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Years ago, in a Graduate Public Speaking course being the somewhat rebel I was, I started off my assigned presentation quoting a popular tag line from a then current television anti-diarrhea commercial. Now that I have your attention, I continued to the confused faces, I’d really like to tell you about, and I went on to present my speech.
The professor was not amused and I’m afraid that it showed quite clearly in my grade. 
People don’t tend to like being shocked. We associate being shocked with something that is bad and why wouldn’t we? We’ve seen it used in shock therapy to jolt brains into resetting themselves, in shock collars to stop dogs’ behavior, in the continued disastrous earth movement shock waves after an earthquake, and even in jokes rings that forever make us suspicious of shaking hands with that person again.
People don’t like being shocked but, and here’s the important thing, people like to talk about something that is shocking.
Did you see the Super bowl advertisement where sweet, demure Betty White got tackled into the mud? Shocking.
Have you been following the Tiger Woods escapades? I’m shocked beyond words on that one.
Shock in itself is a powerful tool that absolutely demands attention. We wake up. We look. We talk about it.
And while we may believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity, bad shock can do some hefty damage to a reputation. Just try being photographed in public without wearing underwear and see how your reputation can suffer in a flash. Shock in bad taste can be equally as damaging. (Red paint on a fur coat anyone?)
Shock delivered with humor is one of the best attention grabbing techniques out there. Delivering a well timed punch line “same as in town Father” does the purpose of waking us up and making us think in a different direction. It’s a gentle prodding shock. It tickles us into awareness instead of jolting us. An unexpected humorous twist sensibly shocks us.
Ah but here’s the rub with that one. Some people are funny, some aren’t. Some writers are funny, most aren’t. If you’re not good at humor, for the love of Pete, leave it out of your writing.
So how do you know if you’ve hit the razor thin line between shock and effectiveness? Some guidelines for using shock techniques:
- Shock does not equal abuse – the purpose is not to outrage your audience, instead you want to wake them up, take note of where they are, and do something. Offensive wording or action (seen a SAW movie lately?) is not shock, it’s simply offensive.
- Shock can’t mislead – some of the angriest comments on the news websites are when shocking headlines mislead the reader. Sure the headline got the reader to read the article but it left him feeling cheated and feeling as if his time was wasted.
- Test the shock – what may sound edgy to you, might sound appalling to others. I tend to think that Dead Baby jokes are hilarious – my mother does not. I have enough sense to not use them in my writing.
- Use shock sparingly – like any technique, if overused, it then becomes the standard. Listen to an hour’s worth of any of these shock-jocks on the radio and you have the routine down. They become repetitive and boring making you switch to another station. They lose their audience.
- You don’t need to lead with shock – although they sound like odd bedmates, some of the best shock is subtle and buried only to rise when least expected
- On the other hand, sometimes a good initial shock can grab someone’s attention –when you are competing in a pack, sometimes you need to get noticed first, the graphic description of a crime scene (a technique used in all of those crime shows) - you've got my attention.
Shock as effective as it can be can also be disastrous. It’s definitely an advanced writing skill that you either have a sense for or don’t. It’s much like a comedienne with the timing of his humor. Although everyone likes to think they are a comedienne, in reality, there are only a few really gifted ones. Someone who can handle shock in writing is a skilled writer indeed.
Shock and awe, it’s not just a military tactic, when used in writing and presentations, it’s also a tremendously effective way to get one’s attention. In the right hands, one can use shock to grab the audience, revitalize them goading them into action. In the wrong hands, as exemplified in my younger days, if done poorly it simply becomes an embarrassment that may be dulled throughout the years but never really seems to go away.
So how do you handle using shock? Something you effectively use or something you wouldn’t touch with that proverbial ten foot pole?
About the author: Wendy Thomas is a journalist, columnist and writer. She has taught undergraduate and graduate classes in Technical Writing and Instructional Design.
A few years ago, my husband and I were preparing for our daughter's arrival. Like many parents-to-be, we wanted to have everything ready before we brought our daughter home. Not only were we prepping the nursery, but we also started thinking about everything from childproofing the house to saving for her college education. It was positively overwhelming!
It's easy to feel the same way when planning your content marketing strategy. You want to do everything right and have this brilliant, organized strategy, but as you start to lay out a plan, it's not as straightforward as you think it will be. Where do you start?
Here's my suggestion: have a roadmap of what you want to accomplish, but plan to take small steps. It's just like planning for a baby: have the basics ready (diapers, clothes and a place to sleep), and know that you can figure out your way as you go along. You never know how your baby or ideal prospects will react, so it's good to be flexible.
The key: just get started! Here are the seven steps I suggest to help you dive in.
