A curious aspect about the hype surrounding content strategy for marketing is the lack of agreement on what it means — or clarity on whose budget should fund content strategy development. Like the blind men with the elephant, we draw different conclusions based on varying frames of reference and professional experience. Our perspectives also differ based on whether we approach the challenge as a marketer with revenue accountability, or as a service provider to marketing organizations.

Marketers need a multi-faceted framework that affords customer-relevant “market conversations” and brings order to the explosive growth in content types, content objects and media outlets.

We need infrastructure that flexes and scales, delivering increasingly personalized customer conversations, while reporting detailed metrics to prove our contribution to revenue or ROI goals.

At present this framework is aspirational, due to the many operational and cultural changes required of highly siloed marketing disciplines. Marketers need to overhaul and retool workflows, processes, behaviors, attitudes — a bigger challenge than adopting new technologies and hoping for the best. For that reason this transition will probably take at least a decade to unfold.

We need to question our tried-and-true notions of what works best. We should invest in a “social savvy” content strategy to uncover how people prefer to learn new skills or communicate with brands and enterprises. This means understanding how to respond to their needs and preferences. Such a content strategy should be informed by insights that emerge from listening and responding to buyers, customers, partners, influencers, shareholders, etc.

It’s a far cry from conventional marketing tactics: interruption advertising, direct mail blasts, “spray and pray” — typical brand– or product-centric monologues.

Content Strategy Is More Than Just the Web

For the sake of future proofing and business agility, marketers should develop content strategy independent of any specific medium. It’s too limiting to constrain content strategy to the domain of web communications only. Or web plus email. Or social media like Facebook and Twitter. We need to take into account all the customer touchpoints, throughout the customer’s journey.

Start with People First

Marketers need to craft content strategy to address and prioritize the needs of multiple stakeholders: e.g.,

• sales people or channel partners
• existing customers
• prospective buyers
• employees
• investors and industry analysts
• third party developers, suppliers, etc.

Insights based on well-informed personas for each stakeholder category should inform our plans and content strategies. We need to pay close attention to the stages of the buyer’s — or customer’s — journey. A customer seeking self-service support to solve an immediate problem has different content needs from a prospective buyer who needs evidence for the business case to justify a purchase recommendation.

How and where people go about finding or consuming our content are also critical considerations when crafting content strategy.

Given those inputs, our content strategy should encompass multiple factors, such as each persona’s:

• media preferences (web vs. print vs. email, etc.)
• goals: where they are in the buying (or ownership) cycle, etc. — what are they seeking to learn or trying to accomplish
• device preferences (iPad vs. PC or Kindle, etc.)
• genre preferences (podcast, video, case study, demo, ROI calculator, problem-solving aid, etc.)
• language (English, Spanish, Chinese, etc.)
• context: at work, at home, at school, etc.

There are additional complications for businesses that go to market via a vertical or industry orientation — adding yet more complexity to the content strategy requirements.

Map Content to Their Needs

For any given campaign or marketing program, we need to map the content components to the buying cycle, given defined goals of prioritized buyer personas. We risk slowing down the buying cycle if we don’t supply what each buying role needs, at the right time and place.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg… I didn’t even mention meta data or strategies for organizing content to enable machine-based searching and personalization, so each persona can more readily find things relevant or compelling to them.

Marketers, It’s Time to Get More Strategic about Content

The more complicated the situation — fragmented audiences, an explosion in digital content types and devices — the more burning the need for coherent content strategies. How else can we provide intelligent guidance to the people responsible for crafting relevant or memorable web-based or mobile experiences? The web writers and designers, information architects, UX / interaction designers, and so on. Without that guidance their work is likely to miss the mark, or squander precious resources and limited budgets.

Whether we approach content strategy from the vantage point of marketers, media execs, web developers or information architects, the business imperative is the same:

“
Until we commit to treating content as a critical asset worthy of strategic planning and investment, we’ll continue to churn out worthless content in reaction to unmeasured requests. We’ll keep trying to fit words, audio, graphics, and video into page templates that weren’t truly designed with our business’ real-world content requirements in mind. Our customers still won’t find what they’re looking for. And we’ll keep failing to publish useful, usable content that people actually care about.

– Kristina Halvorson, “The Discipline of Content Strategy”

Fellow marketers, it’s time for us to step up to the challenge.

