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Be the media rather than surround the media

October 17th, 2008

Joe Pulizzi is the founder and Chief Content Officer for Junta42, a custom publishing and content marketing search engine and resource.

Summary (Joe Pulizzi):

• Launch your own media network rather than surround somebody else’s voice (a traditional media outlet) with your messaging (ads).
• You don’t NEED to advertise with a traditional media network. You might want to, but it’s no longer necessary. You can publish directly to your audience rather than place your messaging around someone else’s leading content.
• Custom publishing is the answer to search engine optimization (SEO).
• A custom publishing effort must focus on customer needs, not your company’s products and services.
• 30% of B2B marketing budgets are going to content development and execution (source: Junta42 study).
• If you just push product with poor content, you’re not going to have a good social media experience.
• Talk to your customers, ask them what their needs are today, and then you need to predict what their needs are going to be tomorrow.
• Learn the art of storytelling, hire people with journalistic talent, or contract out those services.
• Before you launch a content project determine how you’re going to measure its success.
• Be prepared to do lots and lots of work.

Full article:

Before the social and new media explosion, custom publishing was primarily about customer retention. Companies did not have conversations with customers, measurement was poor, rationalization to do custom publishing was poor, and in many cases, custom publishing happened because the CEO was so vain wanting nothing more than his or her picture on the cover of their magazine. This was custom publishing just ten years ago, said Joe Pulizzi (blog) founder and Chief Content Officer for Junta42, a custom publishing and content marketing search engine and resource. Pulizzi is also the founder of the consulting and custom publishing group Z Squared Media and author of “Get Content. Get Customers.” I spoke to Pulizzi about his believe that companies need to “be the media, rather than surround the media.” Translated, it means become the industry voice rather than surround somebody else’s leading voice (a traditional media outlet) with your messaging (ads).

Be discovered by search engines

“The biggest thing to happen to custom publishing and content marketing is search engine optimization,” said Pulizzi, “You get all these marketing people who want to be on that left side of that search engine. And what everybody’s realizing is what does it is great content. Because of the search engine and because of Google, people are starting to realize that maybe content is king. You really need to look at the type of information we’re communicating to our prospects and customers on a continuous basis.”

Produce content about and for your customers, not yourself

Companies that fail at custom publishing only focus on their products and services. “They want to tell, tell, tell. They want to talk about we’re great at this and we have this awesome product that. And when you have a client that starts there you have a little ways to go to get them to move around and really position it from the customer’s perspective. And that’s what content marketing is all about. It’s all about the customer,” said Pulizzi.

To get them there Pulizzi asks the common questions any marketer would ask of his client. “What are your customers’ pain points? What are your customers’ informational needs? What keeps your customer up at night,” said Pulizzi, “The answers to those questions are what you need to be communicating.” Pulizzi admits that this is not revolutionary thinking, but to his clients it is revolutionary because they have their marketing sales hats on all day long and all they think about is how they can sell more product. “You can’t just communicate about your products and services anymore and really grow your business. You really have to deliver consistent information to your customers’ pain points,” said Pulizzi.

During his days at Penton Publishing, Pulizzi had a tech client (couldn’t mention the name) that created a content strategy where the goal was NOT to sell. Up until that point, this company had been so focused on selling. In this instance, they just wanted to create some customer-focused content. All the editorial produced was focused on the needs of customers. The only reference to the company was a brief description and a mention that they were the sponsor of the publication. Pulizzi claims that nine months later (the time it takes to make a baby) they had millions of dollars in the pipeline (the cost of raising a baby) for an e-newsletter that was designed NOT to sell. One key to this growth was that the company was targeting a new market area, manufacturing, for which they had no foothold. They were simply exposing themselves to a new industry.

