Cottage’y gift stores have amazingly consistent merchandise: Candles, magnets, potpourri and other semi-fancy dust collectors you give to great aunts and folks you don’t know that well. If you have ever been to the International Gift Show you’d understand why all those stores are the same—aisle upon aisle, booth upon booth of items that give oak hutches and bookshelves purpose.

Recently I got one of those inspirational signs as a gift and had a content marketing epiphany. Caring is sharing, so here you go:

Gift Store Wisdom—To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.

Content Wisdom—To Google you may be one website, but to a consumer you may be the website.

Gift Store Wisdom—You always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Content Wisdom—You always miss connecting with 100% of the customers you don’t talk to directly.

Gift Store Wisdom—The road to success is always under construction.

Content Wisdom—The content you created last week/month is still relevant but not enough to feed Google—it’s always hungry.

Gift Store Wisdom—Never too busy to be beautiful.

Content Wisdom—Content and Design are not oil and water. Make your content pretty—your content will thank you.

Gift Store Wisdom—Map out your life. But do it in pencil.

Content Wisdom—Have a starting place to measure from and then measure, test and start over.

Gift Store Wisdom—To play it safe is not to play.

Content Wisdom—Content Marketing and Advertising that inspires you to act is rarely safe. Look at all your favorite campaigns (advertising, marketing, content) and send me a link of all the safe ones.

Gift Store Wisdom—Age isn’t important, unless you are cheese.

Content Wisdom—Send your best Content Marketing equivalent to ian(at)eatmedia.net

1. Producing relevant content and without taking design into consideration.

-Stock photography that looks stock does absolutely nothing to promote authenticity—in fact it degrades it.

2. Putting multiple people in charge of your content marketing strategy without direction or oversight.

-Too many Indians equals a watered down content marketing strategy, and too little input equals words on a page without a clear call to action. Your content strategy should be your marketing department’s number one priority and your top team should be managing it, or managing the vendor who is managing it.

3. Creating a content marketing strategy without looking at what your competitors are doing.

-Although there is never a guaranteed blueprint for success, you have to perform due diligence before investing time and money towards content. To really hit it out of the park, you should be looking at what the most successful companies across all markets are doing. Subscribe to Ad Age Daily for a taste of what market leaders are up to.

4. Using the same format over and over.

-Unless you are the New York Times, the “wall of words” approach probably isn’t the best strategy, so mix it up. How-to’s, charticles and Q & A’s are all effective ways to engage readers through memorable content.

5. Telling your story instead of letting your customers tell it for you.

-New customers don’t trust you, but they do trust your current customers. Offer happy customers free services or products to participate in an interview or case study. Create a community or forum from which you can cull great stories.

6. Blogging, every once in awhile.

-Your blogging strategy should drive your content marketing strategy. People want to do business with people, not monolithic corporations, so show potential customers who you are and what you know. (Google likes new content, too.)

7. Interviewing customers and not re-purposing the audio from the interview into a podcast.

-Audio is easily captured during an interview via digital recorder or conference call recording. You can highlight one great answer or post the entire interview. We call this a two-for-one. (Story and a podcast.)

8. Tossing new tools (Podcasts, Video, Wiki’s and widgets) atop an unclear content strategy, or shaky infrastructure.

-Implementing a wiki, case studies and a handful of widgets is not going to unleash the customer floodgates. You have to have build your content strategy from the top down, and from the inside out. Seth Godin’s book Meatball Sundae describes this in detail.

9. Telling people what they already know.

-Don’t repeat what is already common knowledge. I quote and reference many authors, content marketers and executives but I don’t always agree with everything they say, and I say so. You need to make your voice heard. Don’t be gray—it doesn’t look good on you. Be orange instead.

10. Talking to too broad of an audience at one time.

-If your content marketing plan involves a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to connecting with prospective customers, stop. Go back to the drawing board and start over. Successful marketing only works when your message is targeted. If you are creating content targeting middle-aged drivers and teens, chances are you are going to fail miserably on both fronts.

Junta42, run by the Content Marketing ringleader/champion and tireless cheerleader Joe Pulizzi, published the latest release of the Top Content Marketing Blogs today. The Eat Media Blog jumped up 10 spots to number 20—if this were 1986, then we effectively went from #30 “Venus” by Bananarama, to #20 “Higher Love” by Steve Winwood. So, while I am extremely proud to now be numerically associated with an ex-member of Blind Faith instead of a Euro-pop group that included “Banana” in the group’s name, there is still a ways to go. (Ironically, Bananarama most likely out sold Blind Faith by a landslide.)

