Why get up at 6:00AM? Posted by John Assalian on March 25, 2010 It is 6:00AM in Berkeley, and still pitch dark out! My challenge this morning is to get to Palo Alto by 8:00AM to speak at the Marketing Roundtable for the Business Marketing Association of Northern California. I need to make my daughter lunch, feed the cat, find some decent threads to wear, and get out the door by 6:30AM to allow ninety minutes to drive a mere forty three miles in Bay Area traffic (some of the worst in the country)! The line at the café is excessively long even at 6:35AM and I finally hit the road by 6:45, arriving at 8:03AM, just in time! The room at the back of the venue is nice, but very rectangular and I present in the front. Not really feeling the space as the audience is hard to see because it is like one big last supper table. On the other hand, the room is small enough to make the twenty five or so people there seem like a really big crowd, so that is a good thing. Feels comfortable. I forgot to bring my “lectern” to hold my slide notes, so I bend my head way too much to refer to my notes. This makes me lose contact with the audience, and the presentation definitely lost a bit there. Overall, the concepts seem relevant and the presentation went fairly well. The audience was a mix of small business, enterprise, and consultants in the marketing world and they had some great questions (how to apply content marketing to an enterprise versus SMB model, the best buyer phase for a white paper, how to optimize for search, how do you define conversion, etc.). There was one person in the back that must have been a public speaker as she was smiling and nodding her head for encouragement, which is always good! I made a survey to give after the presentation so I can get a true quantitative gauge of how well I did. Each question is scored a weight one to five, and I calculated the results. I got a 3.97 out of five. Not so bad, considering this was the first time that I presented the material. I also provide a general comments area on the survey and I received a few critical comments like you looked down too much and one person said the information was too basic. In general, I prefer the critical comments more because there is always some truth in them, and it is a valuable opportunity to learn more. After the presentation, I realized the overall structure of the story needed a lot of work, and more stories (as always) were needed. I am in the process of redoing the presentation and will present again in the next month or so. Based on the comments, it seems like people were really interested in Content Mapping – and wanted me to communicate the concept (mapping persona attributes to stage in buyer’s cycle) in a more detailed fashion. Ok, so how do you make content mapping into an entertaining story – now that’s a content challenge. Thanks to @popky who did a great job of organizing the event, and the entire BMA of Northern California. Thanks to @NewCommGlobal for tweeting the event. You can see the tweets here. Also, thanks to Bob Johnson from IDG whose data I used to build the business case for content. I’m not going to publish the slide deck yet as I would prefer to improve before making public.
King Content in the Post-Digital World Posted by John Assalian on March 2, 2010 I believe we are marketing in a post-digital world. By post-digital, I mean a time when the communication landscape is no longer defined by the potential of any particular medium (digital, social, interactive, etc.), but instead by its overall ability to connect with particular human needs. Today, the medium has become secondary to the message. Finding one’s way through this new phase of communication and creating a lasting connection with the audience begins with the understanding that content truly is king. What Content Means for Business Content covers the sum of your brand’s publishing activities. When your company offers white papers, YouTube videos, webinars, XML feeds, and social streams, you are already acting like a publisher. In a post-digital world, the successful company publishes through a complete content strategy created with the customer in mind. Successful content strategy begins with the creation of content that tells a compelling brand story through an engaging user experience. This content is incorporated into the overall customer experience. Great website content, free training demos, how-to PDFs, story driven website copy, micro-documentaries, solution overviews, etc. are just part of the mix to engage audiences. Below this surface, the content must contain an intelligent structure in terms of meta data, search, metrics, and code. Further, content is not just for demand generation, but also for improving customer service and delivering value to current customers. Effective content must be useful to the customer, and be wrapped in the social and made available in communities. Creating such content requires brands to reflect and express what customer’s value, not what marketing departments believe customers should care about. Forget about what you think makes you different and find out what your customers think. Like other business strategies, companies need a content strategy based on customer research and customer service improvement. In 2010, most brands don’t fully employ a content strategy in developing their customer experience, customer service and business process. True, everyone is producing content on some level, but the relationship between actual business process and content strategy is not fully engendered. While companies have social media czars, how many companies have a content king? Organizations may have a UX manager, a development team and a marketing dept, but lack a content strategist or content manager to help bridge the gap between these groups and to forge a concise, cohesive strategy. If content is this important, let’s think about adding this person to our teams or partnering with content agencies. Hail to the King The post-digital world is ruled by King Content. Content is not just what you create, but the overall approach to your brand and what you publish. As we move forward, forget about the latest medium, and focus on your customer: who they are, why they buy from you, and what they care about.
