WIley lIfelong learnIng - John Wiley & Sons lIfelong learnIng bit.ly/skillsfuturewithwiley W i l e y i s … you r l i f e l o n g e a r n i n g P a r t n r THIS eBooK ConTaInS

WIleylIfelong learnIng

bit.ly/skillsfuturewithwiley

Wiley is… your lifelong learning Partner

THIS eBooK ConTaInS...

SIngaPore eDITIon

Chapter 1

The 10 Essential Skills EveryMarketer Needs

“In the face of change we have three options: ignore it, grow with it, or

drive it.”1

—Gerard Puccio, Marie Mance, Laura Barbero Switalski,

Paul Reali, Creativity Rising

No one needs to tell us that the world of marketing is changing fast.We are living it. Low-cost and ubiquitous communications technol-ogy is irrevocably altering human behavior, causing seismic shifts inmarketing philosophy, practices, and careers. At its core, marketing isstill about creating and keeping customers, but the how-to questionsfor accomplishing this have changed considerably.

The Web has empowered people everywhere. Whether in NewYork or Nairobi, today’s customers are connected, informed, andmore vocal than they have been in the past. Anyone with a connecteddevice—39 percent of the world as of 20132—now has access to all ofthe world’s knowledge and many of its citizens. With these resourcesat their fingertips, our prospects and customers can discover andinvestigate anything and everything, establish decision-making crite-ria, seek opinions from their peers, evaluate their options, and sharetheir impressions and experience with others, anytime and anywhere.As a result, the relationship between businesses and their customershas been dramatically altered: our customers are now firmly in chargeof the buying process.

1

Digital Has Changed the Game

In the predigital landscape, our prospects undertook a straight-forward purchase journey that we likened to a funnel. Theprocess began with a need or desire that our prospects chose toaddress. Salespeople were involved early on, helping to establishdecision-making criteria. Our job as marketers was to build aware-ness and create materials that made the case for why our solutionsshould be adopted. Many consumer brands had loyalty programsto encourage retention, but not much attention was devoted topost-purchase engagement.

Digital has dealt us all new cards. Today’s customer journey stillstarts with a need or a desire, but our prospects often undertake anat times lengthy period of silent due diligence during which timethey discover and evaluate their options via the web. During thisperiod of discovery our prospects’ consideration set often growsrather than narrows. According to Google’s Zero Moment of Truthstudy, the average person pulls information from 10.4 sources beforemaking a purchase.3 Some of the most influential sources are otherpeople’s unfiltered post-purchase commentary. Salespeople enter theprocess at a much later stage for business-to-business purchases; moste-commerce purchases can be made independently.

Marketers have become essential to the purchase process, as moreoften than not, content is the tool that breaks through this silent duediligence, initiating a conversation between us and our prospects.Recognizing this shift, marketers have become content publishers,experts at creating useful resources that address our prospects’ andcustomers’ underlying needs and desires. If these experiences res-onate, we may be invited into the purchase process. Serving as trustedadvisors, rather than biased advocates for our company’s productsand services, we create the conditions for our prospects and cus-tomers to evaluate for themselves whether we make the grade.

Social media has multiplied the potential points of connectionwith our prospects and customers and its interactive nature hasturned static text into cross-channel dialogue. As we blog, tweet,host webinars, publish white papers, produce videos, and curatePinterest boards, we generate living assets that can draw prospectsto us. As we come to know these people as individuals through

2

The Digital Marketer

EVALUATESELECT

Unknownprospect

Relationshipdevelopment

Customer Partner

Our customer relationship evolves along the way

ENGAGE,ADVOCATE,CO-CREATE

AWARENESS

RESEARCH

TODAY’SCUSTOMER EXPERIENCE JOURNEY

Figure 1.1 Visual of the Customer Experience Journey

careful observation of their digital body language, our encountersbecome more personalized, incorporating predictive analytics toenhance their usefulness.

Post-purchase engagement with our customers has becomeessential. Our customers are a primary source of word of mouth—peer-to-peer recommendations—that can make or break future sales.In these later-stage interactions we can learn the details of their

3


experience with us, answer any remaining questions they may have,and mitigate any outstanding negatives. If done right, these can fosterpositive advocates for our products and services, harness wisdom forour customer service efforts, and generate additional business. Ourcustomers are also a vital source of insight into demand. They may nottell us outright what they want, but they can tell us about their needsand desires. With that knowledge, we can explore latent and emergingdemand and co-create new products, services, and experiences thatwill provide tomorrow’s revenue.

Although our prospects may not begin today’s customer journeylooking to develop an ongoing relationship with us, or with any com-pany for that matter, as we engage in ways that are useful, they oftenmorph from being unknown prospects, to becoming customers, andin many cases, to join with us as partners. As we transform a tradition-ally passive and transaction-oriented association into a collaborativerelationship where we co-create, co-market, and co-serve our brands,our role as marketers expands. We are becoming key drivers of sales,loyalty, and innovation, producers of revenue rather than primarilygenerators of expenses.

The Disruption of Marketing Continues

Digital’s impact onmarketing is not yet complete. Innovative technolo-gies and heightened customer expectations are unleashing creativity,spurring imaginative forms of brand expression and interaction.Sensors and near-field communication devices are changing the verynature of products and services, prompting us to reconsider howour companies’ value propositions may change when every object—fromour customers’ homes to their bodies—are connected to the Inter-net. As the bar is raised, marketers are becoming experience architects,collaborating closely with designers and software engineers.

Widespread adoption of mobile technology has brought newopportunities. The qualities that make mobile a highly engaging,lean-forward medium—touch screens, voice recognition, cameras,and GPS technology—are enabling rich, contextualized experiences.Mobile “always with you” quality has also issued us a new challenge:How to unobtrusively accompany our customers through the courseof their days, offering valuable experiences that enhance their lives.

4


New channels continue to proliferate and are being adopted atrecord speeds, keeping us on our toes as we evaluate their relevanceto our constituents and their effectiveness in obtaining our businessgoals. Every channel is becoming increasingly visual, forcing us toexpress our ideas in alternative, visually stimulating ways.

Today’s customers live their lives across channels, often incorpo-rating several to complete a single task or transaction. To effectivelymeet their needs, our companies must be present and available intheir preferred channels, offering a seamless, personalized, and oftenpredictive experience. Our ability to offer these contextualized inter-actions at scale requires that we become adept at big data collection,predictive analytics, and marketing automation, competencies thatinvolve new technology, advanced organizational learning, and highlevels of coordination across functions.

New enterprise marketing management systems are emergingto facilitate these personalized interactions, augmenting existingback-office oriented enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems thatfocus on accounting, manufacturing, supply chain management,and human resources. These new systems are designed to fosterinformation flows and collaboration across business functions andour entire demand-related ecosystem in order to more effectivelyserve our customers.

Native advertising, which when done well mimics organic con-tent, is presenting new targeting opportunities, causing a lot of buzzand a shift in media purchases. Fueled by immense amounts of dataon our prospects and customers that is collected, integrated, and ana-lyzed on a moment-to-moment basis, this new form of advertisingis prompting marketers to develop converged marketing strategies,blurring the lines between paid, earned, and owned media.

E-commerce has lowered the barriers to entry for competition,establishing a truly global marketplace. Worldwide information flowsare turning marketers, possibly inadvertently, into managers of globalbrands and customer communities. Viable disruptors to establishedindustries can popup anywhere—especially in emerging markets.

Building loyalty in an age when people are inundated withoptions from near and far and can comparison-shop with ease is a

5


demanding task. As marketers we must continually find ways to stayon top of shifting customer preferences and distinguish our productsand services from the growing competition.

Rapid marketplace changes demand that we become more flexi-ble and responsive, challenging rigid corporate cultures andprocesses. Adopting a more iterative and experimental approachenhances our agility; however, it also requires that we foster apro-learning environment that values what we glean from oursuccesses and from our failures.

Finally, the pressure on marketers to prove the value of our effortsis tremendous. On one hand, it has never been easier to see theimpact of our efforts as digital interactions leave behind a trail ofbehavioral data. At the same time, it is not easy to piece together thisdata as it is not captured in a sequential stream from first encounterto sale or advocacy. Closed-loop analytics are making it possible totrack the effectiveness of each of our marketing initiatives, but theyrequire software investment and technological know-how.

We Have All Benefitted from the Disruption

As challenging as it is to be a marketer during one of the most rapidlychanging business environments in history, both our customers andour businesses have benefitted from the disruption. The numerouschanges that digital has ushered in have forced us to move awayfrom our traditional producer-based strategies and tactics, to focuson meeting our customers’ needs and desires.

Customer-centricity is an old story. For decades we have knownthat being as close as possible to our customers and bringing theirvoice into the center of our organizations has been a winning strategy,but we have not turned that aspiration into reality. The rebalancing ofthe relationship between companies and their customers has forcedthe issue, however.

Organizations that have grasped the new reality and are redesign-ing the way they engage with their prospects and customers aremaking strides in realizing customer-centricity. They are distinguish-ing themselves by setting new standards for a customer’s experienceand often exceeding them. A look at Amazon and Marketo illustratesjust how far we have come.

6


Your Amazon.com

Amazon’s customers feel as if the world was made for them.When they arrive on any of the company’s sites, they are greeted byname. A robust search engine acts like a personal assistant, quicklylocating items from multiple vendors. Tailored recommendations thatreflect their prior searches, page views, reviews, and purchases offersuggestions for additional items that may be of interest, presentingrelevant options of which they may not otherwise have beenaware (see Figure 1.2). To make itself even more useful, Amazonoffers its customers the opportunity to proactively rate additionalitems and express their preferences, enhancing its search engine’spredictive ability.

Ancillary features transform a simple purchase into an experienceon Amazon. When looking for a book, customers may enjoy videosabout the author, the opportunity to “look inside” the book’s coverto preview its contents, and the chance to read peer reviews and addtheir own opinions to the mix. With Amazon’s mobile app they cantake a photo of an object, and within seconds, a description of theproduct and a link to where it can be purchased appears on theirscreen. Items can be bought quickly and easily; 1-Click purchases do

Figure 1.2 Amazon Prompts Purchases with Customized

Recommendations

7


not require any additional data input (no names, addresses, or creditcard numbers to key in) and Amazon Prime provides free two-dayshipping—and complimentary TV, video streaming, and borrowingof e-books. If its customers are not ready to buy, Amazon saves theiritems for later access on any device.

Amazon’s reliability builds trust; their customers know that whenthey purchase from Amazon their order will arrive intact and on time,if not early. The ability to set e-mail preferences—“We want to stay intouch, but only in ways you find helpful”—and to track orders onlinego a long way toward making customers feel like they matter. It is nowonder that one blogger wrote, “Amazon is liked so much becauseit is built to love.”4

Business-to-Business Companies Are Players, Too

Business-to-business (B2B) companies are also making strides indefining and delivering new levels of customer-centricity. Knowingthat almost two-thirds of the research that potential B2B customersundertake takes place before a salesperson is contacted, the market-ing automation and revenue management company Marketo createsmyriad opportunities for prospects to educate themselves about thisemerging field.

White papers, e-books, webinars, and videos are available in aResource Center located on their website to assist potential customersin their early due diligence. Search engine optimization and contextu-alized advertising, topics we will explore in the coming pages, ensurethat their prospects find their materials.

Once a potential customer has accessed their content, Marketoproactively offers them increasingly targeted content and invitationsto events in hopes of being able to build a relationship. E-mail alertsnotify prospects of new e-books and webinars on topics in which theyhave indicated an interest. The company carefully monitors recipi-ent’s reactions to determine the next best offer and the appropriatecadence for messages.

Because Marketo’s communications are well targeted and welltimed, prospects experience them positively, not as spam. Figure 1.3,for example, is a resourceful follow-up e-mail about an event for

8


Figure 1.3 Marketo Nurtures Leads with Personalized

E-Mails

which Lisa had signed up for but was unable to attend. Engagementwith Marketo also includes access to their social community of over30,000 Marketo users, as well as on-demand training, and the abilityto submit ideas to the company’s product management team toshape the future of their products.

Just Ahead: Relief and Reward

We have come a long way during the last two decades. Whilemuch complexity remains, we believe that we are entering a time of

9


refinement. After gulping down innovation for two decades, goingforward marketers will be able to chew a little more thoroughly. Thisdoes not mean that invention will stop, that competition will becomeless fierce, or that the pace of business will slow. Nor does it meanthat those who remain standing have secured a place in the future.It does mean that much of the innovation on the horizon builds andimproves upon the seismic transformations that have already alteredthe landscape. Shakeouts and consolidations will be plentiful as themarket integrates. As the dust settles and we gain comfort in ournew skills, creativity will flourish.

The ability to create and deliver remarkable customer experiencewill be the signature of successful companies in this next phase ofmarketing. It is how we manifest our customer-centricity and what ourprospects and customers have come to expect and reward. Organi-zations that are able to figure out what their prospects and customerswant and expect, in terms of products, services, spaces, and theaccompanying experiences, and deliver on this insight, will develop apowerful customer experience differential, a key source of differenti-ation in an environment where commoditization of our best ideas andefforts happens all too rapidly. This differential will drive results—italready is.