In all seriousness, the Junta 42 Top Blogs List includes some very talented writers, online marketers and social media experts, and we are honored to be in their company. And though we didn’t break the top 10 in this go-round, honestly, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have been incredibly busy here at Eat Media and haven’t been doing a good job of drinking our own content marketing Kool-Aid. Remember, in the Content Marketing world if you aren’t updating, you’re backtracking.

Never a sore loser, I do thank Joe for not ranking Eat Media at #15, because then we would have been associated with Falco, and the god awful song, “Rock me Amadeus.”

Congrats fellow Junta42 Top Bloggers.

Stay Tuned,

Ian Alexander
VP of Content, Eat Media

For those that think that shortcuts are okay, here’s another recent example of content and contact. Eat Media, (along with a number of other people) recently received emails from a graduate student attending East Carolina University interested in having us participate in a marketing study. More than a few things went south with this project.

A few problems:

1. They trolled my email from MediaBistro.

2. They cc’ed everyone on the list, leaving email addresses in plain sight, thus creating a privacy issue.

3. There were numerous spelling and grammar errors in the emails.

4. This was the first contact I ever had from East Carolina University and they wanted something. The lack of professionalism and authenticity forced me look up whether or not East Carolina University was even a real school.

5. No CAN/SPAM considerations were in the body or footer of the email.

6. Different fonts sizes were used in the email, on the same line.

7. The survey was unbranded.

8. “The investigators will be available to answer any questions concerning this research, now or in the future.” This sentence confused and scared me, “investigators?”

9. The first email link to the survey was a login page.

10. There were no design elements on the survey.

The graduate student in charge of this project had the opportunity to generate some amazing data and converse with some incredibly talented people. But instead, the student used a sloppy, shotgun approach to a strategy that required accuracy, intelligence and finesse. Needless to say I won’t be participating in the survey and I have scratched East Carolina University off my son’s short list. In the real world, vendors are fired over issues like this and potential customers are turned off.

We all make mistakes and I am sure the graduate student will never make this one again—let’s all learn from her mistakes. In other inbox news, Seth Godin had a similar issue yesterday. See his blog for an example on how to handle a newsletter Oops. And if you want see how big brands like Pottery Barn handle email campaigns, check out the newsletter/email perfection of Smith and Harmon.

“People working together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext (online) documents.”
This was Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the web when he created it 19 years ago. (No, Al Gore did not invent the World Wide Web.) Recently, the world has gone giddy over social media and Berners-Lee’s vision has come full circle—empowering people by sharing information in Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications.

Successful Web 2.0 and 3.0 (and whatever 4.0 turns out to be) initiatives have to focus on gathering people and knowledge through trust and authenticity, because only from that place will sales and market share increase. I recently interviewed Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone and he spoke brilliantly about the powers and pitfalls of networking. Many of the concepts he talks about in his book revolve around conferences and in-person meetings, but they can easily be transferred to content marketing (CM). Here’s my adaptation on how Ferrazzi’s “Don’t Be This Person” networking tips can be applied to a content marketing strategy.

THE WALLFLOWER:

In-person this is the guy with the limp handshake.

CM equivalent—Online this is the company that is doing nothing to ensure Google knows who they are. Their website and content does nothing to differentiate them from the crowd.

Wallflower Action Item—Hire an outside firm to critique your site. Some charge as little as $250 to assess your content and SEO. Play Boggle with your competitor’s collateral—if they have a phrase in their messaging, cross it off your list. Narrow your message down to the terms and phrases unique to your company then start re-writing your copy or hire a content marketer to help you create a content strategy and execute that strategy.

THE ANKLE HUGGER:

In-person this is the codependent BFF (best friend forever) you just met at the conference an hour ago.

CM equivalent—Online this is the company that won’t stop contacting you. Emails, newsletters, pop-ups and “important updates” fill your inbox and browser daily. And the worst part is, it’s the same information over and over again.

Ankle Hugger Action Item—Abusing a customer’s opt-in is the fastest way to rack up opt-outs. Short-term, screaming for eyeballs may get you some attention. Long-term it will get you a one-way ticket to the junk mail filter. Give your potential customers relevant, REASONABLY consistent content and they will come back more often and better prepared to buy.

THE CELEBRITY HOUND:

In-person you can find him expending all of his energy trying to meet the most important person at the conference.

CM equivalent—Online this is the organization that aligns themselves with every new widget and technology in town, in hopes that they generate new business by being on top of the newest trend.

