Web Ink Now

Not Another Junky Blog

Tania Venn, director of PR at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, the largest full-service professional junk removal company in the world, oversees a team that creates content with a focus to reach customers who may not think that they need a junk removal service.

“Once they hear about what junk removal could do for them and how it could impact their lives, they become interested in our service,” Tania says.

Tania and her colleagues focus on what information would be valuable for buyers as they create content for the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Not Another Junky Blog and then use their Facebook page and Twitter feed @1800GOTJUNK to let their followers know of new posts.

Making junk interesting

I hear all the time from marketers who tell me something like "My business is boring. Nobody cares about what we do so how can I create content?"

Tania's example shows any market or company can be made to be interesting. We're talking about junk removal here, people!

"We think about what’s relevant," she says. "That could be tips and suggestions for people on getting their space back. It could be about decluttering and how to do a garage sale. We also focus on environmental sustainability, what happens to the stuff we haul away and creative ways to reuse junk." Right on the homepage there is a counter showing the number of pounds 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has saved from landfills. As of this writing, the ticker reads 2.264937 billion pounds.

They also create content about what's timely, either because it is in the news or tied with the time of year. "With the holidays coming up we'll post about making space to have your in-laws over and making room for new things you might get as gifts," Tania says. "And with New Years, everyone has resolutions. We know that the top ten New Year's resolutions includes 'getting organized' and 'simplifying'. We also look at what's trending. For example, there is a trend called trashion, when people make fashion out of trash, so we'll write about that."

Writing for buyers

Unlike when a blog is written from an egotistical perspective and turns into a bunch of advertising messages, Not Another Junky Blog, because it is written for buyers, focuses on real problems that people have with junk in the home.

"We know there’s an emotional component to getting rid of the stuff that you have," Tania says. "Our customers have an emotional release and an amazing magical feeling of 'that crap is not there anymore' when their junk is taken away. They don't realize until it's gone how good it feels. We hear it time and time and time again from our customers. So we build that into our blog because it answers what customers are looking for." The 1-800-GOT-JUNK? business is a franchise model, so the content they create also appeals to franchisees who learn about clever ways to market in their local area.

When you focus on buyers' problems as you create content, frequently you'll write about something that doesn't have anything to do with what your organization actually does. This is true at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?.

"We might talk about how to set up your own garage sale," Tania says. "That wouldn't get us business necessarily, but we’ve got the experience and we can share that with people. We know that readers may not be able to afford our service right now, but some day they will be able to. They'll have learned something from us that can help them out, something that can help them get rid of some of their junk, but they can do it themselves."

Measuring success

It's not just the billions of pounds of junk that the company saves from landfills that's measured. Tania knows that the content published in Not Another Junky Blog and shared on Facebook and Twitter is working because she uses analytics to measure content success too.

"I look at how many people view our blog on a daily basis and a weekly basis," she says, also paying attention to any content that becomes particularly popular with readers. "We've learned that we need to create content in order to be recognized on the web. It's a way of engaging with customers. It's a great way to get information directly to who you want to reach rather than going through the media."

Hey, if Tania can make junk interesting, there's no excuse for you not making your company interesting!

Seattle Police blogs Marijwhatnow guide to legal marijuana use in Seattle

Here's proof cops have a sense of humor and that the Seattle Police understand the power of online content to educate and inform.

On Election Day, November 6, 2012, the people of Washington State passed Initiative 502 making it legal after December 6 for adults over 21 years old to possess up to an ounce of marijuana (or 16 ounces of solid marijuana-infused product, like cookies, or 72 ounces of infused liquid, like oil) for personal use.

So, Washington residents wonder, what does that actually mean for me?

I just love the post Marijwhatnow? A Guide to Legal Marijuana Use In Seattle on the Seattle Police blog SPD Blotter. The post provides a practical guide for what the Seattle Police Department believes Initiative 502 means.

Brand journalism with the Seattle PD

This is some terrific brand journalism!

Here are a few of my favorite Qs and As from the Marijwhatnow post.

