A couple of years ago when we launched BuzzFactory.net there were a smaller number of competitors both globally as well as locally. We were not positioning ourselves as a social media agency or a social media marketing company back then, we were simply a content marketing / inbound marketing team using our skills at creating and marketing great content to drive audiences for our customers. We evolved into social media service provider or agency since we started expanding our offering and capabilities. Of course more recently, there are a lot more digital marketing agencies many of which are competitors and I get asked “doesn’t the spurt in the number of social media marketing agencies intimidate you?”.

Truth is, of all the ones I frequently come across, the handful that scare me are the ones I find publish some really awesome content.

• Great website copy with crisp messaging that talk to you & prompt you to explore further
• Personality that comes through the writing giving you a feeling you somehow know them and can connect with what they say
• Resourceful & engaging blog posts that tell you they know what they’re talking about …knowledgeable in their field
• Smart use of graphics and video clips to help you visualize a message
• Presentations, downloadable documents, demos, case studies, photos and other well crafted resources that help you evaluate and create an opinion of them even before you’ve picked up the phone or sent and email to contact them.

Online brand perception is formed even before you make any sort of contact with anyone from within a business or organization. It’s created through your content.

Don’t Cut Corners With Content Your Online Brand Perception Depends On It

That said… here are some pointers when it comes to content and your overall online presence strategy:

1. Don’t skimp on time or money when it comes to creating your content, the new Google algorithm updates are based on rewarding sites with higher quality content that get linked to and mentioned purely because they are that good and not as a result of technical SEO gimmicks.
2. Don’t look for short cuts, cultivate a following by delivering valuable content. Don’t buy bulk blog posts (the 1$ an articles types) from providers that piece together from others content and throw in a few keywords assuring you it will help boost links and search results. They will harm your site rather than do any good. Remember it’s now about quality not quantity.
3. Make sure you inject your / your brands personality into everything you publish. Audiences on the web form impressions on who you are from what they have in front of them. A boring web web page full of factual information, statistics and data may convey information but not personality.
4. With social media conversations, make sure those that represent your online voice are doing so the way you’d like your brands voice to come across. They are your voice after all and what they say reflects on your business.
5. Be creative, don’t shy away from being vibrant or different. In a world where millions of conversations and millions of pieces get published every single day, being different helps stand out, getting noticed and carving an identity. (Hence the Pink Elephant in our logo)
6. Become obsessed with the content aspect of social media marketing, it does define how others see you online so give it the priority it deserves.

The next time you check out a website, a video, a blog post or presentation that belongs to a brand or organization, consciously think about how you’re making associations, what it tells you about them and how they come across. It’s how others perceive you from what you put out there on the web. The scales are tipped in favor of those that communicate better online!

One of the top reasons decision makers in B2B businesses put off social media marketing and spending on activity which can help create a web presence is “no instant ROI”. The logic: why pay someone to blog, publish content, share content, comment on others websites and spend time on social networks all day when it doesn’t instantly result in sales? It’s just an ongoing cost which can run for months without a directly proportional result in terms of sales that can be tied directly to this activity.

Most traditional business development decision makers would rather spend on advertising campaigns, email marketing campaigns, telemarketing or buying peoples attention rather than earning trust by building a relationship through social media which can be a much longer process. You wouldn’t be wrong to think social media and the content marketing approach is a slower path to converting attention to sales so it can be put off. However, it would be short-sighted.

You see, developing a content ecosystem and a social media presence is a long term investment much like brand building and not a short term marketing campaign spend like a telemarketing campaign.

So when you look at the term ROI on activities like blogging, sharing, content development and others related to developing an online presence, you need to look at it standing far back thinking what it can do for you several years down the line rather than looking at it up close like a 2 month advertising campaign where you count spend and conversions over this short period. Social media is a long term investment in creating brand pull around your business and that’s the perspective it needs to be seen in.

