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Pinterest And SEO: Keeping The 'Juice Suckers' At Bay

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:46:00 -0400

I’m not an SEO expert, and I never will be. Since we just published a new feature on DemandGen Report, however, dealing with how B2B marketers are using Pinterest, there’s an interesting SEO-related angle to this story that’s worth mentioning here.

Here’s the deal: Since last March, Pinterest has used “nofollow” for links to the source images pinned on the site. That means Pinterest is no longer a source of what’s referred to as “link juice” – the SEO value a web site gets from backlinks placed on other, very popular sites that Google favors for its Page Rank algorithm.

Link juice attracts SEO specialists trying to promote web sites. Those SEOs, in turn, can really screw up the sites they haunt. Here’s how Gisele Navarro Mendez describes what happens as a result:

Even though Pinterest keeps offering tons of benefits for social SEO, I’m sure this latest change will discourage many SEOs out there who weren’t interested in that, and would have shamelessly thrown tons of links only to suck the link juice out of a perfectly healthy platform. And thinking about these juice suckers going away makes me happy, because we don’t need thousands of dead profiles floating around.

As HubSpot’s Maggie Georgieva pointed out when I spoke with her last week, Pinterest has real value for driving referrals – and leads – to a B2B web site. The trick is learning how to engage with the Pinterest community, identify relevant users, and engage them with compelling visual content.

That’s not an easy trick to master, and it’s likely to be more time-consuming than slinging content via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. But if it delivers results – and if you’re taking care to measure those results – the investment might pay off.

So here’s to Pinterest keeping the “juice suckers” at bay – and to giving B2B marketers a cool new opportunity to experiment with visual content.

-Matthew McKenzie

Is Writing A Business Blog Still Worth The Effort?

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:53:00 -0400

Is blogging over the hill as a content marketing tool? You might think so, judging from this University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth study.

For the past five years, the study has tracked how enterprises are using social media. Two groups are included: The Inc. 500, which compiles the fastest-growing private U.S. companies; and the Fortune 500, which is based on revenue.

The banner finding: “Blogging is declining for the first time since 2007 among the Inc. 500 companies,” according to a press release from the university’s Center for Marketing Research. Instead, it seems, these companies are increasingly turning to Facebook and Twitter as their go-to social media platforms.

According to the study, the Inc. 500 companies are also less likely to use online video or podcasts than they were in the past.

Drill into these numbers, however, and a few things become clear:

The 2011 Inc. 500, as the study noted, was skewed more towards fast-growing government services firms – an industry that, the authors note, is “less likely to use certain social media tools” (like blogging).
Blogging at Fortune 500 companies held steady between 2010 and 2011.
92% of the companies that use blogging consider it successful.

In other words, take a study like this with a big grain of salt. When the mix of companies being studied turns into a moving target – as is clearly the case with the Inc. 500 – then the “trends” being identified from one year to the next are highly suspect.

My own take is that blogging remains vital for B2B firms for several reasons. As a content platform, you can do things with a blog that you can’t do with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. It gives you a way to create the content that ends up getting shared on those other channels , while still exercising a great deal of control over how you present your content.

And honestly, if your company treats blogging like rocket science, you’re doing it wrong.

Ultimately, the best way to judge the ROI on your blog is to measure it. Studies like this one are interesting, and they certainly spark debate. If you’re relying on them to make content marketing decisions, however, I think you’re making a mistake.

-Matthew McKenzie

This Week's 3 Big Things: Why Facebook Brand Pages Fail

Fri, 18 May 2012 15:42:36 -0400

Maybe it’s because I’m looking harder these days, but I’m more impressed than ever with the quality of the content I see on many marketing-related blogs. Case in point: Jessica Malnik’s excellent post on “The Five Reasons Why Most Facebook Brand Pages Aren’t True Communities.”

The numbers, Jessica explains, tell the story. Only 1% of the “fans” on the biggest brand pages ever engage with the brand at all. Marketers, for their part, often allow their brands’ Facebook pages to echo with the sound of crickets — more than 80% of these pages are updated less than five times a month.

Those brands that do post content? A lot of it is the digital-diet equivalent of Twinkies and Ding-Dongs: games, contests, Facebook apps, and other value-free junk that only feels valuable because it costs so much to create.

Check out Jessica’s post for more details and some suggestions about how to fix the problem if your B2B marketing is stuck in a Facebook content rut. digital-diet equivalent of Twinkies and Ding-Dongs: games, contests, Facebook apps, and other value-free junk that only feels valuable because it costs so much to create.

