The Conundrum of Content-What is your Content Strategy?

Posted on August 9, 2012 by marc meyer

I’ve been somewhat neglecting the blog over the last few months but I have a good excuse er… reason. Others are getting my good content. Or maybe I should just say they are getting my content, whether it’s good or not, well that’s in the eyes of the reader now isn’t it?

Being a content producer is brutal, it’s hard and it never ends. And yea, it sometimes it sucks. Why? Because content, in and of itself, is constantly being redefined and producing it is constantly a challenge. Content for the consumer, is like Crack, the more one gets, the more one wants. Good content keeps raising the bar for all content producers. Why? Because we all have to strive and push out something that will a) trump what was pushed out before, b) be consumed on a large scale and c) in a sense, hopefully will go viral. Let’s use an Olympic analogy. Once you score a 10, you’re expected to score another one. When you don’t, we maybe wait and see if you can repeat and when you don’t, we maybe ask why and then, we look elsewhere.

The flip side? Like Crack, a users expectations are raised. The tolerance levels rise. The need for more and better increase. No longer is average content acceptable. What make’s this further frustrating is that, as the producer of content, you no longer can control the quality. It’s no longer up to you. You might think it’s good, but it’s really not up to you. It’s up to them.

Thus, just like the old adage or statement that “we’re going to create a viral video” is equal parts foolish and unattainable, thinking your next piece of content is going to rock them, well, it’s out of your control.

At the end of every business day on the web, the bottom line is that content churns the machine. It’s what keeps companies and organizations in the public eye. Sometimes though, the content that keeps you in the public eye, isn’t produced by you, and isn’t necessarily how you wanted to be in the public eye. That’s the dark side. Content is everyone’s friend and everyone’s enemy. Why? Because good content isn’t always about the positive. Content, the good stuff, the reason why we fire up the computer every day, can be all about the bad stuff.

And…content is not abating, it’s not subsiding, and it’s not morphing into something we can control, not even close and not any time soon. It’s not like there’s this rhythmic beat to the content that’s created and the content that is consumed. Why? Pretty soon, (in less than five years) everyone will have a smart phone AND a tablet device. The desktop as we know it, will be dead soon. Which means what?

Multiply the ability to consume what is created times two or maybe three. As device proliferation increases, so does demand for sites, apps, content curators and content creators. Like rabbits and mice, demand and creation will explode exponentially.

So I’m telling you right now, creating, collecting and curating content is damn hard. Additionally, just because you have resources and access to Google or Bing or Yahoo or whatever, it doesn’t mean that you know what will work for your company or a company when it comes to compelling content that will drive eyeballs and sales. You can test, but at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, if you sell soap for example-What content are you going to create that is going to increase the sales of soap?

Here are a few questions you need to ask:

Can the intern help you with good content? Initially, probably not. But if you can nurture them into the position of “content beast,” that would be great but it takes time. This of course would mean that you understand what works and what doesn’t.
Can’t we just automate the process? So that means you’re just going to pull in everyone’s RSS feeds? Or does that mean you’re just going to scrape good content from others? Either choice is not a good one. Though I’m a proponent of supplementing one’s own content with perhaps a national feed, it’s not a good idea to push the content of others. Why? Well, where’s the value? Where’s the reason to come back every day?
How well do you know what your customers want? Why? It takes knowledge and an understanding of your customers, what your customers search for and why exactly, are they your customers in the first place. Once you conquer that, then you start to understand the difference between search and intent.
Does it matter if your brick and mortar customers are online? It certainly helps. Remember, that the first entry point for most people is not through the browser bar but generally through search and invariably through Google-which then heightens three things: one, is the quality of your content, two is the quality of your SEO and three is your “socialness.” Invariably though, your customers may start online before they walk in the door.
Does it matter that your customers are social? It helps but what do you think? If your customers are social that might mean they are digitally savvy and digitally demanding. Don’t deliver and suffer the consequences.
What will it take to create and curate compelling content? In a nutshell, you have to test what works and what doesn’t. This is where a solid analytics package comes into play. You have to know what drives traffic and what get’s clicked on and what doesn’t.
Can we outsource it? You can but you risk putting what you’ve known and what you’ve built into someone’s hands who doesn’t really know you, your product or your customers. You may get lucky and find someone who plays in the same space but it takes some vetting to find that company or person.

So what’t the over-arching theme or point here? As we hurdle towards 2013 and beyond, the proliferation of devices and platforms means that consumers are going to continue to demand content that “fits” them. As well, that content not only needs to fit their niches and demands but it also needs to be accessed at anytime and anywhere. If it doesn’t, they are gone. Which means, if you’re not delivering the optimum digital experience, then you lose. It will start and end with the content you create and curate every day and every night. If you don’t get it right, chances are that your competition will.

