Photo credit: Wikipedia

As organizations progress through their social business journey, for every believer who had drunk the Kool-Aid and thinks social is the solution for everything, you’ll find a skeptic, who is typically less eloquent, but is probably asking things along the lines of:

Why do I need to learn this “social business” platform? I can’t see the business motivation behind it, it’s all hype and no meat. Our current toolset – email, phone, meetings, SharePoint and intranet – is more than enough for our needs. We don’t need yet another tool to make our work life even more complex.

I confess that, between the two groups, I like the skeptics better, as their questions – when vocalized – keep us all honest and make us think about the actual value of introducing “social” to the workplace. It’s easy to understand why a significant number of people don’t see anything wrong with the conventional ways of handling information and knowledge at the workplace. Ultimately, because information is not visible or tangible, it makes it much more challenging to notice the inefficiencies in processing it.

I wish we could “paint” information in bright colors so that manufacturing concepts could be applied to optimize the way we handle it. Then, production systems frameworks like Lean could be used to better identifies where improvements are needed. If you don’t know what Lean is, the following excerpt from Wikipedia provides a 30-second primer:

Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, “Lean,” is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, “value” is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work. 

As part of that framework, eight types of waste were identified. This blog posts discusses how a well-implemented internal social business platform can help to reduce information processing waste in our workplace based on the 8 wastes identified by Lean practitioners.

1. Defects

Our collaboration and communications via conventional channels is full of defects. That innocent email commentary that was grossly misunderstood, the requirements that somehow became a system that nobody wanted, and the obscure corporate policy that is ignored by most employees are all defects in our processing of information. Had information been visible, we would be able to see many of the imperfections in the final product. In the absence of that, a social business platform offers the second best option: by moving conversations from peer-to-peer channels to a Facebook wall-type of rolling board, more people become aware of what’s happening and can help reducing defects in the communication: clarifying a point of view, bringing other perspectives, adding other sources of information and vetting the content.

2. Overproduction

Private peer-to-peer communication channels like email and phone calls are great for exchanges that need to be private and restricted to a few people. They are horrible for content that could benefit a larger group. Look at your inbox: unless you are some kind of chief strategist behind a super-secret initiative, chances are that the vast majority of emails there have content that would help others make their work better. In our organizations, the same information is created and consumed every day with no or little reuse via email, phone and meetings, with a shelf-life of days or even minutes. Like book publishers before Gutenberg, we are over-producing valuable content for the consumption of a few. Internal social business platforms bring the Java programming motto to content: create it once, share it everywhere.

3. Waiting

Many of us despise the Blackberry today, but it had the merit of making information flow better by reducing the waiting intrinsic to the email communication pattern that’s asynchronous and batch-ish by nature. As people could answer emails on the go, it reduced the time information would be sitting in inboxes without processing. However, its benefits were still confined to email limitations: short reach and private in nature. Social business platforms are like Blackberrys on steroids: information that’s interesting, important or popular never just sits there. It’s continuously re-tweeted, discussed and improved upon.

4. Over processing

Most corporate intranets are a victim of over processing. We use very sophisticated web content management systems to create web pages that are beautiful but are often under-utilized. If you create a very elegant page of content but nobody – or very few – actually consume it, your content is like the beautiful flower that blossomed in the middle of the tropical forest but nobody saw it. The look and feel of a Google Search or a Facebook is dead simple and somewhat inelegant, but is very efficient. Good social business platforms mimic that: they are not as capable of creating glossy web pages, but oh boy that activity stream in the home page does attract lots of eyeballs.

5. Transport

You have no shortage of good content in your enterprise systems: email, SharePoint, intranet, corporate wikis and local drives. The actual problem is that you don’t have efficient ways of moving that content efficiently from where it is created to where it is needed. Your corporate search tries to follow Google and rely on cross links to establish relevance, but you don’t have enough cross-links in your intranet to make that ranking meaningful. Efficient social business platforms mitigate that by leveraging social bookmarks, wall-sharing of interesting content and blog posts to provide a social layer around relevant content and bring it to the top. Socially-influenced results are a much better ranking algorithm for corporate intranets than cross links between top-down editorialized pages.

6. Inventory

By far, the biggest “inventory” of information in most organizations are each employees’ email inboxes. You go out for some well-deserved vacation and suddenly you have 1,000 emails waiting for you, completely unprocessed. Had most of that communication happened via a social business platform, others working on the same department or project could have picked up the slack and kept the ball rolling.

