Titled The Alchemy of Content: A Formula for Overcoming 4 Major Content Pain Points, the new eBook focuses on four key content marketing pain points that brands encounter when implementing a content strategy and executing content marketing programs.

The book was written as a companion piece to the firm’s 2011 Content Supply Chain eBook that laid out a strategic framework for forecasting content needs, managing production and publication and measuring its impact on business goals.

The Alchemy of Content takes the content marketing conversation to a new level and presents a method for attacking and taming each of the four major pain points. If you’re interested in reading about these topics in greater detail, you can download the book for free here.

When we published our first ebook in 2011 on Content Supply Chain, the new content marketing model was very early in its maturation and understanding.

· Experts, thought leaders and agencies were busy redefining it and its relationship with social.

· Only a small percentage wrote about content as a holistic process and it was too early for measurable results of a successful program.

· The hottest topic was the notion of Brands as Publishers.

· The biggest pain points were related to traditional publishing demands and the ability to create amazing and disruptive content.

Fast forward to today.

· Though it is still nascent, content marketing has matured and the level of sophistication has risen as brands (particularly large enterprise) sort through the complexities.

· The conversation is less theoretical and more experience-based. And there are lessons learned thanks to early adopters such as SAP, Coca-Cola and Intel.

· Content on content has become more holistic and process-based as companies begin to operationalize internally.

· It is still a long road to ROI, but there are some common value metrics.

· We’ve gone from Brands AS Publishers to Brands ARE Publishers.

· In addition to content creation, the biggest pain points are related to organizational silos and governance issues and roles.

As my colleague Kathy Baughman explained in her latest blog post, this month we are releasing a companion piece to our ebook, The Alchemy of Content: A Formula for Overcoming 4 Major Content Pain Points, to help marketers sort through this brave new world. Hopefully it will serve as a useful tool for marketers and content strategists. Stay tuned!

It got me thinking that we talk a lot about the role of the community manager. It might be time to stop thinking about them as another FTE and start thinking about them as investments. The world of finance tells us that a good investment is one that results in a yield greater than the initial investment and continues to do so over time. Using this standard, community managers really are a good investment. Their “yield” can be seen when you take a strategic approach to community management.

Your community management strategy should take into consideration your strategic business goals and how the community can advance them. Two of the many areas where community managers make a measurable difference are service and sales.

Customer/Member Service

Your community manager can focus on reducing the number of service or support calls by monitoring common questions and developing content to address these. Also, the community manager can develop and support members within the community to provide peer counsel and resolution of issues. No matter the size of your organization, the ability to reduce the time and personnel spent on support is a great yield. In addition, a fast response from the community is a great boost to customer/member satisfaction.

Sales

Your community manager can also monitor community dialogue and activity to generate sales leads via online touch points like blog posts, eBooks and webinars. This strategic approach involves asking questions, listening effectively to needs and concerns and helping to position products and services as a solution. They can also feed this intelligence to other parts of your organization and engage them in responsive action. While you want the sales support aspects of your community manager to be subtle, the ability to monitor community activity and dialogue from a sales perspective and act on the resulting insights is a great community management yield.

When you consider other areas where your community manager and community management strategy can deliver results, like product creation, brand advocacy and customer recruitment, then the ROI is clear. And, if you have a community manager but are not getting the ROI you need, perhaps they just need some training. Check out the great on-demand education that WOMMA offers on community management. I may be biased because our team helped create this with the great folks at The Community Roundtable, but these community management training sessions cover both contextual topics like market trends, strategy, metrics, measurement and culture, as well as specific business use cases like social customer support, internal community building, community in government and more.

I believe that a great community strategy and a well-trained community manager can deliver measurable and lasting results for an organization. But like any investment, you have to nurture your community manager and have a responsive and scalable strategy in order to get the “yield” you need.

What would you do?  Nothing?  Start pushing any button that blinked red?  You’d be taking action without a clear understanding of the implications of your decisions.  You’d find out soon enough if you guessed right though.

This picture accurately depicts the amount of data that marketers have coming at them today.  Like the above picture, the data sources are almost overwhelming and more often than not, it can put the untrained or uninitiated into data overload.  Unlike the trained pilot who has a standards-based plan that goes along with anything the gauges tell him, most marketers are blind to the implications and root causes that are driving the information they receive.  Instead, they look for red blinking lights.