Be the media rather than surround someone else’s content

Any company can be their own media network thanks to the low to zero cost of publishing and distribution, brands can now communicate directly with their customers. Advertisers don’t NEED to spend money with a traditional media network. That’s not saying they don’t want to. They do still want to advertise with a traditional media outlet because they’ll have access to the media outlet’s distribution network and can align their brand with the media network’s brand. But given the leveling of the communications playing field, nobody really NEEDS to advertise with a traditional media brand. “You can be the thought leader. You can be the trusted expert resource for your industry,” said Pulizzi, “The most important thing is how are you going to be that trusted expert resource?”

Custom publishing is not marketing. It’s not about your message points. It’s editorial. It’s storytelling

Pulizzi and I discussed that the “consulting” we do for custom publishing often falls into the trap of advising people on how to be a normal human being. Company people often get stuck in their marketing world and are incapable of having a conversation about their product or industry without hitting their product message points.

Pulizzi explains the dynamic of the traditional marketer trying to get into social media. They’re eager to get into it, so they ask, “How do we get our products and service information out there?” To which Pulizzi responds, “Social media is like having a one on one conversation with somebody. If you don’t have something valuable to say, how long does that conversation last?” If you just push product with poor content, you’re not going to have a good social media experience.

Pick up the phone and talk to your customers

Talk to your customers and ask them, “What is the information you need to do your job better?” When they give you that answer, use your wisdom of the industry and take it one step further. You can’t just give customers what they need because a lot of what they need they don’t know yet. Take what they think they need and then show them additional opportunities. This is where you can be seen as an industry leader. And don’t fall into the trap of thinking that if the traditional media covered an issue, you can’t. They’re not the only expert. You are too.

I told Joe the story of my days writing for eWEEK where companies would constantly pitch me stories to write for the magazine. Many of the pitches were very good, but I couldn’t accept them all. Either I couldn’t write another story or it wasn’t an appropriate fit for the editorial of the publication. Regardless, I always thought, if the story is that good, why don’t you just write it yourself? And no one ever did. The best you could ever hope for is a press release and who ever reads those, or reacts to them the same way they do to an article that tells a story?

The traditional media doesn’t have to be the only one who tells your story. “Why don’t you be the expert trusted resource on that content instead of somebody else? That means bringing in journalistic talent in your company,” said Pulizzi.

Learn the art of storytelling, or hire someone who knows it

Pulizzi said he’s starting to see companies hire marketing people with journalism backgrounds to be able to tell the company story. That surprised me that there would be any companies so hip to the trend of storytelling. It’s not happening on a widespread basis, but Pulizzi’s starting to see some movement.

More companies are creating their own media. According to an internal Junta42 study, close to one-third of all B2B marketing budgets are funding the creation and execution of content,  said Pulizzi. This increased funding to content is not coming from a growing budget, its coming from a reallocation of moneys, Pulizzi continued.

Impressive content plays

After I asked Pulizzi to give me some examples of his own content success stories, I asked him to point to some other impressive “content instead of marketing” examples. Here are three of his favorites:

HomemadeSimple.com – A site from P&G that covers everything to do with making your home more appealing when it comes to cleaning and food. More than 1 million people have opted in for information and are in return offering feedback. As a result, this site has been one of the most popular research tools for P&G.

Beinggirl.com – Another P&G site geared towards 11-16 year old girls. Pulizzi said a Forrester Research report shows the site has been three times more effective than any marketing P&G has ever done towards this demographic.

Willitblend.com – Adopting a little humor from Letterman, the blender company Blendtec posts humorous videos showing what it looks like when you blend various objects like golf balls and iPhones. Blendtec launched the site for less than $1000 and the compellingly silly videos have drawn millions of views. Blendtec says year over year revenues have grown 500% and they attribute all of that success to the videos.

Before you launch a custom publishing project decide how you’re going to measure success

When I asked Pulizzi about mistakes he’s made in custom publishing, he admitted that back in the day he used to launch custom magazines with no idea on how he was going to measure it. In the end, he never had any indication of how successful or unsuccessful a project was. He went fully on qualitative feedback. Today, Pulizzi determines what the measures of success will be before he launches a content project.

