Conversational Media Marketing

If you've yet to read Joe Pulizzi's you should because it contains some eye-opening predictions from leading marketing professionals.

While, as you might expect, there is a wide range and divergence of opinion, some themes emerge.

1. Advertising will gradually be replaced by information.
2. Content and conversational marketing strategies will converge.
3. Social media marketing will continue to gain acceptance

Let's take these one at a time.

At "Bizzuka Labs," we're creating a new social media marketing brand called User Friendly Thinking. While still in the process of clarifying the brand message, essentially it's a place where "technology and creativity intersect."

We refer to User Friendly Thinking as a "social media" brand, mainly because that's the channel through which it's being deployed.

Currently we offer:

UserFriendlyThinking.com
We're "eating our own dogfood" and have built a multi-blog, multi-author site using our own blog component, which is part of our overall CMS. While it's a work in progress, and certainly not on par with WordPress, Movable Type or WordFrame, we're rather proud of it. For the time being, contributors are members of the Bizzuka staff. We plan to invite outside contributors in the not-too-distant future.

User Friendly Thinking Radio
Every Friday at noon central we interview social media movers-and-shakers. Past guests have included Jason Falls, Ben McConnell, Anita Campbell, Charlene Li, Mack Collier, Toby Bloomberg as well as an assortment of Web designers, developers and our own staff.  The show is beginning to catch on too. Last week's episode with Mack was one In the near future our guest will include Wayne Hurlbert, John Jantsch and Michelle Miller among others.


This was a group started by our SVP of Global Sales and Business Development, Charles Lauller. Currently, it numbers some 167 members and growing everyday. We are getting our share of spammers though and figuring out ways to deal with it. We'd like to invite you to join if you're interested.

Plans for the future include a Twitter handle, video channel, Facebook group and online community.

The endgame here is to use UFT as a social media and content marketing "magnet" to introduce Bizzuka to a wider audience, but do so by focusing on the topics of Web design, development, content management and marketing rather than on Bizzuka itself.

As you can see from the UFT site, references to Bizzuka are minimal and non-invasive. We plan to keep it that way. It's "marketing by participation" that will drive the brand, not "hey, over here, look at us!!!!" forms of interruption.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this idea along with any advice you'd care to share. It's an experiment and we can use all the input we can get. Do you think we're on the right track? What suggestions would you have for future development?

In 2006, well-known Web usability expert Jakob Neilsen, developed the Community Participation Pyramid, otherwise known as the 90-9-1 principle, which states...

I was reviewing the notes I took during New Marketing Summit in my trusty Moleskine and decided to pass a few of the gems along to you.

What is new marketing? (Michael Lewis, President, Business Marketing Association of Boston)

• New viral, internet-based marketing
• Mix of old and new to reach more elusive, empowered customers
• More than technology
• Listening and dialog, not broadcasting - Listening is the new marketing
• Better to measure the right things than everything
• Extends beyond the marketing department
• Goals of marketing have not changed

The World Wide Rave (David Meerman Scott, author of New Rules of Marketing and PR and his new book, World Wide Rave)

• You must unlearn what have learned
• Old rules pre-web: Buy your way in with advertising; beg your way in with PR
• New rules: Publish your way in directly!
• Think like a publisher, not a marketer
• On the web, you are what you publish

(David also gave me some excellent, sagely advice on getting my book published. Thanks David!)

Paul Gillin, author of The New Influencers and his brand new book Secrets of Social Media Marketing really got down to brass tacks in terms of providing more how-to information. And he made reference to how small businesses can and are using these tools.

Brian Halligan, President, Hubspot (talked about SEO as it relates to social media marketing)

• Brian was high on SEO, less so on PPC
• Think like a publisher he said. Content is vital!
• Next new hire in the marketing department should be a journalist/writer, not marketer
• Be ubiquitous (I like that word; use it alot) - Use blogs, video, podcasts, photos, PRWeb, forums, directories, etc. to spread your message

Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42, quite literally wrote the book on content marketing. Some time back I asked him to write a guest post explaining the difference between conversational marketing and content marketing. He was gracious to oblige and here's what he had to say...

Over the past year, I've had more than a few requests to define the difference between conversation marketing and content marketing. It's an important question, since most people consider them the same thing. It's also not easy, since the two are very closely related and sometimes can be confused for one another. First, let's look at the definitions.

