The first one, 18 Stats on the Mobile Market You Need To Know, was posted earlier this week and hopefully caused you to consider your mobile strategy.

This next one is called “The Inbound Marketing Process Infographic.”

It comes from Impact Brand and Design and includes 6 steps to inbound marketing success.

It is appropriately sub-titled “Start generating more leads from your website today!” This is an excellent companion to my 7 steps to effective inbound marketing.

The 6 Steps to Inbound Marketing Success

1. Develop an effective marketing strategy. Marketing is an investment in the growth of your business, not an expense.
2. Create and maintain a powerful website. An effective website is the hub of all your online marketing and lead generation activities.
3. Generate more traffic through effective blogging, social media, SEO and paid search. By increasing the traffic to your website you increase the number of opportunities for visitors to convert into leads.
4. Convert traffic to leads. Create effective offers and calls to action that appeal to potential buyers at all stages.
5. Convert Leads into sales through effective nurturing strategies and marketing automation.
6. Measure everything! The most important measures are: Traffic to leads, Leads to customer, cost per lead and cost per customer. But the image also provides 24 measures you should use for each inbound marketing tactic.

I hope you enjoy this latest update to the best marketing infographics…

With more than 2,400 Retweets, 650 “pins,” 200 LinkedIn shares, 47 “likes” and 45 Google+ shares and 25 comments, I was truly astonished by the amount of support and interest.

So in the next week, I will share 2 additional infographics to help inspire your efforts, to focus on your customers and to drive better results in 2012.

We know that mobile advertising is hot and I have already provided 4 steps to mobile marketing success. But if you’re still not convinced or you haven’t established your mobile strategy, then this post is for you…

The original “8 great infographics” post included a mobile marketing chart that showed the size of the mobile market compared to other channels and in context of the average person’s use of mobile technology to access information.

This one goes a little further and provides 18 facts and stats on the state of the mobile market:

• 4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide
• 27% of those are smart phones
• 75% are SMS-enabled
• By 2014 the mobile internet will over take desktop internet users
• One half of all local searches are performed on mobile devices
• Mobile tags provide more product information than traditional bar codes
• 86% of mobile internet users are using their device while watching TV
• 29% of mobile users are open to scanning a mobile tag to get a coupon
• Americans average 2.7 hours per day on their mobile device
• That’s twice the amount of time spent eating
• And that’s more than one-third of the time Americans send sleeping
• 91% of mobile internet access is for socializing vs. 79% on desktops
• Games, weather and maps/search are the largest search categories on mobile devices
• Over one-third of Facebook’s 600+ Million user base uses Facebook mobile
• 50% of Twitter’s 165 million users are accessing the site through Twitter mobile
• 200 Million+ video views happen on a mobile device
• 30% of smartphone owners access social networks from their mobile device
• Women 35-54 are the most social-mobile active

Mobile Marketing Statistics Infographic

From: Milagro Mobile Marketing

Unfortunately, many marketing plans are built with a few minor modifications to the previous year’s plans and some new buzz words added in. But an analysis of what marketing activities have really worked for many of us in the past will show that something like 80% of what we do is ineffective and does not justify the cost.

So keep the 20% – the best tactics, creative, campaigns and programs – and use the rest of your budget to drive a search-driven marketing plan…

What is a Search-driven marketing plan?

A search-driven marketing plan is the only way to ensure that your marketing activities are aligned to your audience. Through a search-driven marketing plan, you are using the words your customers use. You are using the volume of searches to prioritize their most important issues. From this you can create an audience-focused marketing plan that delivers valuable content on your customers’ hottest topics.

You can group the keywords into appropriate category clusters and analyze their importance by buying stage:

• “what” and “how” searches are generally “early-stage” searches indicating your customer’s desire to get educated on how to solve their problems.
• “who,” “”why” and “where” searches will indicate middle-stage searches when your customer’s are looking to identify the vendors that can solve their problems.
• “how much” and comparison terms like “vs.” (such as “Coke vs. Pepsi”) indicate late-stage searchers who are looking to make a decision.

What exactly is Search?

Search is simply about getting found. Earlier this week I wrote about search engine marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as one of the keys to effective inbound marketing along with social media and content strategy.

Shelly Kramer (@ShellyKramer) also wrote earlier this week a post called SEO 101: How Google Works where she provides a link and overview to Google’s Matt Cutz who attempts to white board his explanation on how Google works by 1) crawling the web, 2) indexing those pages and 3) ranking and serving up the best results to keyword searches.

Shelly also provides links to great resources like SEOmoz’s “Beginner’s Guide to SEO,” and Search Engine Land’s “Guide to SEO.”

How to get started:

1. Help your marketing team understand that a Search-driven marketing plan is key to your success
2. Don’t forget that for most marketers, search is really hard. It does not come naturally to the traditional marketer who thinks in terms of targets, promotional messages and outbound tactics.
3. Find SEO resources to help you do the research. You should start with Google’s Keyword Idea tool to understand the important keywords for your audience, group them into clusters and prioritize the clusters based on search volume and conversion.
4. Combine this information with your social media and content strategy to create one heck of a killer inbound marketing plan.

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The simplest definition of Inbound Marketing is to attract new customers. And you can’t do that with boring, promotional content. You can’t do it without engaging with your prospects in the earliest stages of their buying cycle, and on social channels. And you can’t do it without helpful content that isn’t properly placed on the channels your prospects are using.

The keys to inbound marketing success are search, social and great content that allow you to get found, get shared and gain the trust your prospects are looking for in a new business relationship…

How Marketers Market

The problem all starts with what I like to call “linear” thinking. As marketers, we have a product to sell. So we immediately think that the best way to sell it is to talk about it. Here’s what most of us marketers do:

1. We identify “targets” based on flat labels that don’t accurately represent our customers
2. We “position” our products vs. the competition
3. We identify key “messages” for audience segments (industries, functions, sizes of company)
4. We combine a series of promotional “tactics” like emails, webinars, events and cold calling “campaigns”
5. We get lucky and sell some stuff

The problems with this approach start with the fact that this is the biggest mistake marketers make – it is all about us. It is not aligned with the way our buyers think. And it is increasingly ineffective as prospects tune out our unwanted messages.

How Buyers Buy

Our prospects are people (not labels) who have families and bosses and stressful jobs. Thy don’t want to be sold to or talked at and they don’t have time for marketers who only care about themselves. Here’s what most buyers do:

1. They think about the best way to achieve their business’ objectives
2. They identify the obstacles, challenges and risks to achieving those objectives
3. They search for answers to the questions those obstacles, challenges and risks pose
4. They make decisions about the best path to help them achieve their objectives
5. Sometimes, this process leads to the purchase of a product or solution

So where our prospects are looking for answers to questions, we give them promotions they don’t want.

Inbound Marketing = Get Found

In order to deliver the answers to your buyers’ questions, you need:

• A content strategy that identifies all the content that answers your customers top questions in all the places they search for it, for all stages of the buyer journey, for all the types of buyers you serve
• You need a search strategy that effectively places that content in all the places they search for it
• You need content that is engaging enough to get shared
• You need a conversion or nurture path that maps to the buyer journey by offering the right content to the right person at the right time.

Tips To Effective Inbound Marketing

Here are just a few tips to review the above and to help get you started:

1. Stop making your content all about you.
2. Freeze your investment in outbound promotion.
3. Identify the keywords your customers use. If it isn’t a top keyword, it isn’t a customer need.
4. Create content that tells a story. Use your customers to help you.
5. Identify and cultivate relationships with your top influencers. Have them help you tell stories.
6. Test and learn what types of content gets shared.
7. Optimize your efforts to the content, channels and buyers who convert

OK, so I tried to create a little scratch doodle to visualize what I am trying to say here about the disconnect between marketers and our audience. I am a terrible artist so be nice, but please tell me if this article helps? If the picture helps? Or if you disagree?

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And so I offer up to you that the most important words in social media are “thank you!”

They may be the most important words in, well, the history of words. But in social media, where we only see avatars and not real expressions on real human faces, they are particularly important.

I recently read Tweet Smarter Not Harder by Rachel Thompson (@RachelintheOC) and I was reminded about how simply saying “thank you” has helped me make amazing connections on the social channels where I interact with people, sometimes and often on a daily basis.

So I will explain my approach to be thankful on social media here in this post.

And whether you use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin, Tumblr, or any of the social tools available, remember that you are connecting with people, not avatars. And that a little “thank you” goes along way!

What the heck does “Magnanimous” mean?

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” ~ Winston Churchill

I met Bill Lublin (@BillLublin) at a social media conference here in Philadelphia. We were on Triberr together and had the pleasure of reviewing and sharing each other’s blog posts on a regular basis.

After I thanked him for his support and told him how great it was to meet him in real life (aka #irl), he introduced me to his colleague as the most “magnanimous man in social media.”

