Roger Warner, friend of Velocity and all-round PR guru, has flung open the doors to the Museum of Social Media. Before you all start planning an office field trip to see it, it’s actually online – you can visit it here (and no, it doesn’t have a gift shop).

Conceived as a repository for the good, the bad, and the just plain baffling, it charts the meandering and sometimes hiccupping progress of social media marketing.

Take, for example, the bizarre decision to promote Skittles by posting a load of ker-razy videos and ask people to share them. Unlike their previous Twitter-based campaign, this was a campaign that deserved to have a loud raspberry blown at it. So, there it is in a virtual glass case, preserved for posterity.

We decided to interview the esteemed Professor Warner, to see if he had any pearls of wisdom to impart about the development of social media marketing.

Where did you get the idea for the museum? Why did you start gathering the stories together?

It’s a ‘keeping perspective’ thing. What’s going on today is very similar to what happened 10 years ago… Social Media, like the first promise of the Interweb, has become near-mythical. Having lived through round one, I’m keen to keep a scrapbook this time. When I look back, discussions about bricks vs clicks were almost irrelevant. The real winners were the ones who rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in – and we need to remember this right now.

Grand concepts and frameworks didn’t work well (e.g. Boo.com); whilst more randomly organised, iterative services did (eBay, Flickr, etc…). This is very close to my heart. I run a new(ish) Social/Online agency and I’m building a services business around doing pragmatic stuff now. So having a museum means I can put the futurology that bugs me (and also all the great stuff) into a box and keep it close by for future reference. As such, it’s a pet project.

Why do you think even big brands with such a lot of marketing clout get it wrong?

Often they’re taken in by the glamour of it all and get blinded. A common request is ‘I’d like to do a Twitter campaign.’ This is bit mad. Brands have to ask themselves ‘why?’. If they don’t have a very concrete answer then they should have a lie down and/or read up a bit on some history.

In other words, it should never be about the Social Media-ness of it all. My feeling is some brands get so lathered up that they lose context. They just get strung out on the *possibilities* and the *concepts*.

Today, the world needs to understand that just because YouTube lets us upload video, this doesn’t mean a million people want to create mini feature films for brands in exchange for a gong.

Social-for-Social’s-sake campaigns fail because they ignore the basics. And it’s not Social’s fault… it’s more to do with human nature and the way we use things. We *really* need to remember the lessons of the past and to keep reading our little blue book of effective marketing. The psychology of DM still applies. Good old content is even more critical. And Google is still huge, huge, huge.

Social Media changes *how* these things are important… but they certainly don’t go away. Also, a little research never hurt anyone. We should all do more of it before we get excited.

Do you think we’re now entering a more egalitarian age of marketing, where the consumers can get involved?

We ought to be asking: can Social fulfill the promise of a mega conversation with all of the marketplace? Probably not, unless more Twitter-friendly sales people are employed. There’s a fundamental tension that we need to figure out. Generally, marketing is about NOT TALKING TO PEOPLE in the physical sense. Talking is the job of sales. Good marketing reduces the amount spent on sales people and processes. In this context, the promise of Social gets a little messy…

We need to de-focus on the promises, concepts and the channels and start thinking about the core value of it all. Right now, lots of marketing departments see Social as a must-have. Near term this may not be the case – unless they can prove that it helps marketing to do better marketing.

Marketing has changed for good I think. Today, the campaigns and content that work best aren’t Marketing with a capital ‘M.’ They’re conversational pieces, support things, widgets and whatnot. Gone are the days of Ridley Scott TV spot blockbusters. Brands need to be helpful, memorable and available and figure out how their customers are using Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc in this context.

Any particular favourites?

I love Converse’s domination campaign. It’s not particularly Social, but it’s so pragmatic and smart it hurts. I wish we’d done it.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, Branding, Corporate Message Development, Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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Fortunately, it’s very rare that we ever get a client who doesn’t understand that you can’t have all three at once. Yet it’s still something that a lot of agencies come up against. But perhaps these problems wouldn’t arise if we marketers explained ourselves properly.

All our clients are lovely, but Doug and Stan could tell you some stories from the days before Velocity that would make you sleep with the light on for a month. There are plenty of reasons for this. Your contact at the client company has a boss that makes Pol Pot look like a fluffy bunny and is in constant fear of being fired. Or they’re a recent addition to the company and are out to prove their worth. Or they really are being squeezed on all sides. Or they’re just an arse.

