we counseled 300 was optimall.  We settled on several pieces between 500 and 700 words in length, but they insisted at least three pieces be more than 1500 words in length.  So we did an experiment. 
We did one post of a little more than 350 words on a particular subject directly related to a product line but never mentioning the product.  The post got a huge amount of engagement from customers including one particular influential engineer.  We took that conversation and wove it into a larger article (almost 2,000 words) that talked more specifically about the product. 

The result: shorter content got more views and better engagement.

So the lesson today is keep it short and to the point if you want to hold onto your audience

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Trust is the new currency in marketing

Recently read a post over at Hubspot (that I can't find right now) about how companies are lowering their investment in communication tactics because they are disappointed at the  results.  The author blamed the decline not on the efficacy of the tactics, but on how poorly they are implemented by the companies.

I can't say I disagree with him entirely.  Most of the marketing communications plans I see are more checklists than plans (press release, check; trade show booth, check...) While there is tremendous investment made in the marketing infrastructure, I see almost no investment in content and content is the gas that makes the marketing machine go.

Few companies I talk to believe they have great content, and when we review what they have we tend to agree.  It’s the same press releases, the same marketing brochures, the same white papers, and the same contributed articles that everyone else produces... and they read almost identically to every other companies content creating absolutely no differentiation.  The excuse is they lack the budget and resources to create any content, much less effective content, and when they try to bring in resources to do just that, it is the smallest investment possible.  I've even had several potential clients ask for us to create it for free because it would be good "exposure" for us.

 For content to be effective it must be intentional. You have to know not only where you are going, but how to get there.  If you believe a sales pitch is the best way about reaching your goal, you have ignored the path and all you are doing is wandering in the wilderness.  The beginning of the path is establishing trust. I have not yet found anyone who disagrees with that statement, but I've found very few marketers who have the time to work on that first step, much less an understanding how to start.

For the next few weeks, we will be exploring the path of truth in marketing communications and why any deviation from the path will spell doom for your efforts.

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Truthiness won't set you free.

 A few weeks ago I started a discussion on Facebook on what goes into the creation of good content and that turned into the first in a series that ensued from the discussion.  Don Tuite of Electronic Design magazine asked an interesting question regarding what makes a piece of content "truthy," an adjective created by comedian Steven Colbert.  that question is a perfect example of what is wrong with content development today: the effort to make something seem true rather than try to make sure it is actually true.

 Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece over on ZDNet on press-imposed censorship that fits in well as an example of what hampers the creation of good content. Foremski talks about the habit of B2B journalists to continually go to the well of what they consider "reliable" sources that invariably consist of the top players in a given industry.

 I've pointed out it past posts that every journalist has subjective filters when it comes to covering news.  A given subject can have as many as half a dozen legitimate sources for the news.  The journalist goes through the list of previous sources for the topic for the first round, consisting of PR and executives.  If need be a second round consisting of spokespeople from the top one or two players in the market will be contacted.  Rarely is there a second round where the journalist contacts low-level players.  That, however, may be exactly where the real information is.

 During my early days as a journalist I learned that the best stories usually came from the people no one notices:  A local Buddhist priest who turns out to be a Hiroshima survivor; the elderly man who raise parakeets and donates them to shut ins for company; the technologist who develops a new processor technology, once discarded by the industry, that actually resolves many of the problems with current processors.  These were all hidden stories that had been around for years until I stumbled across them.  That's what I was always taught was real news: something out of the ordinary.

 Journalists today are under paid and over worked.  They need to find ways to create as much content as they can with shrinking resources.  And the major players in the market are more than willing to make sure the unusual never makes the light of day by giving the harried reporters and editors "special access" to the corridors of power.  Those sources are dedicated to the concept of "truthiness."

