In early 1995, while living in Hong Kong, I received a floppy disk copy of Netscape Navigator version 1.0 and with my dial up connection got onto the Web. Being a collector (my family might say “pack rat”) I saved the disk.
I remember that time well because zero percent of my marketing and PR colleagues were online. At the time, nobody was tracking the number of Internet users, but IDC says it grew to 16 million by December 1995.
A few years later I created my first personal site and soon after started sending search engine optimized press releases for lead generation on behalf of NewsEdge, the company I was employed by at the time. Reaching people when they were looking for what we had to offer was like magic.
Marketing and PR today
IDC says there are over 2 billion Internet users in 2012.
Consider what we can do today with a smartphone such as an iPhone, fewer than two decades after Netscape 1.0. We can instantly reach anyone on the planet by creating real-time content such as video. Amazing.
The future
We're making up the rules now for what the future holds. Imagine the progress over the next decade or two? Incredible.
I'm bullish on marketing and public relations in the years to come. Not only is it easier to reach buyers than at any time in the past, it's also more fun.
You have the power to elevate yourself on the web to a position of importance.
In the e-marketplace of ideas, successful people educate and inform. They highlight their expertise with videos, content-rich websites, social streams, blogs, ebooks, and images.
We also have the ability to interact and participate in conversations that other people begin on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, chat rooms, and forums.
The key is to focus on buyers' needs, not your own ego.
Stop hyping your products and services. Don't rely on interruption techniques. You'll regret taking advantage of people’s time and attention with unwanted communications.
Instead you need to deliver the right information to buyers, right at the point when they are most receptive.
Organizations gain credibility and loyalty with buyers through content, and smart marketers think and act like publishers in order to create and deliver content targeted directly at their audience.
Don't push product
Teach people something. Share your expertise.
It's counter intuitive: You sell more when you stop selling.
As you build your market people will find you via search engines and talk you up on social networks.
On the global speaking circuit, I frequently get pushback from audience members who work in highly regulated industries. They claim, erroneously, that laws like HIPAA and regulations like those from the SEC and the FDA forbid them from creating valuable content on the Web or engaging in social media.
Nonsense!
This is just a fear-based excuse perpetuated by lawyers in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and financial services industries who want to avoid risk at all cost.
Ignoring the data
The fear is particularly shortsighted when considering the data on how people make decisions related to their health. Last week I delivered a talk at the National Healthcare Marketing Summit and had an opportunity to meet many marketers who are happily reaching their audiences with valuable information because they live in reality not fear.
According to data presented at the conference by Tim McGuire from Greenville Hospital System, Bill Moschella of eVariant, and Anne Theis of Salem Health, 80% of Internet users look up health information online.
More than three out of four people use the Web to make healthcare decisions!
Yet 64% of hospital marketing departments devote less than 25% of their marketing budget to interactive. Even more telling is how hospital marketers spend their time. 83% of hospitals devote less than 30% of staff time to interactive media.
This is ridiculous.
The fearful lawyers say “no” to the 80% of customers and potential customers who use the Web to research health? Fear means that hospital marketers are busy making brochures and TV ads instead of creating Web content?
Can your organization afford such a disconnect?!
Learning from Chris Boyer and Inova Health System
For example, Chris Boyer, Director, Digital Communications and Marketing, Inova Health System is doing a terrific job. Inova is Northern Virginia's leading not-for-profit healthcare provider, serving more than 1 million people each year.
Under Chris' leadership, Inova is active on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Pinterest (and more). You can see all the social platforms on this page, which also has information on Inova's social media policies. In addition, Chris has a personal blog (as do others in the organization).
But it the content that Inova publishes to reach specific buyer personas that interests me the most. For example, there is a Life with Cancer site that contains valuable information for patients and their families.
In the last two years, Chris has transformed the Inova organization to be more focused on creating relevant content. I asked a bunch of questions so that we can all learn from his efforts.
"We take a lot of time understanding who our viewers are and actually write different types of content for different types of users," Chris told me. "Patients are using our patient and visitor information so they're looking for specifics about how to make their stay easier and we write with them in mind. Other people view our services and all the different clinical stuff that we provide at Inova. They could either be referring physicians who want to research what we're doing here or there could be consumers who are actually shopping for healthcare and we want to provide them content that's appropriate for them. It is written so that they don't have read through pages and pages of clinical content to get to the crux of what they're looking for."
Hire journalists
Chris manages the digital marketing and communications team, including a handful of editors and web graphics professionals as well as several part-timers.
A full time social medial manager on the team focuses on social media channels, although there's a lot of content interaction and cross-publication efforts because the lines between social media and the website are blurring tremendously at Inova.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I frequently talk about hiring journalists to create content. Professional reporters and editors, more than marketers and PR people, are the best staffers for content sites because they understand how to tell a story and don't fall back on product pitching. That's exactly what Inova has done.
"The two main editors for our website are actually former journalists," Chris says. "So they have experience in terms of writing; of course, they started in traditional media. But in the last few years, they migrated over to focus exclusively on online journalism and communications."
Manage fear
I wanted to know how Chris has dealt with the whole "fear" thing. Why has he been successful in hiring journalists and creating content when so many other management teams and legal departments simply say: "no".
"Healthcare organizations typically are very conservative in how they market or communicate about their services," he says. The main concern of management was that a shift to content marketing would mean a shift away from what they thought were the key differentiators of Inova Health System in the market that attract the best physicians. "It took a long time for us to educate that the existing content is not being lost, we're just providing it to each audience in the appropriate places. There will be pages for consumers, pages for physicians that are looking to refer or be employed here. It took a while for them to be comfortable with that."