I didn’t really know what magnanimous meant (it’s OK! Look it up…I had to.) but I guessed from his context that he meant to say that I was a nice guy or something – which is pretty cool, right?

“Hey man, thanks a lot!” I said. And didn’t think much about it for weeks. Then a few months later, I was asked by Bill Strawderman (@marketingbard) to present on personal branding to a group of volunteer bloggers and I found myself using the word. I instructed the audience to be magnanimous.

So afterwards I looked it up. It basically means “generosity but literally means “being of noble mind.” So while it maybe really hard to say (and not so easy to spell), I suggest we should all think about being noble and generous as you approach your social activity.

The Thank You Economy?

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” ~ JFK

Last year, famous social media influencer and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk (@GaryVee) wrote The Thank You Economy (not an affiliate link). In the book, Gary talks about how the internet and social has – both consumers and business buyers – given our voices back and transferred the balance of economic power to each of us.

He talks about how it is not the company with the biggest budget who will be successful in the new business climate of social interactivity, but it is the company who cares the most about their customers and makes them feel like they have a personal connection with a brand that will succeed.

I have not read the book (yet – summer reading list), and I’m not endorsing it (yet) but I totally agree with him that “businesses [that] can harness all the changes and challenges inherent in social media [can] turn them into tremendous opportunities for profit and growth.”

Thank Everyone?

From the time I first started on Twitter (on July 9th, 2009) I thanked everyone who ReTweeted me. I follow back every real human being (as far as I can tell). I answer every @ mention and I respond to any direct message that doesn’t look like SPAM or an auto-reply.

Some people might think I am “crowding the twitter stream” with useless “thank you’s”. But for me, it’s the least I can do if you take the time to share something of mine or mention me. I also try to ReTweet and @ mention and comment on blog posts to return the favor. But I always thank my ReTweeters.

My Conclusion: Saying “thank you” and being “of noble mind” is important for personal success. It is especially important for personal social media success and it may be just as important to build gratitude into your business.

Looking To Get Started On Twitter

If you’re not already a Twitter rock star, go back and read Rachel’s post (and the first part of her series) linked above or read my early post on how to get started on Twitter.

Or check out my 10 Tips for Twitter Success. I mention “being nice” but maybe I should have said “be magnanimous!”

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I talked about how every business needs a content strategy – it is not just for large companies.

I also answer the question of whether content marketing is just another term for marketing.

Finally, I discuss how can companies get started in content marketing and also how to get past “campaign-brain” and create the mindset that puts customers first.

Here is an overview of my comments but I invite you to check out the audio recording here…

Is Content Marketing Just Another Word For Marketing?

The answer is yes and no.

Yes, content marketing is just another term for marketing because effective marketing should already seek to deliver on the needs of individual buyers at different stages of the buying cycle with helpful information and educational content.

But the fact is that when you say the word “marketing” to non-marketing business people they often think of SPAM – overly promotional messages that no one wants.

So the answer is no, content marketing is not the same as marketing today because it does not seek to blast the market with overly promotional interruptions that do not serve the customer audience.

Content Marketing exists to bridge the gap between the largely ineffective marketing that takes up the largest share of marketing budgets today and the more effective, customer-focused marketing that will be required in the future – required by our customers, by our executives and by our larger ecosystems.

Does Every Company Need A Content Strategy?

Every company needs a content strategy because content strategy addresses the problem of all the noise in the marketplace. There are way too many messages in the marketplace. And customers are simply tuning out!

Content strategy is defined as the content our audience is looking for, in all the places they are searching for it, for all the stages of the buying journey and for each buyer persona.

But with the rise of internet connectivity, mobile access and social media, content development and delivery has become affordable for even the smallest company.

Is Content Strategy Just For Large Companies?

Content marketing is not as hard as small company marketers may fear. Because of web and mobile access and the rise of social media, small companies truly can compete with larger companies. By focusing on customer-driven content, small companies can be effective at generating leads, opportunities and real revenue.

Content creation can come straight from a small company’s existing customers. Profile who they are, what challenges they faced that led them to your solution, and how they traveled the journey to a solution. Have them tell a personal story about the challenges they faced.

And stop there…create a webcast from the content featuring the customer. Write a blog post. Write a whitepaper.

These are the kind of stories that people want to listen to. And with enough of this content and a strong conversion engine on your website, any company can be effective with content marketing.

How Can Companies Get Started In Content Marketing?

1. Remove the campaign-brain mentality and start thinking about the content needs of your audience
2. Define the buyer stages, channels and personas of the people whose business you want to earn
3. Look for compelling customer stories to create effective content in multiple formats

How Do You Change the Mindset of the Traditional Marketer?

• Show them how ineffective push-based, promotional marketing is ineffective
• Identify all the bad content your company creates that never gets used of read by anyone
• Show them how the buyer journey has changed
• Identify the audience your not reaching with outbound promotion
• Demonstrate how inbound marketing is more effective on a cost-per-acquisition standpoint

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I mean no one wants to call someone else’s (content) baby ugly…

This is not just about marketing. This is relevant for all business professionals who write emails, create PowerPoint slides and leave voice mails (And that’s all of us).

Inspired by Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing training, Joe Pulizzi’s CMI presentations and my own views, this training seeks to create a world where no babies are ugly – where all our content is interesting…

Is Your Baby Ugly?

Last month I wrote “Is Your Content Boring? 6 Steps To Great Content“ where I covered the Content Marketing Institute founder, Joe Pulizzi’s (@juntajoe) presentation from OMS 2012.

After posting this article on an internal website with the above title, I was asked to present my view on the 6 steps to effective content marketing to an internal group of more than 300 registrants. The group contained marketers as well as non-marketing business people.

I told them that the majority of content today is just plain awful. And the reason is because we try too hard to sell and we can’t stop talking about ourselves.

Focus On Your Audience

Effective content is emotive, educational, entertaining. It reaches out and touches you. It makes you laugh. It puts your needs ahead of its own goals.

And we know that our customers start their search for solutions on search engines. So our goal must be to:

• Get Found (SEO)
• Get Shared (Social)
• Convert (Leads, Revenue and Happy Customers)

Become Like A Publisher

Since most of our content is so awful, most customers are simply tuning out. Our buyers and those who influence them follow a self-directed journey seeking for solutions. They are attracted to content destinations they can trust and that provide value.

This is forcing businesses (not just marketers) to think like publishers – to deliver the content our customer need, in all the places they are searching for it, and in each stage of the buyer journey.

Content is bigger than marketing because it requires all elements of a business to meet the needs of the audiences we serve.

Get Social Now

So we all need to get involved. We need to grow our personal brand by getting active and engaged in our own way on social platforms, to blog about our passions (whatever they may be) and to allow our voice to be heard.

So check out the slides below. I hope it helps you support your team in getting all trained up in content marketing. Or share some of your inspirations or tips for effective content marketing.

Content Marketing: Get Trained Up!

View more PowerPoint from Michael Brenner Photo Source

The second is that marketing can be more effective at creating value for our own business when we seek to meet the needs of our customers.

Well, almost as a rule, I try to follow my own advice and don’t use this site as a platform to promote what we are doing at SAP. But I think we have a great example launching today on how to use customers to tell our story. And how to focus on meeting their needs.

So with that request for forgiveness but hope that you find some value in the example, I invite you to read about how we’re trying to put these principles of customer focus and customer storytelling to work in our latest advertising campaign…

Run without warehouses. Run with a department of one. Run with less hardware. Run anywhere, anytime. What’s your vision for how your company can run like never before?

With the launch of our new Run Like Never Before advertising and marketing campaign, SAP is inviting people to imagine what is possible for their businesses today. The campaign is designed to show how companies are transforming with powerful business innovations – not only to run better, but to run like never before.

The “Run Like Never Before” campaign is aimed at telling the story of innovation – and how SAP’s strength across the categories of mobile, cloud, analytics, and in-memory computing is bringing the future into focus – today. Rather than using a traditional landing page with product information, the Run Like Never Before campaign links back to the Business Innovation from SAP site to let people further explore how these innovations can enable their vision for their business.

Unlike many B2B campaigns, “Run Like Never Before” aims to connect to audiences across the world on a human level, speaking not to businesses, but to the people behind those businesses. Our campaign is designed to create an emotional impact with imagery, music, and film techniques more typically associated with consumer advertising.

Filmed in five countries and across three continents, the campaign seeks to reflect what global business means today and saying: “whether you’re a small local business or a global corporation, SAP is ready to partner with you to help achieve amazing things for your company.”

As I said, I don’t normally talk directly about our marketing efforts at SAP. But I’ve been personally involved in the campaign as editor of the landing experience. (See this post on creating inbound marketing destination pages for your customers.) So I invite you to check out the “Run Like Never Before” campaign on this site or through the SAP Youtube, Facebook or Twitter accounts and let me know what you think!