7. Motion

Likewise, the most notorious example of motion waste in terms of information processing in a traditional corporation is meetings: no matter if they are face-to-face or remote, people “move” to a physical or virtual meeting room and share a fixed-box slot where they are only partially productive. While some meetings are crucial and necessary, most are just poor substitutes for our inability to move information efficiently. Because information is often not digitized or searchable, we use meetings to move it from the source to the destination–from the person with the knowledge to the person who needs the knowledge. Fedex and Walmart would laugh at us if we moved physical products the way we move information. Social business platforms help you to digitize more content (via status updates, wikis, blog posts, etc.), filter it better (via likes, bookmarks, shares, ratings) and distribute it better (via walls, “mentions,” personal and group streams), reducing the need for meetings for everything.

8. Human Intellect

Your organization knows so much more than what the organizational chart tells you! That person now working as a business architect may have been a good financial adviser or teller in a past role, but you don’t know that, unless you allow her a platform to express herself. Your business analyst may know a cool MS-Word trick that your Java programmer never heard about and could save his team hours every month. There’s so much unused human talent out there. And people feel better when they are perceived as full human beings with a broad set of skills and knowledge, not human APIs processing a single service queue. Work can be much more rewarding personally when you let employees contribute beyond what’s listed in their job description. And a social business platform is a powerful enabler of that: by flattening the communications channels, the person you are and the knowledge you have both come across much more naturally compared to using tools from yesteryear.

A single blog post, of course, cannot cover all aspects of how the eight wastes framework is applicable to our corporate communications and collaboration. But I hope it can help your analytical mind to identify where you can use a social business platform to improve the way your organization processes information.

Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife

I teach a lot of online classes at various universities, constantly explaining the Do It Wrong Quickly (now being called agile marketing) approach to the digital marketing world. In one of my classes, on search marketing, a student lamented that my coaching to experiment, to try things, to take a guess and then see what happens before doing something else wouldn’t work at all in her organization. In fact, she told me point blank, “Taking a guess can get me fired!” First off, if guessing at Internet marketing can get you fired, you might be working for the wrong person. But assuming that you can actually reason with your boss, or that you can quit before he says “You’re Fired!” and go someplace else, here are the things you need to keep in mind as to why agile marketing is so important, especially for search marketing.

It is absolutely critical that you guess at search marketing because not doing so allows you to do some very bad things:

• Choose keywords that make no sense. Being forced to look at the right landing pages, rankings, and guessing at improvements caused you to realize that you have big problems to address, starting with the right keywords. The worst thing you can do in search marketing is to target the wrong keywords. If you are forced to tell people that you know what you are doing, then you are likely to stick with the wrong plan just to show that you weren’t an idiot without ever trying what is right.
• Stick with dumb paid search ads. Similar to keywords, if you decide to plan out what you are going to do and stick with it, you’ll never discover the best ad, because it is never the one that you try first. Only by experimenting can you figure out what to do.
• Assume things are OK when they are not. This is actually the worst of all of the problems, and it can happen in any kind of digital marketing, not just search. If you don’t take a guess at what improvement you will make, you have nothing to compare your actual results to, which prevents you from realizing that your improvements efforts might not be working.

The direct marketing principles underlying digital marketing are based on the idea that you project what you expect your results to be before doing anything, and then check to see whether it happened before deciding what to do next. Taking an educated guess is crucial to making the whole process work.

I know that it might feel that taking a guess is bad because you want to do something more accurate than taking a guess. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything more accurate. So, the real alternative to taking a guess is not to have any goal at all, which leads to the bad outcomes I outlined above.

I appreciate that guessing is uncomfortable, but it more comfortable than failing–really failing in your search marketing program. None of us wants to be wrong, but accepting that we mostly get things wrong will help us to eventually get them right. The right answer will only be found by actually doing the guessing for your sites, making changes, guessing again, and seeing how you do.

Think about it this way. When you first stepped up to a bowling alley, you had no idea how to hurl the bowling ball or where to aim it. You took a guess, probably a really bad one the first time. After a while, if you kept at it, you got better at it, until you felt as though you were doing more than just taking a guess–you had an idea of where to aim and where the ball was going. You could have taken all the online courses and read all the books in the world on bowling, but you were never going to succeed by just studying–you had to do it. And it probably wasn’t very comfortable to throw the first ball–you probably felt a bit embarrassed at how badly you did it–but it was the only way to really learn to bowl.