Unfortunately, when any light starts to blink, most respond with the same urgency as another and miss many tell tale metrics because those metrics are buried in with a host of less important ones…if it isn’t blinking, it isn’t important.  The the airplane’s cockpit jammed with all the gauges, dials, knobs, buttons and displays, finding what you need to optimize your social efforts either requires a team of highly trained professionals, or a more intelligent interface.

Having an intelligent dashboard that knows how to properly display what’s important to you rather than just showing everything can mean the difference between success and failure.  With respect to this, here are a few things that I regularly hear:

1.  Most activities look the same in terms of their level of importance.  I don’t have any way to normalize this.

2.  Information is grouped by originating source (i.e. Radian 6, Adobe, Google Analytics, Jive, etc.).  It isn’t integrated by topic or area of importance (i.e. ‘Hydraulic Systems’ if you are a pilot).

3.  I have no way of directly linking my information to key strategic imperatives (i.e. ‘Collision warning, pull up!)

4.  I have very few ways to show the direct benefit to my stakeholders of our social initiatives to the overall business enterprise (i.e. ‘This morning’s flight from Chicago to Dallas has taken 1.4 hours and we will be arriving 18 minutes early.  For those of you with tight connections, you will have plenty of time to get to your gates without sprinting’).

For several years now, we have been tracking these issues carefully, as well as, being able to effectively measure them.  We have come to learn that knowing what you are measuring and its relative importance is as important to tracking it in the first place.  We built SPI to solve these problems. 

We know that being able to make the information easy to understand and actionable is critical.  So we invented SPI (Social Performance Index).  For the first time, brands can effectively track important interdependent value metrics such as:

• Social Influence Scoring
• Engagement Indexing
• Brand Advocacy
• Content ROI
• Community Optimization 
• Cost Deflection
• Social Adoption
• Channel Comparison

We think that like the evolution to a digital, smart cockpit that makes pilots more effective and efficient, SPI will provide the same value to marketers and those throughout the enterprise who rely on them for critical insights and effective action.

If you are a marketer and rely on multiple data and information streams, SPI will most assuredly increase your effectiveness. 

To learn more about SPI, take a test drive or hear what other brands using SPI are saying, drop us a note at info@comblu.com

At the heart of the program is a community where members provide feedback to influence how the card is structured and managed; view the card’s financial performance; and share in the resulting profits. Cardmembers seemed to embrace this new ‘democratized’ construct. Customer retention improved 25% while complaints dropped by 50%. Barclaycard has found that customers who engage in the community are 70% less likely to close their account.

Forrester recognized Barclaycard Ring with a Groundswell Award in fall 2012. With such a promising first-year, we asked Jared Young, Senior Director Consumer Markets at Barclaycard US (and former ComBlu client) to share his insights on building this unique social program and give us a peek at what lies ahead.

CB: When you started down this path, it was pretty ground-breaking in the payments space. What were some of your biggest concerns going in?

Jared: Honestly, the biggest unknown was would people ‘engage’ around a credit card. This isn’t Oreos or running shoes. We were pleasantly surprised by just how much they did engage. There’s a lot of ask-and-answer activity. Members have started discussions on debt management, financial resources, and budget tools, among other things. And they step up pretty consistently with ideas and feedback – on the card, on the community itself, on how profits are allocated in our Giveback Program. Benchmarking against Lithium’s community health index shows our engagement has been strong and growing – jumping 15% in the last six months.

CB: Community crowdsourcing was core to this program. What kind of decisions have cardmembers effected so far?

The first major product decision has been to vote in a change to our late fee policy. What was really interesting is that nearly half the members weighed in on that decision. (To put that in perspective, only about 60% of Americans voted in the last Presidential election.) Each month, we open a discussion on different card features. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve talked about an “always on” grace period, rewards and even the card design. Our current topic is a hot one – fees.

Members have also made several recommendations – a number of which we’ve executed — on how the community works. For example, we adjusted the dashboards that detail how the card is performing to reflect their feedback. In total, I believe we’ve had upwards of 70 substantive ideas floated that other cardmembers have actively engaged around.

CB: Speaking of performance, talk about the Giveback Program.

If the card performs well, cardmembers share in the profits. In essence, it incents members to make good card decisions – like paying on time, going paperless and evaluating cost-benefit trade-offs in how the card’s structured. One of the coolest things is that members can choose to take the profit themselves or allocate it to a charity that the community has selected for that giveback period. Members nominate different causes; the community votes up its favorite. The current Giveback beneficiary will be Shriner’s Hospital for Children.

