Content Marketing the Next Big Thing – a podcast with Joe Pulizzi

Having a steady stream of content is more important than ever. Podcasts, blogs, videos, communities – all are very different types of content. And there is no such thing as "sharing" in the content realm.

These days, content marketing is more art than science. That's why Joe Pulizzi put together a blog and business bookmarking site Junta42 to highlight the good, the bad and the ugly of content marketing, as well as to list the top content marketers. The list, called the Junta42 Top Marketing Blogs, includes Buzz Marketing for Technology, ranked #5.




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About Joe

Joe Pulizzi is founder and chief content officer for Junta42, a content marketing/custom publishing community search engine. Junta42, launched in 2007, offers a "digg-like" service for marketers, publishers and association professionals responsible for content marketing initiatives.

Joe is also president of Z Squared Media LLC, a content marketing consulting firm for marketers and publishers. Z Squared Media works with clients to create better content that ultimately helps generate new and lasting revenue streams.

Previously, Joe was vice president of custom media for Penton Media, Inc., the largest independent business-to-business publisher in North America. From 2000 to 2007, Joe worked to develop Penton Custom Media into one of the leaders in B2B custom publishing, developing custom communication programs for top-level B2B brands in a number of vertical industries including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Rockwell Automation, Federal Signal and the American Red Cross. Also during that time, Joe served as publisher and editor of B2B Marketing Trends and publisher of Fire Protection Engineering magazine, as well as managing Penton's reprints, content syndication and database publishing operations.

In addition to serving as a member of the Custom Publishing Council, Joe recently served two terms as chairperson of American Business Media's Custom Media Committee. He has been named a Northeast Ohio "Top Mover & Shaker under 35" by the Cleveland Professional 20/30 club and is coauthor of the book Get Content. Get Customers.

A former public speaking instructor at Penn State University, Joe speaks across North America on the growing influence of corporate content on business decision makers. Joe resides in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife Pam and two boys (Joshua and Adam). Originally from Sandusky, Ohio (home of Cedar Point), Joe graduated from Bowling Green State University and received his Master's Degree at Penn State.

 

Influencers Shminfluencers – a podcast with Duncan Watts

Personally I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. So it was scary to me to read the title of a recent Fast Company article, “Is the Tipping Point Toast?”

The article has prompted numerous authors and observers to weigh in on the topic in the blogosphere:

• Social Media Top 5: RIP Influencers
• Influencer Influenza?
• Book Review: Six Degrees
• Debating the Influencer model: Fast Company debates the "Un-Tipping Point"
• Stephen Denny: Tipping Points and the Psychology of Influence
• Rather Than Target "A-Listers" Talk To "The Usual Susceptibles"
• The Hyping Point
• So Who Will Spread The Word That There Aren't Influentials?
• Influentials On The Web Are People With The Power To Link
• Forget the A-List After All
• Is The Tipping Point Wrong?
• Influencers not so influential, trends out of our control
• The Debate Continues: What Is Influence?
• Pure Viral Marketing - A Pipe Dream?

With all the buzz, I just had to see if I could get in front of Duncan Watts, the scientist who stirred things up in the Fast Company piece written by Clive Thompson. Currently on sabbatical from Columbia University and working for Yahoo, Watts does a great job explaining a very complicated and intricate research project that he and his partner Peter Dodds conducted called Challenging the Influentials Hypothesis. Pay special attention to what he says, not only about his research but about social networks in general.

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About Duncan

The general goal of my research is to better understand the structure and dynamics of social interaction. To that end I am interested in a number of related topics, including the structure and evolution of social networks, the origins and consequences of social influence, and the nature of distributed "social" search. My approach to research is problem-driven and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights and methods from sociology, psychology, and economics, as well as from physics and computer science. I am also interested in exploring the potential of electronic communications data, such as email, as well as online communities and web-based experiments, to resolve some of the measurement difficulties associated with studying human interactions and social dynamics.