I am making you throw the ball in search marketing. And search marketing is even harder than bowling because the ball changes shape, you can’t see the pins, and they move. And you don’t know what a strike or a spare is, so you need to predict what you expect to happen ahead of time to see whether you are doing a good job or not.

It’s very uncomfortable and very difficult. But not doing it means you are guaranteed not to win and not to improve.

Photo credit: Christopher S. Penn

If you call yourself a social media marketer and you’re not completely promiscuous about it, you’re not serving yourself, your boss, or your clients. If you’re not constantly downloading new apps or registering for every single new social network, you’re slacking; if you don’t endlessly click YES when it asks you if you want to search for or invite your friends, you’re derelict in your duties; and if you aren’t hooked in to share everywhere whenever possible, you’re not going to understand how all of these connectors, sharing strategies, cross-posting techniques, check-in features, and general spaminess and shamelessness quotients work first hand, then how would you be able to honestly either know about or be recommend any of them. And unless you want to be a professional tweeter and Facebooker all your life, you had better know both what’s out there now as well as what’s coming down the pike.

This has come to the fore because I have gone crazy now that I have my iPhone. I have jumped in with both feet and have explored any and all passions and hobbies through apps and vertical communities. Since I am on a health kick — as you all are painfully aware — I have joined just about every social network that allows me to track my food intake, my activity, my workouts, my progress, my calorie burn, my running and biking routes, as well as my general movement and sleep patterns: fitbit, Runkeeper, LoseIt, MapMyRun, Strava, Endomondo, DailyMile, PolarPersonalTrainer, and Garmin Connect.

Each one tracks differently, each one enjoys a different segment of my followers as members, and each one touches me in ways that either pain or tickle me. And, for now, I am keeping them all fed and watered — a little easier because all but RunKeeper allow me to upload data directly from my Garmin Forerunner 305, so it’s not too hard.

And since I am the new owner of a motorcycle, I am the member of the Adventure Rider Motorcycle Forum; and because I am a bouncing baby gun nut, I am a member of GlockTalk, Elsie Pea Forum, Rimfire Central, and the Virginia Gun Owners Forum. So, downloaded loads of forum-reader apps, saw how they share, saw how they allowed me to engaged, and decided upon Tapatalk.

And, after years and years, I have finally admitted to being a TV addict in addition to every other form of media, including books and movies, so I have joined GetGlue, Goodreads, TV Guide, yap.TV, and BuddyTV as a way of keeping track of shows and movies as well as being able to check in and comment and engage and track hashtags and mentions, and so forth.

Yes, in addition to checking in with Yelp and FourSquare in the physical world, I have even started checking in virtually when I am watching dumbass shit on TV such as 2 Broke Girls, Girls, Veep, Suburgatory, Grimm, et al.

And, whenever I have been given the opportunity to share to my Facebook or Twitter steam, I say YES. And whenever I am asked if I want to find friends who already on there or to even invite a massive amount of my friends via email, I surely do do that — to all of our chagrin.  But I do it so I know and I do it so that I always know exactly what will happen if and when I recommend something like that to my clients.

What’s more, Facebook and Twitter are not the only games in town. Nor are Google+ and Pinterest. Or even Instagram. So, in order to make the best recommendation to your clients or to best access your target consumer and customer exactly where they live and spend their time, you need to be aware of all of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-tier communities in addition to the most obvious, most competitive, and most costly 1st tier platforms — both to participate in as well as to build partnerships, sponsorships, prizes, and other tie ins and opportunities.  While like IBM in that you’ll never get fired for choosing it, a Facebook Page only campaign is pure laziness.

At a very elite conference years ago, I introduced myself as a syphilitic trucker on the social media highway. No, it’s not funny. Truckers are the number one reason worldwide why heretofore isolated rural villages the globe over are getting sick with all kinds of sexually- and socially-transmitted diseases. Before, only single-tracks, rivers, and airfields — if anything — connected the most remote points on earth; now, a comprehensive spider web of roads and highways is allowing commerce to reach just about everywhere, both to bring in supplies but also to extract commodities and valuable natural resources.

While that sort of shameless behavior may well have made me quite a few enemies, I am generally patient zero when it comes to turning people on to new communities, new interests, new resources, and new passions.  I can’t even tell you how many people are on LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, and Twitter because of me; too many to count had been on MySpace and Friendster before that.