Or, more likely, it’s a mismatch between expectations and delivery. There are reasons why we can’t do right, cheap, and quick all at the same time, and it’s not because we’re sitting around drinking soya lattes and doing tantric navel-gazing.

So what do you actually do all day?

We spend a long time researching and getting to know our clients. We talk to their friends, their partners, the lady who makes the tea… And we listen. We even take notes. Then we go away and produce websites, e-books, identities, white papers, videos, interviews, site tours, and all kinds of other content marketing goodies.

We’re also perfectionists. ‘Good enough’ just isn’t good enough. We want to do the best job we can: because it’s a matter of pride, and because we like our clients and want them to succeed. So doing a thorough job and keeping our clients happy takes time. Perhaps we ought to get over ourselves a bit, but we take pride in doing a good job and (out of selfishness, arguably) we don’t want to have our name on some poor work.

And because all this takes time and we work hard, it tends not to be cheap. We do aim to be value for money though, and generally subscribe to the ‘under-promise and over-deliver’ model of project management. That way people usually have a bit more than they thought they were getting, which makes everyone feel good.

Occasionally of course, you do get that magic combination of good, quick, and, if not cheap, excellent value for money. Without wanting to brag too much, it’s something we’ve managed every now and again at Velocity.

We don't often riot

Original photo from Frihedsmuseets fotoarkiv; Frihedsmuseet, Copenhagen, Denmark. Image is in the public domain under the Danish Consolidated Act on Copyright 2003.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B marketing, Client relations, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Online PR, Web Relations

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It’s a presentation by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, the US online retailer famous for shoes. He talks about his goal to make Zappos stand for the very best customer service and customer experience on the planet. So far, so blah. It’s a hoary old claim many cynical CEOs make.

But Hsieh’s company sees this goal as a real crusade. And it’s based on belief in some traditional marketing values: do what you say you’re going to do; always strive to exceed the customer’s expectation; and, critically, only hire people who are passionate about these things, because if you don’t, convincing people will be like urinating into a particularly gusty Force 7 gale. His passion for customer service has seen Zappos grow way beyond shoes, achieve revenues of over $1 billion this year (from a standing start eight years ago) and attract more than three per cent of the US population as customers.

In this age of social networking, keywords and SEO, what’s really interesting is what Hsieh thinks about more traditional interactions, the ones using a device invented in the 19th Century: the telephone. Zappos believes that having a customer’s undivided attention on the phone for several minutes  is golden, the best branding opportunity a company can have. As a result, Hsieh aims to make that time as memorable as possible, a time, as he puts it, ‘to really wow customers’.

To achieve the wow factor,  Zappos is obsessive about the company culture and who it hires. Everybody who applies to join faces two stringent interviews, one to establish whether they can do the job and one for culture fit.

Once a decision to hire has been made, every employee faces four weeks induction training, during which time they can choose to leave in return for a $2000 one-off payment. Amazingly, only two or three percent of people take up that offer. Meaning the remainder are people who really, really want to work for the company and buy into the culture. And it cuts out the less committed ones before they have time to do damage. Getting a reputation for customer service is hard. Losing it is easy.

Once the call centre reps (called customer loyalty managers) get to work, Zappos wants customers to remember their interactions and tell all their friends. So there are no scripts, no measurement of average call times, no procedures to cut the cost of telephone calls, no recorded messages. Just  encouragement  – from the very top down – of highly motivated humans to talk to other humans and solve their problems. In the video, as a demonstration of how far Zappos’ people go, Hsieh tells a funny story about someone calling a rep and asking for help in finding a pizza at two in the morning and getting numbers for some local outlets.

Hsieh says that because the web makes every company and its actions totally transparent, a company’s culture and a company’s brand are now two sides of the same coin. Unlike in the TV advertising age, consumers today can quickly and easily see through companies that try to project an image that’s not really true to life.

We think that’s true in B2B too: it’s no good claiming to be the innovation leader  in a particular technology area when you’re not – just look at tech companies’ press releases to see how often they do this. Nor does it make sense to bang on about your commitment to the customer when there are countless examples out there proving the opposite. What Zappos shows is that there’s a huge gap between claim and reality. And that achieving the latter demands obsessive commitment 24/7.

