As Matt Cremer neatly stated in a February 2012 article for AdAge, “Content marketing, an idea that’s been kicking around since companies started firing up Movable Type blogs, is in the full flush of its industrial revolution”.  And with good reason.  Statistics continue to point to the voracious appetite that consumers have for consuming video, taking, sharing and now pinning photos, reading and sharing articles and infographics and much much more.

In the midst of this, I had the incredible opportunity to host a dedicated content marketing conference last week in Toronto.  The assembled speakers, comprised of passionate content marketers from across North America,  demonstrated in their own content just how aligned this rapidly emerging industry is when it comes to best practices.  Having never met, the lineup of speakers delivered a complementary and cohesive day of programming unlike anything I’ve ever experienced at a conference so highly targeted.

While there were many incredible takeaways from the event, the one which stood out to me as the most pervasive came from Rob Yoegel, Content Marketing Director at online marketing software firm, Monetate.

His insight – content is not king.  Great content is king.

Great insight from @robyoegel

Of course, the next obvious question is – so what makes great content?

I’m glad you asked.

Drawing from Weber Shandwick’s own Content Fusion methodology, as well as the collective insights from last week’s event, there emerged a number of consistently stated best practices, distilled here into six simple but highly interrelated tips.  Without further ado, here they are in no particular order.

***

Start with story: Without a compelling story to tell, it’s doubtful that your content will be great.  Before you open your mouth or pick up a camera, know the key messages you’re looking to communicate and what makes them valuable/interesting/important to your audience.  Once you’re focused on that, everything gets a lot easier.

Listen: You aren’t the only one creating content.  Your customers and stakeholders are creating it every day and the power of the open web allows your business to deeply understand what your audience is talking about, what they’re interested in, and perhaps as importantly, what they’re not interested in.  This insight is invaluable in shaping content that will resonate.

Understand your audience: Listening is only one element of truly understanding your audience.  All of the data you have about your customers, everything you understand from your brand surveys, customer research, web traffic, email clickthrough rates, call centres and more contributes to an understanding of your target.  Compiling all of this can help you build powerful, content-focused profiles of your audience.  What types of content work best at which stage of your customer relationship or sales funnel?  Do they need to consistently hear your story from you or do you have the opportunity to curate content from other like-minded sources?  The answers (or minimally some strong clues) are in there.

Iterate and improve: Every time you produce a piece of content you have an opportunity to improve if you continue to listen to see how your audience responds to your content.  Monitor your clickthrough rates, feedback through comments, email and your Twitter handle, and any other input you have and use that learning to improve the way you tell your story.  This might be an outcome that’s highly tactical to improve conversion or it might be a significant revamp of your entire story.  Either way, your audience will be giving you clues – both subtle and overt – to help you make better content.  Pay attention to them.

Stay within your means: A content marketing strategy is a marathon and not a sprint – for that reason it’s critical to consider your available budget and resources when planning yours.  Your likelyhood to succeed with a one-off content piece is far lower than a sustained program that blends earned, owned, and paid media and is supported by a steady stream of content.  That said, if you only have the resources to create one blog post a month, look at ways you can use partnerships, 3rd party content curation, and other creative solutions to begin to scale your content production.  Use the rest of these tips to drive results and show the value of content with an eye on proving the need and value internally for additional budget and resources.

Be consistent: Your audience is exposed to hundreds, possibly thousands of marketing messages a day.  If your content marketing story isn’t consistent across every touchpoint, your story begins to blend in with all the others.  You’re working hard to stand out so you owe it to yourself to help your audience recognize a story from you.  It breeds familiarity, loyalty, reputation capital, and business results.

***

The staggering volume of stories, images, videos, experiences and information already present in our lives is only set to increase.  Merely having content will not be enough to reach, engage and retain a loyal audience.  The challenge is upon us – it’s time to stop producing content and start producing great content.

Content Fusion: a methodology to help adhere to these steps

We see them everywhere.  On buildings, in magazines, on business cards and more.  QR codes are more and more emerging as an element of the marketers toolkit.  So it stands to reason that on the ground at SXSW Interactive, the QR could should reign supreme… shouldn’t it?

In reality, as 30,000 digerati descent on Austin the technology is being put to its ultimate test this week.  If an audience that prides itself on being on the leading and even bleeding edge of technology adoption doesn’t respond to an avalanche of opportunities to engage with QR codes, could it mean the end of the line for the argument that this is a viable marketing channel?

Everything is scannable in Austin

Luckily, SXSW marketers are more than happy to give these now highly recognizeable barcodes the ultimate opportunity to prove their worth.  Business cards, posters, t-shirts, stickers, human billboards, rain ponchos and more are all popular real estate on which to find a code in Austin.  In fact, it’s hard to look anywhere around the convention centre without catching a QR code out of the corner of your eye.  But in spite of all of this, there have been skeptics noting that in spite of the extreme visibility of the channel, what we’re not seeing a lot of at southby is people actually scanning them.  That said, this is a fairly subjective form of measurement on which to condemn the practice.

So I did some investigating and talked to a few marketers that were using the codes and found that of those who were willing to talk, the codes were actually meeting with relatively solid success.  One marketer who got specific noted that with an offer featuring both a QR code and a short URL, around 60% of their traffic was originating  from the codes.  Of course the actual number of visitors wasn’t a part of this discussion, but some would argue that the ratio is cause for some optimism.

So with 3 days of SXSW in the can and this highly unscientific study behind us, it’s hard to say the QR code debate is settled.  But following such a large and relevant use case, it will be the presence (or absence) of QR codes in marketing campaigns moving forward will speak for themselves.

The test is almost complete – now to wait and see if the QR code gets a “pass” from SXSW marketers.

800,000,000+ registered Facebook users.

200,000,000+ tweets sent per day.

2 days worth of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.

And my personal favourite:

All of the content created in the history of the world prior to 2003 is now replicated every 48 hours.

In today’s world every man, woman, child, employee, business or brand that dares to participate, has the access and tools available to become their own media outlet.  It’s an exciting time to be an individual with a story to tell, but it’s also a rapidly changing time.

We’ve all been granted the power to broadcast a personal message that could help to reform a country, as we saw in Egypt at this time last year, or just to make the day of friend on the other side of the world.  But as has been quoted in many blogs before this one, with great power comes great responsibility.

Citizen journalism in action

If a person sends a message to the world on Twitter – or even to a group of a few hundred or even dozen friends on Facebook – they are essentially becoming broadcasters.  And while Tom Brokaw or Peter Mansbridge may have several million more viewers, one key difference is that traditional broadcasters are acutely aware that they’re being watched.  In this new paradigm, there is the potential to have our daily lives broadcast across multiple platforms, 24/7/365.  For most of us, this is a completely new phenomenon, and compounding the issue is a second differentiator from the traditional broadcaster – our personal broadcasts are much more personal than the nightly news.

As a result we have experiences like these:

• Someone you haven’t spoken to in months runs into you and mentions a detail about something insignificant that happened to you last week.
• You meet someone for the first time who’s already decided they can’t like you “IRL” because the don’t like you on twitter.
• You meet someone for the first time after following them on twitter (or stalking them on Facebook) and they disappoint you by being far less interesting than you’d been expecting.

Any of these sound familiar?

I realize that these are Hollywood problems but they’re also side effects of a generation of broadcasters who didn’t go to journalism school. The challenge is, with billions of personal broadcast networks up and running, we’re all just going to have to read the coles notes and learn on the fly.

We’re all ‘on the air’ now – we just need to get used to it.

“Next year will be the year of mobile.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this statement before, but in 2012 it’s going to happen – though I’ll forgive your cynicism as it comes from a legitimate place.

As marketers we’ve been hearing this is “the year of mobile” since American Idol brought SMS to the mainstream nearly a decade ago.  While this was a huge leap forward for the relevance of the mobile phone in our culture, it also represented a very different kind of mobile experience than the one consumers are having today.  And it points to the problem with those previous predictions – we were thinking about mobile as a different kind of medium than it actually is.

SMS conditioned many marketers to think that mobile is a push-based platform, which many have refused to let go of.  While SMS is an increasingly relied upon tool in the personal communications arsenal of individuals, the evolving devices that now sit in their pockets are able to do so much more in 2011 than they could in 2002.  And while apps, GPS, bluetooth, built-in cameras and many more features have grown in prominence and mindshare, the reality is smartphones are now fully portable computing devices which enable access to something far more vast – the world wide web.

With improved network access and screen resolution, the mobile web browsing experience is improving as each new phone hits the market.  Consumers are taking notice, using this access to gain the sort of information – once reserved for their personal computer – from wherever they’re located.  According to Google (who knows a thing or two about search) mobile searches have increased 400% since 2010 and by 2013 more people will use their mobile phone to access the internet than their PCs.

And these numbers continue to grow.  Rapidly.

According to eMarketer, 33.8% of the total US population (Google and Ipsos tell us this number represents 50% of American adults) will have smartphones by the end of next year.  By comparison Facebook (the platform marketers are climbing over their mothers to develop a presence on) was being used by a mere 42.3% of the US population as of February 2011.  That’s a pretty small gap in usage considering the disparity in attention from marketers – especially when Facebook themselves are so invested.  This year at the f8 conference, Facebook VP of Partnerships, Vaughn Smith noted that “We expect our next billion users will come primarily on mobile”.

Yet still, varied statistics are showing that only somewhere between 8-11% of major consumer brands have a website that’s optimized for a mobile device.

You see, the year of mobile isn’t being driven by marketers, which is a reason for the cynicism that could be associated with my claim.  The mobile revolution is completely in the hands (and pockets) of the consumer.  When you look at the top 10 gifts on holiday wishlists for 2011, you’ll see Tablets and Smartphones right at the top.  And not because consumers are looking for a shinier screen to text from.  Consider that according to a 2011 Compuware study, 23% of adults have cursed at their phone when a mobile site doesn’t work, Google and Lightspeed Research tell us that 70% of smartphone users have compared prices on their phones and 50% of 2010 mobile product searches lead to purchase, and according to eMarketer, mobile searches for online retailers have increased 95% from September 2010 to September 2011.

With all of that in mind, consider your own smartphone use and ask yourself – can your brand afford to be cynical for another year?

I honestly do feel bad

I have to write to apologize for my negligence on this platform.  While I’m sure I could tell you “I’ve been busy”, I know you’ve been busy too – I just haven’t been blogging enough.  I’ve certainly been tweeting and experimenting with posts on various platforms, but the nitchblog has been a casualty of all the great things happening over at Weber Shandwick.  But no longer.  With this early New Year’s resolution I’m promising more blogging in this space – not a ton, but more.  You’ll see.

Oh – and if you’d like to read some thoughts longer than 140 characters in between posts, I’d love for you to join me on posterous.

Smaller, lighter, faster. With the cloud looking like the concept-du-jour, the Air has a lot of growth still ahead.

Read the full article at: http://allthingsd.com/20111115/how-long-before-the-macbook-air-is-half-of-app…

There’s a lot of skepticism around the longevity of group buying platforms. This seems to support that – group buying business growth is a monster that needs cash to sustain it. Not great for the long term…

I talk a lot about good technology helps business, but sometimes tech is just fun. If we can evolve the way we work and learn, why not the way we play?

It’s so interesting to see a major industry shift before our very eyes. Many would say that Steve Jobs is the catalyst here.