And I recommend you, too, really take the time and energy to get off of Tiny Wings for a little while and spend some time exploring these communities of action, circumstance, inquiry, interest, place, position, practice, and purpose yourself. You can’t be a competent advisor unless you’ve had first hand experience over time. So, go git ‘em, Tiger!

Photo credit: Wikipedia

The Wall Street Journal, in a recent article, Avon Is Late to Social Media’s Party, says sales for cosmetic products have steadily moved online to sites like Sephora.com, Beauty.com and Drugstore.com. This has contributed to a -75% decline in operating profit for Avon and their 5.8 million sales representatives that sell door-to-door over the last decade.  Now, Warren Buffet and Coty are making a move to take over a company in crisis. I feel bad whenever 1-to-1 relationships are replaced by computers. Even though WSJ says Avon is late to “Social Media’s Party,” I don’t believe Avon is. Social media is not about being early or late; it’s there for any brand ready and willing to join.

Here are 5 reasons it’s not late for Avon  to Social Media’s party.

1. BUSINESS STRATEGY: Of any brand, Avon has one of the most powerful social business strategies available. They have a brand community of 5.8 million reps. There are great examples of brands that put their community to work and turned their business around. Take for example, Harley Davidson. This may seem like an odd comparpson but stay with us.

On the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970′s, Harley Davidson overhauled their business to realize their most valuable asset was their riders. In other words, the people were even more important than the product so Harley: 1) Spoke to the shared interest of their community before product benefits 2) brought advocates together and let them help build new relationships. Avon needs a business strategy, not a social media strategy, before they begin. Now, here’s what they can do with it.

2. “AVON CALLING” ONLINE COMMUNITY: Avon’s famous offline slogan could now be a live, online community where their sales reps offer daily advice about Avon products, deals, help customers with a cosmetic question, refer someone to the Avon rep in their area and talk about who they are as people (e.g. where they like to go on vacation). By the way, this is what Harley does daily at HDTalking.com, a customer created content community of close to 400,000 members.

3. “LIKE” US ON FACEBOOK (AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS): Every brand wants you to “Like” them and Avon has a pretty robust but commercial Facebook page that 660,000 people already like. They could use their sales reps more and show a human side. For example, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, recently produced a video called “Likeapella” to celebrate the people who like them. Not to suggest that Avon do the same thing but to make the point that major brands need to use social media to make a more personal connection. Here’s what Kraft did.

4. AVON CUSTOMER APPRECIATION DAYS (VIA TWITTER SEARCH): If Avon representative wanted to build 1-to-1 relationships in larger venues, they could go to high traffic locations in their area like a mall; then, if they use Twitter Search, they could find other women in the same mall and begin a conversation they very same way with the very same techniques they use when selling door-to-door.

5. KLOUT PERKS: With 5.8 million sales reps, they must have a very large number who have high Klout scores. Why not demonstrate to how powerful they already are in social media. Put this social influence to work and see how many rewards Avon reps can get through “Klout Perks.” This would show how much social influence sales reps already have.

Maybe it would let Warren Buffet and Coty know just who they’re dealing with.

Some great brands have turned to their community in good times and bad because it’s their strongest asset. Do you think it’s not too late for Avon and their 5.8 million sales rep to join the Social Media’s party?

Photo credit: Wikipedia

If you try to keep up with the Internet and social media marketing industry throughout the week, you already know that there is too much information for people to ingest let alone digest (that is unless you don’t have a job or a family or hobbies or a life in general). People like to talk about signal to noise ratios which sounds really cool but if you would like to hear it in layman’s terms I’ll spell it out for you. Most of what passes as news these days is C-R-A-P. I should know, I add to it as the managing editor of Marketing Pilgrim. I try not to, but every day I get caught up in passing things along to my readers that are really a distraction and don’t do anything to help them understand Internet and social media marketing better or, even more importantly, apply it to their business. Guilty as charged but I am trying to make it better.

So maybe that’s why I am “telling on myself” to a degree. Maybe now I might stop it because this week has several prime examples of things that people (you know “important” ones) consider “news.” Truth be told, they really aren’t for those who have work to do (meaning you are not an analyst or investor etc etc). They may seem interesting but they literally mean nothing. I will review the Top 3 and tell you what the “news” was but then tell you what you really should be paying attention to

1. Yahoo’s CEO lied on his resume – I’m not saying ignore it but there is nothing to see here folks even if he is let go. It doesn’t concern the day to day of Internet marketing.