It’s worth 15 minutes of your time to see what he says.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, Lead Generation, Marketing, SEO, Technology Marketing, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing, Web Relations, writing

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Its called Customer Value Propositions in Business Markets and it makes a compelling case for what the authors (James C. Anderson, James A. Narus and Wouter van Rossum) call “Resonating Focus”.

The paper identifies three kinds of value proposition: the “All Benefits” approach (list everything good about your product); the “Favorable Points of Difference” approach (list everything that’s better than the next best alternative); and the “Resonating Focus” approach (focus on one or two points of difference whose improvement will deliver the greatest value to the customer).

Like a lot of good business writing, this article brings together common sense ideas that are really rather uncommonly practiced by B2B marketers.  It’s about the hard work of building credibility and about making sure you’re building it where it will make a real difference.  Our recent paper on the Hierarchy of Benefits touched on this (one of the reasons Andrew pointed us at the HBR article).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BB2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, Lead Generation, Marketing, SEO, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing, Web Relations, writing

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Corporate Positioning and Corporate Message Development Paper in pdf Format

When companies bring Velocity in to ‘sort out their messages’, we always ask what’s wrong with the way they’re currently telling their story.

A surprising number say something like, “We’re okay talking about our technology and not so bad talking about the topline benefits, but there seems to be a gap somewhere in between.”

Even if they don’t say that, they ought to – because almost every technology company seems to get stuck trying to find the right balance between tech-talk, feature-speak and business benefits.

If all you do is talk big benefits, there’s no credibility. If you spend all your time on features, it’s a big, “So what?’.

To explore the issue, we like to present the Velocity Hierarchy of Benefits, which starts out looking something like this (with the client’s real features and benefits inserted)…

The Velocity Hierarchy of Benefits (How to Scope Your Corporate Positioning & Corporate Message Development Work in One Big, Easy Triangle)

As you can see, the technical features are at the bottom — they may be important but they’re not benefits in themselves.

The next layer up holds what a lot of techies might think of as benefits. Things like ‘process efficiencies’ or ‘best detection rates in the industry’. To people steeped in the market, just saying these things feels like benefit talk – but to others, they’re means rather than ends.

Next step up the pyramid are three Big Benefits – the core of the company’s positioning and the heart of its messages. ‘Drives down the cost of bunion removal’; ‘Eliminates the need for expensive audits’; ‘Lets you do three times more with the same people’.

These Big Benefits should be aired a lot. And sometimes, they’re as high as the company should ever go. Because the very highest level is either beyond the target audience’s domain or because it’s heavily suggested by the layer below.

At the very top of the Hierarchy are the real reasons companies do things: to increase profit, drive up the share price or both. Again, this level may be too high to use overtly in marketing, but it’s good to remember what the end-end benefit is, to keep everything else in perspective.

Now comes the interesting part.

We like to add two scales down the right and left sides of the Hierarchy, so it looks like this…

Value vs Credibility (Why Corporate Positioning & Corporate Message Development Work Ain’t So Easy!)

On the left hand side, we have “Value”, showing that the highest value things appear higher on the pyramid and the lowest value at the bottom.

On the right hand side, we have “Credibility” – but this time the arrow is reversed. The highest-value benefits are also the least credible and the most credible things are, unfortunately, the ones your prospects care least about.

The inversion of these two scales and their attributes – Value vs Credibility – strikes at the heart of the communications problem that the hierarchy represents.

The things people care about, they don’t believe. The things they’re happy to take on trust… don’t matter anyway.

Making Vines (How to Make Your Corporate Positioning & Corporate Message Development Work Stick!)

When people first see their Hierarchy of Benefits, there’s a lot of talk about ‘where we should be aiming’. It’s as if the challenge were to find the right level and put all marketing efforts there.

But that’s not the point. The point is to connect the lowest and highest levels in meaningful ways.

To create vertical chains, ‘Vines’ if you like, that link each feature to the benefit levels above; and each benefit to the lower-order benefits and features below. Kind of like this…

These Vines do two very important things:

They bring value to your features.
They give credibility to your benefit claims.