More proof that mobile matters. On the B2B Digital Marketing blog, Eric Wittlake offers up something we can’t get enough of lately: Hard numbers that show why a mobile strategy is now do-or-die for B2B marketers.

A couple of good examples: According to ReturnPath, mobile email clients will outnumber desktop and web-based email by the end of the year. And while about 8% of U.S. web traffic in 2012 was from mobile devices, that number doubled from Q4 of 2011.

So, what to do about this? Eric’s got some good ideas, including advice to think twice about jumping on the app bandwagon: It’s expensive, may not deliver any benefits over a web-native experience, and has next to no chance of getting wide exposure.

That doesn’t mean coughing up a generic, non-mobile optimized website – mobile users expect certain functionality from quality sites, and your site needs to take those expectations seriously.

Video blogging for fun and (yes) profit. It’s a vicious cycle: People who record video blogs act super-serious because they don’t want to seem foolish. Yet when they try too hard to act super-serious, they end up – you guessed it – looking foolish.

One way to avoid this trap is to never, ever video blog. The other (and much better) way is to loosen up, lighten up, and learn that you can have fun with video content without seeming frivolous or lightweight.

Ryan Critchett at Problogger offers his own experience as a video blogger for RMC Tech as an example. His iGraveyard series of videos helped turn his small tech-repair business into a nationwide operation. And his secret success equation is simple: “Entertainment + silliness = trust.”

Maybe that recipe won’t work for every B2B marketer. But I think Ryan offers an important lesson here: The best video content doesn’t have to be slick, and it certainly doesn’t have to be stiff. No matter what business you’re in, honesty and humanity will go a long way towards pushing your video blogs and other video content to the next level.

The Best B2B Content Format: All Of The Above

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:59:37 -0400

by Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

The results of our 2012 Content Preferences Survey are now available via SlideShare. We asked scores of executives at top B2B companies to tell us how they find, use, share and evaluate marketing content, and they gave us some fascinating answers.

I won’t rehash the entire survey here – the SlideShare presentation tells the story. But here’s an interesting point that deserves a closer look: The notion that “new” content formats like video and infographics are displacing “old” formats like white papers and E-books doesn’t seem to be correct.

As it turns out, the truth is a lot more complicated. We asked executives to rank nine different content formats as either “most valuable,” “somewhat valuable,” or “least valuable.” Most of these formats got a “least valuable” ranking in the single digits, and none of them ranked higher than 13% in that category.

Content Preferences Survey

In other words, today’s B2B executives value a wide variety of content types. They embrace diversity, and I’m guessing that they consider different content types valuable in different ways.

Video, infographics and other interactive content is clearly valuable; ignore it at your own risk. But don’t go nuts with an all-in “visual web” strategy that treats the written word as a second-class citizen. Our survey results are clear: An “either/or” strategy isn’t nearly as valuable as an “all of the above” approach when it comes to creating effective B2B marketing content.

Bootstrap Blogging 101: 5 Tips For Guest-Blogging Success

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:48:00 -0400

by Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

Contributing guest posts to other blogs can be a great way to bootstrap your own B2B blogging strategy. It gives you a great chance to build an audience by getting exposure on blogs that already have a strong following.

The idea is simple: When readers love your guest post, they’ll want more. When they want more, they’ll go looking for your web site and your original content. And when they find it, at least some of them will turn into repeat visitors – and prospects.

Since guest contributors give the host blog access to a rich and varied pool of original content, it’s a win-win situation. In fact, many of the biggest and most successful blogs, including those with a B2B focus, regularly feature guest contributors.

Before you start cranking out guest posts, however, remember that guest blogging can also be a colossal waste of time if you don’t think carefully about where, how and why to contribute. You’re not doing yourself any good if your guest posts reach the wrong audience, and you really aren’t doing yourself any good if you annoy editors with dumb questions or irrelevant content.

When you go looking for guest blogging opportunities, keep these five tips in mind, and you’ll have a much easier – and more profitable – time:

