I enjoyed this book excerpt by Grant McCracken in AdAge, "In His Nike Work, Dan Wieden Is the Prototypical CCO" (McCracken's forthcoming book is Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation.)

McCracken identifies the trend called the "generous stranger," which is akin to "Pay It Forward" and "Practice Random Acts of Kindness." He tells of how Nike embodies this trend in a recent groundbreaking ad.

If corporations can put aside any aversion they may have to the touchy-feely nature of the "generous stranger," they can take a lesson from the concept in developing a thought leadership strategy.

Thought leadership requires generosity, as we explain in "Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership? Five Best-Practices." Corporations can be thought leaders when they create a corporate culture that is about "paying forward" their vision and expertise.

Corporations may waffle on the idea of actively developing corporate culture, but almost all want to be thought leaders. Thought leadership requires culture. Culture galvanizes the passion and generosity that makes thought leadership possible.

Labels: business to business (B2B), thought leadership

Forbes has published a study "The Rise of the Digital C-Suite: How Executives Locate and Filter Business Information" that is particularly useful for b-to-b marketers who want to reach C-level executives with their content.

The report confirms, with research, several trends we've assumed to be true:

• Younger executives are more likely to use social media than the previous generations.
• The Internet has edged out print media as a trusted information source.
• Text is still king, but online video is on the rise with younger executives. Look for a shift away from KnowledgeStorm and towards YouTube.
  

There are also some surprising findings:

• C-level executives don't delegate research as much as we might think. Executives do perform their own searches, and download white papers and read blogs. That means: decision-makers do find and read good content.
• Competitor analyses are the #1 topic of research executives seek. That means: there's a payoff for companies who take a cue from social media, and adopt a content strategy that addresses competitive differentiation. A rah-rah white paper won't be as effective as one that helps the reader compare apples to apples.

This report will be helpful to marketers who know the age of the executives they want to reach. Articles and white papers will appeal to "Generation Wang," while blogs and video will be effective for "Generation Netscape."

Forbes.com requires a free registration to download the document (name and email address). Download "The Rise of the Digital C-Suite" here. Thanks to Joe Pulizzi for blogging this report.

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing

Custom content is up, and trade publications are down. This week, BtoB Magazine published these two stories, and it is up to me to connect the dots.

Public companies shedding b-to-b media

Incompatibility with volatile ad cycles has big publishers selling off properties

The global downturn has underscored advertising's cyclicality, with ad pages plunging an average 30% this year. The decline's magnitude has left trade magazine publishing a diminished business that appears increasingly incompatible with publicly traded companies.

Custom publishing on the upswing
With corporations competing with media companies, content marketing makes everyone a publisher
There was a time when custom publishing entailed a few pages of “advertorial” in an appropriate trade publication or, more ambitiously, an extended advertising vehicle in the guise of an actual magazine. ... Today, ... companies are turning eagerly to digital content, providing customers and potential buyers with business and technical intelligence that's high on credibility and low on promotion.

It's official. As the trade pubs struggle, the vision of content marketing is borne out. Thought leadership is no longer controlled by publishing companies. Marketers are becoming the publishers. Why wait for a trade magazine's editorial calendar, when you can publish your own micro-site and YouTube channel?

I see the opportunity for marketers--in b-to-b, particularly--to push the "reset" button on their thought leadership content strategy. BtoB published two other articles this week forecasting bigger marketing budgets 2010 ("Making a splash after the crash" and "2010 Outlook survey shows marketing budgets to grow"). The crash of '08-'09 has already forced b-to-b marketers to abandon old habits; with new money to spend in '10, they will be looking for new habits.

2010 will be a big year for content.

Related white paper: Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership?