The Problem with Blending Organic Results with Social Information

Posted on March 8, 2012 by marc meyer

Hey Google, you know me, but do you really know me? I know, I know, you have all that customer data and you’ve just changed, refined your privacy policy so I know you really know me but… we’ve known each other for at least 10 years and we’ve grown on each other but…I have a beef.

Just because I have people in my Google Plus Circles doesn’t mean that what they “might know” or talk about is necessarily the search result information that I was looking for or need. That’s great that you now make it come up above the fold, but that doesn’t always mean it’s going to benefit me. What it really means to me is that I now have to scroll through a bunch of stuff that may not matter in order to to get to a hopefully organic result.

Part of the attraction of Google has always been its simplistic interface tied into an algorithm that really understood that what we were looking for was the best, most relevant search result. Now what we get is a search result tied into a) Google’s latest foray into social and b) someone’s Google + social affiliation to me. This means that if I’m looking for information about violins. I may have to sift through a search result that incorporate’s my Circle’s random observations, musings, photos and videos of violins, when what I was looking for was where I could buy one in my city that was inexpensive and durable.

Google isn’t enhancing the search process with tying it into Google Plus, it’s assuming that it knows me and my circles and what is best for me when I search. You don’t want that, what you really want is this…

What we may have to start doing is redefining what a Google organic search result is. Sometimes, actually more times than not, I need and you do too, a search result that isn’t or hasn’t been influenced by nothing more than pure relevance to the topic at hand. It may not happen today or even next year or the year after that, but at some point, someone will build a better, cleaner search engine that will be what Google was when Google first launched.

Business Myopia-The Need To Realign Hope And Reality With Your Social Business

Posted on March 1, 2012 by marc meyer

A lot of companies are going to transition to becoming a social business and fail horribly at it. It’s not entirely their fault. You might be sitting there and asking why not. Look no further than their website. It starts there. Here’s a real world example. 3 days ago I was on the phone with a prospective client, before I got on the phone I did a little research. First I wanted to look at their source code. I wanted to see what they thought of themselves. Regardless of who built the site, the meta tags that lie underneath can tell you a lot about what a company thinks they are, of how they view themselves.

I know, in the grand scheme of things meta tags don’t matter, but ahhhh, they do. It let’s people like me get a quick understanding of whether a client or company gets the rudimentary element of knowing who they are and how they want to be perceived online. you know why? Metas matter but not in the sense that we were all told or taught years ago. Metas matter because they drive the creation of content, the creation of bios, and the creation of hyperlinks from Tumblr and Twitter to YouTube and Pinterest. Metas are your descriptors of you and your company.

If you can’t tell me who you are with hyperlinks, geo specific hyperlinks,160 characters in a Twitter bio,25 characters for an adwords title, and or 70 characters for ad text, then how are you going to do it for your customers? The point being that search will continue to love social but before you even get to the point of cranking valuable content about you and your business. You have to have your act together structurally, internally and digitally.

Go look at all of your digital touch points and see if they pass the smell test. Are you painting the right picture of how search views all of your current content. Understand that part of being a social business is that, regardless of whatever social channel your choose-the digital content that you will create, has to align perfectly with what you do offline and what you currently have online.

When customers or prospects do a search, the results that they get back tell more of a story about you and your business then you may be aware of, and sadly the results may contain content that you had no control of. By the time you see it, or become aware of it-it’s too late, it’s been indexed and it’s virtually impervious to reputation management fixes.

Don’t wait for that to happen, go check your digital house and see if it’s in order. Align reality with perception and make sure that as a social business you understand that you are now searchable and accountable for content everywhere, starting with something as simple as your source code. Metas might not matter in search, but in reality, they can tell us what you think your business is.

The Dawn of Social Mediocrity

Posted on February 24, 2012 by marc meyer

Let’s do a hypothetical. You like western saddles. You search for them every day on Google. Google gives you relevant results from a) your Google Plus peeps and then b) the most relevant, most SEO’d results. Let’s assume that your peeps straddle the lines of friends, family and business contacts, so the results or likelihood that there will be content from these people about western saddles may be 50/50.

You continue to search for info about saddles. I am a marketer that sells cowboy hats or western hats. I know that if I use the term “western saddles” as a key word, page title, hyper link, hashtag, splog site or blog post in some social networks or platforms, the likelihood of you finding or landing on my pages might be pretty high. Why? Every link that you will find will ultimately take you to my western hat pages. I may or may not have much on saddles, but the bottm line is that I sell hats not saddles. Will you buy from my site? Maybe not. Of course I will or may affiliate links on my pages that will get you to a site that sells saddles but…the “quick” search has now turned into an hour’s worth of chasing the long tail of a bullshit game of bait and switch.