Don’t offer duplicate content as a guest blog post. It’s tempting because it’s easy: Just “repurpose” some of your existing content and offer it up as a guest post. You might get away with it at first, but a savvy blog editor will spot duplicate content, and they won’t be happy about it. Even if they don’t nail you to the nearest wall, Google just might – because Google hates this sort of thing.
Do check for guest-blogging guidelines. Many sites welcome guest bloggers. In fact, they’re so used to working with guest contributors that they already have a copy of their submission guidelines available to view. Before you reach out to a site publisher or editor, look for a copy of their guidelines. If you find them, read them and follow them to the letter. This is often an editor’s first test of a guest contributor: If they can’t follow basic instructions, they probably can’t write a compelling guest post. (Here’s a great example of what guest blogging guidelines look like.)
Do research your guest-blogging options. You have one goal as a guest blogger: Get in front of the right audience for your industry and your content. Anything else is a waste of your time – even (or especially) if you contribute a fantastic guest post that lots of people read. Start with a basic Google keyword search on some relevant keywords, and then select a few relevant blogs to kick off your guest-posting effort.
Don’t act (or write) like a sleazy sales chimp. A guest post is a great chance to practice your B2B content marketing chops. That means putting your readers first; anticipate their needs, offer relevant advice and build trust relationships. This isn’t the time or place to engage in self-serving branding exercises – even if the blog’s editor is foolish enough to let you try.
Do let readers know who you are and where to find you. Guest blogging is a quid pro quo: You contribute great content, and the blog gives you access to a receptive audience. Some of those folks (you hope) will want to read more of your content or learn more about your company, and your guest post should include basic biographical info along with a link back to your own site. Exactly how this is done depends upon the blog, and it’s usually spelled out in the contributor guidelines. If a blog doesn’t allow guest contributors to add a link back to their own sites, then you might want to pass – it’s hard to justify the ROI on a marketing effort where nobody can tell who you are or where you came from.

Finally, here’s a bonus tip: Guest blogging is about building relationships, not about spraying your name and content all over the Web. Pay-to-play “blog networks” have always been a terrible idea, especially for B2B marketers with very specific audience-development requirements. And now that Google is coming down harder on these networks, the best thing you can do is stay away from them. Your guest-blogging strategy should focus on blogs that built their own audiences the hard way – by serving up content that audiences trust and find useful.

B2B Communities & Buyer Engagement: Does Size Matter?

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

by Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

Last week, I had a chance to hear Forrester Analyst Lori Wizdo speak at an online seminar: “Integrating Social in the Lead-to-Revenue Process.” She offered lots of great statistics about social media and B2B buyers, and quite a few useful tips.

When I listen to these things, however, there are always one or two points that stand out from the rest. Lori’s presentation was no exception.

This time, it was research that detailed what B2B buyers find most compelling when they engage with an online social community. Nearly half said they most valued the expertise that other participants offered; many others cited the quality of the discussion and topics as their biggest draws.

Here’s the shocker: Only 12% said “volume of activity” mattered to them, only 7% said the size of the community mattered, and a paltry 6% said they cared about how long the community has been around.

Now, let’s connect the dots with two more interesting numbers: 55% of B2B buyers cite online communities or forums as influencers on their buying decisions, and a whopping 86% say they engage on social channels while they’re working.

The bad news here is that B2B marketers who want to engage – really engage – with high-quality communities have their work cut out for them. After all, the easiest way to decide where to focus one’s efforts is to seek out the biggest or most active communities.

It’s a lot harder to figure out where the most influential people hang out or where people post the most insightful comments. When you trade quantity for quality, it takes more research and a studied eye to make the right decisions.

The good news is that putting in the work will pay off in the long run. B2B buyers seek out these communities specifically to research their options; they play a critical role in moving buyers from being merely curious to purchase-ready prospects.

So, where do you get started with a community-driven engagement strategy? Our advice is to begin with LinkedIn, where you can find B2B discussions on virtually every topic – and where the quality-over-quantity approach is often on prominent display. Hang out, pay attention, get a feel for how these groups work, and when you engage, engage carefully.

Remember that you’re a participant in a community, not a salesperson hunting for prospects. B2B buyers can spot the difference a mile away, and nothing will kill a community faster than a hard-sell attitude.

This Week's 3 Big Things: Crafting A Perfect Call To Action

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

We’re big readers here at C4D. We’re especially fond of the blogs that we see lately covering content marketing in general and the B2B space in particular. It’s amazing how many smart people are thinking about – and writing about – these topics.

Each week, I’m going to highlight three of the best content marketing-related blog posts that I come across. Cut me some slack if I go back a few days on this first batch – it’s hard to pick when there’s such an embarrassment of riches.

Crafting killer CTAs. Ardath Albee opened our Content2Conversion event last month with a really good keynote address. In a recent blog post, Ardath follows up on a question she received during that session about how to create effective calls to action for B2B marketing content.

Ardath isn’t a fan of CTAs that basically invite prospects to get hassled by salespeople. You’re wasting your content on that kind of stuff. Instead, Ardath offers a great list of ways to think about creating CTAs that engage your prospects, invite them to learn more and set your company apart from the competition.