Celebrity Hound Action Item—Maybe I’m beating a dead horse on this issue, but if organizations spent as much time on their content strategy as they do trolling social networks, accounts receivable would thank them.

THE SMARMY EYE DARTER:

In-person she is looking for an exit out of your conversation because she sees someone else she wants to talk to, and when she’s talking to him or her, the cycle repeats.

CM equivalent—Online this is the organization that changes focus too often and never lets its customer wrap their head around the message. Usually, you leave these sites thinking, “What do they do?”

Smarmy Eye Darter Action Item—Changing things up is great but don’t be so clever that you forget to tell people what you do in a non-marketing, non-uber technical, non non-linear manner.

THE CARD DISPENSER/AMASSER:

In-person he passes his card out like it was a cure for cancer.

CM equivalent—Online this person prides himself on his 500+ contacts he never contacts. Or it could be the company with thousands of emails in their database who never reach out to their customers except to say, “Pay up.” There are no shortcuts to building relationships, it must be real, your contact must not be self-serving and (if it’s content related) it must be spell-checked.

Card Dispenser/Amasser Action Item—If you start a relationship with a customer, partner or associate, foster that relationship. Ping them semi-regularly just to say hello and make your contact personal when possible. I recently signed up at Creative Good and got a personal letter from the founder (not auto-generated). He asked what I did, why I signed up and we ended up exchanging a few emails afterwards. In this case, one focused piece of content (email) returned one elated soon-to-be customer. The sloppy shotgun approach content marketing and customer contact will never beat a strategy that includes accuracy, relevant content and authenticity.

Tim Berners-Lee is still fighting to keep the web as close to the vision he had for it in 1988. Do your part with authentic content.

Last week, SAP held an invite-only three-day global online marketing event. (Sadly, I wasn’t invited, but David Meerman Scott was, and he writes about it here.) This virtual event was said to include online communities, virtual conferences, expert content—the works.

It seems every other day I read about another “Can’t Miss Event of the Year in Online Marketing,” but I have “Can’t Missed” every single one of them, despite impressive panelist offerings from Web 2.0 wiz-kids to traditional print legends to design/advertising superstars. So here I sit in NYC, with the MinOnline Digital Media Summit happening less than a mile away from me tomorrow, without a ticket to the ball. The reasons for me not attending are two-fold, but both hinge on trust.

1) Conferences, for the most part (with the exception of SXSW), suck. I’ve been on both sides of them: The “stand at the booth for three days with an unnatural grin plastered to my face until my cheeks ache” side, and the “sit in a huge lecture hall, load up my bags with tchockes and network until don’t like who I’ve become” side.

2) Conference content is much better suited for the web with me as an active participant. Let me watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it.

When looking at conference agendas I can’t help but think:

Is it a community or congregation?

Is it a back and forth interaction, or a sit and listen?

Is it information that I could have procured from the author/speaker’s book, or was it interactive and off the cuff?

In order to get me to purchase a $700-1,300 conference ticket, I need to be provided some sort of guarantee that my attendance is going to be worthwhile.

Am I going to learn something of significant value?

Will I make a useful contact or sale?

Are the speakers/organizers going to answer questions that help me get to the next level?

For some, conferences are successful, useful and exciting. I’m not trying to denigrate the conference world—it surely has its place. What I am trying to say is, there are some among us who are interested in the content but not the excited about the limited delivery options. Because in the end it’s all just content, and information delivered and received (live) from the mouths of the informants is not necessarily different from a well-produced webcast of the same event. Or is it?

So how about you? Where do you stand when it comes to conferences?

I just stumbled on this video:

It really nails what the content marketing movement is all about. You can listen to the entire 43 minutes, but the good stuff is at the 5-min mark and again at the 16-minute mark. After that you become an unwilling participant in a wine-tasting/bluster-fest. This was probably great if you were at the dinner but leaves me a) jealous, because of the wine they are drinking and b) dizzy due to the erratic camera movements.

My favorite lines—

5:00 “Putting out great content is just the beginning. You’ve got to touch the community and become a part of the conversation.”

16:00 “This is thousands of dollars of advice for free.”

The experts/drinkers in the video are:

Gary Vaynerchuk—WineLibrary.com

Kevin Rose—Digg

Tim Ferriss—4Hourworkweek.com

Robert Scoble—Scobleizer.com

Even in the hands of a seasoned professional, every interview isn’t a homerun. An interviewer can poke, joke and prod—but not every interviewee is as quotable as Yogi Berra. Here are 8 tips on improving your interviews for better content.