Working with five years of data from Forrester Research, Inc.’sCustomer Experience Index, a yearly benchmark of businesses’ cus-tomer experience quality, Watermark Consulting found that the stockperformance of companies considered to be customer experienceleaders exceeded that of both the S&P 500 and the customer experi-ence laggards.5 Customer experience leaders had a cumulative totalreturn of +22.5 percent over the half-decade period compared witha −1.3 percent decline for the S&P 500 market index and a −46.3percent decline for the laggard portfolio over the same period (seeFigure 1.4). Here is the bottom line: customer experience matters.Whether we deliver remarkably good or remarkably poor customerexperiences, it impacts our results.

With customer experience driving the growth agenda and perfor-mance measures for companies going forward, marketers are in theenviable position of holding the keys to the kingdom. To rise to theoccasion, we must be able to think and act beyond our traditional

10


CXi leaders22.5%

30%

20%

10%

0%

–10%

Cum

ulat

ive

Tota

l Ret

urn

Five-year stock perfomance of Customer Experience Index (CXi):leaders versus laggards versus S&P 500 (2007 to 2011)

–20%

–30%

–40%

–50%

S&P 500 Index–1.3%

CXi laggards–46.3%

Figure 1.4 Focusing on Customer Experience PaysSource: Harley Manning, Forrester Research, Inc. Blog, “When It Comes toTotal Returns, Customer Experience Leaders Spank Customer ExperienceLaggards,” Forrester Research, Inc., September 14, 2012.

turf to proactively build the necessary skills to take our brands andcompanies to new levels. It is a good time for us to roll up our sleeves,digest what has happened, home the skills that are needed to benefitfrom these developments, re-energize our creativity, and get on withcreating value in this new customer-centric marketing landscape.

What Do We Mean by Customer-Centricity?

Much confusion exists around the definition of customer-centricity.Some false notions of customer-centricity that are expressed withsome regularity include:

• Being all things to all people;

• Treating all of our customers the same;

• Attempting to meet every need our constituents have;

• Allowing our customers to haphazardly determine our strategyfrom minute to minute; or

11


• Blindly copying what Amazon, Marketo, and other market lead-ers are doing.

We define customer-centricity as helping our prospects and cus-tomers achieve their goals in a way that makes sense for our orga-nizations. In this coveted sweet spot, depicted in Figure 1.5, oursolutions meet our prospects’ and customers’ needs and desires. Weare operating in a place of shared value, playing on the same team,and pursuing the same goals. That is a powerful combination.

As a result, customer-centricity is uniquely defined for every orga-nization; however, two underlying principles are the same for everyorganization:

1. Customer-centricity is demand-driven, concentrating on meet-ing our customers’ needs and desires.

2. Customer-centricity is focused, prioritizing our efforts on thosecustomers’ needs and desires that we can serve well and prof-itably.

Ourbusiness

goals

Ourcustomers’

goals

SHARED VALUE

SHARED VALUE IS CREATEDWHEN OUR CUSTOMERS’ GOALS

OVERLAP WITH OURS

Figure 1.5 Shared Value Is the Coveted Sweet Spot

12


Walk in Our Customers’ Shoes

A deep understanding of our customers, perhaps even better thanthey know themselves, is a prerequisite to effectively meetingdemand. This includes comprehending their needs and desires,motivations, attitudes, and existing knowledge, as well as their ongo-ing cross-channel behavior, preferences, and the triggers that promptthem to act. Staying current on these variables is a daunting task, asthey change often. It is important, however, because this understand-ing, when coupled with a solid grasp of emerging trends and playersin the marketplace, drives today’s results and grounds our hypothesesabout future demand. Our ability to rapidly test these hypothesesand to translate the resulting insight into innovative business models,products, services, and experiences keeps our companies relevant.

To truly understand our customers, we must shift points ofview to see the world through their eyes. Flipping perspectives ishard because we are often entrenched in seeing the world fromwhere we stand. It requires rethinking many tried and true, oftenproducer-centric policies, practices, and frameworks.

To facilitate this flip, creativity and innovation consultant Tim Hur-son encourages us to visualize our customers’ needs and desires asitches they want to scratch. These itches can be physical, emotional,or psychological and they can be active, emerging, or latent. Themost promising business opportunities generally come from address-ing emerging and latent itches; who knew we could not live withouta mobile phone or tablet until we had one in our hands? To identifythe underlying itch, Hurson recommends that we ask, “If your [cus-tomer’s] itch were a T-shirt slogan, what would it say?”6 To develop amore complete context for the itch, he challenges us to consider theimpact of the itch, what we know about it, who else may be impactedby the itch or influenced it, and our vision for the future in which theitch has gone away.7

Applying a different metaphor when he was still teaching, formerHarvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt encouraged hismarketing students to think of customers as having an underlyingjob that they are trying to complete. Most of these jobs have a

13


social, functional, and emotional component; Levitt believed thatif marketers could understand this context, they would be able tocreate solutions that would appeal to their customers and prospects.Levitt illustrated this perspective to his students by explainingthat, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They wanta quarter-inch hole!”8 Applying Levitt’s framework, our task asmarketers is to understand the job that our prospects and customersare trying to do, and design the experiences that enable themto do so.

Eenie Meenie Miney Mo

Truly customer-centric organizations are able to take this customerunderstanding to the level of the individual and differentiate theirproducts, services, and experiences accordingly. Differentiatingamong our customers may at first sound anticustomer-centric, but ittruly is not. Our customers are heterogeneous, with different itchesand jobs, and varying abilities to scratch and get the job done. As aresult, the overlapping area of shared value we have with each of ourcustomers varies. By segmenting and prioritizing our prospects andcustomers, we can more effectively meet their needs and allocateour resources. This is not earth-shattering news. What is news isour newfound ability to know our customers well enough to pullthis off and to have the marketing automation technology to do soat scale.

Consider the case of a luxury boat retailer. While there may bemany people who say they want a 50-foot sailboat, a much smallersegment can actually purchase one, and an even smaller set is readyto purchase one now. If we were designing a marketing strategyfor the luxury boat retailer, we would recommend prioritizing activeengagement with those customers who want to purchase a sailboat,have the ability to do so, and are ready to do so. This would involvea customized flow of content based upon their interest and behaviorand engagement with our salespeople when they have been deter-mined to be sales ready.

We would also recommend a nurturing strategy for thoseprospects who have the interest and ability, but for whom the timing

14


is not right. This would involve a smart stream of content, whichbecomes increasingly detailed based upon the prospects’ actions.A low-involvement, self-servicing strategy would be appropriate forthose who are interested, but not yet able to purchase. By knowingits prospects and customers well, the boat seller would be ableto design relevant customer experiences that effectively meet thevarying needs of the market and most efficiently use its resources.

Realizing the Customer-Experience Differential

Our commitment to customer-centricity manifests itself in our cus-tomer experience. When we talk of the customer experience differ-ential, we are talking about consistently meeting or exceeding ourcustomers’ expectations for our brands and accomplishing this withmore perceived value than our competition. Expectations vary bybrand; people naturally have different hopes for shopping excursionsto Costco than to Nordstrom; both brands focus on delivering quality,but in very different ways.

Our customers’ perceptions of our brands and whether or notthey meet the grade are based on their experiences with us. A per-son’s brand experience is defined as the “sensations, feelings, cog-nitions, and behavioral responses evoked by brand stimuli.”9 Theseexperiences can come in all shapes and sizes. Digital channels havemagnified the number of potential brand encounters and have createda digital dimension for every product and service.

Take a Starbucks espresso, for example. There is the robust,slightly bitter drink itself, with its thick, swirled crema that floatson the surface and its satisfying aftertaste. People’s experience oftheir espresso extends far beyond the cup of coffee itself, however.It can include searching for a Starbucks location: how easy is it tofind digitally and physically? It can include the purchase experi-ence itself, including the design of the venue, the personality andskill of the barista—Do they remember my drink preference?—thelength of the lines, the comfort of the chairs, the cleanliness ofthe bathrooms, and the speed of the Wi-Fi connection.

For some customers the quality of the Starbucks espresso experi-ence may also include their mobile phone. The Starbucks mobile app

15


lets them pay by scan, receive personalized text offers, and managetheir loyalty points (see Figure 1.6). The espresso experience mayalso include life between coffees. Starbucks’ 35.9 million Facebookfans and 5 million Twitter followers clearly want to engage with thecompany. For others, purchasing their espresso from Starbucks maybe an expression of their values. They may feel connected to thecompany via its social and sustainability efforts, as represented in theprogram’s tagline, “You & Starbucks: It’s bigger than coffee.” And thatis only a fraction of the possibilities.

Figure 1.6 Starbucks App—Mobile Payments, Automated

Loyalty, and Text Communications in OneSource: http://www.starbucks.com/coffeehouse/mobile-apps/mystarbucks

16


We refer to the sum of these brand impressions over time asthe customer experience journey. These experiences can take placewhile our customers are searching, evaluating, or consuming ourproducts or services, as well as between purchases and even outsidethe purchase process. Every one of these encounters is considered atouchpoint.

Touchpoints can be static, meaning one-way communicationsfrom us, such as when a customer receives a direct mail piece fromus, or they can be interactive, like a tweet exchange or a visit to one ofour stores. (Recognizing the value of engaging with our customers,most of our static brand experiences now invite our customers toengage with us in more interactive environments.) They may involvedirect interaction with our employees in environments like a callcenter or sales call, or they may stop short of that with a simpledownload of a white paper. Each of these touchpoints is supportedby a complex and interconnected system including Operations, IT,Finance, Human Resources, and Marketing, and by a broader ecosys-tem, which may include manufacturers, suppliers, media partners,and retailers.

Our prospects’ and customers’ brand experience include all ofthe interactions they have directly with us, as well as the interac-tions they have about us with their peers. Social media has fostereda recommendation-based global economy, creating unprecedentedopportunities for people to seek out information from peers andto influence others. Some of these conversations take place in ourbranded social environments in the form of a post on our Facebookpage or comment on our blog. Many take place in other public andprivate social environments and plenty still take place around thewater fountain or over a cup of coffee.

Each brand experience contributes to people’s overall perceptionof our customer experience (see Figure 1.7). Trust us, customersalways have a perception of their encounters with us. Theseresponses range from horrible to great or perhaps the dreaded stateof indifference. These perceptions are fluid; they can change overtime with additional encounters.

These perceptions are significant—they largely define our brands.As our customers write tweets, texts, reviews, upload photos, and

17


Searchexperience

Productor serviceexperience

Digitalexperience

(blogs, social,email, website,

mobile)

Non-digitalmarketing

experiences

Shoppingexperience(in-store,

ecommerce)

Service andcustomer care

experience

Communityexperience

CUSTOMER

MANY FACTORSIMPACT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Figure 1.7 Multiple Touches Shape the Customer Experience

make recommendations, they are shaping our brands. This commu-nication amounts to a lot of influence, on par with the big advertisingspends of days gone by, because word-of-mouth influence is pow-erful stuff in a recommendation-driven environment like ours. Theseperceptions also determine whether our product or services will ulti-mately be acquired as research shows that brand experience is thesingle biggest factor in a prospect’s decision to purchase a productor service.10

Get Customer Experience Savvy—It Pays

Clearly there are many moving parts that contribute to how con-sumers experience our brands, some of which are in our control andsome of which are not. (The manufacturing company John Deere

18


identified over 525 possible touches with its constituents!) Thesemoving parts have to work together, consistently, to deliver remark-able brand experiences that capture our customers’ attention and thatstand out from the competition in a positive way.

Recognizing the complexity of the task, it is logical to ask our-selves if it is really worth the effort. Rest assured, there is gold inthem hills. The customer experience differential represents a largeopportunity for multiple reasons:

1. Customer expectations for brand experience are wide-spread. According to a recent study conducted by the mar-keting agency Jack Morton Worldwide (JMW), over 80 percentof people say that they are more likely to consider brands withdifferentiated experiences.11 Although this is true across mar-ket segments, people between the ages of 25 and 34 are “mostlikely to consider, recommend, or pay a premium price basedon a better brand experience.”12 Similarly, research undertakenby the strategy consulting firm McKinsey & Company foundthat customer experience impacts two-thirds of the decisionscustomers make; price often drives the remaining third.13

Heightened brand experience expectations are not justcharacteristic of customers in mature markets. In China, forexample, 93.8 percent of consumers surveyed said they weremore likely to consider brands based on experience, comparedwith a worldwide average of 80.4 percent.14

2. Few companies have made inroads into realizing thecustomer experience differential to date. Although mostmanagers believe that they are already delivering great brandexperiences, a 2013 survey undertaken by Forrester Researchfound that only 8 percent of consumers agreed. In fact,61 percent rated their experience as ranging from okay topoor or very poor.15 This is a significant disconnect—andopportunity.