HIPAA and Dodd-Frank and SarbOx, oh my! Marketing expert David Meerman Scott recently covered the pushback he gets from marketers working in healthcare, financial services, and other highly regulated industries. They all tell him the same story: If we try to do content marketing, our lawyers will eat us alive. And if they don’t, the government will.

Get over it. Allowing lawyers to dictate your marketing strategy sounds to me like suicide by another name. David agrees – for example, he’s astounded at the disconnect between healthcare companies that are terrified of the Internet and healthcare consumers who use the Internet as a valuable information-gathering tool.

David offers a great case study that looks at one healthcare firm’s decision to shake off its paralysis and get involved with online content marketing. There’s great stuff here for B2B and B2C marketers alike.

Mining the content motherlode. Over at the Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi has a post with 3 Ways to Extract Brand Stories from Inside the Company. I think “extract” is an interesting way to put it, since many marketers would rather have teeth pulled than beg their CEOs or other executives to contribute content.

Joe’s response: The “raw material for content marketing” is there, and it’s waiting to be turned into pure gold. The secret is knowing how to build a process to get that done, gathering the right resources, and learning how to tell stories (even if your executives can’t). The good news here is that you’ll probably be amazed at just how much wonderful content you can find sitting right under your noses – if you know how to recognize it.

Could Amazon's Kindle Be The Next Frontier For B2B Content Marketing?

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

by Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

Content marketers often gate their content. But they almost never sell it. The very idea seems crazy.

Yet it’s possible that one very popular distribution platform doesn’t just allow marketers to sell their content – it practically demands selling content.

I’m talking about publishing for the Amazon Kindle. There’s a fascinating post over on Copyblogger about this possibility. (I won’t call it a trend – that would be a gross overstatement.) “Given the option between paying nothing and paying, let’s say, a dollar for the same product,” writes James Chartrand, “some people voluntarily choose the paid version.” In other words, when offered basically the same content for free online or for a small fee via Kindle, they’ll opt for the Kindle version.

Why would anyone pay a buck (or at least 99 cents) for content they can get for free elsewhere? Part of it is psychological: People aren’t used to paying for web content, but they are quite comfortable paying for an E-book. Part of it is the format, which is convenient and flexible.

But come on now. Can B2B marketers really get away with monetizing their content? More to the point, can they use the Kindle platform to reach a target audience and engage with prospects?

The jury is still out on this one. Chartrand offers just one example in his post, and that one doesn’t really go into details about how well it worked. And since it’s completely possible to give away content for the Kindle, I also wonder whether trying to monetize this content – even at a token price – is a smart move for B2B marketers.

What I do expect to see is more B2B marketers experimenting with free content for the Kindle and other E-book formats. It’s not so much the format itself that interests me, though, it’s the distribution channel.

If anyone can shed more light on these questions, please drop me a line or post a comment below. Is the Kindle the next frontier for B2B content marketing, or is this an idea whose time will never come?

3 Reasons Why Mobile-Ready Content Is A Do-Or-Die Challenge B2B Marketers

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

by Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

This week’s Content2Conversion event in New York City was a huge success. I’m not saying that as a DemandGen Report editor – I’m saying it as somebody who has attended a lot of events over the years. It’s insanely hard to pull off these kinds of events, and this one went off incredibly well.

Some of the best sessions focused on two very hot topics: mobile content and video. Both are critical for B2B marketers, and they know it.

Or do they? Being vaguely aware that mobile content is important is one thing. But it’s another to really get just how little time there is to adapt or die. These two facts – both presented during Christina “CK” Kerley’s conference session – prove the point:

According to Gartner, we’ve got no more than three years, and possibly as little as a year, before mobile becomes the default “first screen” viewing platform for B2B content.
Google is going to use mobile site page-load times as part of its search-rank algorithm. Slow-loading sites will be at a disadvantage to fast-loading ones in Google’s results.
Here’s a third data point revealed by DemandGen Report’s own Content Preferences Survey:
Around 40% of the executives surveyed said they already regularly access B2B content on their mobile phones, while 23% access it using a tablet device.

Here’s my own take on the mobile challenge: Too many B2B marketers aren’t yet on top of this issue. I spend a fair amount of time viewing B2B content on my iPad, and what I see varies wildly from very good to simply atrocious.

Getting up to speed with mobile-ready and optimized content won’t be easy and it usually won’t be cheap. But if these numbers tell you anything, it’s this: You no longer have any choice if you want to build a meaningful B2B content presence.