CB: So what’s next?

In Year One, it was all about innovation, the cool factor. This year, education is at the heart of our content strategy. We’re about to kick off a yearlong financial literacy series to help members with financial management and planning for different stages of their lives. In addition to sharing our point of view, we’ll feature other experts, articles and tools we think would be helpful in reaching their goals.

We’ll also be extending the community platform to other Barclaycard products. Later this spring, we’ll rollout a new Travel card with its own community. Our Ring cardmembers have been invited to get a sneak peek at the new site and give us their feedback.

CB: What advice would you give other marketers who are embarking on their own community journey?

One of the key lessons we’ve learned is to keep the customer at the core of the program. Your advocates are out there and willing to engage with you and share their feedback. Be ready to listen and act on that input.

Community is about creating an authentic relationship. That may take stepping out of your comfort zone and being more transparent. In our case, we spend a lot of time explaining how a card makes money – not something that most banks are willing to do. Those P&L blogs are among the most highly read.

A solid gamefication strategy is also essential. It incents consistent engagement and helps you identify your most important advocates. We tap into our best advocates regularly – and then thank them for their extra efforts. Last month, we sent a small token to our Gold and Platinum community members and got a great response.

Cardmember Philip Huff acknowledged Barclaycard Ring’s ‘superuser giveaway’ (thank you) in his blog.  Do your advocates do that?

Pain Point One: Brands recognize their role as a content publisher, but still grapple with the best way to organize the content creation and distribution process. Most of the information about organizing the marketing function as a content publisher follows the media or newsroom model. While instructive, the larger point is missed. Most brands today publish a massive amount of content. The real pain point is not having a central view of who is producing content and how to create better points of collaboration. In the typical organization, many pieces of content are being created about the same topic by multiple areas in the company with little or no awareness that the other content objects already existed or were in process. The lack of a well-defined governance process leads to inefficiencies, wasted time and resources and a suboptimal content experience both internally and externally. Many brands try to build a content organization without first understanding their full, existing content ecosystem. Failure to do this will create new, more complex pain points. Ouch!

Pain Point Two: Brands still wonder if they can continue to effectively “feed the content beast.” In fact, according to a Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs study, 64 percent of marketers say their biggest challenge is creating sufficient content. Marketers fret that they will never have enough content to reach people and stay top-of-mind at every point of the buyer’s journey. In reality, the brand will never maintain the post position in the day-to-day lives of customers, prospects and other stakeholders. Content whizzes past people’s consciousness so quickly that they barely have time to bookmark, download or save it. And even if they do, they may not remember they did so when they need it.

Many brands overcompensate for these dynamics by generating a ton of content and indiscriminately amplifying it across as many channels as possible. The real goal is to worry less about content volume and instead create fewer pieces of “epic” content that kindle an “aha” moment when a person discovers it and realizes it is just what they need right now. That is how most people consume content. They go find it when they need it.

Finding the right mix will help eliminate the “feeding the beast” syndrome as less of the content creation burden falls on the internal content team. This requires an insights process that forecasts the right content and topics along the decision journey.

Once the roadmap is complete, creating the right content becomes a more focused effort. One outcome of the insights process is the creation of filters that can be incorporated into a checklist or scorecard to gauge the overall effectiveness of each content asset. These filters would include segment relevance, message attractiveness, appropriate voice for genre or format, contribution to KPI, ability to differentiate and pertinence to the marketplace. This tool will focus authors and give editors or strategists a process to optimize the value of content. And, if the content is both emergent and engaging, it will have a longer shelf life, which can result in the need for fewer pieces of content.

Pain Point Three: Content cadence is another big conundrum. Many brands still fall into the trap of thinking they need to produce content because they have a publishing cycle that dictates “x” pieces of content per week or month. They use traditional time-stamped publishing models to schedule content. An emerging best practice is to monitor the content amplification process to uncover the natural rhythms and life cycle of your content. This will probably vary for each distribution channel and can be impacted if you publish content that regularly goes viral. However, if the nature and quality of your content is optimized, you may be able to publish less frequently with better effect.