Start with the end in mind
I often think about this question that Joe Pulizzi poses: "A year from today, what will be different in our business as a result of the content marketing program?" Have a general vision in mind, and always ask if what you are doing is getting you closer to that goal.
Listen
Every company can benefit from listening to what their customers and prospects are saying about them - and about their competition. You'll find out what matters to them, which is essential for creating content they want to read and pass along. Of course, social media provides so many ways to listen. Here's a great Slideshare from Stefan Betzold on social media monitoring tools (thanks to Mark Schafer for bringing this to my attention on his blog, {grow}).
Build personas
If you want to reach your audience, you need to know who your audience is and what they care about. I'm a big fan of creating buyer personas that you can regularly update as you learn more about your audience from listening and other methods. Stephanie recently had a great post on building buyer personas if you are looking for ideas on how to get started.
Develop your core messaging
Decide what message you want to get across with all of your content. While you will likely have different spins for each audience, remember that all of your prospects are connected. As Ardath Albee discusses in a recent post, buyers/influencers are linked throughout the buying process, and they often pass information along. Make sure you story is consistent across all buyers.
Build your website
I'm a firm believer that your website is the best place to start when developing content. Even if you have stellar content such eBooks, webcasts, white papers, all roads ultimately lead back to your website. If your website is not resonating with prospects and clients, you are ultimately losing business.
Create an editorial calendar for additional content
To help you deliver consistent content, it's a great idea to develop an editorial calendar. I love the 1-7-30-4-2-1 framework from Russell Sparkman that provides a lot of ideas on how to consistently reach your audience with content. It is ambitious for someone getting started, but you can scale it back and start gradually adding in more content and distribution channels.
Listen to feedback and be prepared to change
Like any parent can attest, you never know how your child will respond to something you are trying. Sometimes you think you are doing the right things, but then your child doesn't respond. Or, on those great days, you accidentally stumble on something that works wonders.
The same is true with content marketing: you never know what is going to work until you try it. You may think that a blog or an eBook will be the best thing ever, but, once you put your heart and soul into it, you find out that your audience seems to gravitate towards videos and newsletters. Be prepared to learn and change to adapt to audience needs.
What other barriers do you have when getting started with content marketing or what suggestions can you share? I'd love to get your thoughts.
Related posts:
- B2B Content Marketing is More Than Content
- Every Company Can't Be a Thought Leader - But That's OK
- Get Back To Basics: 4 Key Questions for B2B Content Marketing
About the author: Michele Linn is a B2B content strategist who helps companies create content and think through how their B2B prospects will consume it (from registration to promotion). You can follow her on Twitter or read more of her posts on Savvy B2B.
The Savvy Sisters want to throw our wholehearted support behind Make a Referral Week.Billed as "a small business referral stimulus program" by the founders we also think it is just plan savvy on all levels. We all know personal recommendations are one of the most powerful influencers in marketing.
The Savvy Sisters believe being natural connectors and a pay it forward disciples has made this blog and our individual business efforts more successful.
So get out there and refer and not just this week. Keep it going year round with Make a Referral Monday!
Feel free to use our comments section to expound on the virtues of a great business you work with.
I've written before about white-paper syndication options for B2B marketers. Here Patrick van Boom – Director of Worldwide Sales and Marketing with TIE KINETIX – and I discuss a syndication option that enables B2B marketers to easily distribute content to their partners.
1. What prompted you to develop a syndication platform geared for the B2B supply chain?
Ten years ago, TIE KINETIX was a general marketing firm working with manufacturers and distributors including Siemens and Ingram Micro in the Netherlands. We saw that these companies had all the right product information on their sites, but their channel partners didn't. Prospects couldn't simply call Siemens HQ for more information – Siemens would point people to their partners. So there was a big disconnect between information on the vendor's site and on the site of the partners who were actually selling the products. In response, we developed the first version of our solution, which enabled companies to distribute their content to partner sites in real time and embed into emails for direct marketing.
2. What is the impetus for companies to build content syndication technology into their global partner strategies?
The main reasons are to ensure:
- Your partners are using your content as intended and at the right time.
- All of your partners present consistent content, to avoid confusing your prospects and customers.
- Your information hits the marketplace in real time.
3. What challenges do companies face when managing campaigns and content delivery through the channel?
Consider a typical marketing campaign. For a new product launch, marketing managers will set a launch date and create lots of materials such as videos, product descriptions, and promotional copy. Next they have to contact each partner individually and get them to buy into the process, for example, logging into a portal to download all the information and materials. In many cases, resellers are not willing – or don't have the time – to download all the information and post it to their sites. Think of it from the reseller's point of view – if you sell for 50 companies, you have to log into 50 portals to download information.