Today while reading yet another social media guru exhorting enterprises to get their best people involved in social media conversations, I wondered about the disconnect. Is this just the latest example of “the corporate free lunch syndrome?” Clearly, these star employees are resisting the pressures to start blogging or tweeting on a regular basis. Why is that?

Sometimes the simplest answers are the best explanation, or so says Occam’s Razor.

It’s not surprising that big businesses would want their expert problem solvers or solutions gurus to lend their voices to the corporate blog. If I were their customer, I’d certainly prefer advice and insights from their experts, rather than the well-intentioned rookies.

But then I think about the situation from the perspective of my professional friends, my husband who is an expert in his field, and other SME’s I know who play key roles in large corporations. They complain about the increasing pressure they’re getting at work to “be more social…” And yes, they’ve read the company’s corporate guidelines. They understand the blogging and tweeting policies, but may not trust the company’s promises not to punish them if they make a mistake…

And despite the potential career benefits of a personal branding strategy, it’s not yet driving their personal priorities.

So why aren’t these folks contributing? They know how to communicate; some are actually great writers and presenters; they’re deep experts in their field. They interact frequently with customers and partners. So why aren’t they contributing to their employer’s social initiatives?

Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best one.

These folks are busy, insanely busy. Inside their corporations they are everyone’s favorite “go-to” expert.

Judging from what I see and hear from my friends and family members, the assignment to “start blogging on company time” is simply added to an already crushing workload. Their boss makes no accommodation in their project assignments, duties or priorities to create time for this new activity. Not to mention the time to learn what’s involved, how to do it, or practice before their thoughts “go live” across the new social media.

If companies are really serious about wanting to involve their best people in the social influencer conversation, then they must adjust workloads and priorities to make this possible.

Despite the myth, there is no free lunch.

Although perhaps an unorthodox choice, my vote for a creative use of social media was the development of The Essential New York Times Cookbook, by Amanda Hesser (and countless others).

The story of its making is almost as interesting as the end product, which you’ll learn in the book’s front matter.

“A 150-Year Flipbook of American Cooking”

A chronicle of changing tastes, this cookbook celebrates America’s best-loved recipes, as well as evolving food passions. It offers a broad spectrum of choices for the home cook, while telling the story of American cooking.

Recipes range from classic cuisine to French bistro dishes, from tapas to Southeast Asian, from Italian trattoria to slow-cooked dishes with artisinal ingredients. About 1200 recipes in all.

I love how Hesser describes her objective: “It was going to be an eclectic panorama of both high-toned masterpieces and low-brow grub, a fever chart of culinary passions.” Humor enlivens the writing throughout the book, such as “Soups used to be simmered until they begged for mercy…”

Crowd-sourced Recipes

Recipes were culled from the Times’ 150-year-old food archive, as well as contributions from foodies and cooks  around the world.

The author used a variety of social techniques to source recipes and then decide which ones to consider for inclusion. Amanda and her colleagues tested any recipe recommended by 3 or more people. Some recipes, especially desserts, got dozens of votes (and over 200 in at least one case). It took Amanda Hesser over 6 years to test the leading contenders, sharing 1400 dishes with family and friends to see which ones merited inclusion in the final cookbook.

From the beginning Amanda Hesser reached out to food lovers and cooking enthusiasts to help her compile the recipes that had to be included. She relied on a voting process to help winnow down the potential candidates.

“To start, I crowd-sourced many of the recipes that had to be included by posting an “author’s query” in the Wednesday Dining section and the Sunday Magazine asking readers to let me know their favorite Times recipes. The results were delightful: thousands of emails and letters poured in, with more than 6000 suggested.

Charmingly, people shared the impact of favorite recipes on their lives:

“…Passionate accounts of readers’ relationships with the dishes they had been cooking for decades. Readers wrote me about recipes that had held together their marriages, reminded them of lost youth, given them the cooking bug, and symbolized their annual family gatherings.

The author also turned to Twitter for help naming the book:

“As a lark… I Tweeted to ask what people thought the title should be. I loved writer Andy Selsberg’s response: That Old Gray Lady Can Cook. But the overwhelming favorite was All The Food That’s Fit to Eat.