Forrester also found that some industries are so lackingin customer focus—health insurance plans and Internetservice providers are at the bottom of the list, as shown inFigure 1.8—that simply being adequate can create a point

19


20

75 89

72

74 80

67

64

83

83

61

53

83

85

8263

88

Credit card providers (70)

Base: U.S. online consumers who have interacted with brands in these industries

Banks (71)

Investment firms (73)

Insurance providers (73)

Consumer electronics manufacturers (74)

Parcel delivery/shipping providers (77)

Hotels (79)

Retailers (82)

Industry (average)30 40 50

Very poor Poor Okay Good Excellent60 70 80 90 100

= Average industry score

Figure 1.8 Customer Experience Varies across and within

IndustriesSource: Megan Burns, Forrester Research, Inc. Report, “The CustomerExperience Index, 2013,” Forrester Research, Inc., January 15, 2013.

of differentiation from the competition. In most industries,however, there are one or two exceptional leaders and manyothers that lag significantly behind.16

3. Remarkable customer experience pays. Customer experi-ences with brands impact margins. American Express found that67 percent of Americans would spend an average of 13 percentmore with a company that provides excellent customer ser-vice.17 Not surprisingly, advocacy is also affected. JMW foundthat 87 percent of those surveyed said they are more likely torecommend a brand based on superior experience.18 In fact,79 percent said they would only advocate for brands after theyhave a great customer experience.19

USAA Understands and Delivers

In the financial services industry, the United States AutomobileAssociation (USAA) leads the pack in terms of customer experience

20


and with good reason: they have made a concerted effort to engagetheir entire company in the effort. A few years ago the company,which serves military personell and their families, consolidated itscustomer-experience–related operations under an EVP of memberexperience. Today, almost half of USAA’s employees are on themember-experience team, which is responsible for “setting strategy,monitoring performance, and driving innovation.”20

To enhance its members’ experience, the company recently reor-ganized its product offerings to better reflect and anticipate the actualsteps that USAA members take when purchasing their products. Forexample, knowing that when their members purchase a car they maybe also looking to secure a car loan and insurance coverage, the com-pany now bundles these offerings into an integrated service. Throughits mobile app, website, and/or contact centers, or some combinationthereof, the company’s 9.7 million members and their families caneasily find, finance, and insure a car.

Seeing its business through the eyes of its customers paid off.Today, USAA enjoys the highest customer experience rankings acrossall three industries in which the company is active. These rankingstranslate into hard cash: the company has enjoyed double-digitincreases in auto sales and loans.

What Do Our Customers Want from Us?

People’s expectations for brands are increasing; 57 percent ofcustomers say they hold brands to higher standards than they didpreviously.21 Our customers become accustomed to the standard ofexperience offered by companies like Amazon and Marketo, which isalways being enhanced. Yesterday’s exceptional experiences quicklybecome today’s baseline.

To stay relevant, we have to keep our finger on the pulse of whatreally matters to our customers and build remarkable experiencesaround that. As a result, the answer to the question—What do ourcustomers want from us?—will differ for every organization; how-ever, there are some basic elements of customer experience that arebecoming universal.

21


Understand and Meet Their Needs

To attract and sustain our prospects’ and customers’ attention and wintheir business, we have to offer products, services, and experiencesthat meet their needs or desires. An understanding of the underlyingcustomers and their needs and desires must accompany this function-ality, creating tremendous opportunities for brands that can developtruly empathize with their customers and translate that understandinginto products, services, and experiences.22

Our marketing must also be purposeful, achieving what market-ing consultant Jay Baer describes as, “Youtility,” marketing so usefulthat our customers would pay for it.23 We can offer entertainment,inspiration, information, or self-actualization, but without being use-ful, we do not have a shot of being invited in to the customer journey.

Useful does not mean boring. In fact, useful experiences are usu-ally drawn from deep wells of creativity. Take a look at what Nike isdoing as an example. Knowing that its customers enjoy the oppor-tunity to express themselves, Nike encourages them to design theirown running shoes. By offering them the chance to personalize theirshoes on the basis of performance features and appearance, Nikegives its customers the opportunity to say to the world, “This is whoI am.”

Recognizing the larger aspiration behind their customers’ pur-chase of running shoes, Nike designs experiences that help themreach their fitness goals and enjoy an active life. Runners can maptheir runs—including elevation details—and track their workoutprogress through the Nike+ app. When they need a bit of extramotivation to make it up that last hill, Nike’s customers can choosea high-energy song from one of the company’s playlists. If theyhave previously alerted their friends of their run on Facebook orPath, they can hear real-time cheers along the way for every like orcomment they receive (Figure 1.9).

For their street-soccer fans in Spain, Nike goes beyond the call ofduty to provide opportunities for pickup games. Through #MiPista,the company creates temporary playing fields with laser beamsprojected from a crane onto flat open surfaces below. Using theirsmartphones, players can request that Nike’s traveling team install a

22


Figure 1.9 Nike Helps Its Customers Reach Their Fitness

Goals with its Nike+ AppSource: iTunes.apple.com/us/app/nike+-running/id387771637

temporary soccer field and then get to work rounding up players.Within minutes, empty spaces are transformed into illuminatedstreet-soccer fields. Take a moment to enjoy photos on Nike’s blog;they are inspiring.24

For anyone, anywhere, who is interested in being fit, Nike offersits FuelBand, an electronic bracelet that tracks and measures theirmovements throughout the day, whether generated from a tennismatch, an early morning run, or just walking around the office. Move-ments are measured in NikeFuel, a proprietary metric that can beevaluated over time, shared with friends, and applied to unlock lev-els and content on the company’s digital game, NikeFuel Missions.It is experiences like these that delight Nike’s customers and generate$25 billion a year in revenue.

23


Offer Relevant Interactions

Today’s time-pressed customers want relevance. For many years wehave operated under the assumption that our customers want moreoptions; however, research conducted by American psychologistBarry Schwartz found that for most people, having too manyoptions is anxiety producing rather than freeing.25 Highly targetedexperiences that zero in our customer’s needs and desires simplifytheir lives; for many that is considered a gift.

Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace, which creates privateonline customer communities for companies, describes this gift in thecontext of a couple. Tired after a long workweek, they are makingplans for Friday night dinner. The man texts his girlfriend asking herto make the reservation at any place she wants, thinking he is doingher a favor by letting her choose the type of food and the venue theywill enjoy. Rather than being energized by being given the choice,the woman thinks to herself, “If he really loved me, he would handlethis, so all I have to do is show up. I would have even paid!”

What does this mean for marketers? Relevance is nothing shortof offering the right experience, in the right format, on the rightdevice(s), when our customers are ready. Relevance increasinglyrequires contextualized experiences that reflect the individualcustomer’s behavior, preferences, current situation, and are oftenpredictive. This type of personalized marketing experience has longbeen a dream for marketers, and big data and advanced analytics arenow making this dream a reality. From our customers’ point of view,relevance means feeling known, not in an invasive or creepy way,but in a way that says, “Can we be of assistance?” It is the differencebetween being welcome and being annoying.

In the case of Starbucks, relevance could be a personalized e-mail(or SMS text) sent to a customer at the time of day when he or shefrequently makes a beverage purchase. The e-mail could feature thesignature Starbucks’ cup and, as in Figure 1.10, include the customer’sname and maybe his or her favorite drink order.

Or relevance could take the form of a personalized video ora Pinterest-like digital bulletin board, sent to a prospect who hasrecently visited a retailer’s website to evaluate and price televisions.

24


Figure 1.10 Starbucks Customizes Its Customer Interactions

The content could provide additional information about the modelsthat caught their attention, including customer ratings, details aboutnearby stores where the selected models are presently in stock, anda link enabling an online purchase.

Invite Participation

The interactions that Amazon, Nike, and Marketo enjoy with theircustomers incorporate another important component of today’scustomer-centricity: participation. This broadcast era of one-way

25


messaging is gone; effective communication now is about engage-ment. Customers are often looking for us to provide more than justa product or a service: They are looking for experiences.

Experiences can be digital, physical, or some combination ofboth. The interactive mobile app, Stylewhile, for example, adds a newdimension to the digital shopping experience.26 Shoppers can visual-ize what outfits will look like by dressing an avatar, whose skin tone,hair, and body size can be adjusted to resemble the person for whomthe item is being purchased. The app facilitates a fun and novel expe-rience, while removing one of the challenges of purchasing clothesonline: visualizing how clothes will actually look.

Similarly, retailers who adapt their in-store experience to leveragethe unique capabilities of mobile are finding that it increases sales.27

The Sprooki shopping app, for example, enhances the in-storeexperience for shoppers in Singapore.28 While in or near the mall,shoppers receive deal alerts on their smartphones from participatingretailers. If intrigued, would-be buyers can browse and purchasethe items directly from their smartphones and pick them up at theirconvenience.

Creating digital communities around our brands provides ourprospects and customers with some of the richest experiences. Itmight be hard to conceive that people want to connect arounddiapers, but they do. The Huggies Community, for example, bringstogether parents to talk about all things child-related. Dell Idea-storm invites customers to cocreate new products and services andto enhance existing offerings. One of the first companies to publiclytap customers for ideas since the site’s launch in 2007, the companyhas garnered more than 15,000 ideas from interested users andimplemented close to 500 from them.

Engage Before, During, and After

Our customers want to be educated and engaged on an ongoingbasis. According to a study conducted by JMW, this is especiallytrue for customers who say that unique brand experience impactstheir brand choice.29 Many want self-service access to content earlyin the customer journey, so that they can evaluate potential pur-chases before they contact a salesperson or walk into a store. Some

26


want ongoing connections after a purchase is made—timely infor-mation that keeps them in the know, invitations to special events,and opportunities to share their experience and opinions. By invit-ing engagement throughout the customer experience journey, wecan develop relationship-based loyalty, rather than the more fickletransaction-based version.

To keep its fans engaged, Scrabble set up free Wi-Fi hotspotsacross Paris in areas lacking coverage. To access the Scrabble net-work, people were invited to play a digital version of the game, whichunlocked the necessary password. The length of time awarded onthe network was based on the player’s Scrabble score; better spellerswere rewarded for their skill with more time. In addition to enablingthe brand to connect with its fans, the experience prompted Scrabbleplayers to try the digital version of the game.

Keep It Simple

Ease of use is highly important to today’s customers, who have shortattention spans and little patience for anything lengthy, deliveredslowly, or technically imperfect. The average attention span of adultshas decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2012, giv-ing us the distinction of now having a shorter attention span thana goldfish (9 seconds).30 The average American in his or her twen-ties switches media venues 27 times per non-working hour. He or shealso multiscreens, browsing multiple screens at once, often absorbingunrelated content simultaneously.31

As a result, interacting with us has to be easy, inviting, and hope-fully fun, or our customers will go elsewhere. At its best, the technol-ogy we employ to engage with our customers should be so simplethat it is invisible; the experience that the tools are trying to delivershould be what is remembered. When our customers connect withus in person or over the phone, our employees should be so help-ful and the processes so streamlined that people notice—and areperhaps even delighted.

Ease of use also means that our engagement with customers takesplace where they are, not where it is most convenient for us to be.We can assume that our customers want to communicate with us in

27


a variety of ways depending on where they are and the nature ofthe interaction—e-mail, voice, SMS text, apps, call centers, and inperson. This means we need to be able to deliver a seamless andinterconnected brand experience across channels and devices. Whilechallenging to deliver, this omni-experience can capture the attentionof distracted customers by creating a consistent surround sound asthey migrate across channels.

Be Real and Be Worthy

Social media offers an interactive marketing experience where wecan engage directly with our prospects and customers as individu-als. As we draw closer to these constituents, we become more likefriends in a neighborhood, rather than buyers and sellers. Many of ourcommunications happen in their Facebook and Twitter streams, rightabove or below their friends’ and family’s updates. Mobile devicesoffer access to our customers throughout their day, whether theyare in budget meetings, at the soccer field, or on a first date. Thisintimacy has changed the social contract between businesses andtheir customers, requiring a new level of responsiveness, respect,and transparency from companies.

To be worthy of this connection, we must be mindful and respect-ful of our expanding role in people’s lives. Are we truly being useful?Is our cadence right? Are we listening? Are we being too intrusive?Are we being good stewards of the customer data that makes thesehighly personalized interactions possible? A breach of security or asense of being too closely observed or intruded upon will turn thedial backwards, perhaps irreparably, in terms of customer-centricity.

Involvement in social environments challenges marketers to betransparent about the ways our companies do business. Everlane,an innovative e-commerce company that creates quality tees, shirts,sweaters, and accessories, has built its brand around this quality. Itencourages its customers to “Know your factories. Know your costs.Always ask why.”32 Colorful photos on its website take us behindthe scenes to see exactly how their fabrics are created, cut, sewn,dyed, finished, pressed, and packed. Descriptions and snapshots ofthe factories that manufacture Everlane products tell the story of the

28


company’s partners: where they are located, how many people theyemploy, how Everlane discovered them, and reassurances about theintegrity of each partners’ workplace. The company also disclosesits costs and profit margin, openly making the case for why it canprovide quality, value, and ethically manufactured products simulta-neously.

Be Meaningful

Everlane is tapping into another key component of remarkable cus-tomer experience: a vehicle for people to live out their values. JohnMaeda, the former president of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD),explains, “What people want today goes well beyond technology anddesign. What people are looking for now is a way to reconnect withtheir values: to ground how they can, will, and should live in theworld.”33 Many of our prospects and customers want us to be mean-ingful brands, brands with a point of view that is larger than ourproduct lines; brands with a true connection to underlying values,not a superficial greenwashing.