In one case, Pulizzi measured the success of an e-newsletter with a follow up courtesy call. That can be a success indicator if many people read it and take action on it. But to actually determine ROI off of a content campaign is not easy because it’s difficult to determine the causality of it. Today, content campaigns are integrated into overall marketing efforts unlike years ago when custom publishing sat out on an island, said Pulizzi.

The formula for creating your own media network

Here’s some basic advice from Pulizzi on launching your own media network:

• Be prepared to create lots and lots of content. It’s an ongoing project that takes effort and money.
• Learn as much as you can about your customers. Can you talk to them and find out what their needs are outside of your products and services?
• Launch a blog. Commit to a consistent level of writing. You won’t get traffic initially, but it will grow over time.
• Look at other blogs that your customers are on and get active in those communities.

If you own an area in your industry and create good content, you’re going to become successful, said Pulizzi, there’s no doubt about it.

Filed under: Blogging, Editorial, Podcast, branding | 4 Comments »

Speed to cool

October 14th, 2008

Bill Ryan is the cofounder of Mandala, a branding and messaging services company. I sat down with Bill Ryan in his home in San Francisco to talk about how his business architects all the pieces of a company’s voice from branding to PR to messaging and to marketing.

Summary (Bill Ryan):

• Companies poorly communicate their story to those that need to hear it (e.g. analysts, bloggers, journalists, and customers)
• Nobody wrote a check because they thought your company was “interesting.” You need to get them to the point where they say, “cool.”
• You need to sell the problem or the opportunity before you sell your solution.
• The lenses for which you and your audience look at your company are completely different.
• You need to be out in front telling your company’s story before your audience does it for you, which may not be to your advantage.
• If you have a situation where there’s no market, then you need to evangelize the space, bring interest to it, and own it.
• Increase discoverability by getting to every point on the influence chain. The further back you get, the more powerful it is.
• The biggest complement you can pay to a writer is to demonstrate that you’ve read what they’ve written.

Full article:

From the individual up to the company level, we all tell stories. A company lives inside a story. The problem is there are many people who work in a company, and if you talk to five different employees, you’ll often get five different stories. That discontinuity within the organization is inevitably carried outside-to people who get pitched (e.g. press, bloggers) and everyone else.

Bill Ryan, cofounder of the branding and messaging services firm, Mandala, wanted to know how well companies communicated their “story.” Ryan talked to story recipients (e.g. analysts, VCs, and journalists) and asked them, “What percentage of companies have the ability to come in and tell you ‘what they do, why they’re different, and why you should care’ in a quick and efficient manner?” Sadly, the average response was 10% with the highest being 15%. Bad for the companies in question, great for Ryan who is in the corporate clarity business. Ryan is also a senior member of the marketing services company, Comunicano, where he leads their Words & Stories directorate.

Most people don’t have their story in place and just keep echoing their five message points, said Ryan. The most you can hope for is a long hour and a half discussion where they’ll inevitably get to the point and you’ll finally discover their story.

How fast can you get them to say, “cool”?

“Speed to cool” is Mandala’s own internal benchmark to determine how good someone’s company pitch is. During a pitch the listeners will often just nod their head and say, “Oh, interesting.” But as Ryan pointed out, “Nobody wrote a check because something was interesting.” What you’re going for is the moment in the presentation where it shifts from them saying, “interesting” to them saying, “cool.” That’s the moment they get it. Their body language changes, and they’re eager. It’s the point when the presenter can shift from just pitching, to closing. “Speed to cool is how fast can I get that audience to the point of saying, ‘cool.’ How can I get them beyond ‘interesting’ which is out of their heads and into ‘cool’ which is into their emotions and it’s all based of real value,” explained Ryan.