One of the reasons why I’ve come to love this book is the author’s wit, revealed both in the Introduction, as well as the preamble that sets the context for each recipe. For example, here’s her rationale for why so few recipes from the 1940s and ‘50s made the final cut:

“Sharp-eyed readers may suspect that I slacked off during the 1940s and ‘50s, but if you could taste some of the recipes I made from this era, you would see that I am saving you from a world of hurt.

If you’re still looking for that perfect gift for someone who loves cooking, or reading about cooking, check out The Essential New York Times Cookbook. It’s a wonderful example of sharing, on many levels.

Note: All citations are from the cookbook.

Lately most of the newsletters delivered to my in-box at work seem to be breathlessly touting some aspect of content marketing or an upcoming conference on the subject. Because the senders tend to be technology providers, marcom agencies or others with vested interests, I take their pronouncements and special offers with a large grain of salt. But then I decided to dig deeper to find the true gold disguised in all that pyrite.

My first reactions — wry amusement, if not cynicism:

• The luster of social media is wearing off, so it’s time for self-styled gurus and vendors to find something new to evangelize.
• It’s just marketing collateral, gone digital; repackaged under a new name and positioned as something innovative or revolutionary.
• PR experts who view themselves as strategic, rather than just execution experts, would assert they’ve been recommending and “developing content” for decades.
• Been there, done that. New name, that’s all.

But then I read several reports yesterday that made me think a bit harder about content marketing, and realized that there’s some merit to the concept beyond the sheer hype.

Recent research points to its growing importance: 90% of B2B marketers claim to be engaged in content marketing, and allocate on average >25% of their budgets to content marketing activities. Their budgets are likely to increase in 2011. [Source: B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, MarketingProfs and Junta42.] This is still an area where marketers are willing to outsource some activities, so it’s easy to understand the appeal to service providers. Having said that, budgets remain one of marketers’ more persistent challenges.

Content Marketing Defined

Let’s start with some definitions of content marketing.

“The creation and sharing of content for the purpose of promoting a product or service.

— Creating Content That Sells: Content Marketing for Demand Generation, Marketo white paper, 2010

Or:

“The creation and distribution of educational and/or compelling content in multiple formats to attract and/or retain customers.

—Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, MarketingProfs and Junta42, 2010

And finally, Wikipedia’s take:

“An umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current or potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty.

—Wikipedia

Content Marketing: Same Old, or New and Different?

When the proponents explain what’s new or different about content marketing, they point to one or more of the following attributes:

Put Content in a Strategic Context

What’s really interesting is the opportunity for marketers to combine key aspects of the above, and thereby craft a more coherent content strategy. These combinatorial qualities, I believe, are the reason for all the hype that currently surrounds the notion of content marketing. This makes it strategic, rather than just tactics du jour or the latest faddish frenzy.

IMHO: Content strategy can be enormously effective when:

• it’s developed from a research-grounded, insight-enriched perspective
• it proceeds from a problem-solving, buyer– or user-centered needs framework
• it maps content options to buyers’ roles and needs, both informational and motivational
• it responds to peoples’ usage or consumption preferences (platform, device, format, timing, degree of personalization, etc.)
• it addresses needs at different phases of the buying cycle (including post-purchase experience phases)
• it creates appropriate opportunities for the end-customer (or sales, support and distribution partners) to add their respective contributions to content creation, sourcing, review, commentary – let them add to the conversation

Said otherwise, what’s really cool about content marketing is the possibility that it will enable “marketing nirvana”:

Deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time and place, in the form that they prefer to see or hear.

But Let’s Get Real

What I’ve learned from client engagements is that most companies lack a holistic understanding of their customer; have a shallow understanding (at best) of buyer roles, needs and motivations; and often set hard boundaries (AKA, organizational silos) between the moment of purchase, and what happens after purchase.

For the customer this is when the joy — or suffering — really begins.

And thus we marketers have a long way to go before we can really deliver on the promise of content marketing.

LinkedIn aspires to be for businesses what FaceBook is for consumers: the go-to social media connector for B2B marketing. Until recently LinkedIn’s primary benefit for organizations was employee recruitment. Now LinkedIn has launched a beta level service that lets companies promote their products and services, and show customer recommendations for each product or service. This increases LinkedIn’s value for smaller firms, especially those with only modest recruitment needs.

I’ve been taking advantage of the Thanksgiving holiday respite to experiment with LinkedIn’s early capabilities for B2B marketing. Here are some early impressions.

