Content marketing needs a better name

via Behance

“Content marketing” is not exactly the most intuitive term in the marketing industry today.

It doesn't help that some agencies think there’s nothing wrong with slapping the label “content marketing” over everything they already do as an ad outfit.

It also doesn't help that consultants, who mean to clarify things, explain themselves in such prosaic, self-serving truisms:

• "Content marketing is about engaging the audience" (And traditional advertising aims to bore the tears out of us all?)
• "Content marketing is all about quality content" (Whereas traditional marketing is a load of crap?)
• "Content  marketing is about the content" (Is there any such a thing as marketing without content?)

What is content marketing, exactly?

Here's my attempt at an explanation.

That population white paper, and 6 common content marketing mistakes

I don't usually write about politics because it distracts from the purpose of this blog. This blog is about content, not so much about public affairs. But the ongoing contention over the Singapore Government’s latest White Paper has important lessons about the place of content and publishing in public relations.

I want to take this opportunity to explain the concept of content marketing to the public relations people that make up the majority of my meatspace professional network. It may not be the biggest example of content-strategy-gone-south from Singapore, but it is the most mainstream in recent memory.

Obstacles to plain language

Business writing, as a style, is bankrupt. Today's audience seeks a plain-speaking, authentic voice.

But this is the funny thing about plain language: While universally acknowledged as a good thing, it 's actually quite difficult to find examples of it in real-life business.

Press releases work perfectly well, thank you very much

Every now and then I come across articles helpfully pointing out that press releases have stopped working, and it's time to switch to a digital content strategy. Sometimes I don't know if marketers in the digital space are just ignorant, or if they are being dishonest in order to push their brand of marketing.

Press releases are nothing to switch “away from”. A media strategy and a digital content strategy are different things, and if anything they are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Just because you’ve stopped issuing press releases doesn’t mean you’re on the way to SEO and content marketing success.

More likely, if you didn’t know what you were doing with your press releases, you probably don’t know what you’ll be doing with your content strategy.

Going viral still isn't a strategy

What does the Singapore telco SingTel, UK sanitation pad brand Bodyform, and the US presidential race meme #bindersfullofwomen have in common? Other than that all three were news items that streamed across my Facebook page last week?

Yes, there's a good reason why I'm leading a blog post with the "What do X have in common with Y" cliché. Honest!

Writing copy for the web vs print [A satire]

Source - used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence

People don't read print the same way as they read content on the web.
The Web format allows publishers to influence readers' behaviour and perceptions. Through analytics and eye-scanning technology, we know what pages they've read previously, and what they're going to read next. Writers can present information in a logical sequence, supported by peripheral cues.
If you’re writing for print, however, you’re bound by an entirely different set of rules.

In content management, beware the 'Talker'

I've just read a HBR blog describing a customer profile that salespeople need to avoid: the "Talker". Talkers are people whom, despite being a friend of yours (or your product); despite strong connections with purchasing decision makers; despite repeated assurances of assistance, somehow fail to close the deal for you.

This passage, in particular, struck a chord:

There is a troubling paradox in the Talker. This profile embodies much of what sales leaders tell salespeople to seek out in the ideal stakeholder: they are accessible, they provide great information, they act as a hub for networking, they are pro-supplier — the list goes on and on.

In the end, however, these very traits ultimately harm their credibility inside the organization. The access they grant to the supplier and their energetic backing of that supplier results in doubt amongst their peers. Indeed, our data show that Talkers are anywhere from four to six times less able to build consensus for a purchase compared to Mobilizers.

This reminded me of the KM (knowledge management)/content management/Intranet projects I've been involved in before. For some reason, there was always at least one "Talker" leading the project.

Seriously, what's so wrong with "click here"?

Image via 365psd

Over the past week, several publications and aggregators I follow have been ripping into the practice of using "Click here" as hyperlink text. This struck me as a little odd--"Click here" has been verboten in web design practice for as long as I can remember. I'd hardly consider it a buzz-worthy subject.

And is "Click here" really so bad as to warrant repeat hazings? I certainly avoid them myself, but I was never fully convinced that the alternatives I came with was much better.

Responsive web content case study: gov.uk

One of the websites my colleagues and I have been paying attention to is the new UK government beta website. Clients have been asking us to think about what design lessons we can draw from it.