Conversation Marketing

According to Wikipedia, Conversation Marketing is defined as "the engagement of social media by a corporation to promote their product or brand. It differs from traditional forms of 'customer touch' because the company may enter into an online dialogue which is stored publicly in a forum or blog. The company may also take the conversation offline."

Conversation marketing is an activity, or even marketing tactic. It's customer service through Twitter. It's creating loyal fans via Facebook. It's building a customer dialogue via blogs and forums. It's setting up listening posts to better understand customer behavior.

Conversation marketing is about employing and leveraging new technologies to develop and further relationships, which will then (hopefully) lead to off-line conversations and business transactions.

Content Marketing

Also according to Wikipedia, Content Marketing "subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action…products frequently take the form of custom magazines, print or online newsletters, digital content, websites or microsites, white papers, webcasts/webinars, podcasts, video portals or series, in-person roadshows, roundtables, interactive online, , events." Distribution of content should also include social media channels as well and wherever/however customer and prospects want/need to consume your information.

The way I see content marketing and conversation marketing intertwining is this: If a company creates a solid content marketing strategy, this should lead to successful conversational marketing tactics.

Whenever I explain social media during my speaking engagements, I refer to it in this manner: Don't get bogged down with a big term like "social media". It's really quite simple. If you are having a conversation with another person and you have something of value to contribute to that conversation, both sides benefit and the relationship will most likely continue. If you are talking to someone else, but are pitching your products or just talking about yourself and how great you are, why in the world would someone want to continue the conversation? The relationship most likely ends there.

Now take that scenario online. If you (as a person or company) are continually creating valuable, relevant and compelling content, targeted to your customers and prospects, they will want to have a conversation with you. Successful conversation marketing is predicated on a sound content marketing strategy. If you don't have the valuable content to share in the first place, your conversational marketing tactics just won't work.

So, content marketing comes first. It's all about understanding the informational needs and pain points of your target audience, and then creating information that solves their pain points. That means valuable and compelling "storytelling" as part of your website, white papers, blogs, eNewsletters, eBooks and so on, which then leads to social media distribution.

The sharing of that "story" creates the opportunity to communicate with customers and prospects and does one very important thing. It generates trust. You become a trusted content provider, which in my opinion, is THE single most important thing you can do for your business today. Once someone trusts you and wants to have a relationship with you because of that trust, business transactions soon follow.

Joe Pulizzi is an author, speaker and evangelist for content marketing. Joe founded Junta42 Matchhttp://blog.junta42.com. Contact Joe at joe[at]junta42.com or check out his content marketing book, Get Content. Get Customers.

For years I've regarded MarketingProfs as one of the two best marketing resource sites on the web, the other being Marketing Sherpa. As such, I attribute immediate credibility to content published there as well as to the contributors who write the articles.

Recently, I received what we in Acadiana refer to as lagniappe. Ann Handley, MarketingProfs Chief Content Officer requested that I contribute an article on the topic of content marketing. She read a blog post I'd written and asked me to expand on it.

Well, I did, then waited to see what Ann might do with it, if anything. How pleasantly surprised I was to find it listed as this week's marketing how-to...and included as premium content as well!

Needless to say I'm extremely grateful to have something I penned included in a resource site that I hold in such high esteem. I'm honored...and humbled.

BTW, the article is entitled How to Acquire and Retain Customers via Content Marketing.

How many times has this happened? You compose a blog post, usually in a hurry, then hit the submit button, only to read it later and wonder how in the heck you missed what is a glaring error. I am the world's worst.

Years ago, a veteran magazine editor gave me this advice, "Never edit your own stuff." It's advice which, when possible, I've taken to heart. The only problem is, how many of us are in a position to have another person, preferably an editor, proof our copy? Most aren't, for sure.

In lieu of that, here are some blog copywriting tips I've picked up along the way that can almost guarantee what I intended to say is what I actually said.

Even before being included in Junta42 Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs list, I've given serious thought to content as a marketing strategy, especially since Brian Clark began touting it via his new Teaching Sells initiative.

Junta42 defines content marketing as "a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action."

What a nice serendipity to find Conversational Media Marketing made the Junta42 Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs list... and at what is truly my lucky number, 13.

What's most exciting (and kind of perplexing, though I'm not knocking it... darn grateful in fact) is that I ranked higher up the list than a number of much more notable people, including Seth Godin!

Apparently, that's because the selection criteria is different for this list than most.