There are common sense principles like “don’t talk about yourself all the time,” and “don’t ask for something without providing value in return.” Direct Marketing News offers a list of “check yourself” advice for social media marketers.

I especially like this bit of thinking from Rapp’s Fritz Desir:

Many brands run into difficulty—especially at the content development level—because internal departments aren’t sure what they’re getting from the company’s social campaigns, Desir says. If there’s one rule of thumb, it is to start small and claim—as in publicize—all easy victories. When applied correctly, social media can feed internal inspiration as much as it can speed external communication.

When rolling out a social campaign, remember your internal audience(s). Not only do you want to satisfy and motivate staff with Facebook posts, you want to make people proud of the company they get up and go to work every morning. That’s a tall order for a Facebook post, but it’s also real. A Facebook post — lightweight though it may be — is just the thing one’s friends or family will see and share in their own networks, so each post needs to be made with care.

Ask yourself, have you hugged your Facebook fans (staff included) today? Have you made the people who care about your company smile, guffaw out loud (GOL), think deep thoughts and/or reach for their wallets?

In the old days, “brand voice” was mostly conceptual. It was about tone of voice, not an actual voice. Today, brand voice is more factual, and less conceptual. It’s a living breathing thing, like the Internet herself. Brand voice is also a composite of many voices inside and outside the company. That part is not new, what’s new is the need for a responsive, near “real time” communications infrastructure. Bonehook can help with this, by the way.

Digital demands speed, accuracy and consistency, but let’s not forget quality in the rush to fill content holes. Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus told me last week, “The meme-style ads (we see on Facebook) are a passing fancy. Great work has to look like it, not like it was made by some 24 year-old with an unlicensed copy of Photoshop.”

That’s an interesting POV and one we might debate. Meme-style ads are popular for a reason. My thoughts are that they blend well with a variety of other approaches. Ideally, a brand mixes it up with news from inside the company, product or service updates, customer-generated media campaigns with promotional legs, and an expansive outlook that supports the larger community around the brand (by curating and pointing to things customers care about).

At this time, I am connected to The Content Strategist, a blog published by Contently, although I have yet to produce a story for the publication.

Contently also provides writers a portfolio to showcase their digital “tear sheet.” I appreciate the free service, as long form brand-sponsored copy is a different beast from ad copy. Thus, it makes sense for me to showcase the two individually.

You’ve heard the new media maxim, “Every company is a media company,” which is sometimes expressed as EC=MC? It is a nice thought, but it’s not accurate. “Every company has an opportunity to make meaningful media” is the actual state of affairs.

Of course, making “meaningful media” elegantly and consistently, day-in and day-out is a challenge for clients and for their agency partners. Bonehook exists to make this challenge easier to win.

“People hate advertising in general, but they love advertising in particular,” she reflects. “We have to make people love advertising in general. We have to move from making good advertising to making advertising good.”

Midway through her Guardian talk, Gallop says brands must progress from co-creation to co-action. For her, making content together is not enough. She wants brands and consumers to “act” in concert in the real world to solve real world problems. I have to say I love the high-mindedness.

Most future-forward marketers and brands have only gotten as far as co-creation. They invite consumers to create content and to share it. I believe the future of marketing is co-action. Brands and consumers micro-acting together to create impacts in the real world that benefit consumers, benefit society and benefit the brand and its business. I believe the future of business is about doing good and making money simultaneously. It’s what I mean when I say we have to focus moving from making good advertising to making advertising good.

We always want the advertising we make to work. But we’ve rarely bother to ask what that means, beyond increased exposure, loyalty and market share for our clients and thus more business for us. Gallop does ask however, and she believes brands can have a much larger impact in people’s lives than any ad campaign will ever allow. She’s saying a brand is what a company believes in and what it does. I happen to agree wholeheartedly. The question is how does this truth impact our work and our business relationships with clients?

The new reality is we need to help guide and continually improve the brand experiences for our client’s customers. In other words, making a new ad campaign is pointless if the real life brand experience is lacking. For instance, we might make a brilliant ad campaign for hotel, but if the hotel has poor customer service, or dirty rooms, the advertising becomes a lie.