Dove, which manufactures skin and hair care products, is con-sistently seen as a brand that is making a difference. Inspired bymarket research that indicated that only 4 percent of women considerthemselves beautiful, Dove is committed to “building self-esteem andinspiring all women and girls to reach their full potential.”34 Towardthis end, the company launched the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.Encouraging men and women to “imagine a world where beauty is asource of confidence, not anxiety,” the brand has brought discussionof “what comprises beauty?” into the public arena.

Dove continues to push forward the conversation, most recentlywith its Dove Real Beauty Sketches. In this latest social experiment,Dove uses videos of women describing their appearances to illustratehow they are often their own worst beauty critics. In the video, severalwomen describe their looks to a forensic artist who sketches themunseen, based solely upon their description of themselves. Thesesketches are compared with drawings created by the same artist withone important distinction: they are based upon strangers’ descriptionsof the women. The differences are stark; the strangers’ images are farmore accurate—and attractive.

29


Though these initiatives are at times controversial, Dove is puttinga stake in the ground, boldly articulating what it considers to beimportant. In so doing, the brand attracts and builds bonds withprospects and customers who feel similarly. It has also earned thedistinction of being a meaningful brand.

What comprises a meaningful brand? The communications com-pany Havas Media developed the Meaningful Brands Index (MBi)to measure and assess the correlation between financial performanceand the benefits brands bring to people’s lives in terms of health, hap-piness, finances, relationships, and community, among others. Theirfindings are important: Being a meaningful brand is not just a niceidea; it pays. In 2013, Meaningful Brands outperformed the stockmarket by 120 percent.35 Dove is among them.

How Remarkable Do We Need to Be?

Throughout The Digital Marketer we encourage companies to settheir sights on delivering remarkable customer experience. What dowe mean by remarkable? We like the definition put forward by mar-keting guru Seth Godin: “worthy of remark.”36 Remarkable experi-ences do not have to be accompanied by fireworks or a parade.Some of the most remarkable moments are everyday experiencesdone well. Think Amazon.

How remarkable do we have to be? It depends upon our cus-tomers, competition, industries, and businesses. Although customerexperience leaders are raising the bar for every organization, our cri-teria for customer experience must reflect our value proposition andthe factors that are most important to our customers.

JetBlue is a customer experience leader in the airline industry.The company goes to great lengths to understand the key factorsthat impact its customers’ travel experience, measure those influencesregularly, and incorporate this insight into its day-to-day operations.As a result, its everyday experience is worthy of remark. Indeed, asthe Twitter exchange in Figure 1.11 captures, one satisfied customerdid remark, quite publicly and colorfully, about her positive experi-ence with the airline. Knowing that responsiveness is a key driver ofremarkable customer experience, the airline offered a witty reply.

30


Figure 1.11 JetBlue Delights Its CustomersSource: https://twitter.com/JetBlue/status/1768096120

On some occasions, we may choose to take our customer expe-rience efforts up a notch as Morton’s Steakhouse did for one itscustomers, author and entrepreneur Peter Shankman. After a longday of travel and before boarding his last flight, Shankman sent alighthearted tweet to Morton’s Steakhouse, a restaurant chain wherehe dines frequently, facetiously asking them to meet him at NewarkAirport with a porterhouse steak when his plane landed. Two hourslater when he landed in Newark, he was surprised and delighted tofind that his dinner awaited him. What is more, it was hand deliveredto the terminal, free of charge, by a tuxedo-clad server. Shankmansummarized the experience in his blog: “I. Was. Floored.”37 That is aremarkable, out of the ordinary, experience.

Whether a unique happening that surprises and delights or theconsistent efficient and effective delivery of something more routine,remarkable experiences cause people to take note, perhaps crack asmile, breathe a sigh of relief, or make a remark. That is how goodwe want to be.

Will We Ignore Change, Grow with It, or Drive It?

Many marketers feel unprepared in this dynamic, confusing, andhighly promising environment. The question for each of us is, “Willwe ignore change, grow with it, or drive it?” The fact that you arereading The Digital Marketer suggests you want to grow and perhapsdrive change going forward.

31


In the pages that follow we explore the 10 essential skillsnecessary to be relevant in today’s marketplace. As marketers wedo not have to become experts in all 10 skill areas, but we doneed to understand their benefits and limitations, and how they cancontribute to delivering remarkable customer experiences. Here is aquick overview.

1. Build a Successful Marketing Career

Success in this marketing landscape requires that we be agile—learning, unlearning, and relearning—in order to be marketerswho can adapt to change. It can be a challenge to let go of ideas,practices, and perspectives that have worked well and even madeus marketing stars in the past. Research shows, however, that thoseproven leaders who cannot let go of entrenched patterns, however,do not thrive in turbulent times.38

Living in a state of discovery can feel exhausting and unsettling,but consider this: In a world where the terrain is shifting, standingstill is an extraordinarily risky proposition. While we instinctuallyseek safety, a more successful approach is adaptation. As Reid Hoff-man, founder of LinkedIn and coauthor of The Start-Up of You warns,“Without frequent, contained risk taking, you are setting yourself upfor a major dislocation at some point in the future.”39

Plenty of opportunity exists for those of us who can success-fully re-envision our roles and expand our skillsets to match theneeds of this new marketing environment. Positions like ContentStrategist, Community Builder, Converged Media Specialist, MarketingTechnologist, and Manager of Customer Experience reflect some ofthe new competencies that companies are developing in their questfor customer-centricity. Several new C-level positions that focus onthe customer are opening new career paths. (More about this inChapter 2.)

To take advantage of the opportunities that this new landscapeoffers we must actively manage our careers to identify the skillsand experiences we need, and how we are going to acquirethem. Intentionally building our networks creates vital and vetted

32


information flows that keep us up-to-date and augment our resourcebase. Branding ourselves and being thoughtful about proactivelymanaging our reputation and contributions to the field have becomeessential. Seeking out developmental relationships including mentorsand sponsors can offer necessary support to boost our careers.Finally, consciously putting ourselves in situations where we can feedand flex our creative muscles kindles our imagination, uncoveringnew possibilities for how we can contribute.

2. Design Valuable Customer Experiences

In an environment in which customer experience is increasingly crit-ical, the thoughtful design of individual customer experiences, andof how multiple touchpoints work together as a whole, is too vital tobe left to chance. Knowledge of design thinking, a disciplined pro-cess of observation, idea generation, and rapid iteration of products,content, and experiences, jumpstarts our organizations’ creativity andtransports us beyond our “go-to” options, unlocking new opportuni-ties for creating shared value. An understanding of basic tenants ofbehavior design and the persuasive impact of technology enhancesour ability to create interactions that prompt people to act. Map-ping the customer journey of each of our market segments deep-ens our understanding of when, where, and how our prospects andcustomers interact with us. By tracking their sentiment across eachof these touchpoints, we can evaluate the effectiveness of each ofthese encounters, prioritize our efforts, and optimize our customerexperience.

For example, working with MCorp Consulting, a customer experi-ence and brand consultancy, a large commercial real estate lender thatstruggled with low rates of customer satisfaction and retention real-ized significant improvements in its customer experience. By map-ping its customer touchpoints, the company was able to evaluatethe effectiveness of its interactions and identify those who were mostessential for driving customer engagement. Drawing from this insight,the company was able to improve or eliminate underachieving touch-points, create new processes, redefine roles and responsibilities, and

33


establish relevant metrics, enhancing its customers’ satisfaction andloyalty, and increasing overall loan volume.40

3. Find Actionable Insight in Big Data

and Marketing Analytics

Big data and marketing analytics can be powerful tools for mar-keters. Indeed, after analyzing more than 250 customer engagementsover the span of five years, McKinsey concluded that companies thatput data at the center of the marketing and sales decisions havebeen able to improve their marketing return on investment by 15to 20 percent—that equates to $150–$200 billion of additional valuebased on global annual marketing spend of an estimated $1 trillion.41

Best Buy is among those companies that are realizing gains. As anexample, the consumer electronics retailer was able to double mem-bership in its Red Zone loyalty program in three months througha razor-targeted e-mail campaign prompted by insight derived fromadvanced customer analytics.42

Finding the business value in clicks, shares, swipes, and pinsis easier said than done, however. It requires an ability to capturerelevant data, integrate disparate data sources, maintain and storemassive amounts of information, and apply advanced analytics todetect the important signals amid a lot of noise.

How technical do marketers need to become in order to realizethis value? Going forward it will be impossible to separate market-ing from technology—software, content, creativity, and infrastructurewill be completely interwoven. However, this does not mean thatmarketers must become data scientists. We do need to be capableof broad analytic thinking so that we can ask the probing questionsthat frame solid data analysis and be able to build and manage tech-nically savvy teams. Given how critical the insights derived from bigdata and analytics are to the success of our marketing efforts, wemust also be informed enough to influence or own the purchase ofthe necessary technology and ensure that it can be readily adaptedfor use by front-line marketing managers.

34


4. Employ Entrepreneurial Thinking for

Discernment and Agility

In markets characterized by high levels of uncertainty and rapidchange, an entrepreneurial approach to decision-making enablesus to act quickly in response to changing market conditions, evenin the face of ambiguity. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is notoriousfor his entrepreneurial decision-making style. Favoring intelligentaction over intelligent inaction, Bezos has a “ready, fire, steer” style,as opposed to the traditional “ready, aim, fire approach.” Bezosencourages his employees to spend less time aiming and moretime doing in order to drive creativity and innovation. One of thecompany’s internal awards, “Just Do It,” recognizes employees whotake the initiative to do positive things for the company withouthaving to involve their boss.

Entrepreneurial decision-making does not mean shooting fromthe hip. Rather, it means creating evidence for or against our ideasthrough immediate and frequent testing. This iterative process allowsus to continuously act and learn, enhancing our organizations’ knowl-edge, experience, and agility. Entrepreneurial decision-making alsoincludes practices such as determining budgets by defining accept-able losses, pursuing multiple options simultaneously, and buildingpurposeful partner networks. Being able to decipher when to applyentrepreneurial decision-making and when to employ traditional ana-lytic methods is essential for today’s marketer.

Consider the experience of the early stage company Carsurfing.Building upon customers’ appetite for sharing services, Carsurfingset out to develop a mobile application to facilitate ride sharing tomajor cultural and sporting events. Before the app was ready to belaunched, members of the Carsurfing team noticed a high volume ofchatter in social environments about Burning Man, an annual art festi-val in Nevada. Recognizing the opportunity that the festival presentedto test the validity of their product idea, the team moved quicklyto temporarily shift their focus from building the app to creating adedicated landing page for Facebook users that were planning onattending the event. The Company’s ability to move quickly paid off.

35


By tapping into the conversations and creating a space for festivalattendees to connect, Carsurfing was able to facilitate over 800 rides toBurning Man, attracting its first customers and validating their “barelyalpha” product at the same time.43

5. Create a Winning Content Experience Strategy

Our customers have changed the way they connect with brands. Tra-ditional broadcast messaging is no longer effective on its own; contentnow drives our interactions. Our ability to tell great stories and designengaging experiences to catalyze customer connection is critical toour being invited into the customer experience journey. Storytelling isquite different from writing ad copy or press releases. It facilitates ourprospects and customers finding themselves in our story and oftenincludes tools that bring them into the experience.

Consider what McCormick is doing to engage its customersaround spices, as shown in Figure 1.12. Understanding the truth in

Figure 1.12 McCormick Helps Customers Create Meals with

Ingredients on HandSource: http://www.mccormick.com

36


George Bernard Shaw’s comment, “There is no love sincerer thanthe love of food,” McCormick makes the world of flavors easilyaccessible to its customers. Cooks can plan their meals with thehelp of the company’s website—even at the last minute—by simplyinputting the food items and spices they have on hand. Acting liketop chefs in a quick-fire challenge, McCormick generates recipes fora mouthwatering dinner.

To proactively design multiple menus around its customers’individualized food preferences, McCormick offers FlavorprintTM. Byfilling out a simple digital survey, customers provide the necessarydata to generate a footprint of their favorite flavors.44 Based onthis knowledge, McCormick recommends recipes that incorporatethose flavors. Who knew that we would like Mojito Lime GrilledLamb Chops and Smoky Montreal Steak Sauce Burgers? As cooksrate, search, and share recipes and products, FlavorprintTM getssmarter and more accurate with their taste bud preferences. All ofMcCormick’s recipes and seasonings carry a FlavorPrintTM symbolthat helps its customers make better selections even when they donot have access to these digital tools.

Understanding the power of peer-to-peer influence, McCormickencourages its customers to socialize their experiences and recipesin McCormick’s multiple social environments including Pinterest,Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Each of these touch-points offers McCormick and its customers an opportunity to get toknow each other better and to share their solutions for leftovers, anabundance of zucchini, and a craving for cinnamon with a broadercommunity.

6. Engage Customers via Social Communities

Social media has created virtual neighborhoods where our con-stituents spend an increasing amount of time. Ninety-one percentof online adults access social media at least once a month, andthe average online adult spends 37 minutes on social mediadaily.45 As a result, these networks and communities have becomeimportant touchpoints with our prospects and customers, often vitalto cross-channel communication strategies. Conversations flow in

37


these environments and important insights can often be found. Inmany instances, these networks and communities are influencingthe design, manufacture, packaging, delivery, and servicing of ourproducts and services, putting our customers directly in the centerof our organizations.