5 Tips For Hosting A Successful Webcast

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

by Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

I have been told that I’ve got a voice for print — and a face for radio. In spite of that, I sometimes get asked to host live webcasts. The fact is, webcasts are important content marketing tools; they’re great for engaging with your prospects, sharing quality information in an exciting format, and driving qualified leads.

Yet webcasts aren’t my favorite things to do. I’m one of those people who rank “public speaking” just ahead of “dying in a fire” on a list of scary things. One thing that I’ve learned, though, is that recording a podcast or webcast gets a LOT easier once you’ve done it a few times.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that before it got easier, I made my share of dumb mistakes. Here are some things I learned along the way to get more comfortable and confident hosting live webcasts.

1. Learn to work without a (big) net. I went into my first live webcast with a carefully prepared script and an exhaustive list of questions for my guests. I thought the structure would make me more comfortable. Instead, it turned me into an obsessive mess: I spent more time trying to find my place on my “script” than I did actually engaging with my guests.

After that, I learned to work with a very brief piece of boilerplate text to set up the event and introduce my guests. I distilled everything else that I wanted to say into a few lines of bullet-point items — or simply winged it. The results aren’t always smooth, but they beat coming across as stiff and over-scripted.

2. Practice – but don’t rehearse. I learned a lot by listening to my archived webcasts. I discovered, for example, that I really have to work at not saying “umm” every few seconds when I talk. It’s an incredibly annoying habit, and while I still fall into it from time to time, practice definitely makes perfect.

3. Breathe! I worry a lot about leaving too much “dead air” when I launch into a live webcast. After listening to myself a few times, though, I discovered that I had exactly the opposite problem – I was speaking so fast that I practically stumbled over my own words.

Now I force myself to breathe and to speak slowly. A cadence that feels glacial in the moment is actually just about right when I go back and listen to it.

4. Learn to listen. There are two ways to interview a guest. The first is way to sleep-walk through a scripted list of questions. The second way is to come into the interview with a list of questions but also to try asking at least one follow-up to every response.

The second approach takes practice (or at least it did for me). Instead of worrying about the next question on your list, you have to listen, think and look for openings where a follow-up question can work. You won’t always find an opening, but when you do it makes for a much more dynamic interview.

5. Get the audience involved. Some live webcasting platforms support audience polling tools. I think they’re a great way to break up live presentations and to get the audience more involved in a topic. Webcasts also allow audience members to ask questions, and it’s a good idea to include a few minutes for a Q&A session. (This is harder to do with pre-recorded webcasts, although you can solicit audience questions beforehand.)

Audience engagement is useful for its own sake, but it also gives me an easy way to keep the conversation going when I draw a blank!

So there they are: My hard-earned lessons for webcasting success. Over the last few years, these tips have actually helped me get fairly comfortable with online broadcasting. And believe me – if I can do this, you can definitely do it.

Study Reveals 5 Hot Trends In Social Media Marketing

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:39:00 -0400

Social Media Examiner just issued the results of its fourth annual Social Media Marketing report. There’s a lot to digest here, but it’s well worth the effort with more than 3,800 marketers participating in the study.

Here are some of the highlights from the 2012 study:

Everybody is doing it. Well, almost everybody: 94% of marketers said they use social media to market their businesses.
But NOT everybody thinks it’s important. 83% of marketers “said that social media was important to their business,” which is actually down from 90% in 2011. On the other hand, half of the marketers strongly agreed social media was important, so those who support it tend to really support it.
Marketers are hungry for hard ROI. According to the study, 40% of those surveyed “want to know how to measure the return on investment of social media.”
Video content is big and getting bigger. More than three quarters of marketers “plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing.” That makes it the top content marketing investment in 2012. (And this isn’t the first study we’ve seen that proves video is taking off as a marketing content format.)
Social media can generate leads. More than 60% of marketers say that spending as little as six hours a week on social media can create benefits in terms of lead generation. This is also one area where experience pays off: That number goes up to 78% among marketers with more than three years of social media marketing experience.

I’m just scratching the surface with this summary, which is understandable since the report runs to 40-plus pages. And while the study has a general marketing focus rather than a B2B focus, there’s still plenty of good information here for B2B marketers. If your content marketing strategy works hand in hand with social media – and that’s true for most companies these days – it’s worth taking a closer look.

Custom Content Survey: Variety Is The Spice Of Life For Smart Content Marketing

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:33:47 -0400

by Matt McKenzie, Contibuting Editor

The Custom Content Council just released the results of its 2012 Industry Characteristics Study. Here’s the most important takeaway: Content marketing isn’t a battle between print and digital. This isn’t a zero-sum game, and in fact the custom content landscape is more diverse than it has ever been.