Gallop says you can create any business model you want, and that it pays to follow your passion. For me, and thus for Bonehook, being in the brand experience business makes the most sense (it’s consumer advocacy meets brand advocacy for the betterment of all). I still love to make ads, and ads are still key to communicating brand value. But ads are not the end, they’re one means to new highly enriched brand-customer relationships.

To help clarify matters, and to show marketers the way forward, I put together this presentation which outlines the big opportunities in content marketing. Please take a look and send over any thoughts or questions you may have.

To my mind, content is much more than media in support of brand initiatives. Content is what a brand is and what a brand does. Also, content fuels brand experiences and helps create the right conditions for customer interest and loyalty.

I particularly like this selection from his list:

Brand as compass. A brand is not just the sign on the outside of the building. It is also the compass inside the building. It should guide investments, decisions, virtues and values. It should help determine what you serve, who you serve and even when you serve. Chick-Fil-A is a good example of how important this is, whether you agree with them or not.

Of course, I would like it given that Bonehook’s logo can be seen as a compass. In fact, I am in the process of creating a self-promo display ad that will read, “Find your brand’s true north.”

To me, our job as ad men is to reveal our clients’ brand truths in smart, memorable ways that drive sales. It’s that simple, although it is far from simple.

Sadly, what I sometimes see from prospective clients and also when meeting people at cocktail parties, is a concept about what I do that is totally foreign to the one that drives me to get out of bed in the morning. Generally speaking, people believe my job is to dress up a brand, when actually it is to strip it from any and all artifice.

Why am I meeting with Strategy execs versus Creative Directors? I don’t know. But a quick look at my LinkedIn page indicates that 18 people endorse me for Content Strategy, compared to only eight endorsements for Content Development. Naturally the two work together, and clearly there’s a lot more to Content Strategy than ideation and execution — the two strengths I bring to the table for my client partners.

Suzanne Baran, Content Strategy Director at Saatchi & Saatchi in Los Angeles explained to OpenForum that “today’s content marketers are somewhat of a rare breed. For those looking to get into content marketing, she recommends learning the language of technical, quantitative and design.”

“A content strategist is a unicorn,” Baran says. “We interface with search, IT, UX, creative, product, customer service, marketing, finance and QA. We have to know code, best digital and traditional publishing practices, a bit of market data, editorial style, product development, marketing taxonomy, and the list continues.”

Given her rundown, my own doubts and the oddity of unicornism, I’m perfectly content to continue to identify as a Copywriter/CD with expertise in content development.

Content married to e-commerce is a topic that Mike Jones, CEO of Science, Inc. in Los Angeles, ran with recently on TechCrunch:

Today’s successful digital companies know to blend content and commerce so that the content is compelling and, frankly, still sells stuff. Fab.com is a prime example of this melding of commerce with content. The Fab.com content email makes for a fascinating read while simultaneously seducing me into wanting to open up my wallet. This mixture of content and commerce is driving a wave of editorial shopping and curation that is rewarding its forward-thinking managers with viral growth and revenue.

When the products themselves are interesting the desire to learn more about them is perfectly natural. Take Fab.com. Today’s menu of items includes a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, so the click through is a given for any fan. Purple haze forever!

Likewise, the disc sports gear about to go on sale on TeeBoxx.com is also compelling content in and of itself. I think it’s an important point to make — that content can support product directly. The J. Peterman catalog is a good example too. You might say J. Peterman’s catalog is direct marketing copy, but I don’t see it that way. I see it as well-made lifestyle content.

I often suggest that the trick to successful content marketing is to not talk about yourself or your products, rather to focus on your customers’ true interests.

Yet, what happens when the customers’ real interests are the products you’re selling? When this occurs, a mix of product-focused content with outward-looking lifestyle content is a perfectly balanced approach.

This first-of-its-kind vending machine from Omaha-based TeeBoxx is stocked with new discs from leading manufacturers like Innova and Discraft and caters to players of three unique disc sports–disc golf, free style and ultimate.

“Our TeeBoxx helps introduce people to the sport, so the gear in our machines is geared to beginners and intermediate players,” TeeBoxx co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Aaron Martin says.

“We have a deep interest in helping to fund and resurrect public parks,” says Martin. “There’s self-interest here, in that these parks are literally our fields of play, but it’s bigger than disc sports. It’s about getting people to move and have fun.”