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, thought leadership

Here's #2 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

In his post, "Five reasons your content is damaging your brand," Kevin Gibbons writes that in the rush to perform search engine optimization, marketers are defeating what should be their primary objective: building of their brand. The bottom line is that readers seek content to learn something--not to be pitched to, or to raise the click-through rate of a link. Anything less than good content frustrates the reader and destroys the brand, no matter what the Web analytics say.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #2:
Great Web content recognizes intent.
First and foremost, content must have a value proposition that appeals to what the person wants, and it must be respectful of the reader's relationship to the brand. Pushing for an in-person demo, for example, is appropriate for someone who is in buying mode, but it is a turn-off to a person who just entered the sales funnel. Some lead generation experts equate the latter situation with proposing marriage on the first date. In the early stages of the sales cycle, buyers are learning the marketing landscape. They want an education, not a solicitation.

Technical buyers consume online media throughout their process, according to TechTarget’s “2009 Media Consumption Benchmark Report 2: Closing the Gap.” They favor specific content at specific parts of the sales cycle, the study found. For example, buyers visit online communities for information in the early stages of the buying process. In the middle of the cycle, Webcasts are popular. Buyers like demos in the second and final stages.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #1 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

There is a lot of tweeting about tweeting--and all the other ways that social media are changing the ways we work and think. But at the heart of it all, every tweeter needs great content to tweet. (Retweeting everybody else's great content is easy, but it separates the thought followers from the thought leaders. Thought leaders originate the tweet.)

In this series of posts, we'll take a close look at "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content" to examine what separates a tweet from a retweet.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #1:
Great Web content is written with a target reader in mind.
For content to succeed, the authors must pick a clear target. One size does not fit all. Good content is highly segmented. That means if you need 200 pages on your website instead of 20, do it.

Search engine marketing specialist John Waddy of TwentySix2 Marketing constantly emphasizes this point. “If you figure out why people are coming to your website and address their needs and their likely questions up-front, you have a much better chance of converting them to the desired call to action,” says Waddy.

To entice their target readers with valuable content, Web marketers need only follow the basic practice of SEO: create a page for each key phrase that readers search. This simple approach ensures the right content gets covered, as well as found. People search, people find, people read. And when your content answers the questions your target readers are asking, they don't have to leave your site to look elsewhere.

If your site needs to optimize 200 key phrases to answer the target readers' questions, then creating great content for those 200 pages is a sound investment.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

This interesting report from Technorati, just published in October has some interesting findings. Among them: bloggers are far more well educated and wealthy than the population as a whole and 35% of bloggers have a journalistic pedigree in that they worked for a newspaper, magazine or broadcast outlet.

What many are saying in terms of the ongoing ying and yang between traditional media and bloggers is that the mainstream media will likely continue to be the main source for reporting the news, but that bloggers will keep the stories alive via their comment and opinion and the overall more viral nature of social media.

We've received some interesting questions in response to our white paper, "Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership? Five Best-Practices." One, in particular, describes the dilemma marketing departments face: How can we prevent our thought leadership efforts from being interpreted as sales propaganda?

The answer lies in the fact that thought leadership isn't built, it's nurtured. It is up to the followers--readers, listeners, and viewers--to certify the thought leader with their trust, and that takes time.

Thought leadership doesn't have a landing page. There is no string attached between thought leadership and lead generation. Instead, it requires a spirit of generosity, as Elise Bauer says. Thought leaders attract followers by virtue of the freely given value they offer. The payoff to the organization is cultural, educational, emotional--but generally not measurable.

It is counter-intuitive to our lead-generation habit, but thought leadership strategy takes the company and the product out of the story. It leads with thought. Guided by generosity, marketers can strategize effective thought leadership campaigns that won't be considered sales propaganda--because they won't be linked (directly) to sales.

Labels: lead generation, thought leadership

David Carr wrote an insightful story for The New York Times on the rapid decline of the business press.

One compelling excerpt:

Business coverage has been, at its heart, aspirational, a brand promise that suggests that if you clip the right articles, internalize the right rhetoric, then you too will end up as one of the shiny, happy people striding boldly across the pages of magazines with names like Fortune, Money, Fast Company and Wired. But nobody is going to read, let alone aspire to, magazines called Middled, Outsourced, Left Behind and Clobbered. It's as if American business has lost custody of its own story.