Selected Publications

Books

D. J. Watts. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. (Norton, New York, 2003).

D.J. Watts. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999).

Papers

M. J. Salganik, P. S. Dodds, and D. J. Watts. Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science, 311, 854-856 (2006).

G. Kossinets and D. J. Watts. Empirical Analysis of Evolving Social Networks. Science, 311, 88-90 (2006).

D. J. Watts. The “new” science of networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 243-270 (2004).

P. S. Dodds, R. Muhamad, and D. J. Watts. An experimental study of search in global social networks. Science, 301, 827-829 (2003).

D. J. Watts, P. S. Dodds, and M. E. J. Newman. Identity and search in social networks. Science, 296, 1302-1305 (2002).

D. J. Watts. A simple model of global cascades on random networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 99, 5766-5771 (2002).

D. J. Watts. Networks, dynamics and the small world phenomenon, American Journal of Sociology, 105(2):493-527 (1999).

D. J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz. Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks, Nature, 393:440-442 (1998).

 

There Is No “Campaign” in Social Media

When marketers use the word “campaign,” it tends to suggest an initiative to get a message out to a targeted group of constituents. It also implies there will be a beginning and, somewhere down the road, an ending.

This kind of thinking creates a danger zone for marketers when it comes to social media. Let me explain …

When starting a blog, podcast series or even a community, marketers have to think in longer terms than a standard campaign. A podcast series may not catch on for several months, heck, for even a year! I have been writing this blog for two years now, and it recently earned distinction as a Top 50 Blog to Watch in 08! (ok, shameless plug, yes, but it’s hard work!)

Here’s the point: There is no overnight success when it comes to social media. Sure, we all are reading about some superb viral results out there, but they are the exception, not the rule. And to say you can systematically achieve those results for your clients (either internal or external) is not accurate.

Another aspect of this is the idea that social media can be incorporated into every campaign you are doing. It’s like “slap a podcast onto that campaign, and we’re going social.”

That’s wrong. You need to prepare for social media with a strategy. See Forrester’s social media guidelines, which they call POST, for ideas on how to formulate your own social media strategy.

Another point of differentiation between campaigns and social media is the latter’s endless need for content. When your content runs out, so does your social media audience. That means you need to be prepared with much more content then you ever anticipated.

2008 is going to be a big year in terms of dollars migrating to the Web and to Web 2.0 tactics aimed at creating a more social version of many companies. Marketers are going to need to adjust their thinking about typical campaigns and what they mean in the social media realm.

The bottom line: If you want to go Social, it takes time, content and a strategy to measure success.

 

BlogCouncil.org - Solving the Challenges of Corporate Blogging

How do you enable legions of bloggers if you are a company like Microsoft? What policies and procedures do you put in place? What approval process can handle thousands of blogger posting each day? Who owns the corporate blog, Corporate Communications or Interactive?

Andy Sernovitz, with input from early participants like Sean O’Driscoll from Microsoft started the Blog Council to help corporate bloggers address these and other issues on a weekly basis. I decided to reach out to them and get some more information and perhaps some clues on how to deal with these questions. Enjoy …



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About Andy

Andy Sernovitz is CEO of GasPedal, a word of mouth marketing consulting firm. He is author of the hot and sexy new book Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking. Seth Godin wrote the foreword and Guy Kawasaki wrote the afterword.

Andy teaches Word of Mouth Marketing at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and previously taught Internet Entrepreneurship at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. He was a founder and CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), which made the idea of consumer-friendly, consumer-controlled marketing into the #1 most important marketing phenomenon. He recently left WOMMA to return to private life and is now its "President Emeritus."

In past lives, Andy founded and ran the Association for Interactive Marketing, the big trade group in the dot com days; was an email marketing guru; ran a business incubator; started some startups; and sat on some boards.