What you should be looking at – With regard to Yahoo you should be looking at their new SMB marketing dashboard. You should be deciding whether an investment in paid search still makes sense with Yahoo’s fading search presence. You should be looking at how your business may work with Yahoo and its still ridiculously large traffic numbers.

As for the C-suite shenanigans. They may impact overall direction of the company but not today or tomorrow or in the next 30 days. You know why? Betty in Omaha who wants to buy your product has no clue (and could care less) about these things. She is using Yahoo to get something done so if you want to reach her Yahoo, in her mind, is the same one she has always used regardless of whether their CEO pads his resume or not.

2. Facebook’s IPO – News flash! Facebook is going public! Mark Zuckerberg wears a hoodie on the investor road show! He’s too immature to be the CEO!

What you should be looking at – Facebook is rolling out Offers to smaller businesses. They have improved their Insight metrics in recent weeks. The cost of Facebook ads are going up.

Face it. Most of you reading this are not going to be in on the IPO for Facebook. If you buy you will likely buy later when it’s overpriced and you’ll be left holding the bag. Or maybe the stock will go up, up, up and you be a thousandaire. So what? Facebook’s value is not your concern. it’s only value to you is how you can use it to get to your market. End of story.

3. AOL is “rumored” to have Engadget and TechCrunch for sale – Really? You should care about this?

What you should know – Read these blogs and if they help you then great, and if they don’t then move on. There is nothing to see here folks. (Unless, of course, you are the handful of people who will make some serious cash in a sale of either one but you aren’t, so who cares?)

Every week there are diversions that are similar in nature to these three. And these are just 3 of literally hundreds of completely useless posts, articles, white papers, research and more that steal your precious time from your work, your family and your play.

Don’t feed this pig. Don’t read the stories. On that note, if I put one up on Marketing Pilgrim call me out in the comments. I’m a big boy, I can take.

So please don’t add to the crap out there by letting it suck the purpose out of your day. Unless there is something that impacts you directly, don’t “dig deeper to learn more.” Look at the headline and say “That’s nice, but it doesn’t impact my business” and move along your merry way to doing something of real value for yourself.

Have a nice, productive day!

Photo credit: Wikipedia

The concern we hear most frequently from clients just getting started with content marketing is some variation on “What the heck am I going to write about?” So let’s start off talking about what kind of content you can and should be generating. Before long, you’ll be able to identify what you are uniquely suited to write about–and your audience will likely respond.

Is This Interesting To My Audience?
With every piece you generate – every word, every sentence, every video clip – you have to know whether the piece interests your audience. Does it help them solve a problem? Does it provide them new insights into their business or their market? In short, is it about them and their problems rather than about you and your products?

Ready For Your Close-Up
Addressing your targets’ needs is great, but can you do it in a way that highlights your expertise? And can you do it without overt selling.

The information you provide has to be of real value, and can’t be thinly veiled sales copy. Your audience is much too sophisticated not to see right through that. So don’t even try. Instead cite a mix of industry data and other research to support your own thoughts, which can take the form of case studies and white papers, among other things.

And … Action!
Of course, as much as your content has to be about helping your audience address their issues, it also has to help you achieve your marketing and business goals.

You can use content marketing for brand building, to generate awareness of a new product, or to explore an issue that your audience might not realize you can help them with. What’s important is knowing your goals and having tools in place to measure your results. (Another topic I’ll explore in future columns.)

Putting It All Together
Here are a few quick examples of effective content marketing.

“Going viral” is the holy grail of content marketing, and though it’s unrealistic to expect your marketing to spread far and wide, some of the most successful viral campaigns are worth examining for their lessons. Orabrush and Dollar Shave Club have had great video campaigns. They’ve also had the good fortune to have executives who are really appealing on screen.

Blendtec has had great success with their “Will It Blend?” videos. They’re less reliant on a really appealing spokesperson, instead trading on the vicarious thrill of watching interesting things being destroyed in a blender – iPhones, iPads, glow sticks. What’s truly genius here is how well the videos, silly entertainment that they are, highlight the product’s benefits. This is what we’re all aiming for.

Video is, of course, not the only content marketing option. (It just happens to perform really well at the moment in SEO and social.) The Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing uses its posts as a way of staying top of mind with its audience by providing valuable small business marketing tips. The content dovetails beautifully with Duct Tape Marketing’s core business.

One more example before we go: email newsletter from the good folks at CMI, the Content Marketing Institute. If you’re interested in content marketing, you need to subscribe. Great stuff on a regular basis, and a great mix of information, research, and promotion of their products and services.

