5 ways to spot a crap Content Marketing agency

Content Marketing is this season’s buzz word. Like ‘Social Media’ was a few years back and ‘Web 2.0’ a few years before that… Content Marketing is apparently all the rage now.
Only there’s a big problem with that.

To try and fill the gap between client expectations and delivery of these, a bunch of agencies have recently cropped up offering: Content strategy, Content Marketing, In-bound marketing and the rest. You know the ones… they email you all the time (well, they fill up my ‘Promotions’ tab in Google Mail – which I now treat like a second inbox for spam) and make it seem like they are a reputable company and not just a bunch of people jumping on the latest digital bandwagon.

Yes, there will be the odd one out there who has actually done what they say and possibly for some brands you may have actually heard of. But a lot of them have either just re-purposed their existing Search Engine Optimisation efforts or may have worked out how to do the basics in Google Analytics (e.g. look at in-bound source URLs, print out a PDF of landing page bounce rates, etc.).
So here’s my tips on the ways you can spot a crap content marketing agency:

1. They send you an email such as “understand blogging basics” or “free website content review” when they've not even looked at your site
2. They don’t actually have any content creation and copy writing skills (they typically only offer to suggest blog posts or to analyse what you've already written)
3. They have spelling or consistency mistakes across their website (an obvious sign of poor content quality) 
4. Despite claiming to have been doing “Content Marketing for years” their own twitter feed and blog posts go back less than 12 months.
   (And watch out for the tell-tale sign of sudden flurries of blog posts all written around the same time, and then large gaps where they haven't been bothered)
5. They make wonderful sweeping statements like “you need to increase brand engagement” with no indication of how you actually do this, let alone measure it.

So. Did I miss any points? Let me know. 

So Is Google +1 going to work? History tells us it might not

Now, I’m a fairly obvious ‘power user’ of Google (as I run a digital consultancy that has an online marketing & SEO division) and have my Google Profile all set up and current… in fact I think I have a couple…. a personal Google account and an Ideal Interface one. So I’m not really your typical user out here, e.g. the person who may not have done this and may even know what a Google Profile is. So I therefore question the usefulness of this function and actually wonder how popular the +1 feature will be.

Hopefully this foray into Social Media for Google isn't as half-hearted as their earlier attempts.

1. Google Buzz hasn't really gained traction in a market already use to Twitter (perhaps because people were upset by its stealth launch into their Google Mail account rather than being something they requested)

2. Google Wave was touted as the successor to email, but turned out to unusable by many as a collaborative place to work and produce rich documents (however, that's not to say that it will have its day eventually, perhaps when people are more used to working in that way).

Only last week the ex-CEO Eric Schmidt accepted that he’d missed out on "the friend thing"…. which is not only a complete simplification of how social networks, it also gives us some idea of just how the search great generally views social media – e.g. it’s a thing to do, rather than a way to connect and even add value to search results.

Put simply, I’m not convinced that Google still gets Social Media and sharing completely. If you want an example of just how little the Google +1 feature is integrated into the rest of the Google product set, consider how useful it would have been to have added a “+1” button into Google’s blogging platform (Blogspot) and how beneficial this would have been to the legions of bloggers who are so dependent on referrals from any source….. That’s really not something Facebook would have missed and perhaps why they lead the social media league table.

Has Brand Measurement got any better?

A year or so ago i blogged about brand and sentiment monitoring tools I had experience of. The market back then was just starting really, but you would have hoped that things would have moved on somewhat and products would have matured (atleast a bit)

A recent piece of research (from Insight Express) has found that:

“Other than the economy, brand measurement is the single biggest obstacle
holding back the growth of online advertising.”

So I asked a few large company contacts recently what they were doing about brand measurement and most said "err... nothing really" or words to that effect. Now, I undertsand that this wasn't a representative sample of the entire UK business world, but given that some of these people were at least considering brand buzz monitoring tools or services last year., I do have to ask...

Has Brand measurement got any better?

Further buzz monitoring justification

Having already covered some of the likely client answers / justifictions for social media monitoring back in January, I thought I'd follow this up with a subsequent posting on the what the your next set of replies could be :


1. We want to quantify the amount of comments or mentions about us over time
Answer:
Shouldn't it be about quality of interaction and not the amount? What does a lot of comments about a particular staff member or product actually tell you?

2. We want to identify our prominent bloggers / influencers out there, with the aim of engaging with them
Answer:
How? Is this a longer-term engagement or are you only after immediate results? (If so, prepare for the second wave of blogger backlash when you stop engaging)

3. We want to quickly spot trends or identify issues and respond accordingly
Answer:
This is a great step forward, what mechanisms do you have in-place through the business to ensure the correct issues are identified and dealt with in the appropriate way? (E.g. how do you filter signal to noise and how do you avoid constant knee-jerking as a response?)

4. We want to understand the general sentiment or tone of the buzz
Answer:
Fine, but are you planning on segmenting this according to different people and their tone? How are you monitoring this over time?

Caveat:
You may want to temper these replies, depending upon your longer-term expectations of the relationship!