About Sean

Sean O’Driscoll first joined Microsoft Corporation in 1992 as part of the worldwide sales organization. During his early years with the company, he held several positions responsible for the recruitment, development and engagement of Microsoft Partners. As part of these responsibilities, Sean was accountable for developing business alliances with many of the company’s largest independent software vendors, including Great Plains Software, Siebel Systems and Computer Associates.

In 1998, Sean joined Microsoft’s professional services organization and helped establish the company’s first support and consulting business focused on global ISV, system integration, and OEM partners. In January 2003, he rejoined the Customer Service and Support operation as Director of MVP (Most Valuable Professional) and Technical Communities.

In his current capacity as General Manager, Community Support Services, Sean is responsible for developing social media and community-based support models and leading the worldwide MVP program. The MVP program is designed to award and recognize amazing individuals in technical communities around the globe who share a passion for technology and the spirit of community.

Sean is currently transitioning out of Microsoft and has launched CGT Consulting, an independent consultancy focused on applying social media and influencer programs to driving business strategy and long term results.

Sean graduated from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, with degrees in business administration and philosophy. He now lives just outside Seattle, Washington, with his wife Kari, and two daughters, Erin and Lauren.

 

Marketing Needs to Prepare for the Distributed Web

Everything on the Web today is becoming more distributed. Sales applications, human resource applications, even marketing applications. This works well for us, because it’s easier to implement functionally important applications without knocking on the CIO’s door to ask permission. And it’s great news for these aps from a speed and timing perspective.

But it opens up a whole new set of challenges. If Marketing has become, or is in the midst of becoming, more distributed, then we must prepare to become more distributed in areas like content and measurement.

Marketing needs to be ready to start measuring outside of its platform (i.e., its own website and sub domains). And the only way to do that is to have a very solid base of measurement to draw from.

By that, I don’t mean Google AdSense + WebTrends + email database history + various event attendance = measurement. I mean it needs to all be on one platform. Something like an Eloqua, Aprimo, Unica, Firstwave or Market2Lead. These are distributed apps that have a platform you can use to knock down the silos of data in your marketing organization.

Once you have that in place, it becomes much easier to measure activities off your website and in areas that you perhaps control, like a blog or a wiki.

Why even do that, you ask? Well, I believe we’re being bigheaded if we think we can keep content on a site and expect people to come get it. Publishers are getting this point, big time, by syndicating out their content as much as they can. As marketers, we also need to think bigger about syndicating our content.

Take widgets, for example. They will go on different social networks via opensocial or Facebook, and the very application will be distributed.

Where’s the Buzz? Marketers need to prepare for the content and measurement distribution systems of tomorrow, because tomorrow may be coming sooner than you think!

 

Making Sense of Emerging Marketing Trends - a Podcast with Sree Sreenivasan

You can’t pick up a magazine these days and not see the words: Web 2.0. Social networks. Social media. Mobile computing. And the list goes on.

But how do you make sense of these emerging trends in marketing??

Well look no further!! Through the help of a good friend I was introduced to Sree Sreenivasan, technology reporter for WNBC TV and professor of journalism at Columbia University.

You’ll want to hear his vantage point on how companies can leverage these tools and how the tools can make your life better, as well as his predictions on what life will look like in 2017 ! Enjoy ...



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About Sree

Sree Sreenivasan is a leading technology expert and WNBC-TV's tech reporter. He is also Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia University's journalism school, where he runs the new media program. His tech reports can be seen on Thursday mornings at 6:20 and Monday evenings at 5:20 on Channel 4 in the New York City area and anytime on WNBC.com. He previously spent six years as WABC's tech guru. His work explaining technology has appeared in The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, and Popular Science (where he was a member of the "Geek Chorus"). In March 2004, Newsweek magazine named him one of the 20 most influential South Asians in America.

Find out more about him at www.sree.net, or to take one of his online courses please visit www.sreetips.com, or to see his WNBC videos, visit http://www.wnbc.com/technology