One of the key outcomes of the insights process, referred to in Pain Point Two, is data that informs both content cadence and publication timing. It requires the brand to view the output from the insights process through a different lens; one that is time-based and will uncover natural points when content topics will have better resonance and opportunity for content breakthroughs.

Pain Point Four: Brands want to know if their content is working hard enough for the investment made. Content ROI is subjective and driven by the business mission or objectives of the content marketing program. An integrated approach to measurement yields a value story as opposed to simply tracking activity metrics. The important thing is to know which content is performing and which distribution channels provide the best positioning and consumption. The resulting data becomes another source for the insights process so that efficiencies and effectiveness evolve exponentially. Brands run into difficulty when they believe that placing multiple activity metrics next to each other on a dashboard will actually tell them a value story. The trick here is to pull metrics from multiple sources into a single dashboard for each KPI. This allows analysis that gleans insights and creates a path for appropriate action.

ComBlu’s new eBook delves into these pain points and presents a method for attacking and taming each one. If you’re interested in reading about these topics in greater detail, you can pre-register for a copy of the eBook by filling in the form below. We’ll send you a copy immediately upon publication.

Everywhere you turn today in our industry, people are talking about content marketing. Content initiatives have taken on a life of their own—with good reason—as brands are working to improve their content system in order to deliver the right content at the right place and time for consumers and business audiences alike.

What is interesting to me is that I often hear people talk about thought leadership and content marketing as though they were the same thing. But, they are not.

Forrester Research defines content marketing as the tactical process of creating communications for prospects, customers and other key target audiences. Thought leadership is defined as the strategic process of creating and sharing big ideas, insights and new perspectives on the critical issues that buyers face.

So they are different, but inextricably linked. Having managed a number of very successful thought leadership campaigns, I consider thought leadership to be all about leveraging the point-of-view expressed within a company’s content. As such, content is really the driver for a strong thought leadership program.

Once you have a point of view, it is imperative that you slice and dice the information and deliver it in a variety of formats across multiple channels. The tactics and channels will depend upon your objectives, audiences and delivery preferences.

For example, a client of ComBlu’s recently shared information on a new loan vehicle they had developed to help serve the financing needs of small business owners in the insurance, medical and franchise industries. They had compiled some research on the market needs and developed a POV in the form of a product brief. Our mission was to leverage this content to let the decision makers in these three industries know about this new finance option and how it could help them today.

ComBlu worked with our client to come up with specific reasons and examples to clearly articulate how this loan product would help companies in each distinct industry, and applied that information in several ways. We then developed the materials to secure thought leadership pieces, including:

· Authored articles on the topic that ran in trade publications and online newsletters that reach medical professionals, insurance brokers and franchise owners

· Guest blogs on related industry association websites

· Expert commentary (quotes by our thought leader) that ran in finance trend pieces written by reporters that cover the three industries

· Company blogs that were then linked to in an email campaign that went out to current and existing customers, as well as lists purchased from the related industry trade associations

It is important to point out that thought leadership is not a “once in a row” activity. Once the content is in place and a point of view is developed, a company has to continually leverage its body of work to bubble up new ideas to sustain dialogue and foster ongoing conversation. The process begins with a clear definition of the thought leadership objectives and ends with a framework to deliver thought leadership positioning that will stimulate discussion, differentiate the organization and generate action.

Thought leadership will always be linked to a company’s content, and true thought leadership will never go out of style. People in all industries will always embrace fresh thinking, new ideas and leadership. But to be effective, it must be on-target, build credibility, attract followers and lead on the issues that matter most to the target audiences.

Do you have a thought leadership example you’d like to share? I’d love to hear.

If you are planning or already managing an online community, here are some dos and don’ts to keep in mind. Remember to put yourself in your members’ shoes and ask some hard questions.

DO

• Activate your advocate base and treat them as “special”
• Allow members to engage across multiple channels seamlessly
• Provide mission-appropriate engagement opportunities
• Put a spotlight on member participation
• Offer a mobile app so that members can take the experience with them
• Experiment with new technologies and tools
• Measure what works and what doesn’t, then make course corrections

DON’T

• Forget that community is a strong post-purchase channel for engagement
• Provide a cumbersome registration and sign-in experience
• Leave up stale content, which sends a signal that you don’t care
• Moderate every single piece of content before it gets posted
• Over-package and lose the authenticity of your user-generated content
• Ask for something and not deliver
• Just rely on Facebook alone

Who does community well?