What if I told you that you most certainly are fascinating and that there is research to prove it?

Less than 2 weeks ago I attended @MarketingProfs Social Tech conference where I learned from an amazing keynote speaker, Sally Hogshead (@SallyHogshead) that yes, I am fascinating! “And research proves it?”

Sally explained that “fascination is an intense emotional focus. Because when customers are fascinated by you and your message, they’re more likely to trust, believe, and respect you.”

I was definitely intrigued. So I took the test during the break following the keynote. And I was really surprised by what I found.

To me this is relevant for brands, for marketers and anyone looking to grow their personal brand. It is relevant for anyone who uses content or persuasion in their business or personal life. And that’s, well, all of us…

Sally explained that there are 7 triggers of fascination. The 7 triggers are Power, Prestige, Mystique, Passion, Alarm, Rebellion and Trust and each translates to a unique approach to fascination.

Each of us has a primary and a secondary trigger that defines our own fascination style or approach to persuading others. And this combination creates a grid of 49 personality archetypes.

“Michael, You are THE VICTOR”

This is the first line in the email that delivered my results to me. It said that my primary trigger is PRESTIGE and secondary trigger is POWER. It also said the trigger I’m least likely to apply in my personality and behavior is PASSION.

This means I am “Results-Oriented” (true), “Respected” (I hope) and “Competitive” (oh yeah!)

Well I thought Sally was truly “fascinating” in her keynote presentation. I would recommend her to any group looking for a keynote speaker.

But I have to say, of all the personality types, I am not sure I am completely comfortable with my results. I always thought of myself as more of a rebel. Maybe “The Catalyst” (Passion + Rebellion), “The Secret Weapon” (Mystique + Rebellion) or “The Change Agent” (Power + Rebellion).

Maybe being unhappy with labels is a classic “Victor” trait?

For now, I’ll take the results with a grain of salt and take the feedback to try and build more passion into my communications, content and persuasion.

But no matter how true the test may be (or feel), I think it’s great to hear that we all have the ability to fascinate, that we can stop creating boring content and can start attracting what we want with our own unique fascination advantage.

So take the test if you dare ($47 and takes just about 10 minutes) and share your results with us here?

As most marketers try harder and harder to interrupt their audience, smart marketers are using valuable and helpful content to attract the audience of future buyers. Because all marketing is content.

In this presentation, delivered @MarketingProfs Social Tech, I showed 7 reasons why most marketing stinks. I presented the 3 most important metrics to help drive change in your organization.

I also define content strategy and show one example of how we’re addressing this challenge at SAP with audience-focused content.

But the real challenge for many of us lies in how to sell it in. So here I will also provide 6 steps to help you sell content strategy into your organization.

Marketing Does Not Equal SPAM

Say the word “marketing” to some business professionals and they immediately think you are talking about the outbound “promotion” of marketing messages designed to get more people to buy more of your stuff for more money than they would normally be willing to spend.

They may think you are talking about subliminal ads, voodoo and other tricks, or even straight-up SPAM. I recently offered to live-blog an event and one of the organizers replied “well, as long as you don’t play any marketing tricks with the content.” What the heck does that mean?

Marketing does not equal SPAM. But the fact is that, well, most of it does.

The majority of the marketing we see as consumers and business people is promotional. It isn’t fun or funny or helpful or entertaining. It doesn’t put your needs ahead of the advertisers. The majority of marketing really stinks. And so it is up to us, to change the perception of marketing.

All Marketing Is Content

We need to market our marketing, but only if it helps someone, entertains someone, or educates someone. So first we need to change our approach and that starts by selling in the concept of content strategy.

Someone asked me recently: isn’t content marketing just another name for marketing? The answer is yes . . . and no.

No – because most marketing is dreadfully unsuccessful. Look at your own results and you’ll see the 80 / 20 rule applies where 80% of your results come from 20% of your activities. And yet we continue to create marketing plans year after year that look largely the same.

We need “content marketing” to define the change that’s needed. To bridge the gap between what is and what could be. We need content strategy to help us create marketing plans that help our audience and that create value for our businesses more effectively.

The answer is yes because Content Marketing will ultimately morph into plain old marketing. Just as all marketing is digital. All marketing is becoming social. And all marketing is content.

Content Marketing: How To Sell It In

1. You need to show the business that your marketing “has issues.”
2. Define the business case for how tested audience-focused marketing is more effective.
3. Analyze what % of your inbound traffic is late stage vs. the larger early-stage buyer
4. Define what % of your leads and revenue comes from inbound sources (web, search and social)
5. Determine how much money you waste on bad content, content that never gets used, events that don’t create any value
6. Re-invest those funds in more engaging or more interesting content that drives inbound traffic, leads and revenue.

Content Marketing: How To Sell It In

View more PowerPoint from Michael Brenner

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But does anyone have a handle on the costs? What are the costs of producing content that never gets used? What are the costs of publishing bad content in the form of lost revenue?

I looked for answers in 2 separate reports. The one mentioned above and the IDG Connect IT Buyer Survey from last year.

While almost two-thirds of the CMI study report that they plan to increase their spend on content marketing over the next 12 months, many report struggling to report effectively on the impact of their content marketing activities.

So I think it starts by looking at both sides of the equation: the costs and results achieved from content marketing. . .

I believe the main problem stems from the common marketing mistake of focusing on activities instead of results (my blood is starting to boil) but I think if we bring some simple and solid analysis to the discussion, we can arm our colleagues to think like business people, focus on the customer and deliver results.

CMI and @MarketingProfs Report

On average, B2B marketers employ eight different content marketing tactics to achieve their marketing goals. The top tactics include:

• article posting (reported by 79% of respondents)
• social media excluding blogs (74%)
• blogs (65%)
• eNewsletters (63%)
• case studies (58%)
• and in-person events (56%)

Marketers, on average, spend over a quarter (26%) of their marketing budget on content marketing. That is a lot dough! And yet non-monetized web traffic is still the number one way marketers are tracking the success of the content marketing activities.

The main challenges listed are quality content that “engages customers,” followed by quantity of content and content marketing budgets.

Those who consider themselves effective content marketers:

• Spend almost twice as much as their less effective peers
• Are more likely to consider buying stage in their content marketing efforts
• Have senior-level support for their content marketing efforts

IDG Connect North American IT Buyer Survey

Digital Content is important:

• represents over 50% of what contributes to a sale
• when done right, adds to a vendors chances of getting the sale by up to 25%

This survey gets to some of the costs of bad content:

• Less than half of digital vendor content is found useful
• 22% of the buying process is wasted with ineffective content
• Vendors who make these mistakes are 27% less likely to be considered on the buyer short list
• And they are 40% less likely to get the sale

And the impact on content:

• Buyers estimate that content is, on average, 50% too long
• Buyers are expecting to be entertained with stories as they get educated
• Buyers are looking for truly “white” whitepapers with no promotional bias
• Content gating leads to a 40% abandonment rate
• Buyers provide mis-leading information on forms 30% of the time
• Buyers are looking for content personalized to them and their contextual needs

Conclusions

From these 2 studies it is clear that content marketing is more than just the latest buzz but is truly important to marketers and buyers. But it must be done in an effective and disciplined and measured way.

How are you measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts? Are you thinking about content that is mapped to buyer stages? Are you tracking what content is found useful by your audience?

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Content Strategy and Content Marketing may be the marketing buzz words of 2012 but their meaning is still debated by the best consultants in the field, in the halls (or conference calls) of large organizations and on the trade show floors of today’s hottest marketing conferences.

To me, content strategy is all about focusing on the needs of our audience. By focusing on their content needs, we are able to attract them, gain their affinity and ultimately their business. And if we’re doing a fair job, they “self-select” into a conversation, a dialogue and hopefully a relationship with us that enables them to get to know, like and trust you.

It’s simply a more effective way of marketing than trying to interrupt, promote, cajole and convince . . .

But first, we need to speak with a common understanding with our business colleagues.

So I endeavored to define what I think are the top 13 terms used today surrounding the topic of content marketing. But I am certainly not the expert. So please weigh in: did I get these right? What key terms are missing?