Can I legally carry around an ounce of marijuana?
According to the recently passed initiative, beginning December 6th, adults over the age of 21 will be able to carry up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use. Please note that the initiative says it "is unlawful to open a package containing marijuana... in view of the general public," so there’s that. Also, you probably shouldn't bring pot with you to the federal courthouse (or any other federal property).

SPD seized a bunch of my marijuana before I-502 passed. Can I have it back?
No.

What happens if I get pulled over and I'm sober, but an officer or his K9 buddy smells the ounce of Super Skunk I’ve got in my trunk?
Under state law, officers have to develop probable cause to search a closed or locked container. Each case stands on its own, but the smell of pot alone will not be reason to search a vehicle. If officers have information that you’re trafficking, producing or delivering marijuana in violation of state law, they can get a warrant to search your vehicle.

December 6th seems like a really long ways away. What happens if I get caught with marijuana before then?
Hold your breath. Your case will be processed under current state law. However, there is already a city ordinance making marijuana enforcement the lowest law enforcement priority.

Will police officers be able to smoke marijuana?
As of right now, no. This is still a very complicated issue.

The SPD Blotter

I love the use of humor in the post. Sure, it provides valuable information about the new law, but in a fun and approachable way.

And hey, we're talking about the cops here!

The SPD Blotter began in 2008 and is maintained by the staff of Seattle Police Department Public Affairs Office.

The Marijwhatnow post was written by Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, a journalist who, as he says in his bio, covered “the always-exciting cops and crime beat at Seattlecrime.com, PubliCola.com, KIRO Television, and The Stranger.”

Spangenthal-Lee joined SPD in March 2012 to tell those same stories on the department's SPD Blotter blog and publish real-time information on breaking news through SPD’s @SeattlePD Twitter feed.

Isn't it great that the Seattle PD hired a journalist to write the blog and update the Twitter feed?! I've talked about hiring journalists many times over the years such as this 2009 post An open letter to journalists: You have an amazing career opportunity on the Dark Side.

Here's how Spangenthal-Lee describes his role: "As a reporter, I've stood out in the rain at crime scenes, rode around in patrol cars late into the night, and pored over police reports in order to dig up and tell stories about just what goes on inside the Seattle Police Department, and the streets of our city."

Nice. Maybe I'll have to take a field trip to Seattle to sniff around and learn more about this story.

photo credit: 1ncognito via photopin cc

Metrics to Show How a Content Marketing Editorial Calendar Drives New Business

This is the third in a three part series on how professional services firm Sales Benchmark Index has made the transition from traditional outbound marketing like cold calls to a content-driven marketing approach using blogs, twitter, ebooks, and videos. I conduced several lengthy interviews with I love the approach Greg Alexander, CEO of the company to learn the inside scoop. If you haven’t done so, read the first installment Professional Services Firm Grows 50% through Switch from Outbound to Inbound Marketing and the second How to Target Buyer Personas with the Right Content Created Especially for Them.

Content based on the buyers' business

Greg knows from his buyer persona research that 75 percent of his US potential clients are on a calendar-based planning cycle. "July through October is when they go through their annual operating plan," he says. This is the time that buyers are most receptive to Sales Benchmark Index services and when the majority of sales tales place. "They are trying to figure out things like how many sales people do I need? How should I place the territories? What should the quotas be? How should I pay them? A lot of the research is centered around those issues."

Because Greg's sales happen July through October, he has a calendar-based approach to content creation.

"From November through June the approach is to give away lots and lots of intellectual property to build up the subscriber base," Greg says. "We believe that permission to have a conversation with buyers is a valuable asset. Within the blog we will write about a problem. We'll offer up a tool that we used with one of our clients to solve that specific problem. All we ask is that they click on the link. We put it behind a form, and then they get the tool for free. During the November through June time period, we don’t bombard them with follow up marketing activity."

As the subscriber roles grow, Greg's team shifts focus during the selling season when buyers have a greater need for information because they are planning next year's budgets from July through October. "During that time period, we shift the focus of the blog to having subscribers participate in our annual research tour, which we call Make the Number: How Your Peers Plan on Allocating People, Money and Time for the Upcoming Year."