Simple But Limited Functionality

Thanks to some how-to guidance from Portent Interactive, I’ve begun developing a simple profile for my consulting firm, Informing Arts. The profile now shows a couple of our consulting services.

If I think of LinkedIn’s profile as a simple directory listing, I find myself less critical of its current limitations. The underlying platform affords only simple editing and display capabilities. You cannot style your text, other than using all caps. Here’s the basic content entry form for the company profile:

Tiny Logos & Product Badges

Options for displaying the company logo are very confining, 100 x 60 pixels for the standard logo, 50 x 50 for messages delivered as network updates. The standard logo is displayed next to your company’s description; network updates include things like tweets, notifications about changes to your business’ profile, etc.

For example, here are the 2 variants for my firm’s logo, boxed to show you the dimensions (the larger boxed image is our “standard logo”):

To my eye, when displayed by LinkedIn, the logos appear muddy, having lost some clarity, crispness or color saturation when compared to the originals I uploaded to LinkedIn’s server. Note that I uploaded images with the pixel dimensions required so that LinkedIn’s platform did not need to resize these graphic objects. Maybe this image fidelity issue is just a symptom of the beta service…

Curiously the constraints on the images used as badges for each product or service are slightly different: 100 x 80 pixels, just a little bit taller than the standard logo.

You need some basic skills with Photoshop or other image editor to ensure your images, when uploaded, meet LinkedIn’s dimension requirements. Otherwise they could be scaled in awkward ways by LinkedIn’s platform.

Basic Text Entries

What you can display as your primary company description is very limited: just over 4 lines of text before LinkedIn truncates your message with a “…more” link. Enough for about 2 pithy sentences.

No text styling: no font changes, no colors, no bold or italics. Just plain simple text. Hence my notion that this is like a simple old-fashioned directory listing. If you place high value on the impact of your LinkedIn company profile, you may want to engage a copywriter’s help with your company description, unless you just repurpose the public-facing positioning statement.

LinkedIn controls your options for URL links: you can link a single website to the company description. No embedded links are permitted (at least for now) within your text entries. So choose your URL wisely.

Similar limitations pertain to text entries for LinkedIn’s latest feature for organizational marketing, the products and services tab. One badge (or image) per product, one URL linked to the service description.

Unlike the company description, you can add a small number of bullet points to identify features, or list benefits or use cases. There are tight limits on the number of characters permitted for each bullet point (about half the length of a tweet, I’d guess).

Content Editing Is Limited

The beta level of this service does not offer a “draft mode” so all edits go live as soon as you hit the “Publish” button. This implies the following workflow for content development:

• Investigate LinkedIn’s detailed requirements before you start creating or editing your company profile
• Create or resize your logos to the correct dimensions in advance
• Identify URL specifics in advance – or know which page you intend to link, and use drag-and-drop to enter the correct URL in the appropriate field
• Write your text descriptions in a simple text editor, and then cut-and-paste to LinkedIn’s form
• With all your ducks in order, then enter everything in one fell swoop
• Hit “Publish” – and voila!

Or, enter the basics, hit Publish, and plan to use the “edit profile” feature to add or correct content details when time permits, knowing your published profile will be incomplete until you’ve finished your edits.

Once you’ve published the company description, if you’re authorized to do so, you can easily make changes, replacing logos, tweaking content, etc. Within limits this seems to work quite well, assuming you don’t encounter server time-outs.

Having said that, if you enter bullet point features for your product or service, there is no way to change the sequence of bullet points once they’ve been published, unless you change them all.

Geared for Social Networking, But Members Only

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn has emphasized social dimensions — the relationships:

• between people and the companies that employ them,
• people who work on or with those featured products or services,
• and the customers (or users) of those products and services.

For each product or service you list, you can request recommendations from your customers or clients. Needless to say, the people making the recommendations must be pre-existing LinkedIn members; LinkedIn doesn’t accept external email addresses for this purpose of sharing recommendations.

Similarly, if key employees are associated with specific products or services, you can link their names and LinkedIn profiles to the appropriate product. LinkedIn allows multiple people to be associated with these product or service descriptions, as long as they are LinkedIn members.

I suspect that LinkedIn believes the social networking dimensions of the company profiles will become their most valuable contribution over time. No doubt this is how they hope to differentiate their offering from Google’s.

