Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Does Web 2.0 make a company effective or does an effective company use Web 2.0 to its advantage?

It’s all to common to make an observation and infer its cause. If you were to measure elementary school standardized reading test scores against shoe size you would find a direct correlation. Students with larger shoe sizes perform better, therefore large feet make you smarter.

I was thinking about cause and effect while reading about a McKinsey survey, which found that companies using the Web intensively gain greater market share and higher margins. The report states that:

…a payday could be arriving faster than expected. A new class of company is emerging—one that uses collaborative Web 2.0 technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners, and suppliers. We call this new kind of company the networked enterprise. Results from our analysis of proprietary survey data show that the Web 2.0 use of these companies is significantly improving their reported performance.

The report found significant benefits enjoyed by these networked enterprises in areas of internal adoption and reaching out to customers, suppliers and partners. Furthermore, 27 percent of these companies reported market share gains and higher profit margins versus their competitors.

Several blog posts I read about this study stopped there and reported these benefits as if any company could start chugging Web 2.0 solutions like a magical elixir. But I think this sentence from the study is revealing if you read between the lines:

In fact, our data show that fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share but also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.

As George Costanza would say,

Ah Ha!

They found a correlation between management practices and results. So which came first? A management style that encourages autonomy, mastery and purpose or a workplace that is transformed by using shiny new tools?

Just like buying a pair of Air Jordan sneakers doesn’t make you a professional basketball player, making Web 2.0 part of your company’s tool set won’t automatically deliver the results uncovered in this study. Using Web 2.0 requires a management style that is not common these days. Most companies’ culture and rules are designed like factories – show up, follow directions, and fit in.  They demand and reward conformity.

Conversely, Web 2.0 work best in environments of creativity and innovation. That’s kind of the whole point, actually. Web 2.0 applications and services are like blank canvases while most companies are like paint by number. I’m not saying one is necessarily better than the other; I think they both have their place. But it is important to understand whether your culture and workforce would look at a blank canvas as an opportunity to create a wonderful work of art or simply stare at it, frozen in fear.

I suspect that those networked enterprises who enjoyed market share increases and higher profits already had a corporate culture that rewarded standing out over fitting in.

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This article originally appeared as a guest post on The Fundable Entrepreneur. Angel investor, entrepreneur and business mentor Ken Steinberg has created a site that is dedicated to providing early stage entrepreneurs with assistance because “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

Moustrap game photo courtesy of Glogger via Creative Commons

The best product or service doesn’t always win. Sorry, but the road to success it littered waist-high with better mousetraps that never sold and in the vast majority of those cases, they failed at marketing. A superior product with inferior marketing is a Betamax. An inferior product with superior marketing is a Shamwow. A superior product with superior marketing is an iPod.

If you want to be fundable, you need to be findable. This article will let you in on five tactics you can use in order to implement an inbound marketing strategy that will level the marketing playing field between you and your competitors, regardless of budget.

You Lucky Dog!

We live in the greatest times in the history of business startups. If you are in the early stages of getting a business off of the ground, you may not exactly feel like it right now but you are lucky to have access to a truly amazing array of resources and opportunities. But if you won’t take my word on that, maybe you’ll take Guy Kawasaki’s.

If you’re an entrepreneur and unfamiliar with Guy Kawasaki I strongly suggest you become familiar with him ASAP. Guy earned his wings as the original “Technology Evangelist” for Apple Computer in the early days of the Macintosh. His job was to convince software developers to write programs to run on Apple computers. His success at Apple allowed him go on to form a venture capital investment firm, Garage Capital, and to also found several successful startups himself. Guy wrote a blog article called, “How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09,” in which he described how quickly and cheaply he was able to launch one of his online ventures, Truemors. He concludes, “1) There’s really no such thing as bad PR. 2) $12,000 goes a very long way these days. 3) You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away. 4) Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.”

While there are countless examples of free and low cost web technologies that can help get your company off the ground, in my opinion the most important, least understood, and most poorly implemented is inbound marketing. If you learn what it is and how to do it properly, it can be your secret weapon to leapfrog competitors and put distance between yourself and them.

The Problem with Outbound

Before explaining inbound marketing, it’s useful to explain its polar opposite; outbound marketing. This is the “traditional” approach to marketing in which companies try interrupt people from doing what they wanted to do in order to watch, hear or read a message they wouldn’t otherwise care about. These interruptions include television and radio commercials, print advertisements, web banner ads and popups, cold calls, unsolicited emails’ etc…

While these techniques can certainly be effective they have three major flaws:

• First, people are getting much better at ignoring and/or blocking these interruptions. DVRs allow us to skip commercials, satellite radio does away with commercials, and spam filters help keep our inboxes clean.
• Second, traditional outbound marketing is linear: In order to reach more eyeballs, you have to pay more. A small advertisement in the local newspaper is affordable to most but a 30 second Superbowl commercial isn’t.
• Finally, it’s rude. As a new business trying to establish relationships with new customers wouldn’t you love to start by some means other than trying to shove an unsolicited message in their face?