Make the Number allows potential clients to have a personal review of benchmarking data and research. "This is an onsite seminar," Greg says. "If you want access to all these tools, and you've been a subscriber of ours for months and sometimes years, one of our experts will come on site and give you a presentation for 90 minutes to the executive team on kind of a set of best practices heading into the New Year. So it allows somebody to compare and contrast the sales strategy before the New Year begins."

Greg has had tremendous success with the calendar approach to content creation. "Just to give you some stats here on the power of content marketing, in prior years we might do between 50 and 100 visits during the July to October period," he says. "But this year, we'll have done over 220 of them. We know that about half of them eventually, inside of six quarters, become clients of ours. When people buy a professional service like ours, it's intangible. So we use the Make the Number meetings to turn what we do into a tangible by actually introducing people face to face. It makes it easier for the buyer to buy."

Measuring success

I love how Greg's team measures every aspect of his content efforts. After all, this is a company that helps sales and marketing executives be more effective, so you can imagine how they focus on measuring the effectiveness of their own inbound marketing.

In fact, they measure down to the blog post level (something that they learned from HubSpot, whose marketing software Sales Benchmark Index uses). "We grade posts based on things like how closely each are related to the problems of our buyer personas," he says. "We count the number of words in sentences, targeting six and 14 words per sentence. And we grade the effectiveness of the title. Then there are the hard metrics like the number of comments and social shares and links generated, and view counts."

Greg also analyzes what he calls "branded versus non-branded keywords" looking at how many people come to the blog on a monthly basis for each. A branded keyword is when somebody hits the blog for a term like "sales benchmark index" (they entered the company name into Google). A non-branded word would be if somebody searched on "sales territory design".

"Important phrases for us include 'territory design,' 'lead management', and 'sales incentive compensation'," Greg says. Note how these terms are fairly specific, but not so long tail as to be obscure. They specifically target 'lead generation' as a term because the phrase is so competitive. "We go after 'lead management', and we’re doing better as a result of that. We're looking at the number of incoming links and we use the HubSpot Link Grader Search Engine Optimization Tool. This year we've generated 579 new domains linking to us with 27,780 individual links that came from those domains. The thing that I'm probably the happiest about is the quality of the links has gone up. HubSpot graded the links earlier in the year at 47 on a scale of zero to 100. Now the average link rate is 82."

I wanted to know about the ultimate success measure, so I asked Greg how revenue was tracking. "We're up over a little over 50 percent this year," he told me. "That's our revenue number and our head count, which in professional services is a key metric. In consulting, utilization numbers are really important, too and we're running at 80 percent utilized right now, which is great. I can directly attribute much of that gain to inbound marketing and content marketing."

Advice to other organizations on how to implement inbound marketing

With his measurable success, I wanted to know what advice Greg would offer to other CEOs interested in adopting an inbound marketing content strategy.

"This is a mental shift to realize that you're really in the publishing business," Greg says. "If you embrace publishing, then the transformation that we talked about here will happen. If you're a CEO and you still believe that you're in another business, I don't believe you're going to make that transition. Unless you grew up in the publishing world, there’s much to learn. It's a steep learning curve. I've spent my time studying how successful publishing companies build their business. I understood things like audience acquisition and things I never knew about before. It helped quite a bit. You've got to learn how to be an effective publisher."

Disclosures: Greg and I serve together on the Eloqua board of advisors, which is where we met. In addition, I am on HubSpot advisory board and serve as Marketer in Residence at HubSpot.

Professional Services Firm Grows 50% through Switch from Outbound to Inbound Marketing

I recently had several lengthy discussions with my friend Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index to learn how he made the switch from traditional outbound marketing like cold calls to a content-driven marketing approach using blogs, twitter, ebooks, and videos. The strategy has grown Greg's revenue 50% in the past year. Sales Benchmark Index has grown from a very small firm 6 years ago to a firm with dozens of consultants today.

The wide ranging discussion was so chock full of valuable information I want to share with you, that I've decided to make it a series of three blog posts starting today and running tomorrow and the next day.

Sales Benchmark Index is a professional services firm, focused exclusively on B2B sales force effectiveness. Sales Benchmark Index helps large and small clients gain a competitive advantage through the way they engage with their clients, the sales process, and the effectiveness of their sales force so they make sales numbers faster and with less effort.

