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A practical definition of content marketing

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Disclosure: I am Vice President of Sales & Influencer Marketing at BlogHer. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

Content marketing. It is the hot topic of 2014. And like “native advertising,” there are as many definitions of and opinions about it as there are marketing pundits on the interwebs.

Far be it from me to back away from a challenge.

Linguistically, content marketing simply is using “content” to market products and services. But what exactly is this thing called “content.” Channeling Inigo Montoya (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inigo_Montoya), it is entirely possible that this word does not mean exactly what we think.

Let’s stay simple to start. Brands are using “content” as distinct from “advertising” to promote their products. This can take many forms:

  • sponsored posts — on blogs and mass media sites (advertorial)
  • sponsored editorial
  • in native ad units
  • editorial on brand sites

Sponsored posts often integrate the brand into a story, not dissimilar from old style advertorial, but quite a lot of this content is just, well, content brought to you by a sponsor, either intermediated by a publisher, like Forbes BrandVoice or Mashable or direct, like Coca-Cola’s new content site, Coca-Cola Journey.

Mashable Screen Shot for content post

Example of integration of sponsored editorial: Is Your Cash Working for You?, sponsored by American Express

On some level, this is the fulfillment of the promise of the World Wide Web — build a terrific website and your customers will come to you, with the twist that we finally get that reading about the products isn’t the attraction. It’s useful and when you are ready to buy, critical, but product websites are selling tools, not marketing tools. They matter once you are in the consideration phase.

What attracts the consumer is storytelling.

And now brands are joining their customers as the publishers of content. If 2004 was the beginning of the rise of the citizen journalist, 2014 may be the birth of the brand journalist. This has implications for the quality of the news we consume, and already has had an impact on mainstream media. Advertorial content is increasingly front and center on mainstream media sites, with varying degrees of disclosure. More on that another day.

The long term impact of this shift on the independent,  read objective, journalist remains to be seen but the shift to brands as the direct funder of our news feed is already exerting a tremendous pressure on prices.

The quality of online content is also at some risk… The costs of feeding a machine that relies on new stories every day is why newspapers began selling advertising in the first place. Unlike an advert,  which is “create once, play many,” and works because of its simple, entertaining, purchase-oriented message, content marketing requires new stuff every day. The temptation is strong to sacrifice quality for volume.

But simply shoving a lot of words into a funnel isn’t going to have the long term effect we want. We need deeply engaging content that will connect consumers with our value proposition in a meaningful way and encourage them to consider our product or service. Bottom line, much as I love the quizzes, and top 10 lists, their impact is fleeting when it comes to long term engagement.

Collectively, we –marketers, consumers and publishers — need to take a step back and commit to creating and supporting GOOD content.

What’s good content in this context? It’s well-written content that engages the audience with a story, and connects with the brand message in some fashion. It can be tightly integrated like a review, loosely integrated like many sponsored posts or simply aligned editorial brought to you by the brand, with a brand message at the end of the post or article.

While brand marketers can, and should, produce material to feed the content marketing machine, the best stories will come from the community. No matter how well we write, we shouldn’t try to copy community-created content. It is extremely difficult to excise our passion for our brand from the story, and, as has been proven time and again, with good stories and bad, there is nothing more powerful than an engaged consumer.

Use your marketing passion to create the brand material for your content funnel that consumers rely on for more information about a product – micro sites, Facebook pages, Pinterest “catalogs,” and help your customers channel their passion into storytelling. Find and nurture your evangelists. Let them create the content and stories that matter with your support, either directly sponsored by you, or syndicated for re-use. A story may not be new to you, but it will be new to someone.

Personally, I’m excited about the potential for content marketing, and true partnerships between companies and their customers, brands and bloggers, to tell the stories that connect us with each other and with the brands we love. It’s what I’ve been hoping this interweb would morph into since I started writing about the space in 2004.

Here are some oldies but goodies from my archives on the topic of the brand-blogger connection:

Other writers who touch on this topic that you might enjoy: Rebecca Lieb, Christopher S. Penn.