On April 24th WOMMA and ComBlu will be hosting a webinar that explores some great community tactics employed by brands such as Axe, AT&T and Marriot. Plus, we’ll delve deeper and highlight some hero brands—Whole Foods, Mountain Dew, SAP and ESPN. You will also learn how the Telecomm industry is becoming a game changer with cross-channel integration and why Healthcare is (finally) starting to embrace community building.

To learn more dos and don’ts on successful online branded communities, you can register for the webinar here. The 2012 State of Online Branded Communities report is available for download as well.

See you on April 24th!

Remember the Heinz Ketchup commercial with Carly Simon touting the virtues of anticipation along with images of ketchup with the taste that’s worth the wait?

I’m reminded of that right now as I wait in a virtual line for the ultimate ioS app that promises to tame my inbox. The app is Mailbox—an app that helps you achieve “Mailbox Zero.” The service checks your email from the cloud and delivers it at super-fast speed to your phone. From there, you can decide whether to act on it now, later or never, all with the swipe of a finger. As of writing this blog, there are 105,619 nerds in front of me in a virtual line to get the app. (On the bright side, there are 193,917 people behind me.)

The buzz began back in December when Techfluentials got early Beta access and shortly proclaimed it “the next big thing.” Said TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler, “Every now and then, I get my hands on an application or piece of technology that I can’t wait to tell the rest of the world about. Something that is a joy to use, tackles a major problem in a totally intuitive way and makes otherwise difficult tasks unfathomably easy. Something that has the potential to fundamentally change the way we do things.”

I wasn’t as lucky as Lawler. I never received early access. Or, perhaps, the invite got lost in my inbox.

In the months that followed, word of mouth continued to spread as the scrappy start-up did everything right to sustain the buzz:

· Provide early access to the media and other influencers. Check.

· Embrace social media to relentlessly tell your story. (The start-up’s trailer video alone generated more than 1.2 million views and more than 250,000 sign-ups). Check.

· Spur conversations at buzz-worthy events like SXSW. Check.

It also helps to have a killer Day Two story: the Cinderella start-up with just 13 employees had been acquired by Dropbox.

Just three weeks after launch, Mailbox revealed it was already delivering 50 million messages a day. (By comparison, it took Twitter three years before it had the infrastructure to process the same amount of messages). What’s more, the waiting list was more than 1.5 million people strong.

There was just one problem: the company didn’t have the infrastructure in place to keep up with demand and scale accordingly. To best serve customers with a good user experience, Mailbox introduced a waiting list. To get on the list, you download the Apple app to reserve your spot in line. Reservations are filled on a first-come, first-serve basis. At any moment, you can tap on the app to see your progress. And, with just one touch, you can stay current on the latest developments and discussions.

At SXSW, Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood explained that the waiting list is an honest and transparent solution. But I think it’s also brilliant in its simplicity: the ritualization of checking daily where you are in the queue keeps customers engaged and excited while the company does what it needs to do to ensure that when it’s your turn to partake, the experience is a good one.

The waiting game enables Mailbox.com to effectively sustain word of mouth as it rolls out the service to new customers. Think of all the attention Apple receives when its new iProduct finally hits the shelves and loyal consumers wait patiently—often for days—to be the first to get in.

I’m guessing I have at least a few weeks before I’ll be able to experience Mailbox firsthand. In the meantime, the company has orchestrated a brilliant campaign to keep me –wait for it — wa-a-aitin’.

Given this great investment in social media, brands have an opportunity to think differently about the ROI of social media programs. Rather than thinking about the ROI of gaining a fan, think about the Return on Involvement.

• How much time are people spending with you?
• How often are they participating in a conversation?
• How much deeper is their relationship with you?

This focus will be the driving force behind the shift of how brands are viewing the data behind social programs. Everyone knows there’s lots of data out there, but no one has yet to really make sense of how big data translates into business objectives. Therefore, companies need to start focusing on small data—a set of clean records that accurately record customer interaction with the brand. Small data sets can be very large, but the core difference is that big data contains everything happening in the
social realm, whereas small data sets contain records targeted to interactions with a brand.

By evaluating small data, marketers can implement better strategies because they will be aimed directly at what customers care about most. The social world is so large that you will never be able to get your arms around the entire thing—so stop trying! Just focus your energy on the pieces and parts that you can control and impact. The rest is just white noise.