Joe Chernov at Eloqua has really been pushing the envelope with content marketing. As one example, their teams have been producing stunning visualizations (previously we shared their Intersection of Influence infographic).
So when they reached out to contribute a Q&A to their newest project: the Social Media ProBook, I of course said yes. Although I had no idea where they were going with it, I knew it would be something creative.
How creative? Well, along with their partner JESS3, they turned all the contributors into avatars and put together a very clever and magazine-style layout of content.
But style without substance is fluff. That’s where this eBook really shines: Eloqua also solicited insightful content on social media with something useful for all digital professionals. Reading through the contributions (including Jeremiah Owyang, Steve Rubel, Sarah Evans, among others) it’s clear this is a must-read.
Be sure and head over to Eloqua’s blog to download the eBook (free) and hear more about how it was created.
Bonus: exclusive for Future Buzz readers, my unedited responses to Eloqua’s questions follow:
Is there an 80/20 rule for the head of digital in agencies? That is, do 80% of the questions you get from clients focus on the same 20% of problems?
Yes, the 80/20 rule applies, but in different ways to those at different levels of sophistication. For example, companies completely nascent to digital marketing activities usually ask very tactical questions (i.e. how do we get more Twitter followers?) or questions about the value of the web in general. Typically, they aren’t tracking any results or making data-driven decisions so their line of questioning isn’t focused or specific.
Unfortunately time spent questioning the value of the web, while well-intentioned, hurts a lot of businesses causing them to miss any early-mover opportunity that might be left in their category to gain a competitive advantage. Their competitors aren’t questioning, they’re executing. This opportunity is shrinking: in most categories there are already at least a few digitally savvy companies actively building a community. And organic marketing is analogous to running a race where the companies who were first aren’t just ahead, they’re running downhill while those just starting still are trying to run uphill. So the companies who spend time questioning the value of the web for their marketing end up being not just a little, but way behind competitors on all digital metrics and it can be very difficult (and costly) to catch up.
More sophisticated companies actively embracing digital channels are generally the opposite. The ones who have flipped their marketing to embrace the web and are data-driven are actively trying to shift their budgets and team members to digital and de-emphasize their time spent on traditional marketing channels. Their questions are usually more focused on increasing outcome metrics (like leads generated) vs. just KPIs (like ReTweets and unique visitors). Or a business unit has had success with their initiatives and the company is looking for help scaling this across other groups. The point is the questions are specific, or they already understand their strategy and know what areas they need help in such as content creation or community management. That’s the difference, and I expect there will be less strategy development and consulting in the future (companies will take this in-house) and more seeking external help for ongoing specific services with metrics goals. Savvy companies are already here.
If a client comes to you and asks, “I want to get started in social, can you help” what’s the first thing you suggest?
We go through a discovery process for the client and understand their larger marketing objectives. Then we work with their marketing team to develop a strategy and tactics that make sense for the company along with specific metrics goals. Within that, we always want to leave room for experimenting and refinement based on data, because for a client that’s totally new to social we can only know what research into their category and customers tell us. Which is great and informs our initial tactical mix, but executing the plan is where we really start to learn what resonates with their category. Ideally, social marketing is an ongoing progression for a company and our plans are living, breathing documents that teams work together to iterate and refine.
IDC reported that in a staggering number of companies, HR owns social media. Do you find that departments other than PR and marcom are reaching out for your digital media advice?
In some cases, customer service teams reach out to us for digital media advice. I’ve actually never had an HR team reach out, but ideally they would get help. My experience has been that a lot of HR people don’t really “get” social. And that’s dangerous, because in a world where everyone is media, your HR worst practices can easily become PR nightmares. If an HR team was going to lead social media activities, they need to have the technical, measurement, creative, and personal aspects of the social web down. It is a demanding set of skills, so ideally a senior team does delegate this to a capable team and not just randomly to any HR manager.
But speaking of HR, I have consulted for the marketing teams at several companies who create software for staffing and recruiting professionals. Gaining insight into that vertical, it became clear that if you are in HR and not actively using social media as a part of your recruiting process, you’re late: equally as late as marketers who ignored the web. Most do embrace social, but I still don’t think most have made the appropriate shift of budgets and resources to these channels. The opportunity here is wide open.
What about for your personal use, if you had to make the unthinkable choice of either Twitter of Facebook, which would you pick?
Truthfully? Neither. I would pick WordPress. Facebook and Twitter are inherantly tactical without being tagged to an owned web property. They lack robust analytics (i.e. ability to define conversion goals or advanced segementation of your data) and you’re at the whim of another business. Also the fact that they are stream-based means your messages are easily skipped over or missed if not delivered at the right time. I wrote a post on the reasons you should blog in 2009 and the reasons in that post haven’t really changed all that much.
Further, social outposts like Twitter and Facebook are inferior for community building for many reasons. With a blog you can offer your content to all channels simultaneously – including RSS and email – which are forgotten and unloved as of late, but if you dig into the metrics behind popular sites you’ll see that RSS and email users frequently make up the most engaged and activated members of a community. They are, as I like to say, opted in to source content external of the noise of social channels.
But to answer your question if I had to choose, I’d pick Twitter because they do one thing well. Facebook is basically AOL 2.0. They are trying to be all things to all people and boil the social media ocean. And that’s fine for the average user. But I don’t really want one network or site that tries to do and be everything, I prefer those that specialize.
Your specialty seems to be the nexus of social and search. To me, those worlds converge around content. What percent of your day is spent creating content — either for your personal brand, LEWIS or your clients’ brands?
Indeed I frequently consult, blog and speak on this subject. It’s simple really, the web is holistic. The notion of categorizing and separating these activities as if they happen is silos is an illusion. That’s not how real people use the internet. Search and social media don’t happen in isolation, and the activities don’t replace each other, they complement each other. Further, the engines and social sites are integrating and innovating together. If you are a social media practitioner and don’t understand SEO, you’re doing it wrong (and vice versa).
For LEWIS clients, I work with all our team members to help them create great content and also consult our clients on how to do so. I’m one person and that doesn’t scale very nicely, so as much I want to touch every piece of content published to the web that isn’t efficient. So I help establish editorial calendars for content creation and develop processes for our teams and clients to follow for creating content designed for a search and social-powered web.
Who gets your vote for the social media superstar nobody has heard of?
The idea of an “total unknown” in social media is a misnomer. The people really passionate about the web are actively working to shape the future of it, and the fact that the web itself is social and tags back to individuals means that people end up being credited. I also think the space changes too fast for anyone who isn’t personally vested to keep pace. So those who don’t manage a community or experiment with content on their own time aren’t really pushing themselves. These activities inherently lead to the person getting noticed by someone. The web affords agility to individuals, to not take advantage of that seems shortsighted for a professional looking to sharpen their skills. The test is simple: if they have zero personal social presence and are unfindable via search, that’s a problem and I’ll already be skeptical before even looking at their resume.
With that said, one person in the space who is exceptionally savvy and is a future technology leader (but I wouldn’t say “no one has heard of”) would be Eric Friedman, director of business development at Foursquare. Previously an analyst at Union Square Ventures, Eric has an eye for successful startups and social technologies, is a web entrepreneur and blogger in his free time, and is working to advance the web’s most popular location-based social network. It’s very impressive and he walks the talk not just in marketing, but in actually developing social products.