• Content Marketing: The process of publishing the content your audience seeks, in all the places they search, for each stage in the buyer journey
• Content Strategy: The framework including people, process and tools to deliver the content your audience seeks, in all the places they search, for each stage in the buyer journey
• Content Curation: The process of identifying relevant content for your audience from multiple sources, modifying or editing that content to reflect the needs of your audience and delivering the content to the appropriate channels of distribution
• Editor: Someone who has authority to publish within a channel without needing further approvals, generally following documented and approved editorial guidelines
• Curator: Someone who searches, finds and filters the best content on a topic or topics from multiple sources providing a service to your audience
• Nurture: the process of offering or suggesting the information a buyer seeks in the next phase of the buyer journey
• Persona: a group of people with common content / solution needs
• Buyer Journey: Keywords, information Needs, content and channels used by various personas across the main stages of the journey from business challenge to solution
• Content Map: inventory of the content in our BOM / content repository matched against the buyer journey content needs
• Editorial Calendar: content to be published by topic by channel by persona across time
• Editorial Guidelines: identification of the types, tone, topics of content to be selected for a given publishing channels
• Channel Manager: someone who promotes content for a specific type of channel (ie – social media, or ie Facebook as a more specific example) or across multiple channels
• Response Manager: someone who is performing social listening and capable of rand authorized to respond to digital interactions such blog comments, tweet requests, linkedin comments, etc.

Tell me what you think in the comments below…

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Because of this we have a history of producing static spec sheets, overview presentations, data sheets, brochures, feature lists, user manuals and . . . zzzzzzzzzz (snore).

To meet the needs of today’s buyers, we need dynamic content destinations that deliver educational, helpful and rewarding experiences to meet the needs of our buyers’ earliest questions.

Dynamic content destinations are needed to develop the kind of two-way dialogues that form the basis of solid relationships. And these relationships will help you gain more customers, more revenue and more effective marketing strategies…

Why You Need a Content Destination

Today’s marketing should identify a content strategy that meets all the information needs of our buyers, in all the places they are looking, at all stages of the buying cycle. Oh, and don’t be boring!

One way to accomplish part of this is to create a destination for your content. A “home base” of dynamic content, social sharing and syndication options that can set your content free!

Deliver Content That Is Helpful

Vendor content in B2B Marketing should go beyond the need to simply explain your product, the strategy behind it and the features and benefits that support it.

Content strategy must start to meet buyer needs the moment they hit the search engines or their social networks looking for education and answers.

Help Your Customers Get To Know, Like And Trust You

By focusing on the needs of our audiences from the earliest stages and not our own promotional objectives, with educational and informative content, we can begin to establish a trusted relationship with our audience over the course of their buyer journey.

And that will lead to more customers, more revenue and better business results from marketing efforts.

Launching A Content Destination

I don’t normally like to hawk our efforts at SAP for fear of sounding too promotional myself. But this week, we launched our own content destination site called Business Innovation from SAP that, as Editor, I am too proud not to mention.

As an example of inbound marketing and content strategy, the site is focused on meeting the information and educational needs of our audience from the earliest buying stages onward.

I’m really proud of the challenges our team faced to get here. But in preparation for the launch, we have already achieved some major milestones: we have identified over 50 contributors, published over 200 articles, syndicated over 20 author feeds, and there is much more to come.

We’re aspiring to deliver some of the best content in the marketplace, in the way people want to consume it, and we aim to keep readers coming back again and again to learn how innovation can shape the future of their businesses.

Soon, we will be syndicating news articles from highly-recognized and trusted news sources. The site will also serve as the destination landing page for our new “Run Like Never Before” advertising campaign focusing on the importance of innovation in helping organizations to Run Better.

So, I invite you to explore the site, share the content or let me know if you’d like to contribute. We realize we have not gotten the design exactly right so we’ll be releasing consistent updates in the future to create the best experience possible.

It has been one of the most challenging, rewarding and fun adventures I have taken in a while so thanks for indulging me. Let me know your thoughts (but be kind?!).

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Now I’ve written before about the business value of blogging and how marketers need to get social, find the time for blogging, twitter and other social tools. But I think blogging in particular can bring value to your business and to your personal brand. And I advise students interested in business to start blogging early.

But once you commit to writing your first blog, what the heck are you supposed to write?

Well here are a few ideas and a list of structured questions anyone can answer for their first post . . .

Who are you?

Open your email program and write a couple of sentences about what you do as if someone just sent this question in an email. You respond to emails all day so this should be easy.

Go a little deeper than your title. Talk about the things you do in your current role that make you excited, passionate or simply engaged.

Think about the last time in your current position when time flew because you were doing something interesting, challenging or down right hard. Tell a story of one accomplishment you’ve made using the “PAR” or “CAR” approach:

• Problem / Challenge: what Problem or Challenge did you face?
• Action: what Actions did you take?
• Result: what Results did you achieve

We face obstacles every day. You probably have hundreds you could tell. Just pick one little story.

How did you get here?

Next write a few sentences on the journey your career has taken. Don’t just list the jobs you’ve had, talk about the highs and lows, the goals you had in mind when you started your career (or even earlier) and the struggles you faced along the way to your current role.

Every good story has a hero (you), who goes on a quest (your career), who faces obstacles (the struggles) and then achieves resolution (your current situation).

It’s not my best writing but you can see my very first blog post “Why am I in Marketing?“.

Why are you writing?

My second blog post defined the objectives for my blog. But whether you commit to 2 posts a week or 1 post a month, have a clear goal in mind and answer this question to close your first post.

Use this opportunity to write your objectives down and share it with the world.

Define what schedule you want to keep, what topic you want to write about, what unique perspective you hope to provide and look for feedback from your fledgling audience what they would like to hear.

Write for just one other person!

Many people tell me “I’m afraid I don’t have anything unique to say.” And the fact is that there is an audience for every writer.

Seth Godin helped me through this fear when he said to “write for just one person.” So imagine that there is one person who is expecting to read what you have to say. And you cannot let them down.

I hope this helps to guide you through your first blog post. Please share this with your friends. Or reach out to me if you have any questions. Or share your first post in the comments. I’d love to hear what you have to say!

Here are a few other posts to guide you:

• The Myth of Business vs. Personal Profiles in Social Media
• My Social Media Hangover
• My Blog Posting Schedule
• Why Do You Tweet? Social Media And Your Personal Brand

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At some point, we need to sit down and have a conversation about how we are going to help each other sell more stuff, to more buyers, at a higher price in a way that helps our customers.

This is the only way to create a sustainable business model where our customers come back and buy more, tell their friends, and we get to invest that extra revenue in more and better products or solutions to meet their needs.

But marketers often struggle trying to sell their ideas to sales people. So how do you sell a marketing strategy to sales people?

Marketers Focus on Activities

I think it starts with understanding where the alignment issues start. Marketers focus too much on their activities and not enough on business outcomes. We list our accomplishements as:

• How many emails were sent
• How many webcasts were produced
• How many events were sponsored
• How many ads were bought
• How many priced of content we created
• How many leads we generated

So maybe we need to stop talk about how many and talk about how much value these activities generate.

Sales Focus on Next Quarter

Sales have numbers that must be hit and they will hit them – with or without marketing help. So when sales people at the beginning of the quarter, they want more leads. Then at the end of the quarter they only what the leads that are ready to buy right now.

This back and forth has frustrated marketers from the beginning. The fact of the matter is that “sales is terrible at prospecting,” as Kenny Madden (@KennyMadden1973) has said. And so in order to generate real demand, sales and marketing must combine efforts into what he called “SMarketing.”

Then sales can focus on what they do best: closing deals.

How to Gain Sales Alignment

I suggest these ideas to align marketing and sales:

1. Go on a sales call. Listen to how your products are actually sold. Hear how they are positioned and how questions, concerns and “objections” are handled.
2. Learn how to deliver your company’s elevator pitch, software demo or main features and benefits.
3. Speak to a customer. Nothing can provide the perspective that speaking to a customer can provide.
4. Get a revenue goal. Identify how much value you bring to the organization and make it part of your goals.
5. Joint planning. If you work together on your business challenges, then you’ve already achieved alignment.
6. Make friends with your sales colleagues. Get to know your sales colleagues on a personal level and it will make the rough conversations much easier.

So if you want to sell to a sales person, you have stop focusing on marketing activities, help them understand that it is your job to develop demand together and you have to be more like a sales person: speak to customers, demo products, carry a quota and go on sales calls.

As a marketer, I feel like it is our role to at least be in the 9%, and ideally in the the 1% of active social users creating or sharing content. I believe Marketers should not be the “content leaches” of the business world but should be leading conversations and driving innovation and new ideas.

But the fact is, the large majority of marketers are still not active in social media. Andrea Edwards (@SAJEIdeas) recently wrote a great post called I Know I Should Be Blogging, But…. In the comments, Mark McClure (@samuraiwriter99) was kind enough to use me as an example of how we can connect with other people from anywhere in the world through social conversation and participation.

So I decided to ask my followers what they see as the top reasons people don’t do social . . . don’t participate . . . don’t engage. I was overwhelmed by the response, but the answers fell into 5 main groups. So here are the top 5 reasons people don’t participate and some tips and guidance on how to get started…

The Top 5 Reasons People Don’t Do Social

I’ve included the actual responses below for more information but here are the top 5 reasons people don’t do social and the number of votes for each :

1. Time (16)
2. Value (12)
3. Not sure what to say (7)
4. Don’t understand how to use (6)
5. No interest / “It’s for kids” (2)

So while this is not a scientific poll, I think it’s clear the top reasons are lack of time and difficulty in understanding the value of spending the time.