Promotions & Advertising

LinkedIn offers 2 ways to promote your company, via a “direct ad” for the company or a branded product/service, or a special promotional offer linked to a specific product or service. The UI is still a bit rocky. It takes a lot of clicks to find the place where you can showcase a product-specific special offer.

If you click the “Promote your company” button, which appears when you’re editing the company profile, you will be redirected to their new beta service for direct ad placements. The first page that you’ll see is entitled “Create Your Ad Campaign.” Here’s the form to get started:

I’ve not tried this feature, but it appears to be just a bit more feature-rich than Google’s PPC ads, from the display standpoint. I haven’t explored its targeting capabilities or likely ROI.

After multiple clicks, when you’re creating or editing your product/service description, LinkedIn displays a spot where you can showcase a special offer. Here’s the UI for describing that offer:

Note: I have not tried the simple promotions capability that LinkedIn offers, so I don’t have an informed opinion about its merits. It does appear that you can link to a landing page, via the URL field, but I doubt you have any options for A-B testing…

Net net: it’s interesting to see LinkedIn’s early forays into social influencer marketing. I’ll look forward to SEM experts’ assessments of their relative merits, as LinkedIn’s capability unfolds.

For the past week I’ve been working with multiple small businesses here on Cape Cod, for some minor property management projects. At night I’ve also researched nearby yoga studios, seeking information on class schedules, teachers, class descriptions, etc. This experience has reminded me that social media adoption still lags across the small business sector. (Despite what pundits may tell you.)

To date I’ve had multiple interactions with Cape Cod service providers, but none via social media. Mostly phone, some email. Email interactions are always delayed, sometimes by 24 hours or so.

In Seattle, where my business is based, near-instantaneous email or twitter interactions are common, so the slower pace of email conversations here on Cape Cod is disconcerting. Phone-based interactions are still the most reliable way to connect here, followed by email, although the traditional family-owned businesses may not yet have email, especially tradespeople like plumbers or electricians.

Is this typical of the real world? Probably so, except in rarified tech enclaves like Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, or counterparts in other countries.

Things Are Different in the “Real World”

Only an hour or so from Boston, this is a seaside community of small businesses, predominantly service providers, small retailers, or people in the restaurant or lodgings trade. They cobble a living by catering to summer tourists, second-home owners, retirees, and a reduced population of year-round locals. Seasonality and the poor economy challenge small business owners who’d like to earn a good living during the offseason and winter months. Many have part-time jobs to fill the empty spots in their wallets.

They don’t (or perhaps can’t afford to) invest in the networking technology and devices that enable instantaneous communications or social media interactions. They use “feature phones,” rather than Blackberries and iPhones. They respond to emails early in the morning or late at night, so voicemail is generally a more reliable means of communication.

Twitter? Facebook? You’re kidding, right?

For me this week’s experiences have served as a reminder that social media adoption may be widespread among big brands, teenagers  and tech savvy individuals, but it’s still early for many small businesses in the service sector. Especially those outside of major metro areas. Here, 70 miles from Boston, Angie’s List is the preferred online marketing tool for the computer savvy contractors I’ve met.

Among these very small businesses blogging is irregular at best. If the service providers have a blog at all, they’ve posted one or two trial entries — months or even a year or two ago — but nothing since then. Forget Facebook Pages…

It’s been an interesting reminder that adoption of new forms of communication always takes longer than its evangelists might think…

Thanks to the Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystified, we now have a framework for deciding how to measure progress with social media marketing — a draft model that’s worth talking about. Both firms have introduced this framework with an explanatory white paper on the co-authors’ respective blogs. Courageously, they’ve done so under the “Open Research” model to galvanize industry-wide commentary and collaboration so the framework can be refined and extended.

Put It in Context

Their paper advocates positioning this framework within a larger planning context, so the social marketing objectives align with the organization’s broader goals and KPIs. To me this is a key point, and one that’s often overlooked in the euphoric hype that tends to surround “social.”

If you narrowly measure social media tactics without aligning them to a larger strategic context, you’re just measuring activity. (That’s like measuring reach and frequency in the old realm of advertising.) The question is, how will those activities help drive business results? How do they link to your most valuable customers or prospects? Which influencers have the most impact on the people you care the most about?

Which are leading indicators, and which are trailing? Which measures will drive actionable insights, given your strategies and key business drivers?