So instead of saying ‘We’re the only widget with Auto-exfoliation™” (who cares?), you find yourself saying, “Our Auto-Exfoliation™ technology means excess bytes are removed on-the-fly – saving administrators time and dramatically reducing the cost of sale.”

And instead of saying, “Our Widget makes you more profitable!” (says who?), you add credibility with something like, “Our Widget uses patented auto-exfoliation to remove the tasks that take 60% of every administrator’s day – and slow time-to-market by weeks. The result is more productive IT people and products that generate revenue instead of costs.”

Where you need Vines

You need Vines wherever you communicate sales messages to the market. On every web page, in every blog post, white paper, product demo, sales deck, webinar and video.

If you spot a tiny tech feature floating out on its own – link it up to a benefit. And if you find yourself making big bold benefit claims without support, link them up to credibility-builders from lower down the hierarchy.

Over-simplifying? No doubt. But keeping yourself aware of the inverse relationship between value and credibility is a powerful guide for finding the right balance in your own messaging and positioning work.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, Lead Generation, Marketing, SEO, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing, Web Relations, writing

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Keyword Research Tools

Tools to help you understand which SEO/keyword markets to attack…

KGen
A sidebar that scans a web page and gives you a read on its keyword volumes and keyword density. Use it for snooping on competitors. If they’re good at their game, you’ll soon learn why.

Google Adwords Suggest
Type in whatever keywords and/or phrases you’re investigating, hit a button and this tool will tell you how many people have used the same verbage to search Google in an average month, and also how many competitors are out there bidding on the same terms as part of their PPC ad campaigns.

Wordtracker
Like Google Suggest, but provides (independent) data on keywords from a wider variety of search engines. In addition, it gives you a superb competitive index that tells you how many other web pages are optimised for your terms.

Competitive Keyword Tools

Tools to help you understand what your competitors are up to…

Keyword Spy
A very smart widget that shows you which other companies and/or sites are using your keywords for their PPC campaigns.

Keyword Page Comparison Tool
This tool enables you to grab a quick read on the technical composition of a web page by scraping its title, meta description, meta keywords, page copy, and top keyword phrases and presenting it all back to you in one place.

Keyword Density Tool
This is a variant on the Keyword Page comparison tool, but gives you a bit more flexibility to include and exclude certain paratmeters. Great to use to get a rapid view on how well your competitors are thinking about keywords and SEO.

SEO Analysis Tools

Things to help you understand SEO performance…

SEO Quake
A plugin for Firefox that sits as an additional toolbar at the top of your browser window. When you’re on a page, it’ll tell you (immediately) key things like Google PageRank, page index volume, volume of inbound links, volume of external links, and other essential data.

Xinu
A great little service that gives you an instant read on a site’s SEO performance across a wide range of metrics. At the press of a button you’ll see key indicators like social media footprint (how often a site’s been bookmarked), volume of backlinks (and their source), and number of pages indexed in key search engines.

Google Analytics
The daddy of analytics tools. It’s free. So use it!

Opentracker
Much like Google Analytics, but has a cool feature that shows you which companies are browsing your site in real time!

Google Webmaster
Provides lots of great tools to help webmasters understand how often their sites are being indexed by Google and which pages are being accessed.

Blog Research Tools

Things to keep you in the know and amongst the buzz and gossip…

Blogpulse
Kind of like a Google for blogs. Also free. Just type in a search term and it’ll give you back a ream of related (recent) blog posts. You can also do some neat ‘trending’ vs other keywords.

Twitter Search
A Google for Twitter. See who’s talking about you and your keywords.

Online PR Tools

Things to help you spread the word at very little cost…

I’ll make it a list. They basically do the same thing: distribute your press releases around the web at next to no cost.

PitchEngine
FastPitch
ClickPress
Sane PR
PR Log

Got any others? We’d love to know. Just post us a comment….

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Content, SEO, Technology Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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As I do this stuff I’m usually working side by side with a marketing manager/director/etc in order to make decisions about SEO strategies, and how to best plan for the future. Content can be a messy business at times, particularly if there are more than a couple of people producing it for a site… anarchy often rules in the shape of strange formating and styling and irregular usage of language.

So I find it helps to give people some guidelines to keep them on the straight and narrow. And in doing so, it’s usually best to strip out the blather and get them focused on just the handful of things they *have* to remember when creating a new web page (so that they can continue to build on a good SEO foundation without our help!)