The Top Traits of Successful Social Marketers

Here are some of the top tips I’ve outlined before on how to be a successful social marketers:

• Think about audience first
• Understand that keywords matter
• Respond to questions, comments and responses
• Set clear business objectives for your efforts
• Be consistent
• Be more social and less of a marketer

I’ve also provided these tips for how to get started on Twitter and with Blogging, how to find time for social media and how to wake up and get social.

The Social Imperative

The bottom line is that I feel being active in social is a business and professional imperative and so we need to take these steps:

• Build it in to your day
• Find ways to scan and filter information
• Share information relevant or useful for your connections
• Build strong connections
• And take the leap of faith and share your views through writing

So below are the actual responses I received to my question on twitter: “what are the top reasons people resist being active in social media?” I want to thank those of you who responded, Andrea and Mark for their inspiration and all of you for taking the time to read my views…

@BrennerMichael they think its a waste of time OR not worth the time required to be impactful

— steveolenski (@steveolenski) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichaelThe biggest excuse I hear for not blogging is… “I don’t have the time.”

— Stacy Taylor (@StacyTaylor17) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael Lack of time, don’t want to put the effort in to be successful on a platform, not understanding tools

— Chris Edwards (@toph303) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael Lack of time and/or resources to do effectively, whatever “effectively” means.

— Terence Coughlin (@TCoughlin) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael 1) Don’t understand them and/or don’t have any interest (at least, as they understand how they are used). 2) No time for it.

— Jacob Sloan (@jacobsloan) March 13, 2012

@brennermichael Top 3: 1. “No time”, 2. “Don’t get it”, 3. “Can’t write”

— Hank Barnes (@HBonCX) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael #1 they don’t have time. #2 they don’t understand how it works or how it will benefit them. — Amy Laine (@hyperlaine) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael that they don’t have time and they don’t think it’s mainstream enough.Sure some are out there, but prob not my audience. — Cherie Givens (@cgivens) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael #1 by far is Time. #2. My audience doesn’t use social. #3. Don’t understand. — RobYoegel (@RobYoegel) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael “don’t have enough time” is easily the biggest. “don’t understand it” is 2nd — Kenny Lasley (@klasley1) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael Main reason I see for not tweeting (not quite an “excuse” though) is not understanding who’s listening — katiedel (@katiedel) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael Biggest excuse for not blogging: Billable work > creating content — katiedel (@katiedel) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael It’s inconsequential; fruitless use of time and energy. — Rick Segal (@MrBtoB) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael Some: waste of time, unclear benefit, no major insights to share, who cares-world already has too many tweeters! — Alex Joseph (@FromAlex) March 13, 2012

Takes too much time @BrennerMichael:Biggest excuse you hear from others on why they don’t blog, tweet, or use other social media tools? — JulieKirby (@JulieKirby) March 13, 2012

@brennermichael of course. don’t have time, to much effort, not relevant to my market, no roi, wastes time, too hard to control, — kennymadden1973 (@kennymadden1973) March 13, 2012

@BrennerMichael “I don’t know how to use any of that stuff,” mostly! — Jessica Langer (@DrJessicaLanger) March 14, 2012

@BrennerMichael I hear these excuses all the time.. “Its not important, It doesn’t help or do anything. That a kid thing right.”

— Don Ciccolella (@doncicco) March 14, 2012

@BrennerMichael Either it’s a waste or time, they don’t understand it or it’s narcissistic.

— Mrs M (@madamding) March 14, 2012

@BrennerMichael Usually “lack of time” is the biggest excuse. — Caty Kobe (@catykobe) March 14, 2012

@BrennerMichael they dont understand #, @. Dont know follow/connect strategy. Scared to say something wrong, or dumb. Content ideas. — Rachel Macik (@RachelMacik) March 14, 2012

@BrennerMichael People just don’t have the time

— Information Arts (@InformationArts) March 14, 2012

@BrennerMichael “still planning the strategy”

— robert phillips (@berge31) March 14, 2012

@BrennerMichael It’s a three-way tie between: No Time, No ROI, and fear of no control over what people will say about you. #scaredofsocial

— Jonathan Barrick (@j_barrick) March 14, 2012

@BrennerMichael Time (biz and personal). Not sure what to say (primarily twitter for personal use).

— Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) March 14, 2012

Also inspired by Content Marketing and The 1% Rule from @tickcontent

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Common mistakes include talking too much about your products, promoting your company before you’ve allowed them to get to know you at all, or even “creative storytelling” that is an obvious or insidious attempt at getting the reader to enter into a sales conversation before they are ready.

Good content educates, entertains or even amazes your audience because it starts with a focus on them, not you. And while Content Marketing may be the latest buzzword in marketing, it has been around “since cave paintings.” This is according to Content Marketing Institute founder and author Joe Pulizzi (@juntajoe).

In Joe’s presentation “Good To Great Content Marketing” delivered at the Online Marketing Summit earlier this year, he presented 6 ideas to help you deliver content that educates, entertains or even amazes your target audience.

Although I was unable to attend OMS, I will provide an overview of the presentation so that we can all benefit from the wisdom and advice…

Marketers as Publishers – The Case for Content Marketing

You’ve heard this argument before: marketers are flooding the airwaves with more promotional messages than buyers can consume. As they increasingly tune out, outbound marketing is becoming increasingly ineffective.

In order to get new customers, marketers need to deliver relevant and valuable content to our audiences. We need a content strategy to understand what content our audiences want, at each stage of the buying cycle, and in all the places where they look for it.

Or to put it more simply, marketers need to become like publishers.

In his book Get Content, Get Customers, Joe talks about how effective content marketing can help you turn prospects into buyers. He points out that the barriers to entry are low and so the smallest companies (or individual “employee-brands”) can deliver valuable content to buyers on an almost level playing field with big brands or traditional media.

Some of the trends supporting this movement include the democratization of information as we now use social media and our connections to filter our news. This along with the journalistic talent now available as traditional media sees ad revenues decline and the low cost of setting up a website, adding an RSS feed and delivering valuable content – all make it easy for any one person or any business to deliver news.

The Content Marketing Challenge

According to research from CMI and @MarketingProfs, 90% of companies use content marketing. Or as I said in this recent article on the CMI website, B2B Marketers “have always done content marketing.” The problem is that most of it ranges from not very good to downright awful, for the following key reasons:

• The biggest mistake in content marketing is that we create content that is all about us and is not focused on the audience
• A focus on completion of the activity (such as “get a whitepaper”) instead of content that produces results (in the form of views, shares, comments, conversions)
• We distribute content only where we think customers go searching instead of using research to tell us where they go
• We label our audience incorrectly using old notions of “targets” that look like an email list purchase filter instead of using research to identify new buyer personas

Focus on Dynamic Content

According to the research, Joe identified the top content marketing types (in order) as:

• Articles
• Social media (other than blogs)
• Blogs
• Newsletters
• Case Studies
• Events
• Videos
• Whitepapers
• Webinars

And yet, if you look at the budget spent on the activities above, most of your marketing spend is likely on the least popular types of content. How many businesses have a news room? Or have hired editors, journalists or a “chief-blogger”? For the majority of us, our spend is upside-down. We focus the majority of our budget on those activities that educate, entertain or amaze the fewest number of our potential customers. (Yes maybe they convert at higher rates, but you can quickly hit the point of diminishing return.) There simply aren’t enough prospects ready to buy right now to support our growing businesses.

The trend in effective content marketing is towards smaller, more dynamic, more mobile-friendly content that focuses on the audience. And according to Joe, we simply don’t have enough of the right kind of content. And we haven’t allocated enough budget to producing it.

6 Steps to Effective Content Marketing

Joe outlined 6 things that differentiate the good from the truly great content:

1. Having a focused content mission and platform or destination
2. Opening up new content and media channels
3. Having a chief: chief storyteller, chief blogger, editor-in-chief or chief content officer
4. Leveraging employees
5. Removing the Brand from the story
6. Focuses on building a community

The presentation is available below including lots of great examples of the 6 steps above…

Good to Great Content Marketing – 6 Differences

View more presentations from Content Marketing Institute Photo Source

In the article, Ryan talks about how consumerization, the cloud and the real-time needs of startups are creating such a high rate of new technology adoption that it is out-pacing our ability as marketers to react and respond, let alone get ahead with effective strategies.