The authors of this framework are well aware of these issues; however, the framework won’t achieve its intended purpose if it’s not set in the right context. That’s the job of the social marketing team, with potential help from their advisors; and it must be negotiated with the business– and line managers inside the enterprise.

Where This Framework Will Be Most Effective, And Where It Won’t Be

Like the social media monitoring technologies themselves, this model is best suited for larger, established organizations, ideally those serving gazillions of consumers; companies blessed with household brand names — or existing marketplaces where conversations among consumers or a company’s partner base are frequent, voluminous and well underway.

At their core these technologies require significant activity volumes before underlying trends start to become apparent or predictive. Sadly, if you work for most start-ups or new ventures, there’s less out there to be measured and analyzed.

Similarly, if you’re in a highly specialized B2B niche, you may find yourself struggling to find those needles in the proverbial haystack. Or worse yet, you may not know where the conversations (sparse as they may be) are taking place. Where the heck is that haystack, any way?

You’ll be challenged when the most important conversations take place behind “pay walls” that are inaccessible to most of the monitoring platforms, unless (a) you own the pay wall and have the wherewithal to help the platforms’ developers troll your content, and (b) their business model and technology strategy enable them to do so. That said, this sort of customization tends to be costly.

Case In Point: SMB

Here’s what confronts a certain 3-year-old B2B technology start-up with revenues measured in the tens of millions. Before beginning a coherent social plan, this firm’s brand name (their company name) averages only 3 mentions a day — and that’s before filtering out the mentions that have originated from the company itself or its employees. No one is talking about them, online at least. And yet, they’re generating revenues. (There are other indicators of marketing fragility, which the company has discovered by analyzing internal data sources, such as customer spending patterns and churn rates.)

To be fair, this should be viewed as a benchmark: the situation pro ante, before they begin any social marketing programs. This company has functioned without a marketing department (or marketing budget) for most of its history, as you might surmise from this chart. (And yes, they’ve just hired a marketer, so hopefully this picture will look a lot more attractive a year from now.)

It’s obvious that one of their first challenges will be figuring out what their customers want to talk about, the issues on their mind, and where those conversations are already taking place — the conversations out of “ear shot,” as it were. Fortunately, they have begun a real-world dialog (by phone) to hear what’s on their customers’ mind.

But they’re not alone.

New Business Objective: Discovery

This is an area where I see recurring limitations in today’s platforms for social media monitoring: the early discovery process for B2B markets.

This a painful and highly fraught phase: when you don’t know what you don’t know. And as most strategists recognize, it’s the things you didn’t know that you should have known that are most likely to kill the company.

So my personal addition to this framework would be a new row linked to a business objective called “Discovery.”

The purpose of the “Discovery” phase, which should precede the “Foster Dialog” phase, is to uncover what people want to talk about, what’s on their minds, etc. This could help reveal unmet needs or latent opportunities that could be ripe for the right companies, value propositions, ventures, nonprofits, what have you.

A related goal is to discover who is talking or blogging, where and when, and what the general “social technographics” profiles are for people in this arena, as described on in Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, and on Forrester’s groundswell blog. (Charlene is now a partner at Altimeter Group, one of the two firms that sponsored the research that resulted in this proposed social marketing analytics framework).

And because this phase generally occurs during the unfunded, or under-funded stage of a company or product lifecycle, the tools and technologies available here will have to be affordable — or they will remain out of reach and under-utilized by the start-up community, category pioneers, and other entrepreneurial innovators.

I came across an interesting blog post today about the differences between active versus passive discovery on the part of buyers and prospects, and what that implies for messaging architectures — and by implication, for outbound marketing plans.

Most of the tactics based on SEM and SEO aim at capturing the attention of shoppers engaged in active discovery. Which is cool, if people already know your brand, are aware of your current offers, and generally understand your brand promise or core value proposition. (In this context we’re talking about the buyer’s activities during the earlier phases of the marketing funnel.)

But what do marketers do if people are unaware of or unfamiliar with your brand? Or if you’re confronting damaging misperceptions about your product’s positioning, core benefits, price-to-value equation, etc.? Search alone is not enough.