To successfully play in the social sphere, marketers need to bewell versed in each community’s individual culture and norms ofengagement, and be clear about how to best participate. Prioritiza-tion is necessary given the sheer number of social spaces where wecan have a presence. Engagement involves monitoring the conver-sation 24/7, actively managing our presence, generating appropriatecontent, distilling the insight, and sharing what we learn with ourbroader ecosystem.

In some instances we may choose to develop our own socialcommunities. For example, through the branded social communityIBM PartnerWorld, IBM offers a broad range of resources that helpits business partners build, sell, and implement IBM-based solutionsfor their customers. Partners are able to take advantage of IBMprograms like Selling Through Social Insights, which taps into thepower of social listening to increase sales. Social Insights tracks datafrom over 280 million relevant social sources. The Social Insightsdashboard synthesizes “who is talking” and “what is trending” in fivestrategic subject areas related to IBM products. Personalized recom-mendations for relevant content, combined with access to relevantIBM experts, provide rich resources for business partners to getup to speed on what is currently on their prospects’ minds. Armedwith this knowledge, business partners are better able to turn leadsinto sales.

7. Maximize Marketing Effectiveness by Integrating

Paid, Earned, and Owned Media

During the past few years, much focus has been placed on thepower of owned media—the content that marketers create. Contentbelongs at the center of any of our experience strategies—it creates

38


the customer experience journey. However, in many cases anintegrated or converged strategy in which we combine our contentwith materials created by our customers (earned media) and amplifyit with advertising (paid media) can maximize our impact.

Why is this the case? In a recommendation-based economy,earned media is paramount. It is what people find most credible.When we incorporate our customers’ stories into our content, we areharnessing the most compelling advocates for our businesses: satis-fied customers. New forms of paid media that draw from reservoirsof social media-derived customer data are creating unprecedentedtargeting opportunities, offering the promise of being able to reachour prospects and customers with highly relevant messaging in thechannels they prefer.

A quick flip through a recent edition of More magazine, a maga-zine for “women of style and substance,” illustrates this convergencevia traditional media.46 A two-page advertisement for L’Oréal’s VisibleLife CC Cream, features celebrity Andie MacDowell, who vouches forthe color-correcting cream by saying, “No wonder it’s my new bestfriend.” On the adjacent page are before and after pictures of reg-ular women who have experienced “the CC transformation,” alongwith customer reviews from four happy users. Calls to action inviteMore readers to enter a contest to win samples of the product andto learn more about the cream on their website. Earned media (inthe form of customer reviews) meets owned media (additional infor-mation about the product on their website) meets paid advertising(the ad itself).

8. Drive Sales with Intelligent

Customer-Engagement Platforms

Our prospects and customers increasingly expect one-on-onecontextualized interactions that reflect their behaviors and currentsituation–time, location, and device. Creating contextualized experi-ences is complex. It requires real-time capture of relevant customerdata across channels and instantaneous application of predictive

39


analytics to proactively offer appropriate resources. While this is chal-lenging to do for one person, imagine the complexity of deliveringcontextualized experiences at scale.

To scale one-to-one communication, marketers need integratedcustomer-engagement platforms that can steward our prospects andcustomers through the customer experience journey. Smart marketingautomation systems can assess where individuals are in the customerexperience journey and distribute content specifically selected forthem. They also detect potential content redundancies, changes incadence, and shifts in interest and priorities, based upon behaviorssuch as clicks, views, shares, time spent with materials and reflect,and adapts content streams accordingly. This means that our cus-tomers are only invited into experiences that have a high probabilityof meeting their needs, avoiding spam.

Marketing automation also allows us to trace the impact of eachmarketing interaction on our prospects’ and customers’ behavior,making it possible for us to continually assess and optimize ourefforts, and to more accurately demonstrate marketings’ contributionsto key financial metrics. For many companies, marketing automationhas also brought marketing and sales into closer alignment, helpingto alleviate age-old conflicts.

9. Build Worthwhile Loyalty and Digital

Couponing Programs

Brands can no longer feel certain about their customers’ commitment.Loyalty erosion and customer defection are pervasive. Ironically, mostloyalty programs do not do much to create loyalty. Although peo-ple enroll in the programs, the majority are not inspired to remainactive. The best way to create loyalty is to ensure incredible brandsatisfaction by creating remarkable customer experiences. For somecompanies, offering a loyalty program that enhances the customerexperience can be a winning strategy.

Starbucks’ loyalty program is leading the way. Designed to give itscustomers more of what they love—coffee—“My Starbucks Rewards”

40


grants free drinks and exclusive offers to customers based upon theirusage. The first cross-channel loyalty program in the market, cus-tomers are rewarded for purchases made in Starbucks’ shops as wellas for Starbucks packaged coffee purchased in grocery stores.

The free mobile app automatically tracks and manages rewards,making participation in the program easy. The app also includes ascan-and-go purchase option, locates nearby Starbucks, and providesfree downloads of new apps and music. One of our favorite featuresis the eGift, which makes it possible to send Starbucks’ gift certificatesto other loyalty members. Students love it when their parents sendthem a gift certificate for a fortified Red Eye during exams.

For some brands, a couponing strategy works well. A separatestrategy from loyalty program offers, couponing may provide just theneeded incentive to encourage potential customers to try, share, oract. Digital coupons and apps offer a faster and more convenient wayfor many customers to clip coupons.

Meijer, which operates groceries and superstores, offers its cus-tomers the opportunity to preview and select digital coupons andfile them in their digital mPerks account, where they can be instantlyredeemed at checkout. Their mobile app includes a find-it featurethat makes it easy for customers to locate any item in the store.47

The program enjoys a redemption rate of up to four times the nationalaverage.48

10. Ignite Customer-Centricity across the Organization

Customer-centricity requires a higher level of operational maturitythan we have needed in the past, because multiple functionsimpact our customer experience. Acting like symphony conductors,marketers need to be able to collaborate across the entire businessecosystem to facilitate customer-centricity at every important touch-point. This requires a realignment of efforts, the integrating of manyprocesses and systems, and a shift in many of our organizations’culture. It is a tall order, but as we have seen, companies are risingto the challenge.

41


What is more, extraordinary value can be created when organiza-tions move beyond their own borders to inspire customer-centricitythroughout their larger ecosystems. By sharing end-user data andcoordinating their efforts, an entire demand chain composed of man-ufacturers, retailers, and media companies can develop proprietaryinsights into demand. This enhanced, customer-oriented view cre-ates unprecedented opportunity and competitive advantage for eachpartner and the network as a whole.

What’s Next?

Overwhelmed? Remember, marketers do not have to be experts ineach of these areas. Being knowledgeable in these 10 essential skillswill take us a long way toward career success. In the pages that follow,we invite you to explore each of these 10 marketing skills in a way thatwe hope is useful for new hires as well as for the most experiencedmarketers. Examples of how large and small companies are puttingthese skills to work bring them more fully to life. Suggestions formetrics to evaluate success are included, where applicable, and listsof resources accompany each chapter. Hopefully, in the pages thatfollow, we will convince you that it is, indeed, a great time to be adigital marketer.

Consumers, Prospects, Customers, and Constituents

Throughout The Digital Marketer, we refer to consumers as prospects,customers, and constituents. This is intentional. By using the wordconstituent, we are challenging each of us to consider theneeds and desires of the multiple stakeholders to which weare accountable—our prospects, customers, investors, regulators,employees, business partners, and more. We also hope to encouragethinking of our customers and prospects as more than transactions.This is not to imply that focusing on sales is not important. A businesswithout revenue is not viable over the long term. A business thatfocuses exclusively on sales, however, is leaving far too much on

42


the table. In today’s connected world, we believe that when youget the relationship right, most everything else—sales, loyalty, andadvocacy—will follow.

As a result, throughout The Digital Marketer we refer to ourlifetime of interactions with our customers as the customer experi-ence journey, rather than the transaction-based consumer purchasejourney. This reframing more accurately captures the richness of thismore genuine and collaborative relationship.

Throughout The Digital Marketer, we often describe the experi-ences of Larry Weber and Lisa Leslie Henderson, the cowriters of thisbook. Larry is the CEO of Racepoint Global, an advanced marketingservices firm. A globally known expert in public relations and mar-keting services, Larry has successfully built companies and brandsand is passionate about the future of marketing. Lisa is an observer,synthesizer, and writer who draws extensively from her backgroundin marketing and consulting. Lisa and Larry have collaborated on twobooks to date, The Digital Marketer, and Everywhere: ComprehensiveStrategy for the Social Media Era. To stay current on their thinking,frequent www.racepoint.com/thedigitalmarketer and follow them at@TheLarryWeber and @ljlhendo.

In the following chapter we consider how companies areresponding to the customer-centric era.

QUESTIONS FOR CONSIDERATION

• Reflect on a recent experience in which you were the customer.What worked well? What needed to be improved? If you were incharge of improving the customer experience, what would yourecommend?

• How important is the customer’s experience in your industry?To your company? How well are you delivering? How do youknow?

(continued)

43


(continued)

• How would your customers describe the essential Drivers ofyour brand experience, the make-it-or-break-it features?

• Which of the 10 essential skills do you want to furtherdevelop?

• What is your next step?

RESOURCES

Influencers We Recommend

• Linda Boff. As executive director of global digital marketingfor General Electric (GE), Boff is the leader of the com-pany’s digital-marketing and global-advertising efforts.A self-proclaimed lover of modern art and Mad Menenthusiast, you can follow Boff on Twitter @lindaboff.

• Chip Conley. Founder and former CEO of Joie de VivreHospitality, Conley is a writer and thought leader in cre-ating meaningful customer experiences. His titles includeMarketing That Matters and Peak. Connect with Conleyat www.chipconley.com and on Twitter @chipconley.

• David Edelman. Coleader of the Digital Marketing StrategyGroup at McKinsey & Co., Edelman works across industriesto understand the implications of the ever-evolvingdigital environment on organizations. A Top-5 LinkedInInfluencer, Edelman is a frequent contributor to Forbes,The Economist, and Harvard Business Review blog. Followhim on Twitter at @davidedelman and on McKinsey’sLatest Thinking blog: www.cmsoforum.mckinsey.com.

• Seth Godin. Best-selling author, entrepreneur, and mar-keter, Godin writes about “the post-industrial revolution,

44


the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadershipand most of all, changing everything.”49 Read his lat-est thoughts, by literally clicking on the image of hishead at www.sethgodin.com or follow him on Twitter@thisissethsblog.

• Harley Manning. Research director in the Customer Experiencepractice at Forrester Research, Manning is the coauthorof Outside In with Kerry Bodine. Learn the latest on whatForrester is uncovering in customer experience on hisblog at www.blogs.forrester.com/harley_manning or on Twitter@hmanning.

• Scott Monty. Scott Monty, the global head of social media forFord Motor Company, writes The Social Media Marketing Blog.Monty describes this personal blog as a “series of links aboutcurrent events and trends in the worlds of technology, socialmedia, mobile, communications, and marketing in order to keepthe wider team up to date on the changes, newsworthy items,and content that might be useful in their jobs.”50 Find Montyat www.ScottMonty.com and follow him on Twitter at @ScottMonty.

• Dharmesh Shah. Cofounder and chief technology officer ofHubSpot, an inbound software company, Shah is a serialentrepreneur, having built and shipped at least 10 com-mercial products across a variety of start-ups. He is thecoauthor of Inbound Marketing: Getting Found Using Google,Social Media, and Blogs. Follow Shah on Twitter @dharmeshand read his contributions to www.onstartups.com.

Hashtags to Explore

• #customerexperience

• #cx (customer experience)

(continued)

45


(continued)

• #digital

• #digitalmarketing

• #marketing

• #mktg (marketing)

• #UX (customer experience)

46


u

RE

AL

-TIM

E P

UB

LIS

HIN

G A

ND

MA

RK

ET

ING

1 1

Real-Time Publishing and Marketing

Welcome to the world of real-time market-

ing, real-time publishing, search, and social. In

this chapter, I will begin discussing some of the

primary meanings of real-time and also lay a

foundation for the defi nitions, strategies, and

tactics covered throughout the remainder of this

book. I will also discuss some of the forerunners

to real-time marketing in this chapter. Here are

some of the topics you can expect to learn about

in this chapter:

Chapter Contents The state of the current Internet publishing landscape Terminology, defi nitions and history The fundamental tenets of a real-time marketing approach Integrating search, social, and publishing into a real-time approach

264386c01.indd 1 9/26/12 9:10 PM

CH

AP

TE

R 1

: R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

AN

D M

AR

KE

TIN

G

u

2

Introduction to Real-Time Content Marketing

In the new world of real-time information-sharing, there are many new concepts that businesses must embrace in order to be successful in their Internet marketing efforts. At the root of this revolution are the following basic elements:

x Seeking and fi nding behaviors

x Real-time interaction and active participation

x Consideration for both audiences and individuals

x Social-network distribution

x Instantaneous information-sharing, collaboration, and engagement

x Content promotion

Real-time information-sharing demands a more fi nely tuned approach from marketers, one that includes a redefi nition of the word publishing and also brings a business alive on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week basis.

N o t e : The changing landscape is not so much about social networks as it is about society being networked, in real-time .