The author proposes that “the Enterprise IT market may have left us Enterprise IT marketers behind…”

Here’s a review and my take but I would love to hear your thoughts…

The argument goes like this:

• Companies have sprung up in just the last few years that allow users to buy software services over the cloud directly. One example cited is Dropbox, which I use on my personal PC to synchronize and backup photos, music I’ve licensed and other important documents across multiple devices. He cited another example of a company called Karmaspehere which allows users to by Business Intelligence to massive data sets and you can purchase access by the hour.
• IT innovations like in-memory computing, cloud computing and the consumerization of IT are well documented, this is about a whole new buyer or new “persona” that most IT marketers ignore
• The author calls these buyers the “Godless barbarians” who navigate the buying journey with significant differences than the traditional IT buyer.

The emergence of this new buyer has come to fruition in stages:

1. The consumerization of IT has largely been a story about hardware and software vendors and subtle references to “consumer” wants and needs but little definition of the new buying paradigm
2. The “Barbarians” are causing a groundswell because, the author says “they’re using Mailchimp. Basecamp. YouSendit. WordPress. Smallworlders. Workday. Wildfire. Because they work.And because you can buy them off the shelf and start using them tomorrow.”
3. They consist of impatient, competitive, frustrated, skeptical, confident and liberated enter-preneurs who expect to see value from a service at the moment of purchase.
4. Companies marketing to them are increasingly understanding the new “consumerprise era where consumer simplicity meets enterprise power.”
5. The marketing formula includes social media and online tactics such as credits when you “sign up a friend” (this is how I found Dropbox) but the author also states that companies who gain IT’s approval may move more quickly to adoption.

The Call-To-Arms

The author concludes this first in a series of articles by advising us enterprise IT marketers to target the Godless Barbarians, not the traditional IT buyer. To allow the barbarians to pick up and use your cloud solutions easily, to make products that barbarians want to sneak into their companies, to develop for mobile and to focus on the Godless Barbarian persona in your marketing efforts.

My View…

I covered Velocity over a year ago when they gave me access to their B2B Marketing Manifesto. And here they are again, stoking the provocative nerve of B2B Marketers.

I read this article last week and it’s taken me this long to process it. I told Doug Kessler, Velocity’s Creative Director that this article “scared me” when I first read it. Not because I disagree, but because I don’t believe most of us are ready for the implications.

But I intuitively agree with these conclusions and think we need to start getting ready… Today!

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Recently I wrote about the decline of trust in traditional news media, CEOs and government officials and the corresponding rise of the employee-brand. I argued that now is the time to build your personal brand to help build our businesses…

While the signs that the traditional marketing playbook is dead are all around us and the large majority of marketing sucks, even I was shocked to see the recent cliff-diving trend in advertising revenue…

And whether you work as a corporate marketer, a media mogul, a consultant or within an agency, this chart is something we all need to understand…This changes everything!

Business Insider’s Founder, Henry Blodget (@hblodget) predicted back in 2007 that “newspapers are screwed“.

He ran the numbers and realized that as traditional newspapers and magazines follow the audience and move to an online-only model, that ad revenue would decline significantly while content costs would stay the same.

Henry predicted a 40-50% drop in print ad revenue and the decline of many newspapers…And many traditional media supporters ridiculed the notion. Remember those numbers: 40-50%.

Mark J. Perry, University of Michigan Professor of Economics, recently covered the latest numbers from the Newspaper Association of America and created this chart:

Mark mentions that “it’s another one of those huge Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction.”

But he also calls out how the decline has been so dramatic that despite ad revenues being at a 60-year low, the greatest decline came in the last 4 years where revenues dropped more than 50% from $46 Billion to $21. Henry Blodget’s prediction was actually conservative.

Lessons for Marketers

• This is not just about newspapers…
• Customers are rapidly rejecting traditional marketing approaches in traditional channels.
• Marketers have been slow to respond, creating a gap between customers behaviors and the marketing mix.
• Content marketing and social media that seeks to meet customer needs is now more important than ever!
• Businesses need a sound content strategy that holistically considers audience content and channel needs.
• The future of marketing was digital. Marketers need to skill-up on digital (and social and mobile) and fast.

What does this chart mean for you?

But as trust has eroded away from corporations and government institutions, we are seeing the ushering in of a new era: the employee-brand.

Those of us who understand how to yield the power of our networks will achieve greater levels of professional success. And those who know how to use social channels to deliver helpful messages will ride the wave of this new era in personal branding.

In this post, I will explain why now, more than ever, is your time to shine as a positive voice in the crowded media marketplace.

And I’ll offer tips on how to get there…

Foundations of The Personal Brand

I was recently asked by Bill Strawderman (@marketingbard), head of digital marketing at AT&T and Trish Nettleship (@Trishnet), the brains behind the AT&T Networking Exchange blog, to address their blogger community on my own Personal Brand journey.

While I was honored, my first thought was: what do I know about personal branding? I had never spoken in public about personal branding. I have only been blogging for less than 2 years. But then Bill reminded me that it was my personal brand that allowed me to join Bill’s Circle of Trust. It is also how I met the other speakers, the amazing Mark Schaefer (@markwschaefer) and Cheryl Burgess (@CKBurgess).

So I decided to tell my story…

I talked about how I graduated from college into a deep recession and high unemployment that caused a lot of companies to begin to break decades old “contracts” with employees.

Layoffs. Downsizing. Rightsizing. It was the era of a CEO called “Chainsaw” and was the beginning of the end of the pension plan.

This must have been terribly unsettling for employees who had come to expect lifetime employment and safe retirements. Employees began to challenge the status quo on every front but nothing captured the ethos of the times better than what I think is the greatest magazine article EVER: Tom Peters 1997 article in Fast Company, “The Brand Called You.” According to Tom:

Big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand. Here’s what it takes to be the CEO of Me Inc.

It’s a new brand world…

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

It’s that simple — and that hard. And that inescapable.”

It took me a few years to really understand what Tom was talking about. I joined LinkedIn relatively early. I tried to network in between kids and travel and new jobs. But I didn’t take as seriously as I knew I should, thanks to Tom.

The New Era of Personal Branding

Fast forward to 2012 and the erosion of trust in businesses, government and traditional media. Edelman recently updated their Trust Barometer which shows that the media landscape continue to fragment with the growth of online and social media information.

But more importantly, it quantifies the dramatic changes in perceived credibility: trust in CEOs, Government officials and even analysts is down. While trust in regular employees and “people like you” reported huge increases. Only academics and technical experts are seen as more credible and their trust level is flattening.

And so when the average employee, just like you, is perceived as more trustworthy than the CEO, then clearly…

The Time For “Brand You” Is Now!

This is why I challenged B2B Marketers to wake up and get social and to realize that there is no separation between our work and personal lives.

We need to simply be ourselves and write about what we know.

I believe that if we nurture relationships, then we can become a positive voice in the marketplace, on topics we are passionate about. And we can earn the power to influence a future boss, a future employee, a future customer, a future partner or a future investor in our companies.

So, as Lisa Barone (@LisaBarone), Founder of Outspoken Media, once said:

“We are officially beyond the days where you can have a distinct “personal” and “corporate” profile. You must decide who you are and bleed it!”

4 Tips to Personal Branding Success

I have covered before 5 Steps To Get Your Social Media Game On and Finding the Time to Tweet and Blog. Here are my 4 tips to personal branding success:

• Define your audience and set objectives by answering “Why you are talking?” “Who are you talking to?” and “What’s in it for them and you?”
• Build it in to every day: I scan, filter, read, connect, write, respond. I believe the adage that Social media success is found in just minutes per day. And for me, goals are important. I make every effort to write at least 2 blogs per week.
• Build relationships of mutual benefit. I try to thank everyone who ReTweets me on Twitter and I share a lot of other content from bloggers I admire. For me, personal brand is about the people you surround yourself with.
• The new content rules: If it isn’t a keyword, no one cares. Titles matter. Bullets help. Tell stories following the traditional story arc: a Hero, has a quest, goes on a journey, encounters an obstacle and achieves resolution.

And in my presentation, I cover how “news” is still the best way to reach buyers in B2B Marketing.

I admit to having a “man-crush” on Ryan Seacrest (@RanSeacrest)…it’s a real-life “bro-mance.” Why? Because, along with Oprah Winfrey, he totally gets the importance personal brand game. There is no one like Ryan Seacrest. And as Fortune recently proclaimed, he is the “future of media.”

And I talk about how following these steps and effectively communicating what makes you unique to the world, will bring you personal and professional success. You will gain influence. Your company will benefit from your strong and positive voice.

And who knows, maybe you’ll get a book deal or star on a reality TV show or even get to meet Oprah or Ryan Seacrest. Tell them I said “hello!” Oh and a Retweet from them would be great…

Many marketers lose focus on the bigger picture as they chase more leads.

They throw registration forms in front of their content without thinking about earning the right to build an engaged audience that will return to you when they are ready to buy.

Too often we think about how to capture people in our nets instead of helping them along their buying journey.