A solution without a problem or opportunity is irrelevant

“If you haven’t sold the problem, the fact that you have an elegant solution is irrelevant,” said Ryan, “It has to start with a sense of relevance.” There’s relevance in the sense of are you solving a business problem that they know they have. The flip side of relevance is opportunity. The Internet itself created all new opportunities. “You either have to sell the problem or you have to sell the vision of opportunity, first,” explained Ryan, “If you haven’t done that you will always stay in ‘interesting’ land.”

You have to give them a taste of the opportunities and you have to be willing to give a little bit of the secret sauce that is making you successful or as Ryan refers to it, “the gift of knowledge” marketing. Go so far as writing a book about what you know. For the person who fears giving away too much, Ryan reminds us that “management would rather bring in the consultant who wrote the book than have to actually read the book and try to implement it themselves.”

People look at your company differently than how you look at yourself, yet no one pays attention to those differences

People look at your company through five lenses. Companies look at themselves (from the inside out) through three different lenses. Bill Ryan summarizes the differences:

A company’s identity is defined by their:

• Vision – What’s the core belief that started the company and what continues to drive its innovation.
• Position – Where the company sees itself in the industry ecosphere as determined by who is the customer, how are we different, how are we pricing this thing, etc. The big vision is made practical around positioning.
• Brand voice – How you express your brand to the world. That’s not necessarily your vision because your vision may be a competitive advantage and you don’t want to share.

The world looks at your company through the following lenses:

• Relevance – Do you solve a business problem that people already have?
• Superiority – Is yours the best solution according to the criteria the customers use to make a buying decision? That can be very different as to why you think you’re the best.
• Ecosystem competency – Are you the company everyone wants to do business with? Are you a follower, or do people not know of your existence? Ryan points to Microsoft here, explaining that they score very high in this area, but not in innovation as version 1.0 of all their products IS usually poor. Later versions are where general adoption is at its highest. More importantly, Microsoft controls the environment. How savvy you are as an ecosystem player gives the perception of the strength of your company.
• The team – Who’s running this show? The strength of the company’s team plays a lot in how the company is perceived as a player in the world.
• Sustainability – Do you have what it takes to stay in business for the long haul to service your customers who will need you to be there for them?

Bridging this gap between how you define your company and how the public defines you requires you to be out in front telling your company’s story to the world. It’s a brand narrative, and you better be able to do it correctly before your audience does it for you, which might not be to your benefit. This isn’t like the old days where you just courted journalists and analysts. There are far more voices out there and it’s important that you’re out there telling your story, or as Ryan puts it “Be the shepherd of your story.” More specifically, he believes that your CEO needs to be the super shepherd telling the company story and why it’s relevant to customers.

There are two ways to tell you story, and it all depends on whether there’s a market or not. “You can either evangelize hygiene or you could sell soap,” said Ryan. If you have a situation where there’s no market, then you need to evangelize the space, bring interest to it, and own it. It’s a common mistake to only sell the product and not the market. It’s easier to just sell the product because it’s something you know. You don’t necessarily know the market. Or if you do, you definitely don’t know it as well as you know your own product.

A great example, Ryan pointed out, was McDonald’s “You deserve a break today” campaign. The campaign didn’t sell burgers. It sold the idea of eating out, specifically towards moms with kids. They were trying to grow that specific market, moms with kids eating out. Since McDonald’s already owns a percentage of the “eating out” category, they can grow their own business if they simply grow the entire category of people eating out.

Ryan is one of the earliest Internet PR players. One of his earliest clients was Yahoo! when they were still at the address www.yahoo.edu. In the early days of the Internet, nobody could see the Internet’s value. So one of Ryan’s first marketing strategies for Yahoo! was to evangelize the Internet and make the two words synonymous, Yahoo! and Internet. Jerry Yang’s early appearance on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air did not discuss the technical architecture of the Internet and search, but rather how the Internet was going to revolutionalize communications. And Yang told the story of how he got his grandmother up on email and how his relationship with his grandmother grew because of it. Ryan saw the value of that story, even if he’s not sure if Jerry had a living grandmother at the time. The net result of this positioning caused Jerry Yang and David Filo to become the poster children of the Internet. And any time anyone wanted to do a story about the Internet, they needed to get those two, or it wouldn’t be a complete story.