Tips:
1. If, at all possible, call the interviewee and get a sense of their personality before the interview. Are people coming in and out of their office? Are they focused on the interview? Are the overly concerned with how they will be represented? Better to deal with these issues now than a few days before the deadline or the day of the interview. Some might say, “If you have them on the phone, why not do the interview then?” I say if it feels right and you are prepared, go for it. But more times than not, that three minute call is better used to lay out the scope of the interview, get the interviewee to understand the approval process and nail down a date and time—all of which is easier done on the phone than over email.

2. If you know the interviewee is on a PR push, do some research and find out something off the beaten path about them or their business. Most likely, they have a standard interview loop they unconsciously lock into—try and knock them off that loop and you’ll get better content. If they’ve had a book published, read it; if they have a website, research it; and be sure to drill down into Google beyond the first few pages. You never know what you’ll find. I, for instance, used to play in a loud math-rock band and my partner played violin in a dreamy post-rock orchestral band. Even if this isn’t relevant to the interview at hand, if an interviewer were to mention our past gigs at The Knitting Factory or Joe’s Pub, we might connect with them in a way we wouldn’t with someone who gets straight down to businesses.

3. Don’t pre-email questions if possible. You are setting yourself up for an answer too well thought out, or worse, a sales-pitch. The goal of the interview is to acquire the sexy, quotable stuff; not the canned answer as approved by every marketing, biz dev and product exec in the company stuff. If the email interview is the only way you can get access to your source, don’t waste time asking the questions you already know the answers to or can easily find through research. “When is your new book coming out?” is a waste of a question. Instead, get more specific, (and here’s where your homework comes in) like, “I noticed you’re with a new publisher. How does Random House’s approach to publicity differ from Simon and Schuster’s?” The more curveballs you throw an interviewee, the more apt you are to get a unique answer.

4. Drill down, and don’t be afraid to go off your script. Don’t accept answers from subjects that are vague, and don’t be dazzled by a bunch of mumbo jumbo that in the end really is nothing but fluff. Keep circling around your question until you get an authentic answer. If you sense your subject is getting frustrated or worn out, move on, but look for opportunities to circle back to the topic later. Watch how interviewers like Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Oprah handle this—sometimes you can learn a lot from watching talk shows. Not that we watch talk shows.

5. If you are recording the conversation using your own equipment (I recommend the Olympus WS-300M), make sure you have fresh batteries. All digital recorders are battery hogs. You don’t know the meaning of the word panic until you are 35 minutes into an interview with a bigwig and you look down to see your digital recorder window blank. It sounds basic but it has happened to the best of us/me.

6. When using VOIP recording services like AT&T or Freeconferencecall.com use your own recorder as a backup. (It sounds like overkill, but erasing a file on your digital recorder is a lot easier than rescheduling an interview.) Don’t forget to ask the interviewee for permission if you are recording the phone call.

7. If you are having the audio file transcribed, send it to your transcriber right after the interview ends. Name the file appropriately, upload it to your transcriber and save the upload confirmation. And always, always save your own copies of your audio files.

8. When you get the file back from the transcriber, do a search and replace for “interviewer:” and “interviewee:” and remove the formatting. Next, quickly gray out any extraneous text that isn’t relevant to the interview, and highlight any passages you know you’ll want to use. That way, by the time you sit down to write the article, all the “good stuff” is staring at you, ready to be turned into a compelling story.

Information without voice is like content without design. Unless someone is dying to read about what you are writing, you have to grab them with your voice/personality. And because many of the articles in the content marketing space are saying very similar things, making your voice (and the voice you give your clients) stand out is one of your biggest tools. Use it.

The way I see it, there are five flavors of writers in today’s content marketing world.

Dry Toast – All information, no voice
This corporate collateral is typically produced by smart people who know all the right marketing formulas and can juggle terms like the “integration of marketing channels” with “streamlining the optimization of sales collateral.” But when you’re done reading this company’s blog/newsletter or collateral, all that’s left is a vague memory of a PowerPoint slide gone boringly wrong.

Solution: Don’t be afraid to lightly ruffle some feathers with your voice. Your view/opinion is never going to appeal to everyone, but if you’re doing things right, you aren’t marketing yourself to everyone, anyway. Also, if you do an honest assessment of your collateral and realize you’re in the Dry Toast category, ask yourself if you’re still fishing for your core competency or audience.

