We’ve been working on a number of ‘web engagement’ programs lately, where we’ve been helping clients to increase their web ‘footprint’ in order to improve their general SEO and awareness levels.

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.

Here’s an experment for you to try.

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…

Our friend and client John Watton, Marketing Director of ShipServ, recently shared with us a Business Week article that dissects and analyses Steve Jobs’s latest keynote at Macworld (the one where he launched the MacBook Air).

The author, Carmine Gallo, refers to the Jobs approach as a ‘ten point framework’. Really it’s just a list of ten tips, but they’re excellent tips. If you follow them, your presentations will be much better — and many of the tips apply to written communication, too.

Lately, we’ve been exploring ways to deliver really powerful web seminars and these tips will all come in handy. I won’t paraphrase them but I do recommend the article.

And since writing the draft of this post, John’s CEO, Paul Ostergaard, sent a link to this terrific presentation on Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt, founder of Sxip Identity. It’s an entertaining, funny introduction to a concept that Sxip is evangelising and an excellent example of how to sell a technical, abstract story without being technical or abstract.

I don’t know how else to put this: nobody gives a shit about you. Your software or service or widget may be the center of your world but the people you’re selling to have better things to think about. Once you accept this simple fact, your marketing will get a lot better – because you’ll realise that your first and toughest job is to stop people in their tracks and offer you a small flake of their most precious, scarcest resource: their attention.

This post is about the most important part of every marketing communication: the opening. The come-on. The headline, subhead and first paragraph. If you’re reading this sentence, it’s only because I’ve passed one of the trickiest obstacle courses in marketing. I’ve got you to stop, read one line, read the next and decide to continue.

I accomplished this through a bit of craft and trickery (including a naughty word) but mostly through an incredibly powerful thing called empathy.
Empathy is at the heart of every great communication, from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (among the most moving 700 words ever spoken) to classic ad lines that boil down entire marketing briefs into five words (like “Buy more beef, you bastards.” from the Australian Beef Commission).

Empathy demands that you stop being you and start being your target audience. If you can do that, you’re more than halfway to an effective piece of communication. If you can’t do it, you need to do more homework or find someone who can.

Starting from empathy does all sorts of good things for your marketing. For one, it forces you to create punchy, relevant, intriguing openings. Short, sharp headlines; subheads with a bit of context; introductions that speak plain English and tell the reader this is about them not just about you.

Remember, you’re not you. You’re a very busy person who knows nothing about your product, who has a toothache and whose boss is being a total jerk. Even putting your lousy ad, website, brochure or video in front of him is an affront akin to Oliver Twist asking his captors for ‘more’. How very dare you.

Since you’ve already interrupted your audience, the least you can do is to reward their attention by being clear, open, relevant and, if possible, just a wee bit entertaining. Let’s take these one at a time:

Be clear – For God’s sake spit it out. Save the business-speak for… on second thought, bin the business-speak altogether. The voice you’re looking for is the one that comes out of your mouth, not your pen or keyboard.

Be open – Most marketing acts as if it’s got a dirty little secret; a hidden sales agenda. Well guess what, it’s not a secret, it’s not especially dirty and your agenda is actually standing naked on the desk with a bird of paradise in its mouth. Just do your job and sell me stuff.

Be relevant – This is about me isn’t it? Well prove it. Start being about me right from the beginning. Start with an interesting way of looking at my world and my problems. Then maybe I’ll hang around.

Be entertaining – Like it or not, marketing is show-biz. There needs to be a spring in your step. You need to be enjoying yourself not getting a tooth extracted. If you think what you do is boring, I guarantee you that I will too. This doesn’t mean you have to be funny. Trying to be funny and falling even a tiny bit short is a very sad and embarrassing thing. Just be comfortable on stage, in the spotlight.

I’ll write specifically about headlines in another post, but these four points should help guide your openings (and, frankly, the middles and endings as well).

For an example of what I’m talking about, scroll up. You’ve just read this entire post so one thing you know is that this opening worked.

Send me one of your headlines and opening paragraphs and I’ll see if I can do a make-over to show what I mean (look ma, no brief!).

Every marketing communication has two parts:

•    The Signal – your message; the thing you want people to take away
•    The Noise – everything else; the things that distract, delay and get in the way of the signal

Most B2B marketing – especially in technology businesses – is so full of noise, the static drowns out the music.

The idea, obviously, is to drive out the noise and deliver clear, crisp signals.

Here are a few ways to do that:

1) Give yourself less space
The less space you have to deliver your message, the more likely it is that you’ll make the best possible use of the space you have. (You can always spread it out later without adding content).

Bumper stickers have very little noise.  No room for it.

2) Give yourself less time
Don’t spend a few days on that web copy or brochure. Spend a few hours.
It will be better.

3) Boil down mercilessly, then subtract
Take a page or a paragraph that you’ve already reduced to its bare minimum and cut another 30%.  Be ruthless.

4) Kill everything that doesn’t sell
The decoration, the frippery, the content-free photos, needless or unreadable screenshots, bloated captions, rules, boxes, sidebars. Kill them.  The support points, credibility builders, facts, figures, quotes, legitimate exhibits… let them live.

5) Have only one bull’s-eye per target
Decide what you want the audience to do or to think, then focus all of your efforts on this.  Don’t give them three other options or try to do four other things at the same time.  Focus.

6) Clean up your act
Clear communications look simple and inviting.  Nice type, plenty of white space, lots of subheads to break things up.

7) Make like Hemingway
Short sentences, plain language.

I could probably come up with seven more tips but that would defeat the purpose.
More signal, less noise.

We B2B marketers are in the business of building cases. We’re advocates. So it pays to look at how other professional persuaders ply their trades. I started with a little research into how criminal lawyers do what they do, focusing in on the summation to the jury, where the whole case comes together into one clear argument…

Here are eight tips, harvested from Jury Arguments and Texan DUI specialists Trichter & Murphy (there’s a lot of DUI in Texas), plus my notes for applying them to B2B tech marketing:

• “Your credibility with the jury depends on how they perceive your competence, your likeability, and your character.”
  In B2B, this is about brand, attitude, style and credibility.

• “Your passionate belief and enthusiasm about your case shows that you care.”
  Enough of the bloodless, jargon-packed techno-speak.

• “Appeal to all the senses: use persuasive visual aids or exhibits in your argument and opening.”
  At Velocity, we’re big on guerrilla video and Pecha Kucha (20 slides, 20 seconds each = rock & roll).

• “Present your argument in a way that caters to the juror’s world view, not yours. To do this, you must consider the juror’s values, wants, and needs.”
  The most obvious thing in marketing is still the least practised.

• “Tell the jury not only what the evidence is but what the evidence means. Your job is not simply to bring the facts to life. You must also interpret the evidence for the jury.”
  A benefit for every feature…

• “Reduce your theory to a short, one-paragraph explanation, clear of obstacles, that can be understood by a group of bright twelve-year olds.”
  The art of the elevator pitch.

• “Admit at the outset the weak points in your argument . You can expose your weaknesses in a better light than your opponent, who will expose them in the darkest possible way. An honest admission, having come from you, not only endows you with credibility, it also leaves your opponent with nothing to say except what you have already admitted.”
  We’re big believers in sharing Pros and Cons — admitting real issues that can’t be ignored and showing how trivial they really are. Ask me for an example from a recent piece.

• “Don’t misquote evidence or try to twist or interpret it into a form that doesn’t have legs.”
  At Velocity, we’re a tough jury. If you can convince us, we can convince anyone.

Who needs copywriters? Get yourself a good lawyer.