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Old Spice: Bring back the man on the horse!

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Boys, use Old Spice, you’ll get laid, and your mom will turn into a crazy stalker who doesn’t brush her hair.

Old Spice has rung in the New Year with a new ad campaign for its teen-skewed products, and I hate it. And not just because I don’t think the joke is funny.

I understand the premise. The “joke” is based on the stereotype that no mother wants her son to grow up, therefore she is bereft when her teen son develops a social life. Like most stereotypes, it has its basis in reality. Not mine, mind you, but I can believe that some women do have separation issues.

But this campaign is creepy. Weird, stalker-y creepy. Oedipal and then some.

Will it get a lot of buzz? Sure. It is deliberately polarizing, which by the way, leads to no small amount of cognitive dissonance for those of us who don’t like the ads but feel compelled to write about them anyway.

But will it sell any product? An ad campaign that gets tons of attention (negative or positive) or wins awards for the creative agency, but doesn’t actually sell anything? Not a win.

If my Facebook feed is any indication, a few folks in my social graph like these ads. Men and women.  It’s just a joke, they say. Look at the crazy ladies… Yeah? Call me humorless if you like, but would we still think this is funny if we switched up the gender? If this were a product for teen girls, and a father displaying such extreme behavior? Doubt it. We’d wonder if he was abusing her.

But it’s a moot point, because a campaign like that would never get off the drawing board. The advertising industry isn’t averse to using the overprotective dad, but it draws the line at making the stereotype so broad, so unattractive. Overprotective dad is the relatively normal guy who still sees his toddler girl behind the wheel even though she is all grown up.

Or chases after the fast food-eating kid who was “hanging out” with his daughter.

Mostly normal. Not a raging lunatic following the kid around like a creepy stalker.

Which is why even if this campaign did send teen boys into the store in droves in search of the magic spray that will get them a…  GIRL, I would still call it a fail. Because it’s lazy and dangerous. It’s so easy to fall back on a prevailing stereotype of women in advertising — madonna, whore, harridan or shrew. Ha ha ha. Isn’t it funny?

Except it’s not funny. It’s dangerous.

Because when we support this “funny” stereotype — overprotective moms are shrewish monsters and overprotective dads are touchingly cute, we perpetuate more harmful ones. You know. Men are assertive. Women are aggressive. Men are persuasive. Women are pushy. And so on.

But in the end, I don’t think this campaign will drive sales the way it has drawn online buzz. The old adage, oft attributed to PT Barnum, that it doesn’t matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name right only goes so far. Sometimes the accumulated negative buzz really does damage your brand.

For my part, I say bring back the man on the horse!

 

For more on the “Mom Song” campaign, check out Hello Oedipus Old Spice Made Some Ads For You by Deb Rox.

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Who “owns” social platforms?

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Who “owns” social platforms? The user or the platform? The answer is both obvious, and yet not.

Clearly the developer of the platform (and its shareholders) own the business and its intellectual property. Deciding who owns the experience is a wee bit harder. Without the engaged users, there is no experience. In that respect the users are just as invested in the platform as its nominal owners.

This tension can sometimes get ugly. Nearly every time Facebook changes its terms of service, interface or algorithms, the users get restless, threaten revolt etc.

But what happens when a change in and enforcement of the terms of service impacts the business of its users. As when Facebook restricted sweepstakes and contests a few years ago. Restrictions it has since loosened. Or when Pinterest began applying daily pin limits to minimize spam and revising and enforcing its guidelines for contests and sweepstakes that involve Pinterest.

On some level, the platforms rely on creative users to experiment with business models to surface interesting ways of leveraging the platform. Is it then fair when the platform asserts its marks (pin, pinning), chooses to limit an activity (number of pins per day) or restricts something to itself alone as Facebook did with “advertising.” Perhaps not, but no one ever promised fair.

When you build your business on the back of someone else’s platform, you run the risk — always — of the platform making changes that impact your business. For example, when Pinterest asserted its claim to the concept of digital pins and pinning and signaled intent to enforce, a number of companies building third party Pinterest tools that used Pin in the name rebranded. Pingage became Ahalogy. Pinerly morphed into Reachli.

And last month, blogger Amy Lupold Blair was requested to not enforce a trademark she had registered for “Pinning Party” and to comply with Pinterest’s terms of service guidelines for sweepstakes and contests.

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet, and my purpose for sharing this example isn’t to overanalyze it or decide who is “right.”

Because it doesn’t matter. Pinterest has a terms of service, and reserves the right to change its TOS at any time. If you want to use the service, you have to play by its rules.

The company also has to be consistent in its enforcement of its TOS and defense of the claim to the concept of the digital pin. That means pinning only happens on Pinterest and no other business entity can own pin/pinning in a digital context. It may seem draconian when applied to a loyal user like Amy, but if Pinterest doesn’t assert its claims consistently, it sets dangerous precedent for when it tries to assert against the inevitable copycat platforms.

I’m far more interested in exploring how we can use social platforms in our marketing and business offerings without getting tripped up by the inevitable tension of who owns what. Here are a few thoughts. Your Mileage May Vary.

  1. Build your offering on something you can own independent of a platform. It can certainly leverage a platform but for maximum flexibility, the underlying concept should be portable. This is why content-based plays are so powerful. The “product” is the story. The platform is simply the conduit.
  2. If you have a great idea for technology play on top of/relying on a single platform, be honest with yourself. Are you a bleeding edge first mover? Or is your idea a breakthrough for the platform? Then it’s possibly worth trying to position you/your idea/your company as an acquisition candidate quickly. Whether the platform wants to leverage your technology, get you out of the way or both, this is a strike-fast play.
  3. An independent technology concept that might plug into multiple platforms is also a decent bet, but again first mover or breakthrough has an edge, and shopping yourself may take longer than you have funds. Your idea needs to have legs on its own. Does it really fill an unmet market need?
  4. Pick a name for your product/service/company that you can own. You can’t own another’s trade or service marks, so don’t use ’em. Very few companies will be as lenient as Twitter when it comes to use of their name in your name. As we’ve learned with Pinterest, that a term is a generic like “pin” isn’t enough to rely on if the company can prove that use of the generic term in the specific context is something it created beyond the generic meaning.

And you know that just because a domain name is available, that doesn’t mean the name is, right?

For most bloggers, the content-based play is the simpler choice. It allows you to build on your strengths as a storyteller without being married to a platform. Your power is in your story, and in who cares to read it/engage with it/converse about it. Not in how you share it.

Bottom line: don’t build your empire — however large or small –on someone else. Build it on YOU.

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Changes to Facebook rules for contests and sweeps

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Facebook revised its guidelines for contests and sweepstakes this week,  removing the requirement that such promotions must be administered through a Facebook app.

Brands can now use their Facebook Pages directly for sweeps and contest entries, including core Facebook functionality like posting to the brand’s page, commenting or liking a post.

However, it is still a violation of the Terms of Service to require users to take actions on their own personal Timelines as entries.

Quite simply, Brand X can ask users like a post on its Brand X Page as an entry but it cannot ask users to share the post on their own personal Timelines as an entry.

Facebook also updated its TOS for Pages to make it explicitly prohibited to tag people in content they are not depicted in, or to encourage people to tag themselves as a sweepstakes entry. This seems a little weird and random but the folks over at Hubspot got this explanation from Facebook:

“It’s OK to ask people to submit names of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize. It’s not OK to ask people to tag themselves in pictures of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize.” – Source Hubspot

Important:  I interpret this restriction to apply to brands and Pages, the use of this tagging in promotional content,  and most specifically contest and sweeps entries. I do not believe this specifically applies to the common practice of tagging non-present people in photos on your personal Timeline. For example, tagging a picture of your niece with your sister’s name so other friends have a clue whose child this is. However, I am NOT a lawyer. Personally, I advise doing it sparingly and generally limited to the example I gave. That’s a nice privacy protection for the kids, and common sense would indicate Facebook would allow this. I am far less fond of tagging people in images merely to make them aware of the photo.

Why did they make the changes?
Facebook says it is to offer more flexible solutions to marketers. I don’t doubt it. Brands were using other platforms (Twitter, Instagram in particular) for their quick turnaround promotions.

Given the sheer volume of non-compliant stuff I continued to see on Facebook under the old rules  — usually but not always from smaller companies, I imagine the cost of enforcement also was well beyond the benefit. Rather than apply the rules inconsistently or try to stem the tide, Facebook decided to go with the flow.

Now it just has to go after promotions that violate the prohibition on using the personal Timeline. Bound to be a smaller task.

What does this mean for Brands?

Brands now have more options for contests and sweeps, particularly to execute things quickly when necessary. Facebook apps are still better for brand awareness and customer acquisition, as you can design a more engaging experience and capture email addresses for future promotions. They are also more expensive and take time to develop.

Activating a promotion on your brand Page is quick and easy, but you are also limited to the functionality of Facebook.

For Bloggers?

If you have a Facebook Page for your blog, you can now do promotions on Facebook, but read the Promotion Guidelines carefully. Facebook has other requirements for contests and sweeps, and you should always make sure that any promotion you administer complies with the law.

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The one about the swag

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Disclosure: I am Vice President, Influencer Marketing at BlogHer. While I work on digital and social marketing programs with many of the brands that sponsor our conference, I am not directly involved in the event side of our business and experience the Expo Floor much as any other attendee would. Except I can’t enter any of the sweepstakes 🙂 In my past life, however, I was in charge of event and channel marketing for multiple employers.

Other writers have already done an excellent job of sharing the attendee perspective on the brands at BlogHer and their promotional offerings.

I want to focus on the brand side of the equation. Whether you call it swag (PG version: stuff we all get), schwag (an alternative spelling) or trinkets and trash (a personal favorite), companies make the investment because it helps them achieve their marketing goals. Ultimately, the marketer wants the target consumer to buy her product, and she uses a variety of strategies and tactics to bring potential customers through the purchasing funnel of Awareness to Interest to Consideration to Purchase.

And marketers have been doing it for a VERY long time. For example this Coca-Cola coupon found on  Wikipedia.

From Wikipedia: Believed to be the first coupon ever, this ticket for a free glass of Coca-Cola was first distributed in 1888 to help promote the drink. By 1913, the company had redeemed 8.5 million tickets.

There are two kinds of swag — promotional items of varying utility (and price points) imprinted with the company name or other branding, and actual product, often but not always in sample sizes.

A defining characeristic of swag is that it is broadly distributed — at a conference, an event, as a product premium, on box, at the cash register etc etc. The intent is to reach large numbers of consumers. It is not deliberate seeding of product with known influencers, although with social media, the two tend to conflate, and there is more of an expectation that consumers are also influencers.

So, back to our two kinds of swag – promotional items (trinkets and trash) and actual product. CPG brands (food, cosmetics, household products) can more easily give away samples of their products than consumer durables like electronics, furnishings, and automobiles, but even they often offer promotional items, either instead of or in addition to product sampllng or coupons.

Promotional items

Why give away promotional items? In a word, awareness.

The more useful the trinket, the better the chance that awareness will lead to consideration. When I was an independent consultant, I gave away lens cleaning cloths in a little plastic case. People held onto them for years. At BlogHer 2008, I picked up a 3-outlet extender from Topix that I still use.

Utility doesn’t have to be longterm. Bottled water, personal fans and sunglasses may not make it home from the outdoor concert, but you can bet they will be well used during. It also doesn’t necessarily mean used by the consumer herself. Many trade show trinkets end up in the “look what I got you on my trip” bag that parents bring home to their kids, and that was just as true at the computer industry events I attended in my previous life as it is for blogging conferences. At BlogHer this year, I picked up pair of green sunglasses at the Turning Leaf booth, and my son wore them throughout BlogHer and our post-BlogHer vacation in Chicago.

Doug in Chicago, note green Turning Leaf sunglasses. (c) Susan Getgood 2013

In addition to utility, another factor to consider when selecting promo items is alignment with brand messaging. Fitness items align with wellness messaging, makeup accessories with cosmetics brands, cooking tools with food brands, and so on. Years ago, I worked for a company that made software for tire dealers, and we gave away tire gauges.

Finally, cost. Promotional items do not have to be cheap trinkets and trash. Luxury brands use promo items too, but their distribution is usually more limited than what we are discussing here, the use of promo items in a mass consumer marketing strategy. Generally, the cost of a promo item for mass distribution should be commensurate with the cost of the actual products as well as your overall trade show budget. Bottom line, don’t spend a lot but don’t default to the cheapest item in the catalog either.

Product samples

Product samples make their appearance at events in all sorts of guises — from sampling on site (usually supported by generous coupons and/or a promo item) to free product in trial or full sizes. Regardless of size or form, their role is to encourage trial. in other words, to jump the consumer right to the consideration stage. At BlogHer and other social media events that attract influencers, the brands want to connect with the consumer on two levels, as both a customer and an influencer of other customers (hopefully with some scale!)

Food and many beauty products lend themselves very well to onsite sampling, while others (shampoo, body wash, household cleaning as examples) work better as trial or full size “take-home” products.

The key is to integrate the promo item or sample into your marketing strategy, with a clear objective and desired result. In other words, don’t just give stuff out because everyone else is. Understanding the ROI of your swag can turn it from a cost item in your event budget to an investment in your brand.

All the exhibitors at BlogHer this year did a good job with their booths and swag. I didn’t really see anything that didn’t work for its intended consumer — and keep in mind that not every attendee at BlogHer was the consumer for every brand. That’s why there’s a Swag Swap set up for people to drop off the stuff they don’t want. Whatever is left at the end is donated to local charities.

That said, I do want to call out a few that are great examples of my points above.

Topix outlet from BlogHer 2008 and AloMune waterproof pouch from 2013

Starting with two very small items in the official conference swag bag. Verizon had a USB car charger plug that scores on all my promo item criteria – useful and reinforces Verizon’s branding as a mobile solution provider at a reasonable price point. Immune supplement manufacturer AloMune distributed samples of its product in a very useful cell phone sized waterproof pouch. Neither item was terribly expensive, but almost every attendee probably could find a use for them. Or knows someone who could. And bonus: small and packable so likely to make it home, even with attendees who were not checking luggage or shipping stuff home.

CVS was a sponsor at BlogHer and another conference I attended earlier this summer, Reviewer’s Retreat. At both events, it took the surprising, generous (and not cheap) approach of handing out swag bags of full size products. Not just one or two items — I didn’t count, but it was about what might fit in the hand basket you’d grab when you’d run into the store for a few things. At both conferences, it also was a wide variety — cosmetics, bandages, a first aid kit, cookies and other snack items, hand creme, sunblock and so on. Some of the items were CVS-brand, others were well-known (and not inexpensive) brands like Lubriderm, Roc and Aveeno.

Now, I don’t have first-hand visibility into the brand’s marketing strategy, but I’m guessing one objective is to increase the average basket size (purchase), and that is the goal supported by the generous swag bag. It’s a bold and noticeable move to reinforce the brand messaging — that CVS carries a wide range of merchandise, including food and snack items, at a variety of price points. It isn’t limited to prescriptions, toothpaste and OTC medicines.

I also really hope that the number of items isn’t a coincidence — that someone really did think about how many (as well as what) to include, to mimic that basket size.

Using my focus group of one, I’d say it works. A few days before we left for BlogHer, I had to pick up a prescription ($20) and while I was there, I picked up make-up remover wipes, vitamins, shampoo for my son and a bunch of other stuff, about $50 worth. I know I considered and purchased some of the CVS-brand items as a direct result of the Reviewer’s Retreat swag bag.

So, next time you hear someone bemoaning the swag and promotional items at conferences and events, remind them that swag is an important element in the event marketing mix, brands rely on it to achieve their marketing objectives and consumers welcome it.

And if you don’t want it, just don’t take it. It’s that easy.

'THAT WAS EASY!'

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