Real life case illustration

A couple of years ago  I was involved with the demand generation team for a B2B service. When it was launched, there were two major components to the customer acquisition process. An inbound marketing lead (just myself) and an outbound pre-sales team of 4 that would run email campaigns combined with outbound telemarketing campaigns to identify potential customers that supported a 5th sales manager that would actually close sales resulting in conversion when a hot lead has been identified by the pre-sales team.

Working of the Outbound Marketing Team

4 resources costing the company $3000 (made up figure) a month each at a total cost of $12,000 a month.

Together they generate approximately 120 phone calls each day reaching about 50  a day of which 2 warm leads would emerge. That’s about 10 warm leads a week of which about 1 would convert into a customer. This team of 4 would consistently deliver about 4 customers a month which was not bad considering this was a service where a single customer would be high value and contribute significant revenues.

The process was linear and the cost of sales constant. The only way to increase sales would be to increase costs.

Working of the Inbound Marketing Effort

1 resource costing the company $3000 (made up figure) a month total cost of $3,000 a month.

As a 1 person inbound marketing resource for a small business, I would spend my hours each day creating a compelling blog post, developing engaging content around the service like slideshare presentations, ebooks, PDFs etc. Promoting and sharing this content across social bookmarking sites, interacting with others on relevant communities across Linkedin groups, doing guest blog posts with industry thought leaders, building a following on Twitter, link building and developing awareness for the service and company.

The first two or three months there was very little traffic, a hand full of inbound leads mainly from decision makers stumbling across conversations and learning about the company. In the next three months we were reaching about 150 inbound visitors a day resulting in about just 10 form fills a month but converting into about 4-5 sales a month since the inbound leads were more qualified and came looking for what we offer. This was at par with the 4 person outbound team.

As the activity continued at the same pace, towards the end of the first year traffic grew steadily towards the website, form fills started to increase and inbound leads were continuing to show steady progress. Conversions were much better on these inbound leads since they came from visitors that had come across us online through our content or conversations, heard about us, reviewed and done most of their evaluation on the website with content provided there and then asked us to get in touch with them since they were interested.

By the end of the second year, the number of inbound leads from the website as a result of the social media and content marketing activity had far exceeded anything the 4 person sales team could come up with who were still at 4 sales a month.

The process took time and effort to yield anything. Once it did, however, it scaled and beyond a point, the returns far outweighed the costs.

Developing an online presence is not going to yield instant results but great brands were not built overnight. They were investments made with the vision that people will connect with them and when they finally did they paid off. Social media and online outreach is an investment. Invest early, reap the benefits long term!

If what drew you to this post was the alluring image of Olivia Wilde on a cover, then I’ve made my point. In fact, even if you stopped at the top of this page and spent a few seconds wondering “I wonder what this post is all about” just because the image caught your attention, that’s good enough for me as a blogger and content marketer because I now have your attention.

Attention is a valuable commodity for any blog or website since we’re all up against millions of competing blog posts, articles, videos, graphics and photos that are published every day. As a content marketer, engaging an audience with  your content to drive inbound traffic versus the myriad of other options people can click through to and consume instead …is a challenge. To stay in the running, compete and still draw online users to your site, your content needs to stand out and appeal to them and this is something magazine publishers can teach a thing or two about to bloggers and content marketers.

Magazine publishers have been battling it out for years when it comes to competing for attention, grabbing a persons attention and getting them hooked to their content. They’ve studied just about every psychological aspect of consumers and readers and incorporated decades of best practices in the way they write new content, design, structure and deliver their end product to readers. Their attention to detail is what web sites, blogs and digital content marketing media will have to strive towards in the sea of user generated content to stand out as a quality source for content as opposed to just another blog.

 Attention Grabbing Titles

The general thumb rule is people will always scan first and then read if they decide to read further. Attention grabbing titles are essential on social media sites and search engine results as they are when you scan hundreds of magazine covers on the shelf at a magazine rack before picking one up.