So, here goes…. notes from my content optimisation scrap book:

Technical Page Content Tips

Here at Velocity, we always use a CMS for our client sites. We choose these apps carefully, and always ensure that they let us do some essential SEO-related things from a technical and functional page perspective… Because, for good SEO, there are a bunch of things you really have to do at a technical page level:

* Edit each of your page titles independently. Your page title is the thing that will be printed at the top of a browser window (in the centre of the grey horizontal bar, next to your minimise/maximise buttons). You should try and make this title brief – around 70 characters or so, relevant to the page and peppered with a few important keywords or phrases. This is because, like us humans, crawlers tend to use ‘titles’ as a good indication of what the page is about. (NB: don’t go crazy on the keywords! The page title MUST be readable and easy on the eye to humankind as well!)

* Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. This is the stuff that Google uses to describe you when it displays its results (ie, it gets used as the blurb that sits underneath the page title link in Google’s listing for you). As such, this field should describe the page, include a few keywords, and also *a call to action* like ‘read more’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘get your free offer here…’ etc. (Think about it – this globbet of content is really, really important – this is your ‘sales pitch’ on a Google results page…. so a call to action is a good thing to draw people into the click.) This text should be around 160 characters or less. Anything more will get cut off at the knees.

* Edit each page’s metadata keywords/tags. Whilst this used to be important, it’s not any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice. Here you should list all your relevant key phrases, separated by a comma. This could be a big list, or it could be small…. whatever you think appropriate. You should note however, that this metadata field isn’t really used by search engines as a measure of importance or relevancy any more. It does, however, give them a clue about who you are and what you’re about.

* Use keywords in your navigation schemes wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

On-Page Content Tips

So much for the functional and technical stuff. What about the writing? Here’s my ultra-condensed guide to producing good, SEO-friendly page content….

* Make your content chunky – use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)

* Use keywords in them there headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.

* Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this). This anchor text is basically a descriptive label. It tells a crawler what your link is about. Hence, if you’re in the business of CRM systems, then your internal link from your home page to your products page ought to include an anchor text that goes something like this: ‘XYZ Corp’s CRM Software helps mere mortals sell ice to eskimos.’ In other words, use a bunch of sensible internal links to help a crawler find its way around your site and learn about what you do in the process.

* Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above. Whilst internal links are important to help a crawler scoot around your site, external links will help them understand what kind of other web sites you associate yourself with. So, if you’re in the business of selling small handheld computing devices, make sure you link out to popular media sites that cover this topic and also other vendor sites that compliment you (and even compete with you). The more popular these sites the better – your goal is the bask in their sunlight.

* If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and of your front end design houses them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can. As per the points above, these navigational elements help crawlers to understand how to navigate your site and understand who you are in equal measure…. just like they help us humans.

* Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like us, crawlers get bored easily.)

* Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words go at the top in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into this important stuff wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces the big keywords in its anchor text. In other words, keywords get kind of scored in order of descending importance, depending on where they feature in your content: from page titles down through primary navigation, headers, body text links, bold text and boring old plain text.

All you really need to remember….

In sum, all of the above illustrates that crawlers basically read the way that we humans do – they scan the page and pick out key elements to get a sense of meaning. As such, good SEO content is good to read…. and to write be able to write it is to have a good level of empathy with readers and crawlers alike.

If you’d like to know more about a bit of the science, check out our best practice SEO white paper ‘How to be a Google Guru in 30 Minutes’….

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Content, SEO, Technology Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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Other highlights include new papers on how to make your web site ultra-usable and how to make your PPC campaigns sing. Plus a roundup of our latest blogs and information on a hot new web marketing service we’re offering called ‘web motion.’

Go get it now!

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Content, Copywriting, Marketing, Newsletters, PPC, Sales, SEO, Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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Now I’ve blogged and blabbed about this before, so I won’t go into the thinking – but if you’d like to get a sense of why social media and web engagement is so important then check out some recent posts such as ‘Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing,’ ‘Pico Branding‘ and our ‘web marketing trends for 2008‘.

This post, however, is all about the mechanics and how to do it.