Be more discoverable by finding the connectors and influencers

If your company is not already on the consideration list when people are deciding to purchase a product or service in your category, you need to increase your discoverability. And doing so requires you to understand your audience and go where they live. More importantly, said Ryan, is to determine who are the people that influence them. “You want to get to every point on the influence chain. And the further back you can get, the more powerful it is,” explained Ryan.

Bill Ryan actually brought up Ken Rutkowski of KenRadio who I’ve mentioned multiple times as the ultimate connector in the tech and entertainment space. Rutkowski hosts meet ups and dinners where he brings people together. He is the connective tissue. In fact, Bill Ryan and I met during a Ken Rutkowski dinner just a few months ago. And then we were reintroduced virtually by Ken’s cohost, Andy Abramson of Comunicano, yet another connector.

“The trick is to find the Ken Rutkowski’s of the world in your particular marketplace that are creating those connections between the people who are influencing the market and the people who are actually creating the innovation. [You have to start] getting those connections made and gauging those people in thinking about your business,” Ryan said.

“You need to understand the chain of influence in your ecosystem.” While that may still involve taking a journalist out to lunch, it also involves understanding the influential bloggers and understanding how their connections fit into the sphere of influence.

“The biggest complement you can pay to a writer is to demonstrate that you’ve read what they’ve written,” said Ryan, “It has nothing to do with you agreeing with what they say. In fact, a good blogger or a good journalist will fall in love with you faster if you disagree with what them and you have a good heated argument and you talk about it, and you really go back and forth, and you listen to what they say…Let them talk, listen to what they say. They may teach you things about your business you never know about before. And if you do that, they will fall in love with you, and they will respect you,” Ryan said. The end result is you’ll learn more about your market and better be able to define the problem, the opportunity, and your story.

Filed under: Collaboration, Editorial, Podcast, Video, branding | 2 Comments »

Build company knowledge by taking conversations out of email

October 13th, 2008

Ross Mayfield is the cofounder, chairman, and president of SocialText, a social business software platform.

Summary (Ross Mayfield):

• You can’t dictate collaboration within an organization. Find a small area where it would excel, introduce it, and then roll it out in concentric circles to other groups that have interest and can provide unique value.
• Collaboration needs a clear business purpose. You can’t have collaboration without a goal.
• Take all content out of email to build a company knowledge base of the revolving door of employees, plus a back channel on what the company thinks on a given issue.
• If one significant person changes their process to be more collaborative and open, it can change the process for an entire organization
• PR has evolved to add value in conversations and be agents for collaboration. It’s not just about connecting clients with press.
• When you ask for permission to market to your audience, immediately offer some value in return.
• Even if someone’s collaboration intentions is purely to promote themselves, still engage if there’s a connection to your brand.
• Collaboration needs to involve multiple individuals within an organization and not just one person, because that one person is just a resume away from leaving and taking that company goodwill with him.

Full article:

Pushing close to 5000 followers on Twitter and a popular blog, Ross Mayfield has been a leading voice in the creation and development of collaborative media. He’s the cofounder, chairman, and president of SocialText, the first wiki developers back in 2002, said Mayfield. Today, SocialText develops and sells a social business software platform.

When Mayfield first started SocialText, before he even incorporated, he wanted to share the process of building his company by launching a company-wide blog. His coworkers had already been comfortable blogging as individuals, but now they were going to use it as an open development platform which was very rare back in 2002.

“I say ’share the process’ because one of the mistakes most people do is they think about blogging as an activity of promoting outcomes,” said Mayfield, “That’s a very different thing. It’s a press release mentality to say, ‘We have achieved this, we’re launching this, here’s the big bang message we’ve been carefully working on in the laboratory, and now it’s ready for the mass consumption.’”