 Awesome Images

No doubt that fantastic quality images are the number one draw to a magazine and all the best photographers and graphics designers in the world would contribute to the publishing team in a huge way. The same holds true for web content too and being able to source and use photography, graphics and imaging in your content will set it apart as a quality content source over the plain text and boring looking pages.

Layout & Design

Another key element which web content has adopted from the traditional publishing industry and evolved is layout, typography and design. Placing images, text, advertising, using fonts well, titling, sub titling and knowing user habits is all well thought out in a great magazine as it needs to be on a web page or blog. This is something every reader will subconsciously make a note of when they are on a professional content site or a casual novice blog.

Rich Glossy High Quality Feel

Don’t you ever relate to the quality of a magazine by how glossy or high quality the cover and the paper quality is? It’s makes the images pop out and create a much richer reading experience also adding to the value of the overall publication. Now some may ask how this applies to web content …and it does. Selecting a good publishing platform and theme with a great modern look and feel CAN change a users experience and perception of a blog or web site.

 Well Thought Out & Fresh Topics

Once you have the readers attention, following through and meeting expectations is just as important to have them engaged and keep them coming back. Magazine content teams sit and brainstorm new fresh topics that could grip their audience carefully selecting the best ideas keeping readers in mind. Every piece needs to evoke some reaction whether they read it and think, “this was useful”, “this was enlightening”, “this made me laugh”, “this got me excited” or even “this made me sad”. The last reactions you want for your content is “huh…waste of time”.

Put The Target Audience First

The magazine business model that publishers have followed since they first hit news stands is “be the number one content and information resource for people in our target segment to build a reader base around the magazine”. Only then target advertisers to promote their products to our reader base and subscribers. A poorly executed web content strategy thinks more about marketing products and repetitively talks about it’s own products and gets boring. A good content marketing strategy thinks about what readers would enjoy or find useful first and the promotion is an added bonus to this. Focus on giving the audience what they want. The marketing will happen.

Would You Rather Read This?

Or this?

So if you run a blog or content site that you hope will really become a marketing asset for your brand or business, think: how would I approach it if I were a magazine publisher and depended on building a reader base regardless of what I intend to market. Do that, and things will take a turn for the better!

Social media as an effective marketing channel has been around for a while now and at times it seems the word has been thrown around so much that some businesses fail to really understand what it means before deciding they want to “use social media” to “increase traffic”, “increase sales” and demand “ROI”.

Among the Indian business fraternity, this divide in understanding how social media is used to build a presence or a brand is seems ever so prevalent after speaking to several business development executives in charge of using the social web in their marketing mix. There some Indian businesses that have used social media “brilliantly” to carve themselves a niche on the web using innovative and authentic ways to engage an audience. They’ve been able to make a connection with their target audiences by giving them something new, something useful, using blogging as a medium to communicate effectively engage their community.

These are often the companies who have said:

- We’d like to try something fresh, we need to communicate to our audience in a way that’s not direct selling or pushing people to buy from us but rather letting them know we’re here in this space and we’d like to connect with others who are interested too

- Let’s plan this right, take the time and invest in building a strong relationship with people online via quality content and engagement

- Of course we need ROI but we’re in it for the long haul and we want our online audiences to “like us” so we won’t jeopardize our brand, reputation or values as a business by crossing (invisible) boundaries that exist in the social web world.

These are the kind of companies you will see:

- Blogging with  a personality and a genuine voice

- Developing content that audiences will find useful

- Using Twitter not just on auto pilot to advertise a single link or two from their website but share, have conversations and open a communication channel with others there. You’ll notice their followers may grow more gradually but they have relationships with these followers and a genuine following.