Is that a good user experience? No, but it’s the reality of search and social.

The more content that is created, the more that you have to choose from. The more that you have to choose from, the more of a chance that the content is watered down and possibly gamed. The more that search and social become intertwined, the more that you may become the victim of a bait and switch. Clicking on a link in the hopes that it is the right link-has become more precarious these days than it ever has.

The more that search and social lines become further blurred by the notion that content drives the machine, the more the user will get played. Pretty soon it won’t be social media any longer, it will be social mediocrity.

The Top 5 Challenges for Digital Brands in 2012

Posted on December 14, 2011 by marc meyer

Last week in a very thought provoking Tweetchat hosted by Lisa Petrilli, the discussion, though swirling around how an introvert uses social media, somehow segued into driving website traffic. So my first thought was a poll was in order. But then I started to think about 2012 and the challenges that most brands will face and thus the basis for this post was born: The challenges for a digital marketer or a digital brand in 2012. What are they specifically as it pertains to the web?

1) Driving traffic– The challenge in 2011 is the same in 2012. In order for people to know that you are open for business you have to get them to your website, your blog, your Twitter account or your Facebook page, right? Whether you’re a click and mortar or a web based only company, either or requires more than just a cursory amount of effort revolved around driving traffic. So you have to think about things like:

Site design that incorporates SEO
SEM to artificially drive traffic
Some type of lead generation
Social site design geared towards your target audience
Content creation

All with the premise of driving traffic. Eyeballs.

2) Engaging that traffic-You’ve got them to your site(s) now what are doing with them? In 2011, it was all about doing “something” with someone once they had visited your site, your blog or your Facebook page. Well that hasn’t changed. In 2012, it’s imperative that we determine what engagement looks like. What does it feel like, what does it smell like? Is it conversational? Interactive? Is it wrapped around gaming? You have to test, you have to experiment and you have to understand that you have about 20 seconds to get it right.

3) Keeping the traffic-The segue from the last sentence in #2 says it all. You have 20 seconds. For some of my friends, when they are telling me a long story and I start to lose interest, I tell them to quit circling the airport, land the plane and get to the point. Marketers and brands will need to land the plane in 2012. Remember when websites were stuffed with content because marketers and webmasters thought that’s what we wanted? Guess what? The challenge now is to do more with less and strike the balance of keeping your users happy, engaged and delivering exactly what it is that they are looking for. Keep your users focused in 2012. Be iconic, keep it simple.

4) Converting the traffic-This is the holy grail of web marketing and sales. Doing something with the people that have come to your site(s). From the dawn of the internet, the goal has always been to convert the people that come to your site into either a lead or a prospect or a sale-Either for your company or your partners. This has not changed. The challenge in 2012 will be to further understand how to utilize the social tools, sites and platforms that now exist in order to convert the passive visitor into something other than a mistaken click, a browser or a passerby. In 2012 social will continue to help deliver customers to websites, but it still falls back on you to deliver on the promise of a good customer experience. The biggest issue? Brands and marketers doing everything to get to the prom but not getting the kiss at the end of the night. Why? It will always be about the customer experience. Don’t discount the importance of search in this equation.

5) Getting the traffic to return-Repeat business, Word of mouth and increased sales, this is what it’s all about. It’s why people go into business, it’s why companies sell stuff. What’s better? The one off or the repeat customer? Why will people keep coming back to a website? Because of the initial experience. How many people give a crappy website a second chance? None. They come back to good sites that are easy to navigate, easy to understand, simple to use, that are safe, secure and trusted and they can find and get exactly what they want without much more than 2 or 3 clicks. Put yourself in the place of your customer. Search for your own product or company the way they do. Do you/they find what they are looking for? Can you be found through search and social? What is your perception of the branded web experience? What are your competitors doing? What are your favorite sites? What brands do you follow on Twitter and Facebook? There’s a reason you follow them. You need to take that mentality into 2012 when it comes to marketing and branding your web presence.

Meet your own expectations as a consumer and flip them into those of your customers.

Content is under scrutiny? It’s about time.

Posted on February 17, 2011 by marc meyer

Creation, curation and aggregation. We all probably fall into one of those categories. We do one of those. I do. I don’t dispute blog posts like this Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay. I get that. What I have a problem with is the type of content creation we run across when doing brand monitoring work for clients. It’s falling into two camps.

Here’s the first.

Recently we were doing some work for a very prominent client where in the analysis of brand mentions we had to sort through thousands, yes thousands, of useless pages of content on websites that were set up as splogs to drive better search results around pages geared towards Google Adwords. This is troll like stuff. This is not new. Useless web pages have been appearing high up on search result pages for awhile now. So Let me ask you a question. I assume that most of you who read this post are fairly savvy web users, but when you do a search-what part of the search result do you look like? Me? I look at the URL under each search result. and that in and of itself can be revealing-sometimes content that you think is going to be worthwhile turns out to be crap.