Next Steps
Generating great content doesn’t have to be hard and it’s certainly easier when you’re armed with information about your audience, their interests, and where they gather (physically or virtually). We’ll dive into these issues–as well as ways to measure outcomes–beginning in next month’s column.

One last thing to keep in mind: as fresh and new as all of this might seem, the concepts behind content marketing are as old as, well, dirt. John Deere, the heavy equipment manufacturer began publishing The Furrow, a magazine aimed at the farmers who were their target audience, in 1895.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

A deep understanding of your target audience will do more to shape your digital media marketing plan than nearly anything else. The more specific you can get, the easier it is to pick the most effective marketing tactics and distribution channels and to develop highly relevant content marketing. I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately about target audiences and buyer profiling. I’m at the start of a couple of new projects and that always gets me thinking about people. That’s because after the strategic objectives, defining your target market is the most critical step in designing a successful digital marketing campaign.

Yet, it’s surprising how little thought some businesses give to this phase of the planning. I love the execs who can tell me the specifics: their ideal customer is a young man, 24-35, single, likes to travel to Vegas yearly, has $100K+ in income and is glued to ESPN. That’s a great starting point. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there’s those who simply give me broad categories (Millennials) or, my personal favorite, “everyone.”

In digital media marketing, specificity means relevancy, and relevancy means higher engagement, more clickthroughs, and higher sales. The more I know about a specific buyer, the better I can craft messages that hook him, and the more likely I can create a distribution strategy that gets the company’s story in front of the most number of buyers.

The thing is, defining the buyer isn’t rocket science. We don’t need Dr. Sheldon Cooper to develop a complicated algorithm.

And I actually like this part of the process, because, well, it’s really, really fun. I’m naturally curious about people – all people – so digging deep into their psyche is endlessly fascinating. (In fact, I’m such an obvious people-watcher that I’ve been caught a number of times.) Also, I love research (and yes, I am that annoying person at dinner who whips out her iPhone during a debate about naming the largest cities in the world by population*).

Here are the top three questions I ask when developing a target audience definition, along with a few of my favorite resources.

1)   What problem are we trying to solve?

My starting point and best initial resource is always the client. They’ve developed a product or service for a reason, and by getting them to describe the problem, I quite often can narrow the audience from “everyone.”

2)   What are the demographics and psychographics?

A demographic study provides an outline, but a psychographic study allows me to fill in the color. A good find is a study that breaks down large groups, like Millennials, into smaller subgroups, allowing me to weed out chunks of the demographic that will have no interest in my client’s work. Marketing firm Barkley USA in partnership with Boston Consulting Group released a study recently on Millennials that looked at attitudes and behaviors of this group and identified six very different segments. It’s useful information if you’re marketing to Millennials.

US Census Data, available for free, can be a valuable resource for understanding the composition of populations on a very targeted local level. It covers key demographic data such as business growth, income, education, marriage and recent births. This dovetails with regionally targeted digital marketing strategies on social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

3)   What do they read and how do they gather information?

One of my current projects is to develop and market a product to college-educated women between the ages of 40 and 60. Critical to the success of this product is understanding reading habits. Now, I happen to be an expert on this demographic – or at least, I think I am. After all, I fit right into it myself. But, as you know, a focus group of one spells disaster.

Fortunately, there are several very easy ways to understand reading and research habits of this group.

• Pew Research Center. The only problem with this site is that I can get completely distracted by it for hours. Pew’s Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism cover reading habits of Americans. Some recent studies: 72% of Americans Follow Local News Closely and How Teens Use Video.
• Nielsen. Best known for its Nielsen Ratings, which tracks viewing habits of TV audiences, Neilsen has greatly expanded the media channels it tracks. It now reports on Internet, mobile, and video games and the usage habits of particular demographic groups.
• Experian Hitwise. Check out this provider of insight into consumer behavior online. Recent studies include political personas, Fast Track Couples, and environmental attitudes. It’s worth downloading their recent 2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report.
• Surveys. No marketer needs to be told the value of a good survey, but while fielding a scientific survey is always best, sometimes quick and dirty can get you good enough answers. I wanted to know if women in my demographic read blogs, so I sent roughly seven questions to about 50 women friends in email. Response rate? 30% to date and it’s still in the field. Answer: most of my friends read news online, but only a small percentage read blogs at all. It’s enough to get me started.
• Editorial calendars of publications. Once you’ve got a clear idea of specific media, visit the editorial calendars of the publications that your target audience reads on a regular basis. These can give you some insight into topics of interest. Many publications have been catering to these audiences for years and tapping into their editorial planning can help you create relevant content marketing.