Choosing the Right Content for your B2B Marketing Campaigns Posted by John Assalian on January 8, 2010 There are a ton of content options available to marketers today, and choosing the right mix is critical to success. But how do you know what content is best? How do you know what content works where? To answer those critical questions, conduct a basic marketing audit that builds a matrix around the type of content mapped to the stage your buyer is at in their purchase decision. There are five general stages of the buyer’s cycle: general education, business case development, implementation scenarios, shortlist creation, and final decision. Once you determine where your prospect is at, validate the assumption by using Google Adwords, phone interviews, and/or online surveys. Example: a small IT software company (revenue 230M) is launching a new product targeting system admins. The company has a strong vertical market focus in healthcare SMBs. After basic audit, we determine the product solves a very big problem, but the nature of the problem isn’t 100% clear to the prospects. We need to build clarity around the issues and trends with the solution. We need to foster discussion, and be visible. This is, therefore, a general education campaign – and so we need to map content that works well at early stages of the sales cycle. So what content works best here? Essentially any content that is high level, including white papers, general blog topics and publication editorials. We want to stay away from social networks, wikis, discussion forums, case studies/success stories, product demos, and in-depth videos. We do a teaser Adwords campaign to see what type of content would be clicked on the most, and we validate further with an online survey from a list purchased form a leading health care content publication. Turns out – this audience loves white papers more than general videos, blogs, or third party editorials. We end up delivering a white paper that clarifies the situation, and exposes the audience to our solution.
B2B Marketing Summit 2009 Roundup Posted by John Assalian on September 24, 2009 The Viewstream team just got back from Marketing Sherpa’s B2B Marketing Summit ’09. It was a great two-day event for B2B marketers across verticals interested in ramping up sales funnels online through content, social media, SEO and digital strategy. Highlights today included a great presentation with Bob Johnson, Vice President and Principal Analyst at IDG Connect, who had some spot-on things to say about content marketing and social media. He laid out the digital marketing landscape shaped by the content and format explosion (everyone is a publisher, everyone is using social media), and the increasing importance of relevant, content that speaks to prospects and their place in the sales cycle. Bob also addressed the challenges marketers face in creating social content that is coupled with effective CTAs that tie back in to your promotional assets or brand. He and a few other presenters nailed it in terms of understanding that social content has varying roles in throughout the sales cycle, and must be adjusted accordingly. As I mentioned in my eGuide, Evaluating Social Media Claims for 2010, social media is a means to be adopted whenever and however appropriate. Careful use of social tools to deliver and share content that resonates with the right prospects is very powerful when used correctly within a promotional framework. Check out participant Tweets from the event here. See Viewstream’s Tweets from the event here.
NEW! Viewstream eGuide – Evaluating Social Media Claims for 2010 Posted by John Assalian on August 18, 2009 As we roll through the last half of 2009, social media has carved out a permanent place in marketing. There’s been a social media frenzy as marketers rush to be a part of the latest trends. With the acceptance that it is here to stay, it is important to take another look at what social media means for marketing. We’ve done a lot of work with social media for our clients, and we’ve had a chance to test what it can do. We’ve also seen a lot of companies adopt social media in the past year. Despite a lot of talk from the gurus and experts, social media can often surprise marketers with disappointing ROI. If you are currently using social media in your marketing, or plan to do so in the next year, you will want to read my new eGuide, Evaluating Social Media Claims for 2010. This brief book reviews some of the biggest claims made about social media, include the costs, best practices, and perceptions of what it can do for your business. It lays the groundwork for a new understanding of marketing in 2010, one that uses social media as a tool, not a strategy, to market based on message, content, and the importance of speaking directly to prospects. Instead of social media for the sake of social media, this guide can help you perform social media marketing that is targeted, effective, and that leaves you in control. View the eGuide now and begin to rethink what social media means for your business. In doing so, you can leverage the power it has to help grow your business!
Desi411: Our Latest Product Demo Posted by John Assalian on July 21, 2009 I just wanted to share Viewstream’s latest product demo for Desi411.com, a startup business and service directory for businesses within the South Asian diaspora. We worked closely with the Desi11 team to create an exciting demo with clear messaging and story, engaging creative, video, and vector animation to build excitement about the launch of this service. View the demo.