- Using Facebook to build communities while understanding that peoples privacy and online space also needs to be respected

Lesson : – Everybody Loves Elmo As Well As Businesses That Understand And Respect The Social Web Environment

Then there are companies who see the social web as another marketing channel not very different from a large telemarketing or email list which needs to be pounded, messaging needs to be pushed out in front of people as possible and the objective is use all means to drive sales fast! These are businesses (And sadly a large number of so called SEO / Web Marketing / Social Media / Content Generation firms) that end up not using…but abusing the social web and effectively pollute it with a lot of the unwanted or spam content that you and I see and ignore out there.

These businesses have said:

- We need rapid link building to our website… we don’t care how you do it but we need to see 4000 links every month. Use auto commenters, leave multiple comments on anyone else’s sites,   publish hundreds of posts with links to our sites….we don’t care what the posts say as long as they have our keywords.

- Our objective is to go from 0 visitors to 100,000 visitors in the first month. We don’t care who they are or how they come to our site….just make it happen.

- If we spend $X for the first 2 weeks, we would like to see $X into 10 in sales by the end of these two weeks otherwise it means social media doesn’t work.

- We’ll create a Facebook account and Twitter account, link them to an auto sharing tool that lifts feeds from rss and then get someone to add 500 random followers everyday so they follow our advertising links and we get clicks that convert

- If you have a few hundred followers on Facebook and Linkedin, lets direct message each one with a bulk message and measure the results

- Create 20 profiles on each social bookmarking and networking site to promote our website.

- Post 30 Facebook updates on the page daily so all that a follower sees in their feed is us….doesn’t matter if it’s useful for them or not.

- Have all our content and links to the site replicated on all social sites like Squidoo, Article marketing tools, article distribution sites, Blogger and every other site.

- Join forums and we’ll post several great reviews of our own business under fake names

It’s these businesses and companies that claim these are genuine social media marketing tactics that are responsible for automated junk comments, tonnes of irrelevant articles and posts, spam email campaigns, spam messages in your Facebook, Linkedin and social accounts, shares that annoy you in your content sharing accounts, un related ping backs and links to your blog and sites, spam discussions in your forums or discussion groups and all that’s polluting the otherwise awesome social web environment.

It’s possible that with the sheer number of people these campaigns are pushed at that it could result in some short term benefits. However, do you really develop a positive vibe about a business that does this to you and ruins your social web experience? Would you really want to buy from or connect with them?

Nobody Likes Darth Vader Or Businesses That Pollute And Disrespect The Social Web For Profit

There’s a fine line between using and abusing social media. Each business needs to respect that the social web world exists on it’s own terms and to fit in, you need to be a part of that experience and contribute something constructive to peoples experience while respecting that they get to choose whether they want to engage with you or not. One needs to understand how to build a presence there gradually developing your influence and not try and get there with brute force like the offline marketing and advertising world.

The social web is not kind to those who use “corporate might” and “hard selling”. Take the time to understand what people want, what they don’t mind, how they interact in this online environment and  you’ll make a place for yourself there that will be yours for a long time to come.

My inbox today had a rather interesting read. I received an email from the other side of the world from someone who was looking for permission to use a photo I had shared on Flickr but couldn’t connect there since I’ve been inactive there for a while. She wrote:

I sent you a Flickr e-mail but when I noticed that you hadn’t uploaded in 2 years I figured that maybe you were no longer checking mail there. So I took the plunge to google you, you certainly are not hard to find and that is a credit to your business!

I’m no Justin Bieber by a long shot but it’s heartening to know that what we do with social media and business blogging makes it easier for others to find us and connect with us. This email could well have been a potential customer who heard about what we do through “content” that they came in contact with and then did a search to see if they could connect with us. As a business that wants to be present on the social web the question you should be asking is:

How easy or hard would it be for someone to find you and connect with you if they decided they want to connect with you and did a Google search?

a) Impossible

b) Not to0 hard with some searching

c) Easy, we come up all over in related searches

This is where the reference to the social media phenomenon Justin Bieber comes in. Now don’t get wrong. For the record I would like to say I don’t get the “Bieber fever” …in fact I’m not a fan of Justin Bieber. I have been lucky enough not to have listened to any of his songs or watch any of his performances all the way through and intend to keep it that way. To go a step further his hair bothers me as much as Donald Trump’s does and if I had a razor and had my way I would probably get a restraining order from both their respective lawyers.