These are just a sampling of questions. What do you ask when defining target audiences? Share your favorite resources with us.

*Tokyo, Guangzhou, and Seoul, per Wikipedia

They always say that the parents who put in all the boring, taken-for-granted time are the very best. That it’s not even about quality time, it’s about persistent time, time spent. I don’t want to compare parenting to social media community development and management but I guess I just did. Folks tend to have the zeal of the newly-converted when they first adopt social media into their communications, sales, and marketing plan; however, the truth of being a “parent” is that you’re responsible for the welfare of an entitled ingrate for not just the first 18-years but for life — and that can be dispiriting. Unless you love it; unless you’re passionate; unless you pace yourself; and unless you truly bond with your beloved. As I have said before, these are human relationships and as such, they require constant gardening. They say that true beauty exists in the flaws and not in the perfection and this is true as well when it comes to the consistency of your relationship with those with whom you’re connected online.

Back in the day, when the social mediasphere was smaller and more intimate — maybe just more new — bloggers would let folks know what was going on.

Bloggers would make sure their readership knew when they would be on vacation, why they took days off, and often would make sure guest bloggers would cover their time away with unique voices and interesting topics — in much the same way that TV and radio show hosts often find guest hosts when they’re on vacation.

Too many social media marketers don’t communicate with their readership in the sort of flawed, open, and honest voice that is more common in radio and on television.

We generally don’t have plan Bs, we generally assume that it really doesn’t matter if we’re there or not, and we often don’t recognize how startling and disorienting it is when your readers and followers and friends don’t really know what’s going on.

So, show your readers your beautiful flaws; let them know why you’re not going to be there next week; and especially let them know why you’ve been MIA for a bunch of weeks. I know it’s not ideal, but I have been really busy and distracted over the last few weeks so what I have decided to do on my blog, while I am not in my ideal blogging mode, is to temporarily convert my blog into a photo blog — a makeshift Tumblr.

While it isn’t ideal, surely, as I said, it is also much better than letting my 13-year-old blog go fallow, becoming yet another abandoned building in yet another social media ghost town. So, no matter what, be persistent — even if every day isn’t bubbling with The Best Day Ever, even if every post isn’t Pure Genius, and even if your blog spends some time being banal, obvious, derivative, and frankly dull. Because if you feel like every engagement online needs to be class A, four-star, Quality Time, then you’ll either burn yourself out and abandon all the work you’ve already done or you’ll end up freezing up with writer’s block and start hating social media, blogging, writing, and the whole ball of wax.

And since you’re now the parent of quite possibly a slew of babies — blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, et al — then you had better prepare to be a good parent and put in the time for the long haul.

Panda (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Post Panda (Google’s one-year-old revolutionary search ranking algorithm that has upended old-style SEO), optimizing individual pages is more difficult and less effective than it was before Panda. Google now pays more attention to overall site cleanliness and architecture. And duplicate content is ever more problematic. The larger and more complex your environment, the harder it is to present an optimized site. That’s where content analytics–the science of understanding your content and gleaning actionable insights from it–is essential to effective web publishing post Panda.

You do the keyword research. You use the research to build your content strategy and information architecture. You write compelling copy and complement it with relevant and engaging imagery, all with the best SEO practices in mind. You build the page and embed SEO-enhanced YouTube videos into it. You incorporate social rating and sharing throughout the page. You blog and tweet about the page as soon as it’s launched, using relevant keywords and hash tags. In short, you do everything right. So why is your page not ranking?

A common reason: there are other pages in your environment optimized for the same keywords. Especially in large corporate settings, the main culprit to SEO failure is duplicate content. Often this is old junk that is just sitting on a server getting in the users’ way. More importantly, the old stuff is taking up slots in Google’s index, distracting the algorithm in its attempt to rank your content. Even if the old stuff was never optimized, these pages have links into them that should be pointing to your optimized experiences.

What’s the solution? Clean house. Find and retire old, duplicate content. Redirect retired URLs to their appropriate newer experiences (making sure to use 301 permanent redirects, which pass link juice). If you have internal links to the older experiences, point them at your newer pages with the appropriate anchor text—especially on your home page. If you need to retain the old content for legal reasons, de-index it. And govern your site going forward to ensure that you don’t create duplicates in the future.