Content Marketing: Seven Ways Posted by John Assalian on June 11, 2009 Today we presented our webinar, Your Prospect Is Your Champion: Seven Ways To Increase Sales Ready Leads with Content Marketing. In the presentation, I shared some insights into how tech marketing departments can achieve better sales-ready leads, execute more effective lead-nurturing strategies, and sustain competitive advantage using uninterruptive, informative content. If you missed the webinar, download the pdf, or view the slideshow below. Your Prospect Is Your Champion: Seven Ways To Increase Sales Ready Leads with Content Marketing View more OpenOffice presentations from Viewstream. We had a great group this morning. Thanks to everyone who attended!
Our event on Microsoft Silverlight Posted by John Assalian on May 14, 2009 We are doing a live event with Microsoft’s Michael Scherotter tonight. Check the invite here for more infomration. During the course of marketing the event, we received several of the “Flash vs. Silverlight” type emails/responses, and so we wanted to mention a couple of things. First of all Viewstream is a long standing Flash Developer — we go back to the Macromedia Director days, the first version of QuickTime, and Flash 1.0. We make decisions about what development tool to use based on our client’s requirements and our client’s clear-target customer. Beyond that, we are completely neutral. Our resident .NET guru emailed me with some notes for tonight, and I wanted to share them with everyone: Silverlight is a contained development environment. It integrates into the Data access layer natively, as it is part of the .NET development. This is a very powerful feature to work with when development web 2.0 or database driven sites. Because Silverlight is integrated in the .NET environment, there is no extra investment of time or specialized debugging methods when developing a Silverlight app in the case of a development house focused on the .NET framework. It uses Visual Studio professional and express editions. Because the Express editions are free, and provide 75% of the tools used in the Professional editions, this mean that Silverlight development, with a fantastic API can be totally free. A myth about ASP.net over PHP is that it’s “expensive”. The only expensive portion about it is when a company hosts their own web servers, or when the host their own SQL Server licenses. However, in a shared hosting environment, it’s the exact same cost as a Linux environment, as ASP.net is always a standard feature along side PHP in said shared hosting. What this means is, you can have a “RIA” web application for a fraction of the price. Once again, take a free edition of Visual Studio, with Silverlight tools and then look at the price of shared hosting. Now take the same price of shared hosting, look at the price of either Flash or Flex development tools. Look at the process it would take having two separate development environments interact (such as PHP), and I think it starts making sense. Anyone who is comfortable in C#, or even Java, can quickly learn to develop highly advanced Silverlight applications quickly.
Webinar on Content Marketing Posted by John Assalian on May 6, 2009 I will be doing a webinar on Thursday, May 28, 2009, at 10:00AM Pacific, on Content Marketing. The webinar will focus on companies that need a persistent content marketing strategy – and how to create engaging content to bring that strategy to life. I will present the seven ways to use content marketing in your marketing & sales strategy, including: Way #1: Make Your Content Informative, Consultative and Engaging Way #2: Make Your Content Portable with Social Media Way #3: Leverage Your Content Throughout Your Channel/Partner Ecosystem Way #4: Create Thought Leadership in Your Industry Way #5: Develop Tracking/Metrics That Listen Way #6: Create a Long Term Strategy (not just a campaign) Way #7: Crowdsource: Using customer content Please attend – I will present for thirty minutes and have some time for Q/A. See you online!
Beyond Semantic Web Posted by John Assalian on May 3, 2009 This month a new software launches that has trillions of data points and millions of lines of algorithms — it is a new search engine and provides specific answers in a way that any search engine hertofore has NOT been able to do. Going beyond tagging and the semantic web, this is an attempt to provide one of the Holy Grail ideas of the 20th Century: Intelligent Computers that can actually answer questions. These are some big promises, and the nature of the promise makes it worthy of evaluation. Check it out here: http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/ The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. I like the mixture of the private database combined with the public internet. Similar to the model of ITDatabase.com Quotes: “For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for.” Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com “If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha.” Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com “It’s like plugging into an electric brain.” Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com “This is like a Holy Grail… the ability to look inside data sources that can’t easily be crawled and provide answers from them.” Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com “For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for.” Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com “If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha.” Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com “It’s like plugging into an electric brain.” Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com “This is like a Holy Grail… the ability to look inside data sources that can’t easily be crawled and provide answers from them.” Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com