However, Justin is a social media wonder. If somehow you don’t know who he is, look up the name on Google and there is no other Justin or Bieber online that dominates the web results like this web phenomenon turned super star. Millions of youtube plays for his videos and a twitter following of over 8 million! Finding Justin Bieber on the web is not a challenge. He is EVERYWHERE!

This is one of the main perks of having an active social media, business blogging and content marketing strategy in constant motion. If you’re publishing and promoting content consistently and daily, you’re growing your web footprint. The more you grow this web footprint, the easier it becomes for those who need to connect with you …find you! Now this may not be on the Justin Bieber scale of things but every action that contributes to reaching out and indexing more engaging content online, makes the process of finding you, your business and website more visible on search engines.

So unless you’re looking to stay anonymous, get the wheels of your business blogging efforts turning and ….get found!

We’ve just concluded a very enjoyable 2 hour session on “Getting Started With Blogging” and making the most of the WordPress platform here at Open Space. The lively audience which consistently grew as the session continued participated and interacted with their questions on the basics of blogging, getting started and tips on how to become an active part of the blogosphere. It was a pleasure interacting with people from various walks of life and discussing how they could use blogging to their advantage whether it was to create awareness for their nonprofit organizations, their college projects, businesses or personal passions and made for a lively session. We hope the workshop will help inspire them to kick-start their own blogs really soon!

The session was arranged by Open Space which is a brilliant initiative by the Centre For Communication and Development Studies which follows a mantra of Talk -> Think -> Act for change. The Open Space centre in Pune leverages literature, cinema, theater, music, debates and several forms of communication to create discussion on issues that impact society, build knowledge, skills and initiate change. For more on Open Space and the work they do check out their website www.openspaceindia.org and their publication www.infochangeindia.org

We look forward to being back!

Well let’s see…

1. The office is quiet
2. You don’t need to spend on phone and traveling expenses
3. You don’t have to worry about what to do if you have too many customers pouring in

Heck…there are no advantages! Having a salesperson who doesn’t communicate is absolutely pointless! Having marketers that are not making a noise about your business or actively doing something to promote your products are equally of no use. Then why have a website that’s doing nothing to make a noise about your business and actively market itself on the social web to sell for you?

Conversation is the very basis of the social web we are all a part of today. If you have a great website but you are not actively reaching out to people on the web and not joining in the conversation it’s virtually like setting up a shop in the neighborhood with no salesperson and making no attempts to reach out to the community letting them know you are here.  Perhaps setting up your website establishes that you have a presence on the online world but to make that presence felt you need to connect with the social web and …make some noise so to speak. How do you make some noise? Keep publishing.

Blog, tweet, comment, update statuses, make connections online, start communities, publish articles, send out press releases, create videos, create podcasts… keep speaking online … and you will be noticed. Stop speaking (publishing) and you will be ignored. The web is a crowded market place and just as you would find street vendors shouting on top of their voices to grab some attention in a bustling bazaar, that’s what needs to be done on the web to draw the right people using content and publishing to create conversation.  Having a blog doesn’t get you noticed, blogging actively get’s you noticed. Achieving something like winning an award for your business doesn’t bring traffic to your website, telling others through your blog or press releases and shouting about it on social networking sites will.

There are no advantages to having a salesman or marketer who doesn’t communicate and actively promote. There are no advantages to having a website that no one is talking about on the social web and no one knows about.