I’m using Google search results as the prime example here.

I thought we were getting the best search results possible? Maybe not. For a lot of us Google is part of our everyday lives. We are slaves to the rhythm of search as much as we are to what Google returns to us. Google and search dominate the web. The conundrum? To get traffic to your webpage, you have to appear high in Google’s search results. Which in turn means that you must create some type of content that works for Google. Thus the incentive to learn or understand SEO and Google’s Algorithm i.e. game the system, is huge.

Google will admit that the quality of it’s SERPS is higher than it has ever been; in terms of comprehensiveness maybe so, relevance may be debatable. They might be the first to tell you that there is a proliferation of sites that rip off other people’s content because they’re too lazy to build their own audiences based on fresh content and fresh thoughts and ideas; and that is a problem. Yep, the rise of the “content farm” which is heavy on volume and light on fresh, original content is upon us.

Google has been making changes to its algorithm to keep low-quality sites from appearing high in searches, according to Matt Cutts in a blog post last month. But he also wrote that, despite Google’s efforts,

The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception.”

I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to have to sort through garbage search results both personally and on behalf of a client; to be bogged down with the process of weeding through content farms.

“As pure web spam has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms’, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content,” Cutts added.

I got into SEO years ago and understand the game. High rankings in search have always been driven by the number of pages/sites that linked to it and how prominent they were ranked and what pages and sites were linked to them. There were always “other” little things involved, but to me it was always about the hub and spoke model. What sites were at the end of the spoke and so on and so forth. Oh yea, and one other thing-Content.

Marketing departments and SEO companies understand this. Thus, they’ve been creating “landing pages” buried inside corporate sites to hit all of the different possible combinations of keywords of a search query relating to their company/ industry. Bloggers do it by linking to each other. It works, content farms work, and that’s part of the problem.

The bigger part of the problem? Large companies are catching on. They know this and are willing to play in this grey area space that Google doesn’t police very well, and we, the people that do searches, suffer for it. As it turns out, they are getting away with it. Or are they? The latest to be identified according to the New York Times is JC Penney. Large and small companies will continue to game the system like this until a) they are caught and penalized or b) Google in particular-fixes the algorithm. Until then, content farms will continue to rule and the research that you and I do on behalf of clients, will still take three hours instead of one.

If only there were a way for monitoring companies to weight and kick out splogs and obvious content farms…hmmmm.

Our Shifting Notion of Search, Social and Mobile.

Posted on November 23, 2010 by marc meyer

10 years ago seems so 10 years ago in the world of search, social and mobile.

We’ve definitely evolved and rightly or wrongly so depending on your point of view. Take for example search. In 2000 Google was a 2 year old start-up still trying to create an identity and compete with Yahoo and MSN. We all marveled at the simplicity of their interface and as a starting point for our queries, it simplified and created a less cluttered entry into a sometimes messy and confusing search result. Little did we know what was on the horizon.

How do we use search now? Search is and has been woven into the fabric of our daily lives thanks to Google. It is a utility that drives our online and offline interactions. We use it for online transactions, travel decisions, job searches, purchases, research, and a dozen other activities. We use search the same way we use our lights, drive our cars and brush our teeth. Google has changed and redefined what search is for you, me and all the companies that rely on it for business.

What search will ultimately be, is as much for us to determine as it is for Google to create and beta test. We will define it.

Online social networks are redefining our offline relationships both casual and personal. What drives that redefinition? search? The barriers for connecting with someone are next to none. Social networks are not what they used to be. Looking back at MySpace, it almost looks like pre-Y2k web Dev. doesn’t it? If you think about what made MySpace popular, it wasn’t as much about the conversations as it was about creating your own content, your own page-it struck a nerve. Facebook has taken that aspect of MySpace, and simplified and reduced the ability to create, and amplified the ability to connect and share- and 500 million people have embraced it. Where does it go from here?

Social continues to evolve into something devoid of privacy and chock full of transparency with authenticity caught somewhere in the middle.

In the world of mobile, the evolution has been nothing short of dramatic. 10 years ago we were an evolving world of mobile adoption, the mobile handset was a utility for and an extension of the land lane. Now the mobile device is an extension of our desktop. The ratio of mobile handsets to people is approaching one to one. Search and social have migrated to the mobile device. SMS drives conversation and just as search has become somewhat of a utility for the desktop, the smartphone is now the defacto device for driving purchases, for buying tickets, for research, for email, for being social and oh by the way…making phone calls.

So what does this all mean? The same thing that has happened to all great inventions and milestones in history-Their original intent looks nothing like their eventual outcome.