The emergence of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990s presented a new publishing paradigm that forced marketers to rethink their approaches, in terms of the ability to connect one-to-one and many-to-many with their core audience. Today, eMarketer reports that two out of every three Americans engage in social networks, so a more accurate characterization of social networks is that society as a whole is almost fully networked. When including search and email usage in overall network participa-tion statistics, as many as 92 percent of all people are networked in some form, accord-ing to the May 2011 Pew Internet and American Life survey.

With the adoption of status-updating and sharing, a message can spread around the globe within hours, minutes, and even seconds. If marketers and brands are not part of the content conversation in either their own brand space or the broader cat-egory space, they might as well not exist to a certain degree.

Although more companies are becoming increasingly connected, the concepts of being present and active most often fall by the wayside. Many companies spend years redesigning their websites. Others look at social media in a start-and-stop manner, and by doing so they are allowing social networks to fully control their marketing conver-sation by simply ignoring it. Marketers and enterprise brands are also fi nding that the barriers built to protect themselves in the old media world have now become the very obstacles that prevent them from being effective in this new environment. The good

264386c01.indd 2 9/26/12 9:10 PM

u

INT

RO

DU

CT

ION

TO

RE

AL

-TIM

E C

ON

TE

NT

MA

RK

ET

ING

3

news is that by knowing the problem, you can start to address the solution. The solu-tion for marketers is all-encompassing and will require the following:

x Organizational shifts from passive to real-time engagement

x A redefi ning of audience

x A redefi ning of brand to include the audience

x In some cases, a redefi nition of business practices

x A greater commitment to sincerity

x A reworking of the defi nition of social media to become more inclusive of search principles

x A deep understanding and executional capability in search and fi ndability issues

x A deep understanding of building out earned attention in social networks

x A redefi nition of the word publishing

x A commitment to being a “marketer as media publisher”

Another major shift is in the way content is found. Now more than ever, pub-lishers and marketers must label content and make it shareable so that it can be found at the most granular level of search or social relevancy. The process of fi nding might involve a search engine, social or popularity-based results list, discovery streams, or network sharing. Each of these aspects presents new challenges for marketers that must be addressed in order to properly maximize the opportunity of marketing on the Internet and networks.

The greatest difference between marketing efforts of today and pre-Internet is the rising importance of being present and always-on . This new landscape—one that has really achieved a new level of fl uidity and agility only in the mid- to late aughts through the rapid adoption of social- and network-based content-sharing sites— creates a new urgency for marketers to be part of an “in-the-moment” conversation that occurs 24/7 about their brand or company and about the general consumer conversa-tion at large. Ultimately, the sum of many missed moments in this new landscape will be the death of some companies, and this embracing of “right now” will be the ascen-sion of many others.

What Is Real-Time Marketing?

Real-time marketing is a way of thinking and philosophy that requires businesses to meet the demands of an always-on digital world, and includes production, communi-cation, organization and infrastructure. In is not necessarily prescriptive, but rather refers to being present and fl uid in your marketing and business efforts, which means being part of the ongoing conversations that exist around your vertical space and brand, as they happen. In the context of content marketing, going “real-time” requires

264386c01.indd 3 9/26/12 9:10 PM

CH

AP

TE

R 1

: R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

AN

D M

AR

KE

TIN

G

u

4

businesses to redefi ne themselves in the digital realm through participation and con-nections through content. Throughout the entire approach, search and social principles are at the core. Real-time marketing is about time, existence in time, and using search and social technologies to interact and strike with lightning speed and laserlike effi -ciency. Real-time marketing will take on an even greater infl uence in future society as its digital layer starts to overlap into the physical world.

An active and alive real-time content marketer must do a lot planning and preparation and also be aware of the intricacies of search and social media in order to capture the full opportunity. Because the more up-to-the-moment aspects of the online experience have been largely innovated in the search and social-network realms, an effective marketer must thoroughly understand these channels in terms of the way con-nections and communications fl ow and how digital assets best travel between search engines and networks. Real-time content marketing is all-encompassing and includes research, content production, community management and outreach, customer- relationship management, analytics and measurement, and real-time response and interaction through a variety of methods.

Although it could be said that talking on the telephone or speaking in person is the total realization of “real-time” marketing, this defi nition refers more specifi cally to engagement in the digital realm and connecting with your audience—one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many—in a meaningful way that ultimately serves your own business goals and serves the needs of your audience.

In a broader sense, the defi nition of real-time content marketing is still evolving, but it has been largely adopted by a social-marketing audience rather than a search-marketing audience. Real-time content marketing is not complete without a deep stra-tegic and tactical understanding of search and social together , because the two become more intertwined from the marketing and user perspectives. In effect, real-time content marketing is about embracing audiences in a human way, but also recognizing the tech-nical drivers of content through networks. This book will show you the exact nuances and interplay between search and social in various real-time scenarios and how you can master the two together as a single unique discipline.

A full defi nition of real-time marketing would not be complete without mention-ing two pivotal thinkers. One of the key thinkers in real-time and social network the-ory is sociologist Dr. Manuel Castells, whose key philosophies will be covered briefl y in the second chapter. Castells’ writings cemented my intentions of a career in Internet marketing in the mid-90s and have driven my strategic perspective ever since. I will show you how his insight and thinking can elevate your own strategies as well.

One other key contributor to the defi nition of real-time marketing is legendary Silicon Valley marketer Regis McKenna, who planted the fi rst seeds of its meaning in the mid-1990s. In an article titled “Real-Time Marketing” published in July 1995 in Harvard Business Review , McKenna described the future elements and approaches of

264386c01.indd 4 9/26/12 9:10 PM

u

INT

RO

DU

CT

ION

TO

RE

AL

-TIM

E C

ON

TE

NT

MA

RK

ET

ING

5

marketing in a world that is fully synaptic and connected and functioning in real-time. Though some of the descriptions outlined an approach to more-traditional marketing and business processes, he hit the nail square on the head by predicting many facets of a real-time content approach that will be developed in other parts of this book. Here are a few direct quotes from his article that you would be well-served to know as you begin using this book:

x “To build customer loyalty...companies need to keep their customers engaged in a continuous dialogue.”

x “Companies must keep the dialogue fl owing and also maintain conversations with suppliers, distributors, and others in the marketplace.”

x “[Real-time marketing must replace] the broadcast mentality.”

x “[Real-time marketing must focus] on real-time customer satisfaction, provid-ing the support, help, guidance, and information necessary to win customers’ loyalty.”

x “Real-time marketing requires...being willing to learn how information technol-ogy is changing both customer behavior in marketing and to think in new ways about marketing within the organization.”

x “[Real-time interaction] allows the customer and the producer to learn from each other and to respond to each other.”

x “The customer still does all the work, hunting and pecking for information. But a real-time marketer would bring the information to the customer.”

Again, all of these statements were written in July 1995 by McKenna, but it is only today that marketers and businesses are able to better justify going real-time, because of the greater adoption of the Internet medium by a majority of Americans (this is, of course, also true for many readers outside the United States). So, what are you waiting for?

Other contributions to the real-time conversation include Monique Reece, who in 2010 wrote Real-Time Marketing for Business Growth , which outlined traditional marketing and business practices in real-time scenarios, and David Meerman Scott, who in 2011 wrote Real Time Marketing & PR .

Other defi nitions exist on the technological side, as technologies are moving from a “ping” or “pull” method to a push retrieval method. Overall, it is not the ter-minology that is important. What is important is that marketers understand the exis-tential real-time shift occurring in digital spaces. Marketing terminology is currently in fl ux, and whether or not the phrase real-time marketing is used in the future is irrel-evant. The point is that marketers must become active and participatory to fully realize the opportunity of the digital medium, with search and social technologies residing at the core.

264386c01.indd 5 9/26/12 9:10 PM

CH

AP

TE

R 1

: R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

AN

D M

AR

KE

TIN

G

u

6

What Is Real-Time Publishing?

Real-time publishing is the process of creating and distributing content across net-works, including search engines and social media. This term refers not only to the speed at which content can be created by individuals or groups but also to how quickly new content can be distributed and shared globally between networks of like-minded individuals. It also includes the latent effect of leaving behind a digital conversational footprint and trail that can be retrieved at a later interval based on keyword search and community memory. Real-time publishing involves digital asset optimization, traditional SEO principles for hosting and labeling content, active community manage-ment and outreach, and the buildup and maintenance of a publisher’s network distribu-tion channels. While effective real-time publishers are active and present, it can take months and years of preparation and expertise to do real-time publishing effectively. In the context of real-time, the term publishing can be as simple as updating a Twitter account with less than 140 characters at a time, starting an online library of shareable content, creating a video channel, or, more often, publishing a combination of various asset types.

Apply Immediacy to Your Approach

In a word, becoming an effective real-time marketer adds the element of immediacy to marketing strategy or, in other words, being relevant to your audience within a certain frame of time. At the basis of this publishing shift are the core principles of search-engine optimization, social media, active social-media participation, audience engage-ment, and network content distribution. But traditional publishing elements are also still key to this approach, because the distribution of content through search and social channels is also highly connected to fundamental marketing engagement strategies and principles.

Be As Fast As Your Audience

While many brands and marketers have increased their connectivity points in social spaces, current approaches to enable a live digital marketing existence are severely lacking. Average consumers on a social network have no problem speaking their minds in a fl uid and active way. Marketers and businesses as a whole do not have a parallel voice that exhibits this same kind of independence.

This problem generally falls into the categories of organizational dysfunction, protectionism, and improperly allocated marketing and IT budgets. What market-ers need to do now is to realize the gap that exists between their active presence and the connectedness with the audience and begin a fl ow of information to the consumer through conversation, outreach, content publishing, listening, and research.

264386c01.indd 6 9/26/12 9:10 PM

u

INT

RO

DU

CT

ION

TO

RE

AL

-TIM

E C

ON

TE

NT

MA

RK

ET

ING

7

A Real-Time Approach

The following list serves both as a hint at what you will be learning throughout this book and as a high-level framework for real-time marketing and publishing, with search and social residing at the core:

Act “In the Moment,” and Be Fluid in Your Online Presence Because your audience is always online and active, it is only common sense that marketers should also be present in their online efforts. It is the difference between existence and nonexistence in a world where conversations come and go if one is not there to be part of them.

Act as a Publisher and Media Provider in Order to Connect Through Content Because digital touch points occur through content (as defi ned by a wide variety of content types), there is an increasing imperative for marketers to embrace new forms of publishing. The defi nition of publishing and content is broad and nuanced in the real-time landscape, and various content types may include images, video, conversation, status updates, applications, and articles, among many others. A real-time digital strategy may include all of the content types mentioned earlier, or a combination thereof. The challenge for marketers is to become comfortable with their own real-time publishing framework and platform and begin to publish on a massive scale in order to take advantage of the opportunities that exist in real-time publishing.

Enable the Spirit of the Audience into Your Online Content and Voice To be effective with a real-time publishing and conversational approach, a marketer must put their spirited and sincere voices on the front line of their real-time presence. Connecting with your audience in a way that they naturally speak and interact is the best way to spread your messages through the digital consciousness. Your audience already has a distinct say in how your marketing efforts and company are perceived, so making the audience a co-partner in your real-time efforts will allow them to resonate in a more synaptic way. Enabling voices means projecting this spirit in your own content and providing a way for users to generate their own content, as well providing insight to help inform how you develop your own products and services.

A Company’s Real-Time Search and Social Identity Is Both “What It Says” About Itself and “What Others Say” About the Company The reality of the current state of online marketing is that brands and companies can project only so much about how they want to be perceived before audi-ences provide their own perception of a company the way they see it. Your real-time marketing identity is a combination of what you write, what you say, and how you conduct your business. Your identity will be ultimately defi ned by the trail of conversa-tion and content in your real-time marketing efforts and by the consumer trail of con-versation and content, for better or worse. To a large extent, your marketing efforts are being judged more by what you are doing right now than ever before.

Reach Out to Audiences and Networks in Real-Time, in a Sincere and Present Manner Whether it is con-necting with your audience through conversation and outreach, sharing and curating

264386c01.indd 7 9/26/12 9:10 PM

CH

AP

TE

R 1

: R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

AN

D M

AR

KE

TIN

G

u

8

assets, or creating active and passive content for both networks and search engines, the activity must be defi ned, sincere, engaging, and committed for the long term.

To Be Eff ective, a Business’s Primary Networks Should Be Acknowledged and Developed The funda-mental network audiences of a business should include both their own organization (the people working for a company) and their targeted network audience that will be directly interacting with the company. This expansion of the defi nition of social net-works speaks to cultivating social participation, presence, and content development within your organization. Whether you are part of a small company with two or more people or the CMO of a large company with thousands of people, careful study, strat-egy, and a set of rules to play by will be part of your real-time marketing strategy.

Marketers and Companies Are Obligated to Listen and Interpret Their Data into Meaningful Content and Experiences for their Audience Analyzing your company’s data should no longer be an option but rather an obligation and commitment to your audience. Your data, and other third-party data, reveals what your audience desires, what they may not be able to fi nd in your network or any other network, and many opportunities for engagement through content and real-time interaction. Your audience tells you what they want in search and social; and as a real-time marketer with a defi ned strategy, you will be in a position to give back to them in a way that will allow for participating in the conversa-tion on a large scale.