You can’t dictate collaboration

Collaboration doesn’t just happen by you announcing, “OK, it’s time for everybody to collaborate.” Mayfield advises companies to find a location within the business where a public social software deployment would really excel, by prototyping in private. Meaning, what internal project can you put a social platform on top of to get people into the groove of using collaboration software and see its benefits.

The example Mayfield points to is IBM who wanted employees to engage in public blogging, but before they did, they asked employees within IBM as to what their blogging policy should be. Instead of starting an email thread that someone would have to edit, IBM set up a wiki which acted as an editable document. It also established the all important company back channel.

“If there’s a crisis communications event that happens publicly, they will first turn to that back channel, privately inside the company, before airing things out in public,” said Mayfield.

Getting people to start using a new communications tool the way you want it used is not easy. I asked Mayfield what tricks he’s seen work to increase adoption of his tools and get people more involved.

“First, you need a clear business purpose. There’s no such thing as collaboration without a goal,” said Mayfield. We both attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference and this realization was often echoed during the sessions at the conference.

In addition, you have to invest some time and money in how the tool is going to be introduced. Some people are going to need training to get comfortable with editing their thoughts on your new software in public.

Social networking: from cheating to business collaboration

People take to the software differently, depending on where you deploy it (e.g. sales and marketing vs. engineering) and who you deploy it to (e.g. baby boomers vs. the Net generation).

“The Net generation just entering the workforce. They grew up doing their homework on Facebook and that’s called cheating. They come to the workforce, that’s called collaboration,” said Mayfield.

Recognize the differences for the environment that you’re adapting the software, said Mayfield. But as you’re training internally and getting people comfortable with the software, start rolling it out in concentric circles over time. An internal group that collaborates on a project will obviously have interest in that project. But there’s also a group outside of those creators that will have interest, and can provide their own unique value. Keep an eye on those groups and over time roll it out to them. Let them participate, and then look for the interest and the connection to roll it out to the next group. This is how collaboration can just grow and grow.

One person’s process change can change that of an entire business

Over the past six years, SocialText has evolved from a wiki-only type collaboration environment for knowledge sharing to a more vertically integrated process implementation for collaboration. Mayfield explained that SocialText’s software is deployed in a way to help them more productively get their work done, and knowledge sharing is a byproduct of getting their work done.

A video game news company called 1UP.com used to handle all of its communications and processes via email. A simple request to an art director to create a graphic could be an endless thread and flurry of emails. That art director decided to change HIS process. All he did is ask that all requests and edits for his work be placed on his wiki page. When the job was done, the person would be notified with a link within the wiki page as to where to find the files. That art director created a process where there wasn’t one before. He became so successful inside the company that he went on to publicly blog for the company as well.

Take content out of email so it has value and life beyond the inbox

One of the other huge advantages of taking content out of email and onto the Web is that it has a life and value when that person leaves. There’s so much knowledge and information that’s locked into each individual’s personal knowledge management systems. Companies need to break free of each person having their own “system” and set up one that everyone is comfortable with and has value for the whole company when employees are and aren’t there. “All of Web 2.0 is just taking things out of email that existed before and adding backlinks, pings, and restructuring them in a more transparent discoverable way,” said Mayfield as he admittedly oversimplifies the Web 2.0 environment.

As a personal example, I used to work at an ad agency and I produced a ton of content for them. Proposals, ideas, concepts, etc. All of that information lived on the hard drive of my computer at work. When I left, they simply formatted the hard drive instead of saving the information for later. They later called me asking for it, and I told them it was on that hard drive. Unfortunately, they erased my three years of information I created for that company with that move.

“People are sharing more than ever,” said Mayfield, “There’s new patterns of sharing by default. You see it particularly in the ‘net generation. Cause that’s how they’ve grown up, that’s what they’ve always done. They don’t necessarily see the reasons not to.”