This is a particularly fascinating example of success because Greg's business – the services his company offers – is completely metrics driven. And that's how Greg markets and sells too, based on the metrics, so this is a case study chock full of ROI measurements!

Outbound Marketing stopped working

Prior to making the switch to Inbound Marketing, Sales Benchmark Index deployed classic outbound activity. "We hired telemarketing firms to cold call," Greg says. "We did batch and blast email. We did interruption-based marketing tactics of all kinds and for a period of time from 2006 to 2010, that approach met our needs. And our needs are really well defined: We know how many inquiries we need to generate all the way through to paying customers. Then early, the effectiveness of the outbound channels just stopped. It's like somebody slammed the doors shut."

Greg thinks that his outbound strategies stopped working because his target audience was super busy. "I wasn't competing against other companies," he says. "I was competing for buyers' attention."

How buyers solve problems

Greg has done a great deal of research on how his buyer personas solve problems. And that was the starting point of his efforts to switch to Inbound Marketing.

"When our target customer (the head of sales or the head of marketing in a B2B organization) has a problem or need in their business, the very first thing they do – and we've done a lot of research to support this – is start searching the Web and reading and educating themselves," Greg says. "They typically don't want to engage with a service provider, us or anybody else for that matter, for a long time. Through education on the Web, they develop a crisp, well-articulated problem statement. Then they reach out to a small number of people to ask for their assistance in how they might approach solving that problem. It's similar to the way somebody would hire a law firm or a strategy consulting firm or an advertising agency."

Building buyer persona profiles and buyer process maps

Once Greg and his team understood how buyers solved problems, the next step was to develop buyer persona profiles and buyer process maps.

"We wanted to understand the key business objectives of each target audience," Greg says "What was standing in the way of them accomplishing those objectives? What were the things that were important to them when they made a decision to hire a service provider? How were they measured? What would the definition of success be? Once we understood that, we mapped the buying process for each persona. We identified when information requests were happening in the buying process for example, and what those information requests were."

Greg quickly realized that he had to create a lot of new content assets so he chose to create what he calls an "internal content marketing agency."

I love the approach Greg has taken to building content. Since Sales Benchmark Index is a professional services firm with smart subject experts, they needed to create an environment to channel the expertise into the creation of blog posts, videos, and longer form content assets like ebooks.

I talked in detail in the second installment of the series about how his team creates content How to Target Buyer Personas with the Right Content Created Especially for Them. Then on Friday. I'll discuss how Greg measures success and provide his advice to other CEOs on how to get started with a inbound marketing content strategy.

Disclosure: Greg and I serve together on the Eloqua board of advisors, which is where we met.

So, what about you?

Nearly every day, I read a great blog post or find some other content that I like and I want to learn more about the artist who created it.

Remarkably, many people don't bother to tell me who they are! Why? Because these folks haven’t developed an effective "about" or bio page.

Often when people visit you for the first time, we want to know about you, so it is important to provide background.

How to make a blog "about" page

If you are taking the time to create content, you need to have a great About or Biography page that might include such things as your photo, a bit about who you are (with a focus on your passions), maybe a short biography, perhaps a few affiliations, and anything else you deem important for people to know. You might even do a a short video introduction. Here's my bio page.

Make it easy for people to contact you

You never know who might want to reach you. Sure, you'll likely get a few unwanted messages. But you may get invited to speak at a conference or a request be interviewed by a journalist. So you should include contact information such as an email address.

If you are worried about your email being available on the public web you can cleverly mask it. For example, I sometimes list mine as david (at) DavidMeermanScott (dot) com. Humans know what this means but machines do not.

Avoid the About page template that ships with your blog platform.

The worst About pages tend to be ones where people use the template. Try to avoid this because these frequently force you into categories of information that may not make sense for you like "gender" and "hobbies." Instead, make a page on your blog and create an original About listing.

Say it with fewer words

My blog posts always seem to be long. Sometimes as much as 500 words (or more). I find it difficult to say something in just a few words.

But we're all busy with so many things demanding our attention. When you see a long blog post, are you eager to read it? Maybe not.