Case in point: Nearly 90% of the companies surveyed still produce print content. Yet the number using Web content has gone up from 77% to 82% over the past three years. The number creating email-based content during that period increased from 66% to 71%.

Digital Content Grows – Video Content Grows Faster

Video content, however, was the biggest winner in a strong field: In 2009 just 37% of the companies surveyed were using video. Today that number has jumped to 52% — the fastest growth of any content category. More marketers than ever before are also adding virtual events and white papers to the content mix.

In fact, out of eight content marketing formats included in the study, just one – E-zines – dropped in popularity this year.

The study also asked participants whether they intended to do more or less with various non-print content formats in the future (as illustrated by the following chart from the CCC study). Once again, the big winner was video: 54% of the companies surveyed said they planned to produce more video content in the future. Virtually none of the companies said they planned to do less of any content format, although some – like white papers and e-zines – are forecast to hold steady at their current levels.

3 Bad Habits That Will Cripple Your Content – And How To Avoid Them

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:32:00 -0400

You already know that typos are the kiss of death for B2B content marketing. They make your content – and your company – look sloppy and disorganized. That’s especially true for long-from content like white papers and case studies where every detail counts.

Yet there’s another class of content errors that slip under the radar. In some ways, they’re even worse than typos because they’re much more insidious. They’ll undermine your authority and annoy your readers – even when they can’t quite figure out what’s bugging them.

In spite of this, some companies actually embrace these bad habits. They associate them with “real” business writing, so they don’t have a problem with them.

That fact gives you an easy opportunity. If you learn how to spot these bad habits and hammer them out of your prose, you’ll create far more effective content. Your readers will instinctively see you as more authoritative and trustworthy – especially compared to your competitors. It’s not always easy, but it’ll be well worth the effort.

1. Cut back on passive voice. This is the biggest style-related issue that I see in B2B marketing content. Passive voice is especially common in academic, legal and technical writing where authors strive to present themselves as objective and unbiased.

There’s just one problem: Passive voice doesn’t make you sound objective, and it certainly doesn’t make you sound authoritative. Readers instinctively associate passive voice with “weasel words” and evasive, buck-passing behavior. (When you hear somebody admit that “mistakes were made,” you know exactly whom to blame!)

Passive voice isn’t a grammatical error, and it’s not always a bad choice. When in doubt, however, I prefer not to use it. (There are some great resources online to help writers recognize passive voice and to use it judiciously.)

2. Stop sending a noun to do a verb’s work. Nominalization is passive voice’s annoying kid brother – the one who says things like “gave a report” instead of “reported” or “made a decision” instead of “decided.” Like passive voice, it’s especially attractive to scientists and technical experts who want to make their writing sound objective.

Unfortunately, nominalization often sounds clumsy and vague. Writers who use nominalization as a crutch risk undermining their own authority; they beat around the bush so much that readers get bored and wander away.

As with passive voice, there are cases where nominalization can be useful, but those exceptions are few and far between.

3. Avoid redundancies. If your business “evolves over time,” “grows in size” or “looks ahead to the future,” then you’re using redundant language. This can be a tough problem; many redundancies feel appropriate because we’re so used to hearing them in everyday use, especially in spoken language. They may also serve a legitimate purpose, such as when you’re trying to emphasize a point.

Use redundancies sparingly, however, and you’ll create lighter, more readable content. If past history is any indication, that will give you a very favorable advantage!

5 Point Checklist To Create Content That Establishes Customer Trust

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:29:00 -0400

by Amanda F. Batista

A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times published an Op/Ed piece, a first-hand chronicle of a Goldman Sachs executive’s resignation. The article underscored why Greg Smith, now a former executive director, could no longer in good conscience be a part of the firm.

“To put the problem in the simplest terms,” Smith wrote, “the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money.”

Smith emphasized how this ultimately impacts Goldman Sachs’ business: “It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”

Client trust is not easy to build, particularly in the financial services industry. But Smith validates a basic challenge most companies face, as many buyers are wary when they initiate key business discussions. They need to make sure that they can trust a potential partner. If they decide they can’t, as Smith says, they’ll take their business elsewhere.

Content marketing helps B2B organizations connect the dots on their buyer’s journey. But beyond that, the right content can drive repeatable success — built on trust. By establishing credibility, expertise and knowledge of market trends and needs, content can be your ticket to building trust relationships.