Quick Explanation of Terms: Online Context

Active discovery

A buyer engages in active discovery when using Google or Bing to search for something in particular, such as which stores are offering a specific brand of fashion jeans at the best price. From the marketer’s standpoint this is the realm of search marketing. ‘Nuff said: there are a bazillion web resources on this subject.

Passive Discovery

Passive discovery occurs when the buyer didn’t know she was looking but found out about your brand (or offer) while visiting a web site and noticing your ad, seeing your message presented in the context of other search results, stumbling upon it while researching the category as a whole, etc.

The challenge for marketers is how best to leverage passive discovery in order to influence the buyer’s perceptions or emotional state as he moves through the purchasing process.

For B2B marketers Steve Woods (the author of the post I’m referencing) writes,

“Passive messages are messages that would not be actively sought by potential buyers, such as messages that alter preconceived notions of reliability, applicability of a solution to a certain industry, and perceptions of product usability, service quality, or price point.

Woods says that marketers planning their messaging architecture need to think about how/when buyers are likely to encounter your messages, so you can anticipate and then create opportunities to benefit from passive as well as active discovery. He highly recommends the storytelling format as the mode most likely to be noticed and recalled.

So What’s the Answer?

Advertising?

Traditionally consumer marketers have resorted to various forms of advertising as “the way” to get in front of people when they’re not looking, but to do so in a way that would be memorable (and hopefully motivational). Once upon a time that kind of mass marketing worked … at least, better than its alternatives. These days, old-fashioned, out-of-context, interruption-based advertising is not an effective solution for capturing people’s attention when they’re not actively looking.

That is, it’s not the solution if you’re being held accountable to measured returns on marketing investment. Instead you’ve got to figure out how to make those messages available to the right people, at the right time, and in the right context. And despite all the advances in online display advertising over the past decade, we’re still in the early days of what’s possible when it comes to marketing effectiveness and ROI. [Disclosure: one of my clients is working on ways to meet the needs of under-served marketers who want to include more intelligent forms of online advertising in their marketing mix, especially when challenged by budgets that are too small to appeal to digital agencies.]

Word of Mouth?

Word-of-mouth is probably most effective in the context of active discovery, when you (as shopper) ask your friend what she thinks about her new Prius, or the nail salon that’s just opened up down the road.

All the wizards practicing social media marketing have lots to say on the subject of how to influence the people most likely to be influential when it comes to online word-of-mouth, so I won’t add to their wisdom here.

I do think the jury is still out when it comes to making social influencer marketing scalable and sustainable in the face of hard-to-prove concrete ROI. If the downturn continues,  hard-nosed bean counters are going to make it difficult for companies to staff up so they can operationalize social market-engagement models.  I think social has lots of promise, but it’s in its infancy when it comes to practicing this as a discipline that can be managed appropriately so it has a lasting effect on customer engagement and retention.

Other Sources

At the conceptual level there are some intriguing possibilities in Martin Lindstrom’s book Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. He spent several years and millions of dollars researching how the brain responds to advertising, product placements, and various communication techniques (such as symbols, stories, etc.). His findings are summarized in Buyology.

His application of neuroscience to communication effectiveness suggests some very interesting ideas, but taken too far, could also be scary…

Based on Lindstrom’s research Steve Woods’ recommendation that passive messages should be designed for transmission within stories is a good one.

Lessons from Apple & Evangelism

Lindstrom notes that communications techniques practiced by most established religions and cults are also highly effective when it comes to stimulating the brain to pay attention to or remember messages about brands and products. (And yes, those of us who have formerly worked for Apple’s marketing department are well aware of this…)

Here are the cross-denominational pillars of “marketing” as practiced by the world’s leading religions, according to Lindstrom in Buyology:

• A sense of belonging
• A clear vision
• Power over enemies
• Sensory appeal
• Storytelling
• Grandeur
• Evangelism
• Symbols
• Mystery
• Rituals

Just think about the launch of the iPad, as a case in point… It’s clear to me that these techniques are being deployed by Apple’s hype machine…

I’ve always loved David Armano’s thoughtful irreverence, his clear infographics, and the ways he helps us think about or reframe core issues in the worlds of marketing, media, community and communications. After stumbling across his wry “wheel of marketing misfortune,” for a recent presentation to a Chicago AMA event, I just had to share it here.  It made my day.

Looks like we’ve moved from “shiny object syndrome” to “social media goldrush,” if this gizmo is to be believed.