This is where I go crazy with infographics

While on a current project, I was asked to find opportunities to include infographics into the content mix. Being new to this whole infographics thing, I wondered if this print-medium artifact, which has really gotten popular this past year, really worked on screen from the usability perspective. I decided to do some research on Google to find out.

User expectations for government content

The Content Marketing Institute has just published helpful article on content development for government entities. If you are a inhouse content developer with a governmental organisation, or if you have a government client, you will find many useful tips inside the article.

This reminds me that I ought talk a bit about my current project: alpha.ecitizen.sg.

Surprise: When the message is not the medium

The idea of hiding features for users to discover is common to both content and platform, but the execution is quite different. In software, an easter egg must be well-hidden. In content, they must also be hidden--but in plain sight.

Who needs a lede?

Copyblogger founder Brian Clark has a classic piece on how to open your article with a bang. Those tips in his blog are basic strategies that belong in every writer's toolkit. (Or at least, we should all know them so that we can avoid the cliches).

They can be summarised as follows:

• the Question Opener ("What's a good way to start articles?")
• the Anecdote Opener ("'I'm really tired of this,' said Robert Scoble as this interview started.")
• the "Picture this" Opener ("Imagine: Wouldn't it be grand if all your readers paid you a dollar?")
• the Shocking Statistic Opener ("Study: 95% of your readers are bored")
• the Analogy Opener: ("What does your dog and my fruit basket have in common? Answer: Nothing.")

I happen to hold a somewhat contrarian view on the subject of ledes. I don't think blog content needs to have ledes at all.

The 'factory model' vs the social business

For some reason, I have been roped in KM (knowledge management) projects in almost every organisation I've ever worked in. All of them have failed. (No fault of mine, I swear.)

Years later, when Web 2.0 came around and the Intranet-based wiki became fashionable, it felt like déjà vu all over again.

It's recently occurred to me why social media hasn't taken off in the enterprise space. It's because of the factory model.

The influence of Influence on your bottomline

That new algorithm that Klout has just launched has routed the Klout scores of many users (including mine), creating a furore among many people. My naive reading is that people are declaring Klout is useless to them, not because its utility or lack thereof, but because the lowered score bruised their egos. If the change had created an inflation of scores instead, my guess is that opinion would have been much more divided.

The effectiveness of Klout aside, I think a large part of this anger is rooted in a persistent misunderstanding of the difference between public relations, influence, marketing, and sales.

Influence in social media is primarily a measure of relationships between peers. Specifically, it's a measure of the flow of ideas, an indication of whom is spreading ideas to whom. It's nothing to do with sales performance.

Social media influence will only affect your business directly if you're in the business of idea commerce: for example, if you're a consultant. If you're pushing products, social media influence is at best a rough proxy of brand awareness, right there at the rim of the the so-called sales funnel. And then, it's only if your market has a very narrow sales funnel--both buyer and seller are within the same tight circle, so that sales driven strongly by your reputation in the community.

On the other hand, if you're in a commoditised business (say, you run a small cafe) and new business relies entirely on awareness and people finding you, Klout is pretty much meaningless.As Marshall Kirkpatrick recently observed, Klout can be a great tool for finding people. But that's exactly it: yes, it's useful for finding people--not products.

Use the right tools for the right purpose. And stop waving that e-peen around.

Stop the sorry waste of ink

Have you ever read brochures being handed out at booths in exhibitions and conventions? Typcially, they are

• filled with copy on product features
• packed with "value propositions" that are nothing more than concatenations of buzzwords
• plastered with aspirational pictures of happy people at home or at work. Or with exciting, industry-specific stock pictures, say, photos of racks of servers.

I have no idea how effective these brochures are, even though I've even written some of them myself. I do know that a lot of them are left in bins, venue washrooms, and on the exhibition floor. I also don't really know why we continue to produce them. But I do know that our sales forces continue to ask for them.

The sympathetic design of Steve Jobs

Of all the obituaries on Steve Jobs, Slate published the one that I wished I wrote.

Join the Google+ tribe

Now that I've used Google+ for three months, I'm finally at the point where I feel comfortable writing about the social platform. I'd also like to make a case for why you would want to use Google+, and what you should use it for.