Setting the Stage for a Search- and Social-Enabled Real-Time Publishing Platform

A sizable part of this book is dedicated to enabling you to develop a place to distrib-ute and share content directly with your audience, but you must go into your strategic planning and execution with a key foundation for what is inherently different about today’s Internet world. In addition to understanding the foundation of a sound real-time marketing strategy, understanding the core principles of search marketing and social-media marketing is also crucial. The following sections discuss the basic strate-gic cornerstones of approaching search and social marketing in a real-time landscape.

Dr. Manuel Castells and the Space of Flows

One major work that documented and predicted the impact of the Internet on mod-ern society and economies is called The Rise of the Network Society , the fi rst part of a trilogy written by sociologist Dr. Manuel Castells (Figure 1.1), published in 1996. In the book, Dr. Castells forecasted and documented the impact of networks as they created connections that transcended traditional geospatial boundaries and borders. In addition to outlining the global economic and sociological impact of the Internet, he touched on one of his key theories, called “the space of fl ows.” Castells described how networks broke down the traditional forms of communication that had previously inhibited everything from relationships to group organizations to economies on both a

264386c01.indd 8 9/26/12 9:10 PM

u

SE

TT

ING

TH

E S

TA

GE

FO

R A

SE

AR

CH

- AN

D S

OC

IAL

-EN

AB

LE

D R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

PL

AT

FO

RM

9

massive and a granular scale. He further differentiates the space of fl ows as a phenom-enon of being present in the network in time (and real-time) and apart from the “space of places,” which relies on the proximity of physical location.

Figure 1.1 Manuel Castells

The space of fl ows concept provides a practical basis for defi ning fundamental social interactions within a global network, which transcends places, and allows for a constant fl ow of information through people connected as nodes. It is as true and valid today as it was when he fi rst wrote about it. While Castells’ writings further address the philosophical and economic implications of a digitally networked society, a funda-mental understanding of this concept serves as an invaluable strategic foundation for real-time marketing strategy.

Dr. Castells was one of the fi rst sociologists to publish a signifi cant analysis of networks on economies, world societies, and politics, and predicted their impact on the world at large.

The concepts outlined in Castells’ work are extremely intricate, and this short section here does it little justice, other than to call out its meaning toward the prem-ise of this book. In addition to The Rise of the Network Society , I also recommend the book Conversations w ith Manuel Castells , if you prefer a more casual take of his theory on the space of fl ows.

PHOT

O BY F

LICKR

USER

USCP

UBLIC

DIPL

OMAC

Y, CR

EATIV

E COM

MON

S

264386c01.indd 9 9/26/12 9:10 PM

CH

AP

TE

R 1

: R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

AN

D M

AR

KE

TIN

G

u

10

The “Resource-Discovery Problem”

In addition to understanding the philosophical basis for network interaction in real-time marketing, one other key observation about the importance of search to the real-time Internet was posited by World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Figure 1.2). In one of his early FAQs posted on the W3C website in 1992, he explained the huge oppor-tunity for a search engine to come into play and help organize all of this new informa-tion and connective structure that was developing at a rapid pace.

As you can see, the web is suffi ciently fl exible to allow a number of ways of fi nding information. In the end, I think a typical resource discovery session will involve some-one starting on their “home” document, following one to two links to an index, then doing a search, and following several links from what they have found. In some cases, there will be more than one index search involved, such as at fi rst for an organization, and having found that, a search within it for a person or document. We need to keep this fl exibility, as the available information in different places has such different char-acteristics.... In the long term, when there is a really large mass of data out there, with deep interconnections, then there is some really exciting work to be done on automatic algorithms to make multi-level searches.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee; May 14, 1992. www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/KeepingTrack.html

Figure 1.2 Sir Tim Berners-Lee

PHOT

O BY F

LICKR

USER

KNIG

HTFO

UNDA

TION,

CREA

TIVE C

OMM

ONS

264386c01.indd 10 9/26/12 9:10 PM

u

SE

TT

ING

TH

E S

TA

GE

FO

R A

SE

AR

CH

- AN

D S

OC

IAL

-EN

AB

LE

D R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

PL

AT

FO

RM

11

In the spirit of Dr. Castells, Regis McKenna, and Sir Berners-Lee, the core marriage of the search, social networks, and real-time behavior dates back to the beginnings of the Internet, even before the rise of the commercial Internet. With this statement from Berners-Lee, we see the early framework of the Internet in place, with his crystal-clear observation that one other major need is a search engine to sort and organize it. I would posit that it has been only since 2007–2010 that a tipping point has occurred, with search and social becoming fully interdependent on the other. The interdependence is so strong that the game to watch is not which search engine or social network is bigger, but rather which web property will combine the most robust algorithm with the best human social layer.

The Web Gets a Robust Search Engine and Network Map

While a number of universities and companies had begun developing directories and search engines to help users better fi nd the information they were looking for, it wasn’t until Google launched in 1998 that a superior and robust approach to crawling, index-ing, and retrieving Internet information began to emerge. Google’s approach to crawl-ing all of the Web’s content, as well as analyzing the link structures and weighted authority of those sites and individual pages, was a landmark event on the Internet as it began to assemble a structure of the entire Web and its linkage as a network of infl uence.

Even in their earliest stages, search engines were based on core network prin-ciples, and they were developed by humans. It is worth noting that early search engi-neers constantly fought with publishers in terms of optimizing their content. The search engines wanted to capture the Web as an observer and to rank those pages in order as they saw it. Of course, not every web publisher agreed with their results and some began to reverse engineer the process through what is now known popularly as search engine optimization (SEO), a term coined simultaneously by Bob Heyman, John Audette, and Bruce Clay. What the engines did not consider as closely at the time was that their data was an almost living and breathing corpus. The corpus was interactive, and this caused the engines to innovate in ways they had not previously considered. I believe it is unfortunate and misplaced that many people still perceive search-engine algorithms to be purely technical. The more accurate picture is that search is cre-ated and edited by people, consisting of content created by people (even if they use technical tools). Links are created by people. The analysis of relationships between links and sites is network analysis . In this sense, search has always been “social” and “networked.”

264386c01.indd 11 9/26/12 9:10 PM

CH

AP

TE

R 1

: R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

AN

D M

AR

KE

TIN

G

u

12

Social Emerges as a Description of Network Behavior

A popular description of networks and the Web becoming inherently “social” began to emerge from the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. Users began to more directly associate their online identities via networks and content sharing, and informa-tion fl owed through one’s own personal networks of connections, and that informa-tion in turn could be shared more quickly with other networks. In effect, content and conversations could be spread quickly, if not instantaneously, around the globe to audi-ences of like-minded interest.

While the word social became a popular way to describe what was previously known as standard network effects, this word adoption did not necessarily negate the fact that the Internet was already “social” prior to 2004. Many forms of online media were redubbed as being social, when nothing had really changed about them prior to this word adoption. Message boards and forums had been well established, and “social content” in the form of user-generated content and collaboration had also been around since the earliest days of the commercial Internet. Even email—one of the earliest forms of networked media and communication—sometimes falls into the category of social media.

Whether the word social tells us anything new or not, it has been embraced by a new generation of Internet marketers as a way of talking about standard network effects. There have been calls by many veteran digital marketers and thinkers to kill the term altogether, but for all practical purposes, it looks like it will remain for at least the foreseeable future.

Engage One Bird, and You Might Attract the Whole Flock (and Flocks of Flocks)

One other core tenet of real-time content marketing involves the effects of networks of networks . In the one-to-many scenario, a content creator can publish their work to a network, and in effect, a chain reaction can occur from one like-minded individual in a network to cross over into another network. It extends the concept of one-to-many to many-to-many .

By establishing your own primary network, you are providing a launch point for your own content to begin this cascading effect of distribution across the Internet. The quality and size of your distribution network can determine how well your content travels through the networks of those people with their own network infl uence. This is why a well-thought-out strategy is required for your own search and social platform in order to determine the amount of network infl uence you want to achieve. In other words, if you have a limited content strategy and limited time for engagement, you should not expect domination of your relevant network channel through these efforts alone. But if you see a huge network and search opportunity in your channel, then you may realize that a robust content strategy is needed to meet the search and social

264386c01.indd 12 9/26/12 9:10 PM

u

SE

TT

ING

TH

E S

TA

GE

FO

R A

SE

AR

CH

- AN

D S

OC

IAL

-EN

AB

LE

D R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

PL

AT

FO

RM

13

demand, to the point that your efforts are viewed as a hub of leadership in your indus-try. These hubs of infl uence tend to spread and disseminate their own messaging, and search engines and social communities reward them for it with a greater mindshare of the conversation and ultimately help you achieve your desired business goals.

Connectedness

The implication of a world society being connected via networks is that marketers and businesses must also be connected in the same one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many sense with their core audiences and customers. One-to-one means a direct connection and conversation with individuals, one-to-many means connecting to your group or network, and many-to-many means being connected and communicat-ing with extended audiences and groups. Not being connected, whether in listening, conversation, transaction, or participation, means that a marketer does not effectively exist in those conversations and economic opportunities afforded in networks. The marketing imperative is to establish these connections in a meaningful way, and this book is designed to show you just how to do that.

Flows

Once you have started to establish your network audience of groups and individuals, you should be managing and stoking the fl ows of communication. Because information is fl owing in real-time, a live presence is required, either as an individual or as an orga-nization. Network fl ows and search fl ows consist of conversation, content publishing, content promotion, content stewardship, curation, and sharing through a variety of methods.

Although a substantial part of this book is dedicated to showing you where to fi nd and establish your social network and search presence, an even greater part of the book will show you how to maintain the fl ows of communication via strategic and tactical content development, community management, search engine optimization, digital asset optimization, and a real-time mentality.

Universally Identifi able, Shareable, and Networked Content

To be successful in the digital publishing landscape, you must ensure that content is readable by both humans and machines. Here, a core understanding and capability in search engine optimization, the principles of community management and engagement, a real-time attitude, and network sharing are in order.

At a high level, your content must be understood , by both people and algo-rithms, in order to get the most out of your online publishing efforts. It must also be inherently capable of being disseminated or distributed by people and algorithms to spread your content beyond your hard efforts alone. Being “understood” by people and algorithms means both that it must resonate in way that is readable by algorithms and

264386c01.indd 13 9/26/12 9:10 PM

CH

AP

TE

R 1

: R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

AN

D M

AR

KE

TIN

G

u

14

technology and also that your points are clearly articulated in what you are trying to communicate to humans with infl uence across networks.

Making It Easy for People to Distribute Your Content via Networks

People in networks can quickly make a judgment about whether your content is of importance to them. This means being clear in your points, utility, usability, design, format, and messaging. Making it “shareable” is also of critical importance in networks and makes a great difference in whether your content is linkable, has the proper sharing buttons, is capable of publishing directly to a share network, or is easily downloadable.

Social and Search Algorithms

Being understood on an algorithmic level requires a literal approach in describing and marking up content in a way that it can be understood and retrieved by machines. Content tagging and labeling via keywords, page elements, and making assets index-able extends the shelf life of your content and conversations and increases the oppor-tunities for that content to be found in both networks and search engines. Making an asset “crawlable” means that it may essentially be copied by automated software to become a freely indexable and shareable object between databases where search or other processes may occur.

It is also important to note that the defi nition of search engine does not just mean a traditionally understood engine such as Google or Bing but includes any site that may crawl the Web or any network with its own search or algorithmic functional-ity, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, eBay, or Amazon. In addition to sharing across networks, a large majority of the Web’s content is surfaced to consumers via algorithms, whether it is in the form of a search engine, discovery, push notifi cations, popularity lists, personalization, or other types of technology that show content based on similar interests.

Universal Search and Digital Asset Optimization

In 2007, search engines Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live, and Ask each introduced a new search-results concept that has since changed the search marketing landscape as we know it. The “universal” search approach involved not only retrieving the 10 best website result links but also promoting results from vertical engines into the “prime-time” web results area of the page. So, now searchers would see photos, videos, news, blog posts, and other vertical content interspersed into the results page based on its importance and relevance to their query. The days of optimizing for the “10 blue links” alone were offi cially gone. If you cared about the health of your natural search pro-grams, then the time had come to start venturing off into other areas of content beyond text, and into these verticals, if you had not already done so.

264386c01.indd 14 9/26/12 9:10 PM

u

SE

TT

ING

TH

E S

TA

GE

FO

R A

SE

AR

CH

- AN

D S

OC

IAL

-EN

AB

LE

D R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

PL

AT

FO

RM

15

While search professionals had long understood these innovations both concep-tually and in practice, it was search and social marketer Lee Odden who coined the phrase digital asset optimization . Digital asset optimization implies that it is no lon-ger enough just to optimize your web pages and that a full optimization approach to content creation and strategy is in order. If your audience is searching for images, then you would be wise to consider a content play involving the use of images and optimize them appropriately. If your audience predominantly consumes video, then you need to fi re up your digital video cameras and optimize. The same can be said for consumer usage of forum dialogue, news, social status updates, PowerPoint slides, PDFs, and white papers, among many other asset types. Digital asset optimization is not just a search tactic. If executed properly, it will also lend itself to shareability and readability across social networks, in real-time, and this is one of the core tenets of marketing with a search and social frame of mind.