 Good content is not "truthy."  It is true.  More often than not it has to come from the unusual suspects.  That's why at New Tech Press we impose a subjective filter of excluding the top players as often as possible (e.g. in our Semicon coverage we chose interviews with KLA Tencor, current number 4, as the lead interview...having been unable to get responses from Varian and Advantest).

 Can traditional journalists ignore the top players? Probably not.  There is too much pressure from publication management to keep the large potential advertisers happy and no pressure whatsoever from the lower-level companies who invest nothing in media buys.  But the lower-level companies can make an effort to use social media strategies to share good content (not necessarily about them) and help journalists get a broader view.

 More later.

Let's get engaged.... or not

I've been having some interesting conversations of late on the subject of engagement, including one short argument over whether the term was overused and understood within the context of social media.  I don't think it is overuse but neither do I believe it is really understood.  So I started pondering how I might help with that understanding.  Amazingly enough, I found my inspiration from a Ragan Report post on Ray LaHood (DOT Secretary) and his social media approach.

You can read the entire report in the link, but let me summarize it for you:  Offer content readers can't get anywhere else, don't chase numbers, use other mediums other than just text, open the site to participation, learn the value of each medium, and give up control.

Most of those points are anathema to marketing and sales people... maybe even to engineers.  But the spell the difference between success and failure in social media.  This is probably going to be come a series on how to build engagement so let's start today with what engagement actually looks like.

When I say your audience is engaged, it can mean many things.  Engagement is an issue of degrees and most companies measure at the very first level: How many views are we getting.  And that violates the second rule of LaHood's effort.  Numbers are cool.  Nothing wrong with numbers.  But numbers don't tell you the whole story.  Numbers don't tell you how deep the content went, or even if the posting was read.  When I look at my numbers, I see a lot of views, but some of those views don't even last a second.  Why? because they are being picked up by RSS readers so the follower can read the post at his or her leisure.  But I have a reader, too, and I have to admit that I only scan the headlines most of the time before I "mark as read." About 1 out of 5 times my stats show that my blog posts are read all the way through and 1 time out of 10 they go to a another post within my blogs to learn more.  I also see where they follow links that I offer.  

What I find interesting, though, in talking to other SM noobs is that most of them don't even go that deep.  they just look at the total views.  I know this because when I ask, "how many RSS readers are connected to your blog," they respond, "Huh?  

Then there is the ethereal, unmeasurable, "we get lots of people thanking us for doing this."  I fell into this number trap for a while... until I set my spam filter efficiently.  A lot of "responses" congratulating you on "a great site" are just phishing.  This type of engagement is absolutely useless and potentially dangerous to your site.

To make your engagement valuable and definable, you need to go beyond the numbers and that means getting some sort of data from the readers.  It could be statistical data (name, address, place of employment, etc.) or it could be something really valuable -- like what they think of what you have to say.  I'll put them in three categories of increasing importance: agreement, disagreement, expansion.  

If readers are agreeing with you, that's nice.  You have a loyal customer or friends.  But you've already decided on a certain course of action, getting people to pat you on the back as you had over a cliff isn't very helpful.  Everyone needs course correction. so the second level can be more helpful.

A reader who disagrees with you can be annoying.  They can also be a competitor.  A nasty response from the latter can give you some valuable competitive information so don't get mad or even, listen up.  A negative response from a customer or former customer is even more important. Don't consider them stupid, find the grain of truth and adapt.

But the third level -- expansion -- is the most valuable of all.  This could come from a current or potential customer providing you with real-time market data.  This is someone partnering with you to make you successful.

This is what I would call the embodiment of engagement and you can't really put a number to it.  It's the nugget of gold found after two weeks of back breaking panning in a cold muddy creek and the whole reason you're doing this social media crap.

The problem is, you may never find it in a comment on your blog and you sure aren't going to find it in the web stats.  So where will you find it?

I think I'll get into that next time.