Brevity: "the attribute of being brief or fleeting."

Sometimes brevity is best. I'm trying to say things with fewer words.

open cycle launches today and is a company to watch

open cycle, the new project from Gerard Vroomen, officially launches today.

Back in 2006 when I was looking for interesting examples of companies for inclusion in the first edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR (now in its third edition) a cycling friend told me about Cervelo. I checked out the site and quickly learned Cervelo was a content marketing pioneer so I interviewed Gerard, a co-founder of the company.

Back then, Gerard told me that he is an engineer, not a marketer. He said that Cervelo does not have any marketing experts.

Yet, in the past six years, Cervelo has generated much more attention than their bigger rivals and has grown quickly into one of the most important bike companies in the world.

Yes, Cervelo has awesome products used by the top road racers and triathletes. But the content on the Cervelo site as well as their attention to social networks, built to educate and inform and keep the community involved, has been instrumental in the company's success.

I've kept up with Gerard via social media and this past January went on an expedition with him into the jungles of Panama where he told me about selling Cervelo and shared his vision for a new company called open cycle which he is launching today.

open cycle

open cycle, co-founded by Gerard and his partner Andy, is producing high-end mountain bikes unlike any other on the market.

As they say on the site:

"Three words describe this new venture: bikes, open and simple.

Bikes we live and breathe. Andy's career spans from downhill racer (back when helmets were optional!) to CEO of a mountain & road bike company. Gerard’s career includes co-founding Cervélo, where's he's done everything from engineering and design to sales, supply chain and marketing.

Open means open to new ideas; from our customers, retailers, vendors and ourselves. Open to show the intricacies of our products but also our company. Open even to issue shares to some of our customers.

If open is the goal, simple is the tool.

'Relentless simplicity' is our guiding principle. Reduce the number of models and you simplify production, logistics, customer decision making, the website, everything. Avoid traditional advertising or sponsorships and free up precious time. Transfer logistics to third parties and you can focus on what matters most, which in our case means:

Designing better bikes, the first of which we introduce here.

Connecting with our customers.

And when you put it that way, is there really anything else to do?"

An unfolding marketing case study still in its infancy

open cycle is a marketing example to watch because we will witness a social media and content marketing enthusiast launch a company from day one.

Right from the start, the company is focused on social engagement throughout the site, with community aspects and social network links. Anyone can comment on anything. They are committed to having the community of enthusiasts help them so everything is open.

The open cycle site also features a blog. What's interesting is that Gerard and Andy have been blogging for a year as they’ve secretly developed the technology for their new bike. But the blog posts went unpublished until now. Kind of cool, don't you think?

Are you a marketer?

A few days ago I revisited the question I asked in 2006 when I again asked Gerard about marketing. As I wrote way back then, I think he is a marketer extraordinaire, but he always pushes back:

"To be honest, I don't think of it as marketing," Gerard says. "It feels simply like talking to people. And companies like Facebook, Twitter, et al have given us some interesting ways to do that.

They turn companies such as open cycle into the global version of the village baker of yesteryear (to paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuk). You know your customers, they know you, so you want to treat them well. You want to give them good quality and they tell their neighbors. You mess up and you feel bad and try to make it right. The opposite of what's happening at many companies today (Goldman Sachs anyone?)

And of course, the flipside is that if you don't treat them well, they'll tell the rest of the village."

I'll be updating the progress of open cycle from time-to-time in the next months and years and expect great things from Gerard and Andy.

Ben Edwards on the IBM transition from outbound marketing to inbound marketing

Last week I delivered a talk at the Text 100 Digital Rising event in Port Dickson, Malaysia. I connected with Ben Edwards, VP Digital Strategy and Development at IBM who was also speaking at the event. I’ve known Ben since his days at the Economist – we were both based in Tokyo at one point (I was with Knight-Ridder at that time).

Ben spoke with me about the ongoing transformation at IBM from being a company primarily focused on outbound marketing to a social media and digital enabled inbound marketing powerhouse.

I've written before about IBM social computing guidelines, but I wanted to learn more. Here's a three-minute interview with Ben on the more than 200,000 IBMers involved in social media.