Understanding Delivery Frameworks Across Multiple Platforms

It is also imperative for marketers to understand the platforms and devices that deliver their content and how their audiences consume this content. Search and social tac-tics are quickly spreading from the desktop and into the physical world in the form of mobile devices, kiosks, RFID, voice activation, voice search, touch screens, and myriad other applications. If you look closely, most of these new digital applications have some function of search and/or social at the most basic level. Studying this landscape as it evolves will help you become a more effective marketer, help you spot new emerging opportunities, and help you plan and execute on strategies for the future. For these new areas of innovation, you may even have to invent optimization techniques of your own.

The Power of Reciprocation

Reciprocation is another fundamental element of search and social marketing in real-time and is apparent in many different forms. In real-time content marketing, there are two basic rules you need to know in order to have an effective strategy and platform.

The First Rule of Reciprocation: You Give, and You Get

The fi rst rule of reciprocation, one that should be central to any agile and real-time frame of mind, is that you give away a lot in order to earn what you receive . This takes on many forms:

x Gaining knowledge, expressed in the form of content

x Answering questions in real-time

x Building useful applications in anticipation that they will be used widely

x Providing a voice or point or view to further a conversation

x Volunteering and helping to “crowd-source” online projects

264386c01.indd 15 9/26/12 9:10 PM

CH

AP

TE

R 1

: R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

AN

D M

AR

KE

TIN

G

u

16

x Sharing the content of others in your community, in hopes they will reciprocate

x Speaking at and documenting industry events and conferences

x Volunteering and participating with industry or consumer associations

As a marketer who has done all of these tasks for many years, these activities have paid immense dividends for the companies I work for in gaining new business, raising awareness, making useful connections (who in turn also reciprocate), and elevating the online conversations that occur in my business, both at the brand and general conversation levels.

The most successful real-time publishers are providing content, coverage, online help, and useful information on a steady basis and allowing this content to travel so that a greater community can receive the benefi ts as well. In turn, marketers are reciprocated by receiving broader consideration, direct business sales and leads, brand awareness, better collaboration with partners, offl ine word-of-mouth, assistance in sharing your own content, and general goodwill from their industry and community at large. If your real-time marketing strategy is really amazing, your audience has an ongoing expectation of quality that you must continue to live up to in your content, products, and services. Consistently meeting these expectations can cement your place as a hub in the conversation and content of your industry.

The Second Rule of Reciprocation: Search and Social Are Interdependent

A second type of reciprocation occurs in networks, and it is between search and social. While search and social have many independent elements, they have become inter-dependent in many ways. Search engines look to social signals to rank content and provide an edge of freshness to their results, and social networks are becoming more algorithmic and also reliant on search engine traffi c to build communities. This inter-dependency creates wider visibility and extends reach to new and recurring audiences.

“Search and social” is quickly evolving into its own discipline. Search and social are often viewed by marketers as opposing entities, but the real-time reality is that they are constantly giving to and taking back from each other. It’s not a question of whether search or social will cannibalize each other, but more a question of how they work together to extend the opportunities of real-time marketing and content publishing. This book is also designed to show the key correlations between search and social and how, together, search and social is a guiding marketing discipline unto itself.

Social “signals” are most often just traditional SEO signals. As content passes through networks, new pages and links are created all along the way. Considering that links are one of the main elements of how search engines rank content, social distribu-tion of content is fundamentally connected to basic SEO principles. New links may come in the form of connections, status updates, and shared links in many different formats. At the end of the day, likes, tweets, and +1s are still links.

264386c01.indd 16 9/26/12 9:10 PM

u

SE

TT

ING

TH

E S

TA

GE

FO

R A

SE

AR

CH

- AN

D S

OC

IAL

-EN

AB

LE

D R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

PL

AT

FO

RM

17

In addition to the links created by social network distribution, user-generated content can create a massive symbiotic effect between search engines and social discus-sion spaces. When communities are properly managed and formed, they create new content in real-time, using language that would be impossible for marketers to develop on their own. This content is indexed by search engines and matched to new audiences at the keyword level. The traffi c of these like-minded individuals has then found a rel-evant social network of interest and often becomes part of the community as either an observer or a content creator, which starts the social and search cycle all over again. By properly engaging in communities, a marketer is able to capture both search and social benefi ts as they grow in real-time and require a hands-on and active presence to main-tain and develop.

These are just a few examples of the benefi ts of real-time search and social recip-rocation, and many more will be covered in later chapters. The closer you get to acting in the moment in terms of your online content–publishing strategy, the more you can expect to receive the benefi ts.

Trust and Authority in Search and Networks

Bing real-time search engineer Paul Yiu describes the process of fi ltering search and social status updates as dealing with a “tsunami of spam.” One of the key problems for Bing, Google, Twitter, and other search and social engines is dealing with the onslaught of spam and fi ltering it out in order to provide users with a relevant and useful experience.

The spam problem is a major issue that search engines have dealt with since they fi rst began. The fundamental issue for search and social providers delivering results in real-time is that they must trust a content provider to determine whether it is “spammy” or a reliable source of content. Although search engines have gotten very good at studying the signals of trust that point to high-quality content, the imperative for marketers is to cultivate trustworthy websites, content, and a social-network pres-ence that shows it is backed by a real content producer, used by real people.

Marketing at the level of a highly trusted resource means you should always be sending signals of trust to search engines and networks. This includes providing fresh content, attracting links and citations from other trusted sources, and expanding the depth of your content. If you study the top 100 websites that rank for any given set of keywords, you will fi nd that they have many unique pages of content, have a large number of authoritative links, and have long passed all of the basic tests that search engines put them through algorithmically to determine whether they are a site to be trusted. This is why sites like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, and BankRate, among many others, rank for a wide group of terms within their respective themes of focus.

Social Relevancy

While different search and social spaces have individually had their own methods of determining trust and authority, there is a new and emerging area where relevance,

264386c01.indd 17 9/26/12 9:10 PM

CH

AP

TE

R 1

: R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

AN

D M

AR

KE

TIN

G

u

18

authority, and velocity can be determined by analyzing all as one signal. In 2008, I coauthored a white paper with Gabe Dennison called “Integrating Search and Social Media” and fi rst discussed the concept of social relevance . Social relevance takes both search and social signals into account, as well as other key aspects of real-time mar-keting, to provide a more relevant result. Social relevancy incorporates some of the traditional methods of search algorithms and applies them to the faster-moving world of real-time marketing and social media. It looks at the velocity and speed of shared digital assets, status updates, and keyword search velocity in order to determine what is going on with the real Internet at the speed of “now.”

The release of Google+ in June 2011 introduced a new kind of social relevancy, and this time it was not about social signals on search but rather on search signals to improve the social experience. By placing more emphasis on relevancy within social networks through segmentation, Google+ proved that the social experience could be enhanced, not by shouting out to the entire world but by speaking to only the most rel-evant audience within your network. With the concept of “circles,” Google+ users are able to more easily share messages within the relevant context of their network, and this concept is quickly being adopted by other major social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

In the greater discussion of social-media optimization (SMO), a phrase coined by marketer Rohit Bhargava in 2006, social relevance could be considered the “thing” you are optimizing for. My intention for the phrase is to make it easier to describe SMO and SEO together conceptually, in the sense that search and social are one discipline.

Gaining Trust and Authority with Your Audience in Real-Time

Again, the imperative for marketers is to apply what they have already been doing with traditional common-sense SEO principles and extend this method of thinking to the management of networks and content development and propagation. It involves creating relevant networks and attracting followers and friends of like-minded groups, creating content that gets shared by these groups, attracting and promoting citations of your content, and optimizing assets in a way that will extend their shelf life beyond using either social or search tactics alone.

Beyond just search and social, the practice of being present in your marketing efforts or otherwise having an alive presence that is as active as your audience will send the strongest signals that your content is backed by a real person of group of peo-ple and is not spam. Of course, there is another level of trust and authority that good content providers should be seeking at a very strategic level, and that is with the audi-ence. Building trust and authority with your audience means the following:

x Creating engaging content

x Creating knowledgeable and expert content

264386c01.indd 18 9/26/12 9:10 PM

u

SE

TT

ING

TH

E S

TA

GE

FO

R A

SE

AR

CH

- AN

D S

OC

IAL

-EN

AB

LE

D R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

PL

AT

FO

RM

19

x Creating content so good that your audience would be inclined to share it with other like-minded people or groups in their own networks

x Helping your readers and people in your network with their problems and concerns

x Conversing with your audience through passive content or direct interaction

x Writing clearly and communicating effectively

x Keeping a clean and consistent web appearance with your website and digital assets

x Enabling your assets to be easily shared

These approaches require a constant real-time presence and in turn will earn the trust of the audiences you serve, which will ultimately translate into achieving your designated business goals.

Listening to Your Audience, Data, and Your Competition

One of the other biggest, but perhaps most overlooked, opportunities in real-time con-tent marketing is the ability to use data to help inform and build upon your own strate-gies. When starting off with a real-time content marketing strategy and tactical plan, you may feel overwhelmed by the constantly changing landscape. But knowing that the answers to your big questions lie in both your own data and third-party data should provide you with some relief. A typical problem is determining where to start or deter-mining which conversations are of most importance to your audience. Here, keyword and conversational data can help. Reviewing keyword popularity helps you determine which themes are of most interest to groups of searchers and can provide key direction to start your content-development process. Reviewing common questions in Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com can also show social popularity of different topics across a wide range of categories. Studying the overall web space can help you fi nd the areas of focus for your own strategy, and later chapters in this book will spe-cifi cally show you how to do this.

Real-time content marketers should get their data from a number of sources on a timely basis. New content opportunities constantly arise, and if you or your organiza-tion are not paying attention, then a major opportunity to become part of the conver-sation may come and go without you even knowing it.

Google is a great example of a company that makes the best use of its data to create new products and also help expand future strategies. In June 2007 I attended a panel discussion on personalization at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle. Google engineer Matt Cutts provided an interesting revelation that gave the audience key insight into the way Google’s chief strategists think. In a response to a question by one attendee, Cutts effectively stated, “You give us your data for free, and we feel we have an obligation to use it.”

264386c01.indd 19 9/26/12 9:10 PM

CH

AP

TE

R 1

: R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

AN

D M

AR

KE

TIN

G

u

20

By “obligation,” he meant that users had given Google their data through its search queries and other measured behaviors and that the company had a responsibil-ity to use this data to make their products even greater. So in this case, the end result was personalization of search results, which meant that about 20 percent of a person’s search results may be changed based on their own biases taken from prior search, recently viewed or clicked web pages, and geographic locations, among many other factors. Google continues to invest in areas informed by keyword demand and user data. It is also active in promoting Google+ data into many other products and services Google offers.

But the story here is not about Google; it is about you and your business. Consider the following questions with regard to how well you are currently using your data to inform your strategies and tactics in a world of search and social:

x How is your company using its internal site search data to fi nd out what people are looking for but can’t fi nd?

x Why are people abandoning your website pages?

x What are the most common questions asked offl ine about your business?

x Do you have a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page to answer those questions?

x Do you effectively address those questions in your site content and community-management strategy?

x Does the content you publish on your site refl ect these questions as a whole?

x What does your competitors’ data tell you about what they have and what you lack, and is this something you should address?

x How do people react to your products and services online?

x What suggestions do they make or what changes do they wish for, and how can you implement them or make sure your organization is aware of these suggestions?

Keep in mind that more likely than not, your audience wants you to weigh in online about your relevant areas of expertise. So, in addition to the basic questions about your business, are you chiming in to give that extra level of insight, once the questions go a little bit deeper about your company or respective general conversation area? If a question were to come up publicly right now on a social network, would you be ready to answer it right now or in a timely manner that shows you are active while the conversation is still in the social spotlight?

Real-time search and social data is not just for identifying strategies directly for your own company or brand, but also for comparing how others in your competi-tive space are doing. What do people like or dislike about your competition? What are they doing right or wrong, and how can you best capitalize on this data with your own strategy? Is there a huge opportunity, or does your company just have a lot of catching up to do in order to remain relevant in search and social spaces?

264386c01.indd 20 9/26/12 9:10 PM

u

SE

TT

ING

TH

E S

TA

GE

FO

R A

SE

AR

CH

- AN

D S

OC

IAL

-EN

AB

LE

D R

EA

L-T

IME

PU

BL

ISH

ING

PL

AT

FO

RM

21

Brands and Marketers As Real-Time Content Publishers

These are just a few of the questions that will be addressed in the subsequent chapters, and there are so many more you need to answer in order to prepare for acting in the moment, with a real-time frame of mind. Real-time marketing is about interaction and online publishing at its core and about businesses and marketing practitioners embrac-ing real-time content publishing as the new marketing . Get ready, because in order to fully understand and develop a real-time marketing and publishing platform, you need to better understand how search and social work together. Chapter 2 will explain exactly how these two are working together to form the foundation for real-time marketing.

264386c01.indd 21 9/26/12 9:10 PM

Documents

WIley lIfelong learnIng - John Wiley & Sons lIfelong learnIng bit.ly/skillsfuturewithwiley W i l e y i s … you r l i f e l o n g e a r n i n g P a r t n r THIS eBooK ConTaInS