So how do you use content to build trust? Think about your customers, and most importantly, think about why they’re seeking out your solution or service. Then develop messaging that speaks to their needs and objectives. Check out this five-point checklist for developing “trustworthy” content:

Understand your buyer and develop personas that you can enlist when crafting messaging, campaigns and collateral. If you don’t know your buyer, they won’t even want to get to know you.
Feel their pain by providing resources and examples that demonstrate your understanding of their key challenges. Your understanding of their market pressures and realities not only helps satisfy customers, it also positions your organization in a unique thought leadership role.
Hold nothing back when it comes to sound decision-making for your customers. If you have an opportunity to upsell, but it’s not a direct fit for a customer’s needs, then don’t do it! A small, incremental sacrifice today could pay long-term dividends in customer lifetime value.
Provide a variety of resources to let your customers choose how they consume information about your brand and services. If you package content in different formats, you’re more likely to appeal to different buyer preferences and needs. For example, start with an E-book, and then repackage bite-sized pieces of that content into videos or mobile podcasts for on-the-go prospects.
Evaluate your internal resources to ensure that your entire team shares your company’s culture and core values. Remember that one rotten apple spoils the bunch, and if customers have an unpleasant interaction they won’t just walk — they will TALK!

[INFOGRAPHIC] Email Hosting Puts Businesses on the Road to Competitive Advantage

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:35:56 -0400

Email is a mission-critical function in most businesses today, and efficient management of email services is vital to ensuring maximum uptime and productivity. Hosted email platforms can have a profound impact on the accessibility, mobility, and productivity of organizations of any size to enable employees to focus on high value tasks that drive competitive advantage. Check out the numbers in this infographic that illustrate some mind boggling numbers related to business email.

Khan Academy: A Low Cost Lesson In High-Impact Video

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:40:00 -0400

Over the past few weeks, I have spent a lot of time with my Khan Academy iPad app. I had heard about Khan Academy before – who hasn’t these days? – but this was my first time actually using the course material.

It has been a revelation. Partly because it’s a great way to learn about, well, pretty much anything. (I’m currently geeking out on credit default swaps and how they contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.) But it’s also interesting to me because of the lessons B2B marketers can learn from how and why Khan Academy earned its success.

First, if you don’t yet appreciate just how popular and even beloved Khan Academy is with students around the world, you should check it out on YouTube. There’s a reason why Bill Gates is a huge fan – so much so that Gates uses Khan Academy tutorials to teach his own kids. Sal Khan is truly a heroic figure – one person who has improved the lives of millions around the world.

What makes this really amazing is Sal Khan’s approach to teaching. His production “infrastructure” is a walk-in closet in his home, where he keeps a few hundred dollars’ worth of audio/video equipment. His teaching style is humble, approachable, low-tech and low-key. Khan’s mini-lectures focus on a single, relatively concentrated topic or idea; his videos are never longer than 10 minutes apiece.

I can’t help but think about Khan’s approach in terms of how it applies to my day job. As I recently posted, video is now the fastest growing type of marketing content. Yet the video content that I see on B2B web sites often misses the mark. It confuses slickness with quality; it pushes in-your-face branding and PR-heavy content.

In many cases, this kind of video content doesn’t even pretend to engage viewers in a dialogue. It’s painfully clear that it’s a one-way “conversation,” taking the same passive approach to consuming video that we have learned from decades of staring at our living-room TVs.

Do You Have The Khan-Do Attitude?

Here’s a challenge to B2B marketers: What could your company do with a Khan Academy approach to creating video content? Can you strip down and unplug your messages, and still deliver something substantial? Are you capable of breaking your key messages – technology ideas, business challenges, whatever – into bite-sized pieces that are crystal-clear and totally accessible?

Can you produce video that allows your thought leaders to engage with viewers on what feels like a one-on-one basis, with none of the trappings that usually come with “professional” video production?

Can you use video to launch a conversation, instead of conducting a monologue? Could you do it on less money than you’d spend taking your team out to lunch?

I’m not saying that all B2B video marketing content needs to have an Ed Wood budget and a 10-minute time limit. I am suggesting that we need to think a lot more carefully about what we can and should accomplish with video. Otherwise, I’m concerned that the future of B2B video content is going to involve throwing a lot of good money after bad.

Google Drops The Hammer On Shoddy Content

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:55:10 -0400

by Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

Over the years, I have worked with companies that viewed search engine optimization (SEO) as a tool for promoting high-quality, original content. I have also worked with a few companies that viewed SEO as a way to sucker people into viewing worthless content.