IBM has been spending many millions of dollars in traditional outbound marketing communications efforts. Ben cited the following:

-- 58,000 marketing activities
-- 8,500 events
-- 4.5 million people targeted with outbound marketing

He said they are now moving much of this resource into digital, which includes building the systems and infrastructure required to go from outbound marketing to inbound marketing.

Ben cited a report that says 96% of IT buyers say they use search in the buying process. And it is used throughout the entire buying process, not just at the top of the B2B sales cycle.

Amazingly, over half of 407,000 IBMers are connected socially because the company encourages them to engage. Ben said 200,000 are on LinkedIn and 200,000 on Facebook (of course there is some overlap). There are 30,000 on Twitter who have declared that they are IBMers in their profile.

"If the average person has 150 connections on their social pages, that's millions of connections," Ben says. "Imagine if IBM could mobilize that group of people. Imagine if people could excite loyalty and advocacy."

The challenge, according to Ben is: "Communicating through 407,000 IBMers is more complicated than working on logos and brochures."

The key, he says, is to engage with people based on how they define themselves. A shared belief is more important than things like job function or geography. And he cited a need to build marketing with digital as the core, not as an afterthought.

Note: My video camera stopped working in the middle of the interview with Ben. What I’ve learned from this is to ALWAYS check that I have enough battery power and storage space before I start to film!

The Goth in development writes in the first person singular

When I get pushback from Corporate Communications teams about employees on blogs, forums, and social networks, it’s usually because the professional communicators are scared silly about hundreds or thousands of people in a company "speaking on behalf of the company."

The PR team imagines the Goth who works in software development who has 5,000 Twitter followers delivering "messages" on behalf of the company. Yikes!

The wrong answer is to simply say "no" to allowing employees to communicate on social networks. Sadly too many companies do just that.

There is an amazingly simple and effective way to deal with this corporate concern.

First person singular

Create a policy that requires people to write in the first-person singular on social networks. That's what IBM has done with its IBM Social Computing Guidelines.

In fact, I think that speaking in the first-person singular is essential to social media when used at work.

When somebody from your company says something in a social network using "we" -- as in "We're going to create a new product and release it in December!" -- readers might think that this is some sort of formal corporate announcement, even if the person is not authorized to talk about product launches. That's the part that frightens corporate communications people.

However, when the same employee uses the first-person singular -- "I'm working on a new product targeted for December release!" -- it becomes a personal statement or a personal opinion.

Simple and clear.

Photo credit: Shutterstock / Kuzma

CEO blogger reaches a global audience including the media and employees

Last week I sat down with Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) to learn about how he uses his blog.

I'm fascinated by CEOs who blog and who are active on Twitter @PaulFlevy, especially those from large organizations like BIDMC (7,000 people work there).

See below for a ten minute video discussion I had with Paul.

Paul has been blogging since August 2006. His Running a Hospital blog is popular with healthcare professionals around the world, with BIDMC employees, and with people who work at competing hospitals in the Boston area.

My favorite quote was when I asked Paul for his advice for CEOs about starting a blog:

"It has to be in your voice," Paul says. "It cannot be written by your press and media department, it cannot be overwritten by your lawyers. There has to be a single author for a blog to be effective... Readers want to feel that they know you."

Video may take a few moments to load.
Direct link to video here.

BIDMC in Boston is an academic medical center affiliated with Harvard Medical School. It is a large organization, with 7,000 people who work there. They see half a million people a year, about 40,000 of them emergency room visits.

Here are some video highlights of our conversation.

0:30 – 1: 30 - How Paul got started blogging

1:30 - 3:40 - A little about Paul’s large global audience including healthcare professionals, employees, and people who work in competitors at other Boston hospitals.

3:40 - 5:20 - How the blog provides transparency and using actual data to provide an inside view into what goes on at the hospital which leads to accountability

5:20 - 6:50 - What about blogging in a regulated industry?

6:50 – 8:00 - How blog posts lead to instant corrections (vs. print news) and how reporters use the blog for stories

8:00 – 9:30 Advice to other CEOs about blogging.

I first met Paul two years ago when we spoke on a panel together and have been following his blog since. It was great to get together again in person.