Inbound to the Rescue

Implementing inbound marketing means pulling people into your site by creating remarkable content and then converting visitors to leads and leads to customers. This approach counteracts the three problems I just listed with outbound marketing. You’re not trying to interrupt people so you don’t need to worry about all of those roadblocks. Inbound marketing is nonlinear because it relies on people sharing your content with others; one person tells two friends, they tell two friends, and so on… Finally, it starts off your relationship with potential customers with an act of generosity, not interruption.

But wait, there’s more! In addition to having the positive attribute of not being outbound marketing, it has the added benefit of being much less expensive.

Do I have your attention yet?

Five for Finding

OK, hopefully you’ve bought into the idea that to be successful, you need to be findable and that the best strategy for getting there is inbound marketing. So let’s meet the rubber with the road and list those five tactics of inbound marketing:

1. Create Remarkable Content – The key word here is “remarkable,” which means something worth remarking about. While there are lots of tips, tricks, and techniques involved in creating remarkable content there is one golden rule that will help get you started. Make sure the content you create qualifies as being a “gift.” In other words, does your content provide something valuable to the reader? Does it improve her day? Give him something that makes his job easier? Provide advice for solving a problem or making more money? This should clue you into the fact that the most common form of content companies shower upon us – the press release – is not a gift. In fact, if you think of it in that light the whole concept of a press release starts to feel a little silly and a lot antiquated.
2. Optimize for Search – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complicated process that is very poorly understood. But the reality is that about 85% of how well your site will rank for given keywords breaks down to just three factors; inbound links (65%), URL structure (10%), and page titles (10%). Obviously, the most important factor, by a long shot, is inbound links. This is why creating remarkable content is the cornerstone of an inbound marketing strategy. On the Internet, people remark about your content with links. If you create great content with keywords in the URL and page title, you’re 85% of the way there.
3. Promote Online – Once you’ve created your content and made it search engine friendly, you want to get out there and spread the word. This primarily means using social media to get people sharing and talking about your content.
4. Convert – This step could also be labeled “paydirt.” There is a reasonably famous clip of former New York Giants football coach Bill Parcels motivating his players on the sidelines during a Superbowl in which he yells, “This why you lift all them weights!” If you’re going to go to all the trouble of diving traffic to your website and not go to the effort of converting visitors to leads and leads to customers, then why bother in the first place? So how do you convert? With landing pages. A landing page is contains two key elements; a strong call to action and a low-friction conversion form.
5. Analyze. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Having a good analytics package installed on your website is a good first step, but it only provides metrics, not analytics. The difference is that metrics are relative indicators of behavior whereas analytics are absolute measurements of desired outcomes. For example, unique visitors and depth of visit are important and meaningful metrics, but they only indicate traffic volume and patterns which may or may not correlate to actually improving your business. However, conversion rates on landing pages, for example, give you a measurement of a very specific desired outcome; new leads.

Simple, Yes. Easy, No.

These steps sound simple enough, and they are. However, simple does not always equate to easy. In fact, simplicity is pretty hard to pull off. Each of the five inbound marketing tactics mentioned here involve hundreds of sub-tactics and techniques in order to be successful. Some are common sense, some are counterintuitive, but all of them are free or low cost.

That’s why inbound marketing levels the playing field: it’s more about the width of your mind than the depth of your wallet, according to Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot and co-author of “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs“. If you want to learn more about inbound marketing, I recommend you get started by picking up a copy of his book.

Now go forth and be remarkable!

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The Who 1308720059 by Heinrich Klaffs on Flickr

In an article titled, “Meet the new boss” on Magellan Media’s blog, Brian O’Leary expresses skepticism about the characterization of a “new crop of chiefs” profiled by the New York Times as really being very new. O’Leary says:

First, these guys – all middle-aged white men – reflect experience in the old order, not necessarily an embrace of a new one. They aren’t part of a “born-digital” generation; they are on the other side of that divide.

This article caught my eye because I wrote a blog article earlier this year about this same group of companies called “Print Publishing’s Public Pity Party.”

The publishing industry has embarked on a quixotic journey.  A recent  Adweek article announces that “Close to 100 titles are planning to sacrifice prominent placements in their issues for an industry campaign.”  Their tilted windmill is a sense that we have all simply forgotten how wonderful their product is, and that by running ads they can remind us.  I can’t help but picture a group of buggy whip salesmen on the side of the road laughing at a car with a flat tire, secure in the knowledge that a horse would never succumb to such embarrassment.

I commented on O’Leary’s post, agreeing with him that it seemed that this new group would simply be tinkering with a model that needs to be blown up. Or as he quotes, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” And then it occurred to me to offer these titans of publishing some unsolicited advice: they could learn a lot from ESPN.

Inbound marketing is fueled by compelling content. The magazine publishing industry doesn’t have a content quality problem; they have a content packaging, promotion and delivery problem. As it turns out, there are two things that ESPN does exceedingly well in this regard, and I think any organization following a content marketing strategy can learn from them as well.