4. How does your content syndication platform work?
Once a company signs up to use our on-demand (i.e., SaaS) solution, we start collecting their content. We do so by integrating with their in-house systems to automatically transfer information, even as new content becomes available. We also have a global partnership with CNET, which hosts content – such as reviews and white papers – for and about many companies so we pull relevant content from the CNET network. Our customers can also input content manually. Or we can do it for them.
We then combine all the information – including PDFs, video, banner ads, news, and downloads – and normalize it in our system based on what content elements the customer wants to share. For instance, we can slice it up by publication date, title, or topic, to name a few. This step gives us the utmost flexibility for syndication. As an example, we can syndicate content that maps to different partner categories, such as silver, gold, and bronze.
Next we make the information available to the vendor's partners. While the vendor handles the outreach, for example by sending an email to its partners, the rest of the process is hands-off for them. When partners click on the link in the email, they're taken to a subscription page that let's them to set up their dynamic content profiles and choose their syndication preferences, assuming the vendor allows it. One option is to have syndicated content show up via a "light box" on your site; in other words, a box that pops open above the page. Another option is to integrate the content directly into your site pages.
Partners then hit a button to generate code that they paste into the relevant pages on their site; for most partners, that's a single page dedicated to the vendor. However, if a partner is representing multiple vendors who use our platform, our platform can generate code that provides consolidated content so the partner doesn’t have to manage multiple feeds.
Once partners add the initial code to their sites, all content is displayed dynamically. And it's tailored to the visitor's behavior on the site. For example, if visitors choose a notebook that allows them to buy an OEM version of software, they'll be shown the OEM versions of the software and can add this directly to their shopping cart along with the notebook.
If a partner starts selling additional products for the vendor, it simply updates its profile and the appropriate content is automatically directed to its site – without the need to add new code or revisit the portal. This is an important point – unless the facilitation process is automated, not all resellers will update their site with the latest content. And that, of course, reduces the effectiveness of the program for both the vendor and the channel.
5. How is your syndication platform different from – and similar to – other content syndication used by B2B marketers?
Today, many B2B marketers are familiar with RSS, white paper syndication, and maybe even application syndication. These technologies and services are only similar to the TIE Kinetix Content Syndication Platform in that they’re all forms of syndication. However, our system is more sophisticated in that it can syndicate all content types over various channels, such as Web sites, online stores, narrowcasting, email, and mobile phones, to name a few. Content pushed to Web sites can also be a combination of dynamically co-branded white papers, videos, customer reviews, and banner ads, to name a few. If it’s digital, we can most likely syndicate it.
6. How is your solution used to support outbound marketing to prospects?
We provide ready-to-use e-mailings created for the vendor. Once partners install the software we provide to support this, they can use these e-mailings without handing their prospect list over to the vendor. When a campaign is ready to go, our system sends it – along with all relevant supporting material – to each partner in the local language. The partner pushes the send button in the software we provide and the tailored mailing goes out to prospects. When prospects click on the link in the mailing, they're taken directly to the partner's site. Because our system syndicates all information related to the campaign, the prospect will be shown the right promotional content – and partners don't have to do anything beyond pasting the initial code into their sites when they first registered to be part of the syndication program.
7. What type of analytics can your customers access?
We partnered with WebTrends to provide Web stats. We also provide statistics related to overall email campaigns and specific email click behavior. Vendors want to know how many resellers they've reached, and how many subscribe to the syndication program and integrate content into their sites; we can tell them all that. We can also give them the names and numbers of partners that subscribed to the program and generated the integration code, but didn't yet integrate so they can follow up with them.
Moreover, we can track a campaign from end to end. For example, say a vendor delivers a mailing that the reseller sends out with a URL to the reseller's site, and the recipient clicks the link in the mailing and ends up purchasing a product on the reseller's Web site – we can track that process from beginning to end. We can also tell vendors how many times an up-sell banner is displayed and clicked on a partner's site, how many times people hit the buy button, and how many checked out within the reseller's online store. We can also do simpler things such as track which white papers are downloaded.
8. On your site, you offer an AMR Research case study on Siemens. Can you share another success story?
Consider Microsoft's initiative to launch Windows 7.0. Microsoft in the UK works with 300 partners and wanted all of them to use approved materials for the launch. It sent out a mailing with the link, and the next day, 250 partners had content integrated into their site. As far as Microsoft was concerned, this was an overnight success. In fact, it was the first time in Microsoft history that all launch-related content was available across their partner sites the morning of a launch. That just wouldn't have been possible without content syndication.
Before working with us, Microsoft in the UK had to assign partner managers who were responsible for trying to get partners to use the available content and post it on their Web sites. Beyond that though, it couldn't see what its partners were doing to promote and sell its products. Now the content automatically populates partners' sites, which saves Microsoft and its partners lots of time. In addition, Microsoft has more insight into partner sales. For example, if the partner agrees to tie the syndication system into its shopping cart, Microsoft sees every time a product is added to a shopping cart and purchased. This enables Microsoft to proactively engage with its partners. If Microsoft sees that a reseller's revenues are on the decline, it can get in touch with the reseller to devise a plan.
9. Why haven’t B2B Marketers heard of TIE KINETIX?
B2B marketers may have not heard of TIE because we launched our Content Syndication Platform to the US market only a few years ago. However, we've been a technology company in the US for over 20 years, and our content syndication solution has been in use for many years in Europe. You can learn more on our site.
About the author: Stephanie Tilton is a content-marketing consultant who helps B2B companies craft content that nurtures leads and advances the buying cycle. You can follow her on Twitter or read more of her posts on Savvy B2B.
This week we welcome John White who writes for the blog, How to Hire a Marketing Writer. His post is a great reminder to all of us about why--and how--we need to brand consistently.
The good news is that the Web gives you dozens of B2B points of contact with prospects and customers. The bad news is that you need to synch and maintain all of these properties. It doesn’t take long for your brand to spring a leak.
“I’m putting together a newsletter,” I wrote to a dozen people whose opinion I value, “and before I launch it, I’d like your take on it.”
Have you ever sent a message like this? Were you prepared for what your customers, testers and influencers found? How much of their input did you incorporate?
Bob was VP of business development at a software company when he and I worked there in the 1990s. I showed him the newsletter. Right off the bat I knew I was in for it.
“I must say that I’m not a big fan of your graphic banner,” he wrote. “I’m not sure where to start, other than to say it falls way flat.”
Drat. I put a fair amount of work into that when I developed my Web site about 18 months ago, and I thought it had visual appeal. Oh, well, let’s see what he thinks of the rest of it.
A day later, he sent me a critical analysis for which I probably would have had to pay at least $1000.
Marketing Identity Crisis
“In short, I sense that you are suffering from a marketing identity crisis. If you want to align your writing with marketing in your prospect’s mind, your brand has to be cohesive. Your skills cover many bases, but it would make you look more effective if all of these fell under a consistent-looking brand.
“I think it’s vital to you – to anybody – to present yourself as a singular, cohesive brand (whether that’s venTAJA Marketing or johnwhitepaper is up to you to decide). Why isn’t your web presence under that single identity, with the brochure site, writing blog, Twitter profile and newsletter all under that single brand?”
Why, indeed?
Of course, he also sent me plenty of to-the-point feedback on the newsletter itself, both positive and negative. But it all added up to the same identity crisis.
Cover the Web, and Fast
Whether you’re a globe-straddling enterprise, a one-person show, or something in between, the opportunities for B2B Web presence and points of contact with your audiences crop up all the time because of how fast the Web moves:
- Web site
- Blog
- Newsletters
- LinkedIn profile (personal and company)
- Facebook (profile and page)
- Twitter profile
- YouTube channel
- [Other stuff that hasn’t been invented yet]
It’s hard enough to keep content fresh and looking up to date on just your Website, let alone propagate changes across all of these points of contact. The whole thing is supposed to run like a train, with your brand as the locomotive. But it often runs more like a herd of cats, as you try to cover the Web as quickly as possible and gain first-mover advantage on new portals and venues.
One of the cardinal sins of online marketing is spreading yourself too thin. Not only can you commit this sin by trying to post, comment and stay noticed in six different channels, but you can also inadvertently commit it by letting the Web pull you too far from where you started. The result is a leaky brand.
(And when I write “you,” I mean “all of us.”)
Plugging the Leaks in Your Brand
How do you fix this?
- Keep an eye on consistency in your look. Some properties like LinkedIn and blog templates don’t always make this easy, but it’s important for your brand to look the same everywhere, or for you to link to places that look the same everywhere. In particular, you need a main banner graphic that will follow you everywhere. Link to it over the Web so that you need change it in only one place, and the changes will propagate across your Web presence.
- Enlist outside reviewers. Get feedback from somebody who will tell you if the emperor is wearing no clothes. It’s not as much fun as being slapped on the e-back by people breathing the same exhaust as you, but it’s more productive.
- Do what they tell you. Or at least do some of what they tell you. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Or, if this is too much work, just ask your mom to review your newsletter. She thinks everything you do online is perfect.
About the author: John White is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. At How to Hire a Marketing Writer, he posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it
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