Eric generally produces the most thought-provoking articles, and this one got me to thinking that we need a new term to describe the whole process. I think the rise of content marketing as a hot topic in B2B Marketing is partly due to this struggle.

So instead of lead generation or demand generation, content marketing might be the term to use.

Eric describes the two processes:

Lead generation: collecting registration information, often in exchange for content, in order to build a marketing database for email or telemarketing followup. The direct outcome of lead generation is new contacts available for sales or marketing.

Demand generation: the practice of creating demand for an organization’s products or services through marketing. The direct outcome is your audience is more likely to purchase your products or services.

In the comments, Ardath Albee correctly pointed out that “leads” do not always have to equal contacts who filled out a registration form.

But even with this clarification, I think Eric’s larger definition applies. Many marketers focus on leads instead of the larger demand picture. And they do this because, well, because that’s how they are measured!

But can we truly “generate demand” or is our job as content marketers to harness demand by helping our buyers?

I think if you’re selling candy bars, you can tap into people’s desires to self-medicate with food by showing them a picture of a delicious candy bar.

But in B2B Marketing, aren’t we just educating people that we have solutions to problems they either know they have or we are educating them that they have a problem, (and thus we have the solution). But they are still in control.

So I think content marketing is an attempt to cover both lead generation and demand generation.

The content’s goal is to educate and inform, at different stages of the buying cycle. Some content is more relevant for early stage (problem identification?) and some is more relevant for later stages (solution identification, vendor short list.)

But it is all about managing that demand to produce more engagement, with more people, earlier in the buying process and earning the right to see them continue their journey with us.

In the end, I agree with Eric’s point that the terms Lead Generation and Demand Generation should not be used interchangeably. But I think we should combine them into the holistic term of Content Marketing. And we need to adjust how marketers are measured.

We need to generate leads. We need to harness demand. And we can only do this with a sound content strategy and cost-effective, inbound marketing approach.

What’s your take?

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CMOs feel largely unprepared for the challenges of today’s marketing challenges when it comes to the changing buyer, the corporate pressures to contribute and the skills and tools they have to work with. And yet much of the B2B Marketing conversation is still on generating leads.

Generating leads is one important aspect of what we do in marketing but while we are busy talking about how to meet the needs for sales today, we are losing ground in our ability to meet the needs of our customers tomorrow.

This is why I believe we have a leadership gap in B2B Marketing today.

Change is coming to B2B Marketing. Are you ready?

In this article from last year, I talked about the changing buyer and a series of stats to support the notion that traditional marketing approaches are becoming less effective, driving up the cost of leads, driving away customers and creating a negative loop of promotion, customer rejection and higher marketing costs.

I included a few examples of Marketing leaders like Dana Anderson from Kraft (not B2B!) and Lisa Arthur from Aprimo who are driving change in their organizations by addressing some of these challenges. The comments in that post are pure gold and largely in support of the notion that we (still) need to see change-agents in our marketing leaders.

The Future of marketing was digital?

Digital used to be an important topic because so many B2B Marketers lacked these skills. And with the entrance of “digital natives,” we thought we would all be saved. The future of marketing used to be digital because the future is here!

Yet we largely stopped talking about the digital skill gap and never really addressed it…

Marketing leaders might be scared to address this issue to avoid putting fear into the minds of their teams. But as Danielle Sacks said in the Fast Company magazine article The Future of Advertising, “Digital will f-ck you up!”

Maybe it’s okay to allow the situation to fix itself for some organizations through attrition. But I think change is happening so quickly that buyers are beginning to increase their rejection of promotional messages and are expecting digital relationships with brands who know what they are doing.

In Marketing Managers and The Parable of the Monkey Tree I talk about the disconnect between leaders and managers in marketing and suggest that we all have a role to play in driving change in our organizations. But when I look across the social landscape, how many CMOs are active on twitter, blog or engage directly with customers on digital channels?

We Need Social Leaders

My wife Liz Brenner (@LizBrenner), who also works at SAP (yes, it’s a family affair!) recently covered these 3 great example of social media leadership coming from SAP and our User Group organization ASUG. Here are a few of the great quotes from the leaders she covered:

The Social CMO: Keeping it Real with SAP’s Jonathan Becher

“I’m a big believer in abandoning traditional B2B marketing techniques in favor of a people to people approach. It’s especially critical for those conversations to be two-way. Twitter is a fantastic way for me to listen to what people think about SAP and our solutions. As an executive, you usually get packaged analysis after the fact. Twitter is unfiltered and it’s real time.”

The Social CIO: On the Cutting Edge with SAP’s Oliver Bussmann

“Social media is changing the enterprise decision making process. With a tablet (such as iPad), I can scan and take in news quickly, take advantage of RSS feeds to stay up to date with relevant blogs, and even use mobile apps to aggregate, orchestrate, and assimilate facts fast.”

The Social CEO: Connecting with ASUG’s Bridgette Chambers

“I believe great leaders wield influence, rather than command and control. Social media tools provide another avenue for ASUG to continue being the chief influencer of SAP’s product strategy.”

Calls-To-Action for CMOs

So there are some examples of marketing leadership today but what I would like to see is a vision for change from B2B Marketing leaders and examples of the benefits (and mistakes) they experienced along the way. Who is going to step up and provide a roadmap for the rest of us?

In the meantime, here are some calls-to action for marketing leaders from IBM:

1. Start investing, supporting and leading your teams in the use of digital channels.
2. Make it a mission to transform your organization into a social business.
3. Use analytics to measure and drive customer value, investment decisions and customer engagement.
4. Put all of the above on your “people agenda.” Make sure you are hiring and investing now in the skills and talent you will need to support the needs of a more digital, social and mobile business environment.

So what do you think? Do you have any examples of leadership in B2B Marketing?

Photo Source

Despite all this, many B2B marketing organizations are seeing huge growth in the number of channels their business is demanding. And as the channels grow like weeds in a field, they become harder and harder to control, maintain and nurture.

In fact, channel proliferation might be overwhelming the good, customer-centric, buyer-controlled marketing you are trying to encourage. And that’s why, for many marketers, your social media marketing stinks!

One of the main challenges of integrating social media into the marketing mix is lack of a consistent strategy. As corporate marketers have defined governance, standards and training, less-strategic efforts have undermined effectiveness by using social channels as just another “SPAM cannon.”

According to research from the Altimeter Group, companies with greater than 1,000 employees are averaging 178 total social media accounts across the wide spectrum of channel possibilities. That includes an average of 39 Twitter accounts, 29 Facebook accounts and 28 Linkedin accounts. This is on top of 32 blogs, 23 community spaces and 9 YouTube accounts.

Altimeter suggests that companies are falling into a cycle of social sanitation (managing crap?) and forcing social media marketers into the role of a compliance teams. When instead, social media marketers should be driving employee adoption of customer engagement practices that drive business results!

Altimeter’s recommendation is for B2B marketers to climb a “social hierarchy of needs.” They suggest the path to reach “Social Enlightenment” starts with policies and frameworks but needs to evolve to a dedicated team prepared for workflows and crisis management, followed by a center of excellence, empowerment and a holistic social business environment.

I think there’s a good reason for the sorry state of social media marketing in many B2B companies: someone told marketers to go get a branded twitter account (followed by Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and a blog) for each region, line of business, portfolio and product. It is likely that many of them had no objectives behind them. And regions, lines of business, portfolios and products only line up to internal structures, not to customers.

So it starts with marketers who make the biggest marketing mistake of all: they make it all about them and not about the customer. They focus on activities instead of results and end up with dead-end accounts with no reach or engagement.

But I also still believe part of the problem is that B2B Marketers need to truly wake up and get social themselves. Once you start blogging and tweeting and interacting with real customers yourself, you quickly learn that registration forms are the death of any social content. That blatant promotion is the quickest way to get blacklisted. That offering no real value actually hurts your brand. And that understanding customers, offering them something of value and engaging with them regularly is the most satisfying marketing you can do. Better yet, each and every marketer, regardless of title or position, can participate and reap the rewards and personal satisfaction of meeting customer needs.

Marketers who do social, get social and can provide leadership to those who don’t!

So what’s a marketer to do?

1. Start with a governance policy that requires certain criteria are met before any new branded social media accounts are opened. Criteria can include identifying why existing channels cannot support the need, commitment of resources and regular updates, a unique content focus and adherence to standards.
2. Weed out the non-conformers. 178 accounts is way too much for any business. I wonder if you need 17. Languages and major portfolios with vastly different target audiences may account for some but there has to be a limit.
3. Show the value of a coordinated approach. Higher quantity AND quality of activity will drive higher reach and engagement. This will result in more followers, fans and likes and more conversions later in the buying process.
4. In the end, it takes simple leadership to defend the customer-first approach and show how putting their needs first drives higher engagement, more reach, better conversions, more customers, more loyalty and happier employees.