Repurposing

I’m a fairly avid sports fan and have been consuming sporting news in all its various forms for a long time. I’ve watched television programs, read newspapers, subscribed to magazines, listened to sports radio, and read blogs. ESPN has invaded all of those media channels and more with Napoleonic fervor. One thing I’ve noticed in particular is how effectively they’ve modularized their content and then squeeze every last drop of value out of it.

Take a simple 20 second sound bite from a post-game interview, for example. You’ll see this snippet embedded in a Sports Center broadcast, embedded in multiple ESPN.com articles, played throughout the day on ESPN Radio broadcasts, incorporated into relevant Podcasts, embedded in blog opinion pieces, uploaded to YouTube, posted on the Sports Nation fan page, Tweeted by one of their anchors, etc… And even that list doesn’t really do justice to the number of different places from which that singular chunk of content will be consumed.

Instead of embracing reuse and extracting the maximum value from their content, what are newspaper and magazine publishers doing? Erecting pay walls on the web and creating tablet applications (that are pretty terrible, by the way). But efficiently re-purposing content by itself isn’t enough…

Demand Publishing

Richard Nash is an independent publishing entrepreneur, having previously run the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. I watched a 35 minute video of Nash at BookNet Canada’s Technology Forum 2010 in a session entitled “Publishing 3.0: Moving from Gatekeeping to Partnerships.” It connected a whole bunch of dots for me and blew my mind (the video is embedded at the end of this post).

In this presentation, Nash describes how the publishing industry must evolve from a supply model to a demand model. Under an economic model of scarcity, companies manage supply. From the invention of movable type until the proliferation of Web 2.0, information was – relatively speaking – scarce. Publishers would, in the words of Clay Shirky, “filter, then publish.” In other words, they would decide what books deserved to be published and then deliver them to the market. In an economic landscape where information is abundant, Nash argues that publishers must manage demand instead.

Mike Reiss began as a New England Patriots beat writer for the Boston Globe and is now ubiquitous across ESPN's many media channels.

How do you manage demand? You need to provide products and services along the entire demand curve; abundant but inexpensive (or free) as well as scarce but expensive experiences. ESPN does this by turning their content creators (formerly known as journalists) into experiences. Instead of writing one or two weekly columns, their correspondents deliver a constant stream of bit-sized content from short videos to blog posts and Tweets. This forms a sort of experiential pyramid, where we can consume lower value products (i.e. facts) at a greater volume and higher value products (i.e. video and opinion) at a lower volume.

Instead of embracing demand publishing, newspaper and magazine publishers are implementing draconian social media policies that attempt to keep their journalists as faceless as possible.

Here is Richard Nash’s 35 minute presentation. If you’re interested in the future of publishing, this is well worth the time.

Inbound Marketing Takewaways

Many organizations and individuals could do a better job at re-purposing and leveraging their content. Recall my social media strategy advice: Be authentic, relentless and everywhere. You can achieve better results by promoting your content relentlessly and everywhere, and by having your content creators engage with the audience in order to create enhanced, value-added experiences.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Choosing a basket for your Internet eggs.”

#5: WordPress Wins Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award

Since the most important aspect of an effective inbound marketing strategy is remarkable, shareable, readable content, it therefore stands to reason that choosing the right basket (content management system) for your eggs (content)  is also going to be critical to success. I’m a huge fan of WordPress and the Open Source Awards agree.

Link: PacketPub

#4: iPad ‘newspaper’ created by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch

Publishers are spreading their eggs in all kinds of baskets (print, open web, walled web, mobile, social media) in an attempt to figure out the best business model in a Web 2.0 economy. We now see the Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar of media by planning an iPad-only publication.

Link: The Guardian

#3: Ask the Wise Guy: Facebook Fan Page or Website?

Guy Kawasaki is nothing if not a “bottom line” kind of guy (rimshot). In this article, he does a great job of explaining why he put all of his eggs in the Facebook basket for his latest book, Enchantment. The bottom line is that if you’re trying to establish a web presence for something more ephemeral and less permanent, then skipping the website and going for a Fan page may very well be your best option.

Link: American Express Open Forum

#2: Facebook Introduces Anti-Email: Social Inbox, Seamless Messaging, Conversation History

Where are you going to put your e-communication eggs? Facebook is betting on the current trend of teens and twenty-somethings shunning email in favor of texting and instant messaging. But the central issue here may turn out not to be the technology, but the trust. Facebook hasn’t engendered a very high degree of trust lately, but we’ll see whether convenience and expediency win out over trust.

Link: Fast Company

#1: Long Live the Web

Tim Berners-Lee authored a sort of “State of Internet” article this week. Much of it discusses eggs and baskets, and the threats to both. He argues that net neutrality (lack thereof) threatens to crush certain eggs while failure to adhere to open standards threatens to diminish the quantity and diversity of baskets we have to choose from. It’s big thinking from a big brain about big issues.

Link: Scientific American

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Whether you are a sole proprietorship or global technology company with 20,000 employees, inbound marketing is accessible, affordable and essential. Contact us today to learn how you can attract and convert more customers from your online presence.

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