The new TeeBoxx.com with an online disc sports store will debut shortly. Follow TeeBoxx on Facebook for updates.

Speaking of FB, I must say it’s a lot of fun to see the reactions of players and the number of shares, comments, messages, Likes and posts on TeeBoxx’s Wall. As a veteran of the ad wars, I’m used to somewhat chilly receptions from jaded audiences, but this is a world away from that. There is genuine and growing interest in disc sports and what TeeBoxx is doing from near and far.

Providing good answers to the real questions potential customers ask — on your own website — is the key to a successful inbound marketing strategy, according to Marcus Sheridan, a.k.a. The Sales Lion. Sheridan’s company, River Pools and Spas, was spending 250,000 a year on radio, television and pay-per-click advertising, until the economy tanked and they had to cut the budget to about a tenth of that. The company began to focus on generating sales through informational blog posts and videos instead, and they’ve been wildly successful thanks to a common sense but unconventional approach.

Sheriden told the The New York Times, he merely examined how he and others actually use the Internet.

Most of the time when I type in a search, I’m looking for an answer to a specific question. The problem in my industry, and a lot of industries, is you don’t get a lot of great search results because most businesses don’t want to give answers; they want to talk about their company. So I realized that if I was willing to answer all these questions that people have about fiberglass pools, we might have a chance to pull this out.

I love when the answer is this simple. People who might want to do business with you have questions they need answered and it’s your job to answer them.

Sheriden reports that price is always one of the first questions River Pools gets from potential buyers. So, he wrote a post about what it costs to install a fiberglass-pool, and used every cost-related phrase he could possibly type in. Remarkably, he’s been able to track a minimum of $1.7 million in sales to this one plain Jane article (screen grab posted below).

It’s strange to see Sheriden’s post and realize just how effective it is. In the advertising business we think of elegant solutions as perfectly crafted commercial art pieces. But perfectly crafted for whom? The truth is we often make ads to accomodate our own tastes. But that’s all wrong, especially online. People are searching the Web right now for answers to the pertinent questions before them.

What shall we make for dinner tonight?
Where shall we go on vacation this summer?
How do we develop a winning content strategy?

It is time to get your list out and write down all the questions that prospects ask you (I’ll do the same here). By the way, I’m happy to help you answer the questions on your list and make multimedia content for your site that draws people in, so you can make a sale. That’s what content maketing is, and it’s what we do best.

Content Marketing is brand-sponsored text, images, audio and video, plus live experiences that people actively seek out, thanks to the fact it enriches their lives in some small way, either by providing compelling entertainment or some form of utility. For instance, I helped Columbia Sportswear make their first smartphone App, “What Knot To Do” in 2009, which provides branded utility to sailors, climbers and others.

Rosie Siman of 360i uses a similar description:

We define it as assets and experiences that, in aggregate, form pieces of your brand story. It can range from apps to ebooks, from infographics to transmedia experiences, from tweets to filtered photos.

Siman also touches on how Content Marketing is different from advertising.

I’d argue that all commercials are content, just not necessarily good content. Though the reverse isn’t necessarily true: good content doesn’t have to resemble what we traditionally think of as commercials.

I see the differences as more distinct, even though the purpose is the same (to build the brand and grow the business).

Most advertising we see everyday repels because it’s loud and obnoxious me-first messaging. Content flips the script by placing the audience, not the marketer’s talking points, at the heart of the communications strategy. For instance, a community credit union may have better rates and lower costs, which are perfect points of difference to build an ad campaign around. But the credit union’s content strategy won’t follow this formula, instead it will discover what credit union members care about, and where the brand’s interests intersect.

A company is not an island, it’s part of a community made up of workers, customers and so on. People in your community already tell stories about your company, whether you realize it or not. By telling some of your own, you can help guide the narrative around the brand. You can’t control it, but you can elevate the overall discourse and put the brand’s best foot forward.

Just like your company is not an island, either is the content you make and offer to your various constituents. The best content is a perfect compliment to your advertising and PR. Content helps deepen connections with prospects, customer and staff. It doesn’t replace your ads or your PR, it is one-third of the paid, owned and earned media trinity.

Feel free to call me at 503-970-3862 to discuss in greater detail.