Buzz monitoring: why are you doing this?

We at Ideal Interface have recently started some new work for a particular company to understand the blogosphere buzz about them. Whilst this may seem like a simple-enough request, what became clear was that unless clients understand and answer the initial question"why are you doing this?", they won't get the most from this work.

So... if you are a client, before your digital consultant asks, why not ask yourslef "why are you doing this?".

Note:
Just saying the generic response "We want to see what our customers are saying and writing about us online", is really repeating the brief. To get a fully answer, its best to understand what you will do with the information once you have it.

Here are some of the most likely/possible answers:

1. We want to quantify the amount of comments or mentions about us over time
2. We want to identify our prominent bloggers / influencers out there, with the aim of engaging with them
3. We want to quickly spot trends or identify issues and respond accordingly
4. We want to understand the general sentiment or tone of the buzz

Replies and further questions in response to these likely/possible answers to follow in subsequent postings.

Just how good are social media monitoring tools?

Following some recent investigation into Social Media monitoring tools, I found this interesting article from Daniel Riveong at e-Storm:
http://www.emergence-media.com/2008/04/social-media-monitoring-broken-conversations-broken-tools/

I think he actually has a well made point. Tracking the buzz within the blogosphere and other social media is one thing, but these tools are still growing in their capabilities.

What they current have a particularly difficult with is following the dialogue that takes place over several sites or sevices. These conversations are similar to family members that change and take on new personalities depending upon their environements and influences. All comments and discussions may well be relevant, but they are also getting increasingly complex to follow, especially as new methods appear (e.g. who used http://www.twitter.com, http://www.friendfeed.com or http://www.plurk.com a year ago?)

However, don't over-do the measurement though, as this article from Commetrics highlights.

Online reputation management

A quick 'Hat Tip' to Andy Beal for his 'reputation management for dummies' column
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/03/online-reputation-monitoring-beginners.html

Do Reputation Management Services Work?
Well, BusinessWeek mentions that this new industry promises to help counter negative search results on the Web. Hiring one of these fixers may make nasty comments go away:
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2008/sb20080430_356835.htm

I've already seen TNS's Cymphony product (previously mentioned here) and am due to see Magpie's Brandwatch tool (previously mentioned here), both of which are useful for monitoring the buzz about product and brand, which obviously feeds a company's reputation.

So... is there a way of integrating these online reputation tools into other graphing services to come up with a way of understanding and visualising the Corporate Social Graph?

The New Influencers - Part 3

Paul Gillin's book, that I've also covered in previous posts, is proving to be a far more insightful read than I anticipated.

The 3rd Chapter 'The Enthusiasts' covers the friend/enemy creation dilema that every company worries about when they start to deal with the Influencers. One of the biggest concerns at this point is how to identify and solicit their opinions.

In one case study he cites about the Nokia N90 phone, he covers the way that the Enthusiasts were identified and dealt with.

This is a filtering process of:

a. Identify a seasoned professional who can help
In this case, they got Andy Abramson on-board

b. Scour the Internet (blogsphere, Google, Technorati, etc.) for the respected voices
Note: It doesn't say what criteria and weighting he used

c. Whittle your list down to a select a small group of individuals.
Again, it doesn't say how this was exactly done. But 50 people were sent actual product to in advance of the official launch date. I guess 50 may have been a number set by Nokia, but even this is a szeable investment for something they hadn't done before ($600 X 50 = $30,000 retail value).

d. Monitor the response you get fromthese selected individuals.
According to Paul (and Andy I assume), over 40 bloggers responded by writing about the phone.

I do however have a couple of further questions:
1. How did he measure the 'Buzz' created by these 40 bloggers?
2. What would happen if this was a service or a non-tanglible product?

Using the Collective Sentiment

Collective Intelligence taps the expertise of a group rather than the individual, usually to make decisions (not 'design by committe'; but more usually 'if 2 brains are better than 1, then many are better than a few') . However, tapping into the collective sentiment could be aterrible way to gain insight. But doing it timely and in the right way could identify feelings or other tendancies towards companies and their products.


Think of it like a focus group for the 21st Century... your users/consumer/customers all commenting in their own ways about what presses their particular mephoric buttons. Normal people generating pockets of 'buzz' across the digital landscape or alternatively generating misinformation about your products (or you). They blog about their face cream, they twitter about the latest flavour of chicken sauce or they load your company logo to their MySpace area.

Just as some companies use distributed co-creation (user-centred innovation) to solve problems by encouraging feedback and even facilitating changes to products by their users*, we can utilise the people and structures beyond the 'walled garden' of complete influence for PR purposes. Although this is already happening (don't all company PR execs secretly 'lurk' in product discussion areas?), how many companies actually understand and measure the collective comments and sentiment?

*(If you don't believe me, just ask why so many Web2.0 products are in permanent 'beta' .Then look at the requested features list from its top users)

Dear Santa, can you please send me:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wikinomics-Mass-Collaboration-Changes-Everything/dp/1843546361/

One word of warning though:
"Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups" - W. F. Nietzsche