Mayfield brought up the CIA who presented at the Enterprise 2.0 conference (I wrote about them and conducted an interview with them as well.). The model of the CIA is the complete opposite of open collaboration-type thinking, yet that’s what they’re doing. Traditionally, the CIA has operated under a “need to know” philosophy, they are slowly switching into a “need to share” culture, yet still with levels of security clearance.

Don’t let one person in your company possess the “King of Collaboration” title

Culture change can’t be the goal of a collaboration initiative. It has to be a byproduct. Those who share will be rewarded, and those who horde will be at a disadvantage, Mayfield said.

During my interview with Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions, he stressed the need to build a network of individuals to develop your industry voice. That it was detrimental to leave that up to just one person because they’re one resume from walking out of the company with all that built up goodwill. Mayfield continued that line of thinking by repeating results from studies that show that people trust individuals within a company more than they trust brands (source: Edelman trust barometer, six out of ten countries trust individuals as peers rather than institutions as reliable and credible sources of information). In addition, half of all individuals trust a rank and file employee more than a CEO of the same company.

PR has evolved to provide value in conversations, not just connecting clients and the press

Mayfield believes that the role of PR is actually increasing and not declining. “You have a much more decentralized, fragmented media landscape that organizations need help understanding,” said Mayfield, “You have a new role of a PR person as a public actor in the conversation.” PR persons are no longer agents to allow conversations between their clients and the press, but rather people that are providing value and developing relationships within the conversation. And PR is no longer relegated to training top executives to hit the top message points, but also the entire company who has interactions at lower levels like support or developer relations.

“An overall social media strategy needs to be diverse in its tools. It needs to be diverse in its empowerment of different individuals,” said Mayfield. While most of the social media being presented by the media and pushed is very public, Mayfield sees a trend to more intimate type relations like a social communications network between PR firm and client. Or maybe new relationships between PR agents and those that they’re contacting. For example, instead of setting up two separate interviews with two different analysts, why not get both of them in a room as you’re giving your presentation and see what new rises from that interaction. For more on the importance of developing a relationship for communications, see episode #3, Build your audience by sharing their ideals and beliefs.

As I implored Mayfield to give me stories of what it takes to get people to collaborate, he straightened me out by explaining, “There’s no collaboration panacea,” said Mayfield, “It really just takes some conviction to identify what the true collaborative problem is and get agreement from a group to try to solve it and with what steps.” To start that off, Mayfield suggest looking for those people that have already taken to online collaboration outside of the organization (e.g. say they started a local social network of cat lovers). These are people that feel comfortable with social tools and are passionate being a community manager. Let them lead the charge.

Permission to market to your audience

As you’re developing a relationship with your audience, when you ask them for information like how to get a hold of them (e.g. contact information), you need to immediately reply back with some value (e.g. an invite to an event, or a trial of a product).

“[Ask yourself], ‘What can I give away to let people distribute, reuse, attribute, bring sources back to you, not just find on the Web, but carry forward into social networks,’” said Mayfield. It’s also not just your direct business, but the goodwill you bring to the environment. It’s something Mayfield has been doing for years, and he’s hoping it’s what is going to keep him afloat.

Even if people just want to promote, engage in conversation

When I asked my traditional, “What are the worst mistakes you’ve made?” question Mayfield admitted that he didn’t initially see the value of engaging with people who were obviously just interacting with him for their own ego and to push forward their own initiative. People would come on, self promote, and Mayfield would ignore them. Today he realizes “You really want to engage with every conversation that relates with your brand,” Mayfield advised, “Even if you don’t want to necessarily draw attention to the existence of a competitor.” How open is your discussion about your competition is an issue Mayfield still wrestles with today. It’s different industry by industry. A general rule of thumb about sharing information is to share the process, not the outcomes.

Filed under: Blogging, Collaboration, Podcast, Video, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »