Content Is a Business Asset: ConFab 2011

Content Is a Business Asset

Session description: How can your content help meet your business objectives? How can your content initiatives truly focus on returns? Who’s executing content strategies that work?

Speaker: Valeria Maltoni, principal, Conversation Agent

Quote marks indicate direct quotes. If there aren’t quote marks, it’s paraphrased.

The skinny

Everyone just finished the “Taste of Minnesota” lunch featuring wild rice, walleye, cheesecake… and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. There will be no falling asleep at these sessions. In case you liked my fashion commentary from the Data-Driven Content Strategy session, I’ll tell you now: Valerie is an Italian hawttie. Sheer white silk blouse, black leather vest, skinny gray jeans and patent nude peeptoe stilettos. And the accent. Oh, the accent.

What she said

What can content do for your business?

• Content can attract people. Content helps lower the cost of leads. The cost efficiency of using content to attract business is huge.
• Content can interact with and influence people. Social media is very large here, but overall we spend nine hours per day on a media diet.
• Content helps you provide the right information at the right time.

How has content evolved?

• Portals: All in one place. (Prodigy, AOL, Yahoo, MSN)
• Blogs and RSS: Search and pull. (Blogger, Bloglines, Google Reader)
• Social Voting: It will find me. (StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit)
• Social Stream: Via friends, personalization (Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed)
• Apps: Pull and push (Mac app store)

So what do we do in the most recent environments? We can “pull” interested new “hand raisers” into your “Hub.” Also, you can “push” relevant assets (content, existing assets) into social networks: you can stay connected to your Hub even when you’re not logged into the Hub. This takes experimentation. You have to figure out what people like.

It helps to think of content as a product. When we think of content as product, we shift our thinking from marketing to how we construct and produce this project. “In a way, your website is your direct consumer warehouse, where you serve up content.”

What are content business models?

Meeting business objectives with content is key. There are three main models that have emerged that are worth pursuing:

1. Relationships. Talk to those people who are already using your product. They’re more valuable to you. Traditionally, marketing has been focused on acquiring new leads and not really focusing on your base. Knowing what you base is and what your base wants is very important. For example, 37 Signals tracks visibly how satisfied their customers are with the product.
2. Innovation. There is a movement around crowd sourcing. “I like to talk about co-creation.” Inviting people to create with you… this allows people to get passionate about your product and help them have a stake in what you did. Eloqua did this.
3. Infrastructure. This is traffic-ing messages to consumers. Traditionally, this is the media business; you provide opportunities for brands to get to their target audience.

You must make a decision. Are you in the customer relationship business, are you in the product innovation business or are you in infrastructure business? You can be in two, but trying to do all three is like trying to be fast, cheap and good.

Regardless of which business you’re in, you must:

• Focus on the returns in the beginning. For example, calculate your Internal Rate of Return (IRR) for each customer.
• Create constancy of purpose and commitment toward product improvement. Consider the 37 Signals Manifesto. How do they translate that? With a company blog and a product blog, with clear editorial strategy and simple execution.
• Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement. Report on missed opportunities, as well as successes.
• Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. You might have people you would never suspect who are amazing. When Eloqua started their training, 20 new staffers became active on twitter, and three staffers closed their personal blog and began blogging for Eloqua. At 37 Signals, the way they do business is baked right into their content.

Audience participation

This is more of a statement. 37 Signals has more than a million customers, but they only have 19 employees. Right, they stay simple.

Of all the things you discussed, what is the biggest stumbling blocks for companies? Egos. Organizations have a hard time seeing themselves with outside eyes. Bringing the facts to the table is very, very important. That’s why I’m a very big fan of A/B testing. Go test it.

How would you translate this to a nonprofit where you don’t have dollars to benchmark? It’s a mistake to think of content just as cost—shift your thinking from cost and money invested to return. If your objective is to gain more subscribers, you need to be able to measure that. If you’re organizing content to do that or to get people informed, test ways to let the community know that they heard you and have seen you. How do your organize your assets to track actions? That’s a return, already.

What do you think clients need to understand most? Your clients should be concerned about their goals. Often there is a disconnect between what people think their goals are and what they should be. Why do you want more Twitter followers? What are your followers supposed to do? “The goals should be making a profit.” Consider in what space you could get those returns. You might be surprised at the gold mines that you didn’t know about. Forums are making a huge comeback. A ton of great information is changing hands. Nobody is looking at that.

“In my mind, being everywhere is the key to being nothing to nobody.”