Below are the slides from Altimeter that inspired this post and thanks to Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) and Altimeter for his continued work in the social CRM and social media marketing space.

Climb the Social Business Hierarchy of Needs

Disclosure: SAP is a client of Altimeter.

I mean “Whoa!”…The power of content marketing!

The suggestion was that content marketing will result in the rapid erosion of the sacred trust we all have in the established media.

I certainly do not agree with these statements, but I do think this topic deserves a healthy dialogue and discussion…

Some of the relevant questions this raises for me include: what is the definition of content marketing? Where is the line between editorial and advertising? Is it blurring? Are marketers pushing the boundaries in pursuit of more leads or are publishers loosening their standards to collect more advertising dollars?

I’ll offer my point of view and share the opinions of a few colleagues of mine who are actively participating in this discussion.

But don’t let us hog the spotlight, chime in with your opinion in the comments below or on your social channel of choice…

Content strategy will actually save marketing!

I’ve written before that traditional marketing is on the decline and that I believe educational and informative content along with an audience-first approach are the only ways to deliver more customers, more revenue and better business results from marketing efforts.

So a statement like “content marketing will destroy social media” is by definition a blanket statement (and probably an attempt at getting lots of Re-Tweets). I’m not sure what definition of Content Marketing was intended in that statement but it seems highly likely to be referring to undisclosed “black-hat SEO” attempts at building links, or in some other way undermining public trust with content that has a veiled objective of only promoting the sponsor.

I believe today’s buyers and content consumers are way too smart for such tactics.

In its simplest form, Content Marketing is about meeting all the information needs of your diverse audience, through owned, earned and yes, even paid media, and through all the varied formats of content that we all consume.

When the objective is appropriately on meeting our audiences’ needs and not our own self-interests, then content marketing is the only way to be effective at reaching our buyers and influencers.

And any level of understanding of the media landscape will show you that there is a battle for customer attention taking place as consumer generated content is over-taking journalism at a rapid rate. And this is due to the simple fact that too few of us content consumers want to pay for so-called “trusted-source” journalistic content.

So we are all forced to try and understand the source of the information we are consuming. And to try and discern their objective or “angle.”

The right content at the right time…

As my SAP colleague Chip Rodgers (@ChipRodgers), VP and COO of the SAP Community Network said in a recent tweet:

“Marketing done wrong is an annoyance;Marketing done right is a gift”– Right message about the right product to the right audience.

— Chip Rodgers (@chiprodgers) February 7, 2012

Where is the line between editorial and advertising?

According to Bob Evans (@BobEvansSAP), former SVP and Editorial Director at CMP Media and TechWeb, and now VP of Strategic Communications here at SAP, “one of the urban legends swirling around in this new age of content marketing is that all ‘traditional’ journalists are 100% objective and unbiased, whereas any other content creators are biased. That’s utter nonsense.”

Bob continues, “add into this the recent and extraordinary impact and influence of social media, where hundreds of millions of people who used to be passive consumers of information have become creators and amplifiers and conveyors of information—and in some cases highly influential opinion-shapers. Are all of those views irrelevant, biased, or untrustworthy simply because they’re not part of a supposedly ‘objective’ traditional media that turns out not to be objective at all?”

“Sponsored” journalism and the new advertising model

Content production and delivery over the ages of modern humanity has always been paid for and influenced by someone, somewhere. The “someone” and the “somewhere” may change over time but the system remains largely unchanged.

Content gets written and distributed because someone is paying for it. The content must meet a relative standard of quality and perceived objectivity or it will be rejected. Except that now, the financial burden is shifting from the consumer and the advertisers who want to reach them to the the publisher and the advertisers who want access to the audience.

So we’re seeing relatively new pay models emerge as traditional media companies are being forced to the point of extinction. Publishers, as new as the Huffington Post and as established as Forbes, are embracing the era of the “sponsored post.”

And marketers such as my company SAP, and others like IBM, Dell, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Gyro are getting into the game. Programs like this are helping us all to evolve to thinking more like publishers – to put our audiences’ information needs ahead of our own. They are clearly labeled as “sponsored” and they are helping media companies to deliver against more of their visitors’ content needs.

Are advertisers blurring the lines between editorial and advertising?

I think it all comes down to the adage Chip mentions above that good (content) marketing is simply a gift – or as I like to say, content marketing means having the right answers to the important questions that your audience is asking.

So it is no surprise that advertisers are looking to reach their target audiences, but the bottom line is that only great content wins.

Tim Clark (@TClark01) is Editor-In-Chief of SAP Corporate Blogs and manages the SAP Forbes AdVoice program, which has garnered some criticism from our influencer community as an example of the kind of program that potentially erodes consumer trust by blurring the lines between paid, owned and earned media.

With nearly a million pageviews, hundreds of thousands of potential prospects have spent close to 3 minutes each engaged with SAP AdVoice content. You don’t achieve those kind of numbers with self-serving, or promotional content.

The quality measures extend beyond pure readership to engagement metrics such as the tens of thousands of shares via social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, etc.).

According to Tim, this is because “every piece of our content is clearly labeled as ‘AdVoice.’ We do not get any special treatment from Forbes. That said, the AdVoice label hasn’t deterred folks from reading and sharing our content. We work very hard to maintain a high level of editorial integrity and publish stories from SAP thought leaders that cover real life experiences and insights into a wide range of business-related topics.”

So let’s review: content marketing puts customer content needs first, it helps publishers to continue meeting the needs of their audience, and it helps advertisers earn the attention of prospects.

Now it’s your turn:

• What is your definition of content marketing?
• Do you see the line between editorial and advertising blurring?
• Are marketers pushing the boundaries in pursuit of more leads?
• Or are publishers loosening their standards to collect more advertising dollars?

Photo Source

We should all be working toward the same goal of growing our businesses by meeting customer needs. But something gets in the way…

The problem, it seems, is that we see completely different challenges in the roles we play and are quick to point fingers to the other.

We’re certainly not on the same page, and recent research shows this disconnect. I’ll review the research and propose the parable of the monkey tree to explain the results.

When I read through the Forester Navigating Tech Marketing survey with Gibson Marketing Group and the results they reported I was initially surprised at how far apart Marketing Directors, CMOs/VPs and agencies really are. A few highlights:

• CMOs / VPs are most concerned with the “what” of marketing: ROI, alignment between sales and marketing and generating more quality leads (a common complaint from sales leaders)
• Marketing Directors are more concerned with the “how” of marketing: marketing mix, process and technology concerns, consistency, messaging and how budgets are being used.
• Agencies feel that they do not have the tools or the time to support their clients: they cite gaps in the data from the media landscape, tools to analyze media performance, experience in B2B Markets and the time required to be effective.

That was the open-ended portion of the study and it evolved just about how we might think. Marketing leaders are concerned with the issues of managing their marketing resources, Marketing Directors are concerned with execution concerns and agencies are struggling to keep up with the demands of their clients. But a further review of the top concerns from a list of marketing challenges shows a deeper, more concerning divide:

• The top concerns of CMOs / VPs cover the approach to the market: reaching the audience across the vast array of media outlets, the effectiveness of media plans, media testing and buyer research.
• The top concerns of Marketing Directors cover more strategic issues like the lack of fact-based business plans to drive investment, how well messaging is resonating, gaining regional alignment and content marketing.

When asked about which tools were most important in B2B Technology Marketing, GMG summarized the disconnect this way:

• Agencies want the data to plan accurately and justify planning decisions.
• Directors want to get the messaging and content right to drive leads.
• CMOs want accountability for budget decisions.

And while the gaps between CMOs / VPs who are looking for budget accountability, Marketing Directors who are more concerned with execution and Agencies who are looking to catch a break, are understandable, the biggest concern for me was the conclusion that many decisions in technology marketing are made without fact-based, quantitative buyer or concrete business results.

Or as this quote from the survey indicated, much of technology marketing is “upside down. 10% of the campaigns are driving 90% of the leads.”

The Parable Of The Monkey Tree

A business leader I really admire once told a large group of colleagues this parable, that may explain some the disconnect:

An organization is like a tree full of monkeys,…all on different limbs,… at different levels,…some climbing up.

The monkeys on the top look down and see a tree full of smiling faces.

The monkeys on the bottom look up and see nothing but [the monkeys backsides].

So I’ll propose what this research and the parable might be telling us:

If you’re a marketing leader, enjoy the perspective you have been given and take a few moments to lend a hand to some of your team. Pull them up with your perspective, your time and your attention to the struggles they face every day.

If you’re climbing up the tree, accept accountability for the responsibility you’re given and help those above you to see the important issues you face every day.

And to all the marketing monkeys out there, let’s stop making technology marketing decisions on past history, gut feel and anything other than logic, research and facts.

What do you think? Does this survey resonate for you? How do you explain the disconnect.