Make some noise. Keep publishing. Jump start your content marketing and start a conversation. It’s easy to ignore the silent website, it’s hard to miss the one that everyone is talking about and doesn’t stop talking itself.

being silent leads to being forgotten

If you picture a kid in a bus who is constantly talking about something and barely silent for a moment, you may not really be interested in what he is going on about but the chances are you are going to notice him and tune into what he is talking about. Chances are, others in the bus have also taken notice. It’s a lot like this with online channels starting with your blog. If you keep a constant conversation going online through your blog, Twitter, social networking and bookmarking sites, it will draw some listeners and create some interest. A part of that interest may drive readers to contact you and explore further. It generates a active interest in what you are talking about and creates opportunities. However, when the conversation stops, the blog posts dry out, the Twitter accounts turn silent and there is no dialog online, the activity around your site also tends to diminish (with the exception of search traffic coming through content that has been well indexed and show up in search results which has long lasting effects). If that online silence is prolonged, you’re likely to be forgotten.

constant activity is key

Most of those we work with are looking for our blogging and social media marketing support not because they don’t know how to do it themselves. It’s because they do know how it works and they know how important it is to be able to post and stay active very regularly and that is something their time schedules don’t permit.  They know there is a direct relation between the ability to consistently publish fresh content having active social channels and the ability to generate interest, conversations around their business and new customers.

keep a continuous online conversation going starting with your blog

For now, it’s time for me to break that silence on this blog with this post and other ones to follow. Then get back to being active on Twitter and other social sites to let everyone know I’m back and stiring a buzz. Perhaps I’m not very talkative in person but when it comes online marketing I know for sure, too much silence is not good for business.

Perhaps best said by Joe Pulizzi of the Junta42 blog in a post he published in July this year:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, social media doesn’t work without relevant, valuable and consistent content. Success in social media relies on a web content strategy that works for the brand and especially for the brand’s advocates.

Running a community, sharing links on Twitter, blogging, search marketing, inbound marketing, online marketing promotions or landing pages all rely on having great content to generate that conversation or value that draws the right people. That “content creation” is a core component of all subsequent social marketing and online marketing activity and needs to be accounted for by businesses.

What needs to be considered about content?:

• It’s a core component of social media and a lot of other activity is built around it and relies on it
• Creating content involves considerable investment in terms of time, effort or money. Even a one man business running a daily blog to create awareness needs the owner to spend considerable time daily to keep posts fresh.
• It’s a constant requirement not a one time purchase. As long as you need to improve search traffic results, deliver something engaging to your audiences or keep a social marketing program running, you need a supply of content.
• It needs to be accounted for in marketing budgets and feature separately for any online marketing plans to really measure true costs of online marketing and accurately track progress.

Good social marketing campaigns are fueled by a great supply of quality content. Just take a look around:

Successful software product company 37Signals much loved blog Signal Vs Noise and ebooks like Getting Real have fueled a huge online fan following for the business who will generate massive marketing for anything they do.

Inbound marketing company Hubspot‘s exceptional content in the form of blog posts, videos, comics, podcasts, Slideshare presentations and online TV show is behind the huge buzz they have generated online around their business and drew a large customer base in a relatively short time.

The evidence is consistent with every sucessful social marketing effort. They are all backed by great content and to build a supply of great content, a dedicated effort is needed. One that clearly addresses content creation and content marketing as a core part of the overall social marketing strategy. Do you have your consistent supply of online content figured out?

In this short span we’ve discovered we’ve outgrown our previous website and that’s driven us to move to the new BuzzFactory.net website and blog which will be our new home on the web. The new WordPress driven site will give us a better platform to continue our conversation on blogging, content development, social marketing and how these tools can be used effectively in generating more online visibility for your businesses and websites. The blog will continue to have regular articles, updates, views and posts around content marketing as well as updates from the team every now and then so stay tuned.

Please bear with us as we transition to our new home on the web and iron out any kinks that may come up in the process. We are extremely grateful for the support of all our early customers and hope to be able to work with more of you along the way. Here’s to the journey ahead…

Cheers!

From the BuzzFactory Team