Extra Sauce – All voice, no information
“Then, after I attended the Shiny Happy Convention hosted by Guy I Knowsowell, I parlayed over to the Social Media event of the year. If you weren’t there, you really missed out.” Really, I missed out. Because you reporting on your blog about the event you attended shouldn’t have been all about you. You know.

Solution: Talk to us, not at us. Keep your reader at the forefront of all your communications. If you’re going to write about every industry conference you attend, give us information we can use (not a blow by blow of your itinerary and all the cool people you saw).

French Cuisine #1 – Great design, little to no content
Flash is for advertising firms and art school. Everyone else put it away, now.

Solution: I realize it looks cool, but lets just face facts: Flash loads slow (always), the motion graphics detract from the content, it’s difficult to track (SEO), and sometimes customers and prospective customers already know what information they want and don’t have time for your two-minute splashy intro or your nav-bar to reload. Great design should breathe life into editorial content, not take away from it.

French Cuisine #2 – Great design, little to no content
Without great design, readers may come to your site, get what they want, and get out. Content needs great design or no one will ever notice it. Or if readers do notice it, they most likely won’t navigate beyond what they came to read. Case in point—I am a basketball nerd. Every morning I read Hoopshype.com and ESPN.com. Even though I have been reading Hoopshype for years, I couldn’t tell you who advertises on the site, the names of the regularly appearing columns, or anything about who runs the site—I’m in and I’m out. With ESPN, I read the NBA highlights, view an ad that catches my eye, and before I know it, I’m reading a feature about some champion ping-pong player from Guam. The content may have drawn me there, but it was great navigation and design that made it easy for me to stay.

Solution: Make sure your website looks as good as it reads. The truth is, Hoopshype has far better content than ESPN when it comes to basketball. But while the content delivers, the design doesn’t court me to stay.

Meat and Potatoes – No opinion information
Content that tells people what they already know gives readers the impression that the product is available elsewhere—and it doesn’t matter if they use company A or B. Telling me what you sell, what you charge and that you are the best is the same thing everyone else is doing. And in a contest of best vs. best I’m heading for the hills and looking for offbeat and good (at least they are saying something different and I will stand out amongst the crowd of same-osity). Remember, your clients can blend in safely amongst their peers all by themselves (sans your retainer fee).

Solution: Every brand doesn’t need to be as “voicey” as Jet Blue. But every brand does need a personality. Customers should be able to view an ad or read a piece of collateral and know who it’s from without even having to look at your logo.

Smorgasbord – A little of everything
Ever land on a website and wish you had a digital weed-whacker to knock back all the Social Media/Web 2.0 widgets that clutter the site? Welcome to the work of the “smorgasbord content marketer.” That old “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” mentality unbelievably employs people for years, but flies in the face of logic when you are in the business of measuring who read what, when, why and how it may lead to a sale.

Solution: Take a look at your site and then your competitors’ sites. Do those
widgets add value? Do they differentiate you from the pack? Or does your site look like a 2008 Jaguar littered with bumper stickers?

When content is your business, story angles are your end caps, voice becomes your packaging and the hunt is always on for more product. Today my inbox got a pleasant surprise with the beta launch of First30days.com. First30Days Founder, Ariane De Bonvoisin, sets out to prove that targeted, free and quality content (sans a sales pitch) does have a place in the market.

The concept of First30days is simple.

“Whether you’re starting a new job, getting married, switching to the Mac or have decided to live a green lifestyle, you’ll find the help you need at First30Days. Expert Advice. Helpful Tips. Q&A. Inspirational Stories. Community. And a whole lot more!”

Despite the fact that Ariane just used up 50% of her annual exclamation point allotment, my recent switch to Mac had me immediately hooked—moving emails from PC to Mac has proven to be on par with a string and doorknob tooth-yanking, and I have yet to figure out how to save a file directly to anywhere but the desktop. I’m a prime target for this service.

Some may argue that First30days.com is a rehash of About.com, but by narrowing the subject focus and having the content delivered passively versus actively, the perception is very “Mr. Miyagi” (master this lesson and I will deliver you another). I feel like First30days.com is a “they” and not an “it” and I perceive them to be experts. About.com has historically told me what I already knew or told me in a way that felt like they were talking to a watered-down me.

Do I have concerns that my next 29 days of emails will be full of trite advice that I could have figured out on my own? Sure do. But something tells me First30days.com is onto something. Content doesn’t have to be corporate, overly intellectual or entirely state of the art, but it does have to make the reader feel like they are in a special club and that the information is just for them.