OK, so I'm naive! I'll admit it.
Even though I know the web is full of charlatans and rogues there have been a few (small number) of bloggers who've caught my attention over the last months. They come across as genuine sharers - helping people to understand the way this new world should work. Unfortunately some of these have really disappointed me recently. Not because what they write isn't valuable, but because they've adopted product placement. And product placement is scary in terms of the credibility of blogging. The stuff I write is intended to help people understand how their day to day problems can be solved with our software - no disclosure required because the product is written all over the site.When these guys push their own books (and their are lots of them now) that's fair game, in the same dimension. But when they start pushing other peoples stuff, disguising it as good, solid advice, the whole business takes a turn for the worse.There's one particular blogger who makes no secret (properly) about promoting his own program - no problem. But in a recent article he claimed to be using three different CRM products. Either he's a fool, or he thinks his readers are!And now we're seeing others follow his lead. They'll screw the whole thing up.
Since the very first blog, written around an ancient campfire somewhere in the moist foothills of Seattle, content has been crowned the undisputed king.
The king ruled over all that was written, be they blogs, articles, ads, fiction, or a killer love letter. All that was copy sat at the feet of the king.
Nothing succeeded without content. Writing without it was cast from the kingdom, banished as self-serving junk mail and the much-loathed “interruption marketing.”
But the king is dead.
Okay, not exactly dead, just appointed Prime Minister. Content still rules, but it’s from a more evolved perspective.
Long live the new king: context.
Because nothing sells, nothing works, without it.
The inherent power that is context
At the center of every effective piece of content is an agenda, an implied pitch residing at the heart of the content.
Content is the license, if you will, to move forward with the pitch. Valuable content gives you the right to go on to sell or promote something. It’s the embodiment of a noble premise — to receive you must first give.
You give with the hope that the prospect will stick around and finally buy something. And that is the context behind content marketing.
A commercial context doesn’t diminish the value of strong content. In fact, acknowledging your agenda can be a very smart strategy. It’s like saying, Here, I have a gift for you. Stick around. Because there’s even more where that came from.
Content creates value, and value builds trust. From trust springs the willingness to part with dollars in return for even more value.
The universal nature of context
Of course, context isn’t something we only find in commercial transactions. It’s the empowering juice of fiction, as well.
In the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s current flick, Inglorious Basterds, we see what would otherwise be an overly long, annoyingly irrelevant conversation between a Nazi officer and a terrified farmer.
Why is the farmer terrified? Why is the viewer hooked? Because of the context of the scene. Beneath every seemingly innocent line is a foreboding sense of dread.
Idle chit-chat about milk and neighbors form the content. Fear and unthinkable consequences form the context. Without the context, all you have is a rather dull conversation.
We know something really dramatic and truly horrifying is about to happen. Right after Tarantino teases and torments us into a frenzy of anticipation.
How does he do that? He has mastered the art of context in his scenes.
We copywriters should take note.
Context as strategy
Effective context doesn’t happen by accident. We need to consciously create it.
Context comes from the writer’s clarity about her goals, juxtaposed against the expectations and tolerances of the audience.
In the context of content marketing, first we deliver valuable content, free and clear. As a gift. As a solution. As narrative bricks and mortar. And in doing so we earn the reader’s trust.
Once we’re trusted, we are now able to expand on our own agenda. We get to talk more about the intended outcome of the piece. That outcome might be a sale, a subscription, or even conversion to a new idea.
In a blog, we set out to deliver value. In an ad, we pitch solutions and overcome objections. In fiction, we infuse scenes with anticipation and emotion.
And in each case, when we understand the context we’re working in, we achieve our goal.
And so, too, does the reader. Because their context isn’t what you’re selling, but what they’re seeking to take away from what you’ve written.
Long live the new king.
About the Author: Larry Brooks is a bestselling novelist and the creator of Storyfix.com, an instructional site for fiction writers and those who love them.
Everything I read at Copyblogger informs and educates me.
It's so refreshing to come across a site where they just talk straight forward common sense with no hype.
What a great job guys!
Twitter is not your average social network. One study shows that the average Twitter user is a female in her late teens. She follows 20 – 50 people, with the same number of Twitterers following her back. Another study found that 10% of active users account for 90% of all tweets. And yet another study concluded that 24% of tweets are created by bots. Clearly, Twitter has an engagement and identity crisis on their hands.
Thus far, Twitter would encourage new user participation via a hand picked list of recommended Twitterers (often referred to as the Suggested User List or SUL). Now, however, Twitter is ready to kill the SUL and provide something of even greater value: user-curated Twitter Lists.
As we’ve detailed before, Twitter Lists, which are live for some users, enable users to create and name their own curated lists of Twitterers. Your lists are public by default, which means that anyone can check out who you’ve added to your topical lists, and the feature also makes it easy to see which lists you’ve been added to by other Twitter users. As our Editor in Chief, Adam Ostrow wrote, “This is essentially taking the whole concept of “Follow Friday” and building a killer feature around it.”
As any addicted Twitterer knows, the key to Twitter becoming an integral part of your online life is reaching a threshold where you’re consuming interesting tweets and getting responses from others who read your 140 character opinions. Without that push and pull exchange, Twitter is absolutely meaningless.
That’s why Twitter Lists will prove to be the key engagement tool. Lists will ensure that new users can immediately find other Twitterers who appeal to their tastes. Right now, seasoned Twitter users can create communities of their own, so engagement isn’t a problem, but Lists will brings the crafted community element to new users who may be initially trepidatious or confused about the point of Twitter.
Rule Two: Don’t Sell… Teach
Many people think the main barrier to online marketing success is a lack of traffic. But it’s really a lack of trust. People love to buy stuff, but they hate to feel sold. So despite the fact that you’re building a website that will build your business, you need to concentrate on delivering value that builds authority.
Educational, tutorial-style content works online. It attracts links, it brings traffic, it builds trust, and it causes you to rank for relevant keyword-phrases in search engines. And all the while, you’re decreasing sales resistance, because after all… what is effective selling?
Selling is simply educating people about the benefits of doing business with you.
For the newbie getting up to speed with Internet Marketing when the outer limits are accelerating is a daunting prospect.
The whole thing is moving from Keywords and Adwords to Content, Context, Influence and who knows what next.
Luckily there are people who generously share their experience. Unluckily there are also pretenders who claim expertise. The unhappy lot of the beginner is the hard yards of following both lots and, over time, figuring out who to believe on which topics.
Brian Clark and the team at Copyblogger just impress the hell out of me.
When it comes to explaining the new phenomena of selling through blogging with authority reinforced through engagement in social media these guys are the REAL THING.
This is a tiny extract from Brian's free white paper Authority Rules. Having just read the extracts in the site I'll happily confirm that authority does indeed rule - a fact which is self evident when you read Brian's rules.
Throughout the entire 2008 and the better part of 2009, we’ve reported on Facebook and Twitter’s explosive growth. Month after month, we’ve seen tremendous numbers from both these services, while some giants of old, such as MySpace, dropped lower and lower.
Somewhere in June, however, Twitter stopped growing, at least according to Compete. The same thing happened to Facebook at the exact same time; at first we’ve attributed the traffic numbers to the summer slumber, but now that Compete’s numbers for September are out, there’s no doubt that both Facebook and Twitter are no longer growing, at least in the eyes of the (admittedly US-centric) Compete.
Summer is one thing, but September is the month when everyone comes back to work, when the IT industry wakes up and when things, generally, start happening. A bump in the stats of almost everything that’s online is natural, so Facebook’s meager 1.96% growth when it comes to unique visitors isn’t something you’d write home about.
There’s a difference between these two, however: Facebook is already huge; there’s always a question of whether it has room for further growth at all. Twitter is several orders of magnitude smaller; accustomed to its explosive growth, we’ve already started calling it the “new SMS”, but if it stays where it is, numbers-wise, it’s not going to cut it. In September, its unique visitors fell by 0.17%, to 23,538,791. Over the last three months, it has grown approximately three times less than in May alone.
Furthermore, if we look at visits, Facebook experienced a solid 3.99% increase to 2,290,512,524, but Twitter actually dropped by a further 2.68% to 144,661,590. This doesn’t look too bad until you remember that Twitter’s growth in the last three months has been a staggering 463.62%.
When it comes to other social networking powerhouses of old, the situation is far, far worse. MySpace and Bebo are bleeding users at an oustanding pace: 11.15% and 15.41%, respectively. If the trend continues, we might see these sites join services like GeoCities in the geek history books in a couple of years.
We’ve noticed, however, that LinkedIn has been steadily growing lately, and the trend continued into September, with the service recording a solid +5.68% growth. Finally, we’ve noticed last month that Digg’s numbers look excellent, but in September, they remained almost the same with a tiny 0.25% growth to 43,888,259 uniques.
Judging by these (very diverse) numbers, I have a feeling that the period ahead of us will be different than before. Users are getting picky about what they want; they’re very fast to jump on and off bandwagons, and the movements in the social networking space are getting harder and harder to predict.
A good example is another social media darling that recently got sold to Facebook: FriendFeed. Once touted as the next big thing, it seems to have sold at just the right time, as Compete’s numbers show a huge drop in both unique visitors (-28.41%) and visits (-27.96%). A couple more months, and it might completely drop off the charts.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Norebbo.
Tags: bebo, compete, facebook, linkedin, myspace, stats, twitter
If we can believe Hitwise, we’ve all hit a Twitter slump:
Of course, this could just mean that we’re all switching from the web interface to desktop and mobile applications, but surely if Twitter were adding new users, they’d start with the web site, right?
Hmm. Maybe there’s a slump in those seeking out Twitter too!
Summary
Competing in the Many to Many, Free Market can appear to be a race to bottom. A race in which everybody loses. I'm sure the sure the custom build auto manufacturers accused Henry Ford of being similarly destructive. In fact, he wasn't and we're not.
We are being disruptive, and disruptive value propositions create value in different ways, reducing costs and enabling new ideas. But being disruptive doesn't stop at the new product or service. It takes a fundamental rewrite of the entire business process - marketing, sales, revenue, delivery, service, ROI. It takes vision, strategy, execution and undoubtedly a good slice of luck.
But most of all it's about the triumph of new ideas over old.
The Argument
In the Many to Many, Free Market we need to turn competition into a battle between ideas, not budgets. It's those ideas which will commit the user to adoption and exploitation, so we can make some money along the way.
Those ideas need, in my view at least, to do two critical things 1) show the users they have a problem they can solve and 2) add some value to the solution - hopefully in multiple ways.
Our Case Study
In our case this gets to be:
Contrast this idea with the competition - CRM and Project Management. I don't know about you, but everything I ever heard about CRM was bad and the Project Management systems I've seen have all been far to complex with those Gant charts etc.
The battle of ideas becomes one between a) identify, understand, solve real problems versus b) marketing speak acronyms that nobody really understands. To my mind this should be like showing up at a knife fight with a machine gun and grenades. :-)
The Challenge
But it isn't - because
In theory the search engines are there to help those interested in our solutions find them.
In theory we can meet and engage with people using social media, displaying our wares without overtly selling.
In theory the cream of the Internet rises to the top. If we're good we'll get noticed and go viral.
In my experience it doesn't work quite like the theory suggests. Actually getting heard above the noise is the biggest challenge.
The first problem is Search is now a mature technology. Internet marketers have spent years writing pages crammed with Keywords. Competition for even long tail keywords is fierce. Google uses keywords to make Adwords work (for Google, of course).
The second problem is Google, and perhaps others, have moved on from Keywords when finding results for organic search. It now matches the exact phrasing of the search term with the exact title pages. The good news is the user gets more accurate results. The bad news is we have no idea which questions they'll ask.
The third problem is social media is immature. We haven't really established conventions which make it work for everybody. Right now it's a torrent pouring a mixture of enthusiam, generous sharing, self promotion, and spam, into a very deep mine of information. Catching the attention of real people to have real conversations about real problems and real solutions is more a matter of luck than anything else. And it takes up so much time.
Finding ways to get heard above the noise is now a discussion between even the gurus. Some highly qualified people suggest the answer lies in engagement and conversation - all day. Others disagree, suggesting it's the content that counts and engagement naturally follows quality content. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle because they're all experts at both, and established as such. The
Conclusions
The less capable, and less experienced, need to find their own way of building a quality footprint on the Internet. As part of that group we've determined the answer lies in our ideas.
Blogs allow us to write about our ideas from every conceivable angle, addressing as many likely questions as we can think of. Traffic reports tell us which ideas achieve traction in organic search and that directs the topics of more articles. Google gradually indexes our pages and watches to see how well they satisfy the searchers.
If we do well for Mr Google he promotes us up the page, and takes more seriously our articles on other subjects.
Social Media allows us to publish those articles in the torrent pouring into the mine. Along the way we might get Google's attention and also attract some people to our work.
But there's another benefit. Today Google doesn't have a monopoly knowledge of quality content and where it can be found.
Twitter, Friendfeed, Stumbleupon, Digg, Diigo, Delicious and a lot more, all have their own versions and provide search capabilities. And they're all potentially places where people who are looking for our solutions can find them.
Search engines don't exist without content and those with the fastest route to quality content will triumph.
The Goal
If we can, with our ideas, help the search engines to satisfy their customers we'll be able to take ownership, and get heard above the noise.
Where's The Business Model in the Information Revolution?
This unfortunately, and inevitably, is a complex description of what we've learned in our quest to answer the question "what happens when the cost of software drops to zero?"
We don't make any pretensions as to academic leadership, but the article does have some authority - written by an accountant who's spent the last thirty years selling software, and the last three finding the answer to the question.
And any way if you want to get the same message from somebody with real authority watch the full programme at Free - The Future of Radical Price
Summary
Business will never be the same again. We may not be able to predict what it's going to be like, but we do know it will change, and keep changing. Anybody in business, or wanting to be in business, is going to have to understand, and accommodate/exploit, rates of that change to find business models which make money.
Background
The scene for this was set by Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital (1995) when he explained the separation of bits from atoms and the impact this would have on the world. He presaged the Information Revolution.
Anybody who hasn't read the book can be excused for thinking that Information Revolution has happened, but they'd be wrong. We're currently working through the death throes of the Industrial Revolution. The Information Revolution hasn't started yet.
Agreed, the successful businesses today are competing on the basis of information as we know it, but their business models - how they make money - are all rooted in the Industrial Revolution. As mass production emerged businesses competed on their ability to dominate distribution of their products. They created One to Many distribution channels, and the channels competed until one triumphed over the others. In this way we saw entire industries distilled into a small number of brands.
The business models we see today, even for the newest information based companies, are all One to Many models competing with their ability to dominate distribution. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle are all examples.
Google is perhaps the most interesting. It dominates Search and so is the only game in town for people like us who want to be found. It dominates Search, so it's the only game in town for those who want to advertise. It dominates the distribution channel and sets it's own rules. This is no different to the situation Microsoft built through the 1990s. Hardware manufacturers, software developers, computer retailers and service businesses, even corporate IT departments all had to dance to the Microsoft tune. It was the only game in town.
They are both One to Many distribution models and will need to change, or die.
Direction
Back in 1995 Negroponte kicked off a conversation which has since been added to by Chris Anderson, in the Long Tail, by Malcolm Gladwell and Don Tapscott in Wikinomics - plus a host of others of course. This conversation has anticipated the impact of Many to Many markets and the disruption of existing business models.
Recently Anderson has accelerated the discussion with his new book Free The Future of Radical Price.
Bring together the concepts of Free and Many to Many markets and we get an idea of the perfect storm arriving soon - the transition to the Information Revolution. In fact it's already started. The simplest example is blog marketing.
Blogger provides us hosted software, for free. Ezine Articles (and lots of other sites) provide us with content, for free. Google finds us people to pay for ads on our blog, for free. Within an hour of starting each of us can join the ranks of the Many marketing to the Many, for free.
Many to Many distribution, and Free, bring millions of suppliers into the market to provide for millions of customers. Most offer something based on software, and most of those are built in people's spare time - essentially for free. Hosting is effectively free, as is distribution. Experts in every field can offer something to the individuals who need it, when and where they need it.
These new entrants can effectively offer their product/service for free. Joining the race to the bottom they can wait and watch while the One to Many businesses go bust under the pressure of thousands of competitors setting a price expectation below their break even point.
Challenges
So it's easy to see how the demise of major players can come about remarkably quickly. It's much harder to see how the new entrants are ever going to make money. Surely the minute they try to monetize they'll be hoist on their own petard. A new kid on the block will do to them what they just did to the previous incumbent.
Well not quite.
We don't get to make money like the One to Many guys through price. We only get to make money when people use what we give them for free. This isn't a new concept.
Unlike Many to Many, Free has been around for a long time. Perhaps the best example is the man's razor, heavily subsidized at the point of sale by a manufacturer who earns on every blade used, and keeps doing it. And unlike razor blades, software or services don't have a physical presence we can assign a price to.
So making money in the Free, Many to Many world of the Information Revolution has its own, significant challenges. Those of us in this business have to find ways of catching the attention of our users/customers, making them want the benefits we offer, motivating them to use our stuff, and then make money out of the fact they're using it, probably not through price.
Implementation
Having innovated in the development and distribution of our software/service we need to innovate even more in our other processes. Attracting users through free channels, exciting them with ideas, building confidence with our service, and rewarding them - all so somebody else can reward us. And we have to do all this at, or close, to zero cost. The minute we start paying for anything we erode our main advantage.
Examples
There are two excellent examples of the two dimensions 1) rewarding users and 2) paying for stuff
Rewarding for Use
Zemanta has been quietly building a presence in blogging over the last year or so. The blogosphere is a very noisy place with endless free offers around so getting air time can be hard. Zemanta first built a plug-in for Wordpress, and offered it for free. Then it built an Add On for Firefox and offered it for free. Early adopters found a number of benefits. As a post is being written Zemanta offers images and hyperlinks to information sources, and suggests tags. It also offers a list of other people's content. Links to other relevant articles can be selected and inserted by the user. All of this makes writing articles easier. But in addition Zemanta rewards us for using the service. When other users are writing their articles they get offered our content to include. We get our articles distributed to other authors, and back links from them, just because we use the service. Quite how Zemanta plans making money I don't know. I do know it'll have knowledge of quality content, and only quality content, published on the web. And it'll have all of that for free or close to it. We get rewarded for using Zemanta and Zemanta makes money because we use it, but price never gets mentioned.
In my other example we can see the difficulty of paying for the presence Zemanta gets for free.
Paying for Marketing
An Industrial Revolution company masquerading as an Information Revolution business is salesforce.com. Any new entrant in the business software market runs up against salesforce as soon as it's persuaded to pay for advertising.
The One to Many guys have developed a commercial model based on Pay Per Click and Conversions. The theory is the advertiser can spend more of it's cost of sale budget on advertising and get it back from usage price. This can obviously work provided the cost per conversion and revenues from price are predictable.
But they aren't. The typical model is a) sign up today, b)first 30 days free, c)on-going $x/month. Using this approach the critical success factors are 1)cost per click 2) clicks per conversion 3) transition from free to paid 4) number of months the user pays. That's a lot of variables to try to make predictable and discovering a combination which continues into a mature business must be very expensive.
Here's where salesforce comes in. The company isn't really interested in the small business software market, but it does want to dominate the space where anybody who is will need to advertise. The price of PPC isn't set by the advertiser. It's set by somebody else following a different agenda.
Most new entrants will run out of cash competing for ad position long before they get close to looking for ways to exploit what they've got.
Our Case Study
In our business, having wasted a modest amount of money on PPC, we decided to replace the typical advertise, contract, invoice, service, invoice upgrade process with one more closely fitting the challenges of the Free, Many to Many distribution model.
It turned out we could get people to register for our service, but couldn't persuade them to use it. This is the fundamental problem of the sign up for free approach. So we decided our real problem was Adoption (and to an extent it still is). The adoption problem arose from three issues:
There is an implementation phase which is fundamental but a barrier.
Users needed to understand how they could use the software and this takes some thinking about.
We needed to attract people, for free to messages which created an aspiration sufficient to motivate them to address the previous two items.
From this we identified our own process - Attraction, Aspiration, Adoption, Exploitation.
Now we can monitor the ways we attract visitors, which content they access, progression to sign-up, and adoption. We can see where the process breaks down, and in fixing those we'll be able to build a predictable model. Predictability is the key to exploitation. In summary, we haven't yet identified a business model for the Information Revolution, but we do know it isn't just software. It's based on something like Zemanta, rewarding people for using the service, and bringing them to adoption in a predictable, and free, process.
If we can do that we'll have a business, and so will anybody who can do the same.