In truth, it’s not hard. All you need is the following:

1. A dedication to publishing a regular stream of gold top content to your site (note: it needs to be good and valuable to the folks you’ll reach out to in #2)
2. A variety of web outlets in which to cost-effectively publish this stuff (note: per above, the idea here is not to abuse these places but to selectively publish your best stuff on them ….think sensibly about this as many of them are happy to ban content ‘spammers’)

For help with #1, call us.

For #2, the mind map below gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and – once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site – follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations.

Let us know your thoughts (and results).

Note: your key to success here is to BE SOCIAL. Don’t just use these ‘outlets’ as a window for your own content. When you see other pages that you like, Stumbleupon/Digg/Reddit them – because this is their inherent value ….they exist to raise awareness of good, valuable web content. So, consider it your duty to promote everything that you really like, and not just the stuff you grow at home.

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Copywriting, Lead Generation, Marketing, SEO, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing, Web Relations, writing

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Open your web stats app and check out which pieces of content are your top performers over the past month. (By top performers, I mean on key ‘attention measurements’ such as time on page – these are the things that tell you if people are really interested and engaged.)

What comes out top?

If you have a blog, or if you’re in the habit of publishing white papers or opinion pieces then my money’s on them. Am I right?

Here’s my hypothesis: for B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages – your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages – the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits.

More to the point, having done detailed analyses of a mass of B2B technology web sites, I can tell you that this rule holds firm for our entire industry, without exception (and, I’d hazard a guess, it does so in any information-hungry B2B market).

To give you a feel for it, here’s our top content stats for the year to date… (Note: we measure our content performance by establishing an ‘Attention Index’ – average time on page x number of page views…. and we only include those pages that have held people’s attention for more than two minutes.)

(Click to open!)

You’ll see that the most engaging pages are a bunch of white papers and blog posts.

Putting the blog aside for a moment, this is interesting because unlike most of the B2B technology industry, we make a point of giving our most interesting content away for free. Most firms take a strategic decision to lock prime content such as white papers away below a subscription line, and often within secure ‘walled gardens’ that render it almost completely inaccessible to all but the most motivated of site visitors.

The consequences are obvious. If you lock your most valuable, compelling content away beneath a subscription line, then you’re missing a proven opportunity to help your prospects select you.

The rationale for ‘content locking’ is straight forward. You hold out the promise of access to an interesting piece of content in exchange for a visitor’s personal information – usually a name and an email address. This is the concept on which ‘web-to-lead’ forms are built to support the growth of CRM ‘lead’ databases.

I think this approach is fundamentally flawed, and also detrimental to driving quality sales leads.

Why? Because if you lock your content below a subscription line, it’s not just sales prospects that you’re hiding from: you’re also hiding from Google.

Put simply, if your content is sat behind a firewall, then Google’s spiders can’t reach it. This means a big loss of SEO traction, since your ‘thought leader’ content is likely to be your most valuable in SEO terms – it’s going to be stuffed with all the key phrases and concepts that you want search engines to associate your site with. Also, if it’s sat beneath the subscription line then you’re discouraging other sites from linking to it – which is illogical from an SEO point of view (good SEO practice means helping sites to link to you).

Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for. In this way (and this is the flip side of ‘web-to-lead’ thinking) you give yourself more opportunities to convince the skeptics – the people who until this point believe in your competitors not you, or those who have chanced upon your site during some desk research. Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?

Instead, we ought to be finding better, more intelligent and subtle ways of establishing leads. There are better deals to offer our prospects than ‘give me your names and I’ll give you some content’…. deals that don’t carry an SEO penalty. We can divide our content in different ways, and base a ‘lead generating’ offer on a really big ticket content item, after we’ve provided people with the opportunity to see all our other great stuff. For example, an offer for a piece of industry research can be embedded in a free white paper. Isn’t this a better place to pop the question? Wouldn’t the quality of resulting leads be better?

Whatever – my point is that a bog standard web-to-lead form slapped on as a firewall to the content that people (and Google) really care about is clumsy and negligent.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself:

• What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
• Do you make you accessible enough?
• What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
• What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
• How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)

I’d encourage you to play around with these thoughts and, if you’re not a fully paid up member of the free content brigade, to tweak the presentation of some of your content and see what it gives you…

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Copywriting, Lead Generation, Marketing, SEO, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing, Web Relations, writing

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