Why you don't (or do) like social media, part 2

As I said in part one a few weeks ago, Social media attacks the tradition mass communication paradigm with a natural flow of communication, which is why marketers and journalists often chafe at embracing the practice.  What I've seen happening through this paradigm shift (geez, I never thought I'd hear that phrase again) is the rise of the value of talented, trained and experienced communicators within corporations and organizations that are making an effort to figure this stuff out.  That probably doesn't include your company, though.

I was describing what is happening in social media to a friend who has no connection with high tech (they do exist, you know).  He thought a bit and then said, "Sounds like their going at it like they're killin' chickens."  It was a great analogy.  When you slaughter chickens (and yes, I have done this) it involves a lot of running about, noise, flyiing feathers and blood.  Total chaos.  And when you sit down to eat them, you wonder if it was worth the effort.

That well describes how most companies are going after social media.  Chaos. It looks like it might be important, but at the end of the day you have to wonder, was it worth the effort.The reason for the buyer's remorse is that most companies are still trying to apply to old paradigm's interpretation of media to the new paradigm's infrastructure.  And it doesn't work.

Most corporate communications involves a bunch of people sitting in a room with a white board and trying to figure out "messages" that will convince customers to buy their stuff.  David Scott Meerman calls it an MST (making stuff up) meeting.  That is translated into news releases, brochures, white papers, press pitches, trade show signage, etc.  Then when it doesn't work they call the customer stupid or fire the PR agency.

Social media steps into this mess and says, "Hey, why don't we ask the customer what he thinks."  This concept is completely foreign to most marketing people, and anathema to the sales people.  Remember, the customer is stupid.

But companies that adopt the attitude of listening to, rather than talking at the customer... they're the ones that go at social media the right way. The bottom line is that those customers understand that social media is more than another communication medium, it is a way of communicating.  Until you understand that, your social media effort will resemble an abattoir more than a virtual marketplace.

Happy Thanksgiving, BTW.

Why things don't work...anymore

I just got off my fourth phone call in the past week from someone asking my to help them get some media attention on another partner release.  I've told them the same thing I've been telling everyone for three years: Unless it is a painfully slow news month the chances are virtually zero.  Here's why:

 First, there are 5,000 private technology companies in early to mid stage funding in the US at any given time, according to Dow Jones,

Second, All 5,000 of those companies are negotiating with at least on Fortune 500 company on some sort of partnership/joint agreement.  All of those companies will issue at least one news release about the agreement and will be seeking media coverage.  That means the technology press are dealing with, on average 13 partnership announcements every week.

Third, none of these agreements will mention what specific customers are being served by these agreements, nor what products will be made available to customers as a result of this collaboration, nor will they contain anything more than a very general, high-level and superficial endorsement of the private tech company's involvement.

Finally, the target audience for these announcements is always a very limited part of the entire market, possibly 10-50 people total who are directly affected by the relationship between the two companies.

The press are part of what is called mass media.  Their goal is to produce information that is valuable to the largest possible number of people in a given industry.  10-50 people does not meet that requirement.  On top of that, the press is given the responsibility of finding out information that is out of the ordinary and 13 announcements a week that virtually say the very same thing, with changes only in the players and the names of the products, do not constitute what is callled "news."

Partnership announcements are good for three things: filling out space on websites, keeping the name of your company active on the web, and for salesmen to hand out to the 10-50 people that really care.

Eschew obfuscation (look it up)

Ron Ploof chimed in with a post on brevity today.  It was like a cool breeze to me.  The hardest task in communications counsel is teaching clients to be succinct.  The writing style of the real journalist requires paragraphs of no more than two sentences, no more than 25 words long each.  It is the best way of getting an idea across.  That's how most people talk.  That also means you have to keep the superlatives at a minimum and THAT is really hard for most marketing people and CEOs.

Had breakfast with Shel Israel yesterday who explained one of the reasons he left PR was pressure from client's boards who believed adding adjectives increased "buzz" for news release.  The more said, however, the more obscure. 

Get to the point.  That's all I'm sayin'.