Google is determined to make life easier for companies that take the first approach to content marketing. It’s also determined to make life miserable for those that take the second approach. I wish them luck.

Changes to Google’s search algorithm are nothing new; they’ve been regular occurrences for the better part of a decade. Starting last year, however, the changes in Google’s so-called “Panda” algorithm update dropped the hammer on sites that rely upon repetitive, derivative content. Some of the most notorious online “content mills” saw their traffic drop by 50% or more.

And Google isn’t done yet. Earlier this month, Google technologist Matt Cutts spoke at a SXSW panel about the company’s next round of algorithm changes. Here’s what Cutts said, courtesy of a transcription posted by SearchEngineLand’s Barry Schwartz:

What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO? We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

There’s been some hand-wringing online about how Google’s use of “semantic search” technology could capture more page views at the expense of sites that appear in the company’s search results. This is an interesting issue, but I think it’s overblown – especially since so much of what’s going on there is still speculative.

At Cutts’ remarks make clear, Google’s attack on SEO abuse isn’t speculative at all.

This is a zero-sum game. There are only so many spots at the top of Google’s search results. Thanks to these changes, companies that focus on creating quality content will have a better shot than those that focus on SEO.

Of course, the best marketers will always use SEO to promote high-quality content. But if you needed any proof that the content – and not SEO – is now the most important part of this process, Google is about to provide it.

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Study: The 'Mobile Web' Is Still Mostly a Myth

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:07:00 -0400

by Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

Here’s an interesting nugget for B2B marketers trying to get a grip on when – or whether – to invest in mobile-ready content: Less than 10% of the Web is mobile-friendly today.

These aren’t the guys putting big bucks into iPad apps. They’re the ones doing something – anything, really – to make their sites usable for visitors on mobile devices.

Here’s a second data point, courtesy of SearchEngineLand.com contributor Michael Martin: Half of all consumers won’t recommend a bad mobile site to others, and 40% will go to a competitor’s site instead.

Don’t Make Your First Impression a Bad One

This is another case where I think it pays to apply B2C knowledge to B2B challenges. For many consumers, mobile isn’t just about usability. It’s about credibility. Sites that feel slow, or outdated, or somehow “broken” come across as less than trustworthy. Once consumers take that attitude towards a web site, they’ll quickly apply it to the brand behind that site.

That’s important, because I know that some B2B marketers wonder whether mobile is a good fit for their content – who reads a white paper on a smartphone? It’s a valid point, but it’s not the one your organization should be focused on.

Instead, focus on the emotional impact your site will have on a prospect. When they visit from a smartphone or a tablet, what kind of experience are you giving them? Do you come across as competent and efficient?

Whatever you do, don’t read that 10% figure as proof that your mobile strategy belongs on the back burner because nobody else is doing a good job with mobile, either. This is a fantastic opportunity to put your competitors into a very tough spot by making their mobile presence look backwards compared to your own. Once you’ve got a mobile-ready platform in place, you can tailor an appropriate B2B content marketing strategy to take advantage of it.

In the process, you’ll send your prospects a very important signal about your company’s credibility as a B2B partner.

Twitter And B2B Content Marketing: The Keys To Credibility

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:06:00 -0400

What can social media do to help – or hurt – your content marketing efforts? Not surprisingly, the answer is all about creating and maintaining your credibility.

A recent research paper from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University focused in particular on how Twitter users assess the credibility of tweets. Here are the top traits associated with a tweet that add credibility:

Clearly, there’s a great deal of value to be had in building and nurturing a Twitter following that includes influencers – those retweets from trusted users are social media gold. On the other hand, you have to wonder about the importance attached to Twitter verification, since there are clearly some very serious problems with the process.

I’m actually more interested in the traits that are least likely to boost a tweet’s credibility:

I find these interesting because there are a number of action items here for B2B marketers who need to promote content on Twitter. Perhaps surprisingly, details matter when it comes to grammar and punctuation in a tweet. Swapping out a corporate logo with an actual user image will help, as will customizing your Twitter homepage. Also, be sure you don’t get into a situation where you follow more people than you have following you.

Finally, the study turns up some interesting results when it looks at the relationship between credibility and the method used to find a particular tweet:

It shouldn’t come as a shock that Twitter users consider content more credible when it comes from people they follow than when it turns up in search results. I don’t need any scientific analysis to explain why: This is human nature, plain and simple. Yet for B2B marketers struggling to fine-tune their Twitter presence, where the signal-to-noise ratio can sometimes be overwhelming, these findings are a timely reminder that you really do need to sweat the details.