Armano presents some interesting frameworks and concepts, including a more holistic approach to guiding social media initiatives across the core disciplines of a business, rather than isolate them within yet another marketing silo. Thanks to Slideshare, here is David Armano’s latest thinking on social media from a “common sense” perspective:

Every time I hear references to social graphs, I’m reminded about research into relationships and community structures, published by Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter in a thought-provoking book, World Class: Thriving Locally in a Global Economy (1995). Kanter’s research suggested that people, organizations and civic communities gravitate toward one of two classes: local or cosmopolitan.

Mindsets, competencies and connections are what distinguish these two social classes.

The implications can be profound for local economies, based on the prevalence and mindsets of locals versus cosmopolitans within their population. At its worst the political divides can be polarizing, especially in regions full of locals whose once thriving industry has withered away or moved offshore. Unable or resistant to change, locals can languish in a community of “have nots” who lack the imagination and wherewithal to reinvent their local economy.

These distinctions apply to the world as a whole, not just the Americans Kanter studied for World Class. As she declared so presciently 15 years ago,

Today, the world economy is a period of rapid and dramatic change, and the question of just how we will connect to this new world is the single most important issue of our lifetime.

Here is how she characterizes these two social classes.

Cosmopolitans

Cosmopolitans enjoy travel, “are comfortable in many places,” and tend to move away from the homes of their youth for access to a wider set of opportunities. They are broad-minded, have learned to be adaptable, to listen, and how to bridge cultures. By definition they are well-connected to other people and information resources. Kanter writes:

Cosmopolitans are rich in three intangible assets, three C’s that translate into preeminence and power in a global economy: concepts — the best and latest knowledge and ideas; competence — the ability to operate at the highest standards of any place anywhere; and connections — the best relationships, which provide access to the resources of other people and organizations around the world.

Cosmopolitans tend to affiliate with other like-minded cosmopolitans. Depending on how often they travel and how many places they’ve lived in, their ties to their local community may be loose, and their definition of “home” quite fluid or multi-faceted.

Locals

Kanter goes on to say,

Locals, by contrast, are defined primarily by particular places. Some are rooted in their communities but remain open to global thinking and opportunities. Others are simply stuck.

As long as their local economy remains vibrant, locals like these enjoy satisfying lives surrounded by friends and family, nourished by long-term ties, deeply rooted in their community. When all goes well, they provide the social capital and investments of time and resources that enable their local clubs, churches, synagogues and schools to thrive.

Unfortunately, locals tend to be vulnerable, says Kanter, to external changes imposed by factors beyond their control, such as factory closures, the exhaustion of local natural resources, as in Oregon’s timber industry, or the mid-century migration of the textile industry away from New England to the Southeast and now to Asia. Locals can suffer when exogenous change occurs:

…At the extreme end of the local class are those whose skills are not particularly unique or desirable, whose connections are limited to a small circle in the neighborhood, and whose opportunities are confined to their own communities. In contrast with the limitless horizons for cosmopolitans, [such locals] face increasing limits to opportunity. They lack control over resources and knowledge, which can move rapidly in and out of their communities.

Given the cultural divide between “Red States” and “Blue States,” I wonder how much of it might be ascribed to the predominance of cosmopolitans versus locals within their boundaries…

Visualizing These Differences

It would be interesting to apply these constructs to the leading social networks and other online communities, to see what the patterns might reveal. It’s probably a safe bet that LinkedIn enjoys lots of cosmopolitans within its professional membership. As MySpace moves down market, is its appeal shifting towards locals? And is FaceBook a mix of the two? An interesting visualization of US regions based on FaceBook data by Pete Warden is an intriguing beginning (as shown here).

It’s beyond my abilities to apply data mining or visualization to their members’ connections and degrees of relationship in order to compare social networks. But it will be fascinating to discover the patterns that characterize communities based on their members’ mindsets, geographic locale, and interconnections. I look forward to what will emerge from the social scientists who will study this subject.

Having said that, the unintended consequences of doing so might be frightening, especially if unscrupulous politicians and demagogues exploit the results to further polarize the citizenry of our already divided country.

News update: Pete Warden, the creator of the social graph above, has had to destroy the data set he culled (apparently without permission) from FaceBook in the face of threatened legal action, saying he could not afford the litigation costs.

Clearly, this is a controversial subject on many levels…