I know what you’re thinking. That’s easier said than done, right? The larger and more complex your enterprise, the more difficult it is to build a content inventory. Building an intelligent content inventory—what we call an audit in content strategy land—is even more challenging. If two apparent duplicates are owned by different business units, how do you decide which one stays and which one goes? Once you have an audit, how do you govern new content creation?

Your time and attention won’t allow me to answer all these questions, at least not in any detail. My main point in this blog is to get you thinking about the questions and give you a sense of how important it is to start answering them. I also wanted to point you towards a few resources that can guide you to the right answers.

•  Auditing your content: To get started with content auditing and strategy, I recommend Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach. In this second edition, the authors have written the definitive guide to building content audits as foundational components to corporate content strategy.
• Building a strategy: Once you have an audit, the main way to govern content is to let the data answer your questions for you. Using the methods I outline in an article in the current issue of Contents Magazine, keyword demand and audience analysis help you understand how to prioritize your content efforts.
• Choosing the right tools: In large organizations, building a comprehensive audit without the right tools is a fool’s errand. In IBM, we use two primary tools to help us with auditing: Covario and Acrolinx IQ. Covario is a web service that helps us audit pages in our environment and discover apparent duplicates and untapped keyword opportunities. Acrolinx IQ is a content quality tool that can help us govern content and publish only the highest quality, optimized content. In the age of Panda, content quality and optimization are converging.
•  Using the right metrics: As Mike likes to point out, these methods help you make your best guess on how to build better content. You need to iterate on the content you choose to nurture using A/B testing, and referral, bounce and engagement data help you tune your content. Mike’s book Do it Wrong Quickly  is still the best source for this information.

On the post-Panda web, content strategy is the new SEO. It’s no longer an option to optimize pages in a vacuum. You need to optimize your site as a whole. Using content analytics, audits are the key way you do this, providing answers to a host of questions about how to improve your site’s search optimization and overall effectiveness.

James Mathewson is the global search strategy lead and co-author of the book Audience, Relevance and Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content. The views expressed here are his own and not IBM’s.

Image via CrunchBase

This week Bing redesigned its presentation of its search results. Most news from Bing is usually around how it’s market share is still around the same number it has been for quite some time or about how much money Microsoft money loses on a quarterly basis for its online efforts (usually in the 1/2 to 3/4 billion dollar range …. yup, that’s a “b”). This time the search engine took the route of cleaning up their results in search of a less cluttered approach to a search engine result page (SERP). What is curious is that the new Bing looks a heck of a lot like the old Google. Take a look for yourself.

Now I have a so-so memory as I get older but these new results do look like the old blue link Google don’t they?

But how did Bing explain this move. In their blog post announcing the change they said

Bing is getting a new look. Starting today you will notice a fresh, de-cluttered experience designed to help you find the results you want faster. Over the past few months, we’ve run dozens of experiments to determine how you read our pages to deliver the link you’re looking for. Based on that feedback, we’ve tuned the site to make the entire page easier to scan, removing unnecessary distractions, and making the overall experience more predictable and useful. This refreshed design helps you do more with search—and gives us a canvas for bringing future innovation to you.

OK so it looks clean. But there are also reassurances that the results are faster and more relevant. Let’s be honest here, if they were more relevant wouldn’t more people use the engine?

Bing is starting to look desperate and it’s a shame. They really have a decent product. What they don’t have is a passion. As a result they are starting to grasp at straws to get people to use the engine. Imagine the person who lives in a medium-sized city in Missouri. They use Google every day because they are simply used to it and they trust it. They don’t read anything about the Internet marketing industry and they could care less about Silicon Valley. They do, however, buy things and advertisers want to get to them. Can you think of ANY reason why they would suddenly use Bing over Google? Is there any reason for advertisers to suddenly put their advertising dollars into Bing just because it looks like Google used to?

Let’s face it. Bing is desperate. It’s doing whatever it can to appear as if it can put up a fight with Google. It has to, since Microsoft has to explain away the huge losses it incurs every quarter. How long, though, will Microsoft put up with this? How long will it lose money and wait for Bing to save face?

I don’t think they will for the long run. It’s too costly and too difficult. Also, what better way for Microsoft to show the world that their claim of Google’s monopolistic hold on search is real than to give up? That would actually be the worst thing that could happen to Google.

This whole song and dance is getting old. And now that it seems like there is an air of desperation from Bing it’s not even interesting anymore.

What do you think?