Measure success
What about the whole ROI thing? With a team of people, there are significant resources devoted to this effort. Is it paying off?
"We use tools like Vocus to measure effectiveness," Chris says. "But I also manage, as part of my larger responsibilities, our CRM team and our customer relationship management database. So I've been creating a social media strategy that is aligned with our customer relationship management database so I can actually measure downstream utilization and ROI of our social media activity."
Chris is a bit of a social media ROI rockstar and was even filmed at a Mayo Clinic conference singing his Social Media ROI Rag.
Chris has three specific areas that he measures:
New patients. How many people become patients who first connected online either through content on the Website or social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
How much money can be saved by using online tools. For example the existing Inova nursing communications is a printed newsletter that goes out to all nursing staff and it costs $80,000 a year to produce. So converting over to a blog they means eliminating that expense while increasing readership.
Long-term patient engagement and wellness. Chris measures patients (or potential patients) who get involved wellness programs. For example, Inova has email communications focused on how to have a healthy heart, how to eat well, and the like. He’s looking for people who stay healthy because of the information they consume and how that effects things like re-admittance rates.
Advice to the fearful
With all of his success, I wanted Chris to provide suggestions to people in other regulated businesses.
"Realize that you don't have to transform your entire organization all at once," he says. "I found a lot of success in focusing on areas where there are some obvious opportunities and used social communications in those areas. Try something and see how it's working. You're gaining valuable expertise and understanding about how to use the tools. Eventually in most organizations once you introduce social communications to your portfolio, very quickly you'll start to see how it will start to augment, if not replace, some of the current ways that you're communicating."
No excuses
As Chris shows, content marketing is alive and well in highly regulated industries.
Isn't it time for your organization to eliminate fear?
Back in the day, the only way to easily communicate with your public was to use mainstream media and analysts as your mouthpieces. So the public relations department and the agencies they employed spent a great deal of effort convincing editors, reporters and analysts that your company was one worth talking up.
Prior to the Web, there wasn't an efficient way for organizations to communicate directly to the public.
What's the role of public relations in the new world of the web?
There has been an explosion of channels that organizations can reach their audience directly with valuable online content: videos, ebooks, white papers, photos, infographics, and more – and then have that information shared in social networks.
However, many PR professionals still operate as if their only conduit is mainstream media.
Apologies if you've heard this because I've talked about this many times in the past. But there are still many holdouts so I say it again.
Don't confuse the superset (public relations = reaching the public with your information) with the subset (media relations = using the media to tell your story) and therefore insist that PR is only about mainstream media.
What you need to realize is that these are different activities. Media relations is still valid as a way to get attention. Who doesn't want to be quoted in an important newspaper, magazine, or television broadcast?
Today there are so many other ways to communicate with your publics
If your organization operates this outdated way, my recommendation is to re-name your public relations department the media relations department to reflect what they really do.
In this new world, smart PR pros realize they have a tremendous opportunity if they can effectively communicate directly with the public. They are transforming themselves into content creators. However, most are still operating in the traditional press release and pitching mentality.
If you're an entrepreneur or executive, don't put your PR department in charge of content creation for your company (unless they understand completely the power of the new world).
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.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, the oldest English-language encyclopaedia still in production, was first produced in Scotland in 1768.
The company announced it is going completely digital. If you want to pick up your very own copy, the final 2010 print set edition is available at The Britannica Store for USD $1,395.00.
Everywhere we turn there is evidence of the communications revolution.
I've often said the revolution of Web content and social media is the most significant communications revolution since the invention of the printing press.
It took centuries for the world's population to become literate. But in just a few short years, of the 6 billion people on the planet, 4.8 billion have access to online information in the form of mobile data. In fact, there are more mobile phones in the world than toothbrushes.
I've been talking about the importance of online information as a tool of marketing and PR for nearly 20 years now. For the last decade I have run my own business focused on helping companies make the transition from traditional offline marketing to online marketing and PR strategies.
In 1998, people thought I was insane to argue that marketing & PR is going to the Web.
In 2002, I was that weird Grateful Dead listening oddball insisting that the revolution is coming. That's the year I got fired from my corporate VP of marketing job partly because I insisted on the Web and didn’t agree on investing in print direct mail the way others in the company did. In 2002 I started my own company to develop strategies and write and speak about what the communications revolution means to marketing & PR.
In 2005, others began to realize we're at the cusp of a revolution. These pioneers fought the bosses and the entrenched powers and started to create content on the Web as a form of marketing.
In 2009, many people saw the power as hundreds of millions gravitated to social tools like Facebook and Twitter.
Now, in 2012, while over a billion people are engaged via social media and tens of thousands of organizations have a dedicated online content effort for marketing purposes. However, there are still many holdouts resisting the revolution.
Encyclopaedia Britannica print set discontinued after nearly 250 years
In a New York Times blog post, Jorge Cauz president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. was quoted as saying: "It's a rite of passage in this new era. Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia."
Exactly.
So here are a few questions for you:
How much effort are you putting into producing brochures and other print materials?
What happens if I Google the name on your resume and the most recent company you worked for?
When I am asked to vet a candidate for one of the companies I am associated with, the first thing I do is head to Google and see what content appears. And that's what I suggest potential employers do.
On the Web, you are what you publish
Sadly, for many job seekers, what pops up on Google are a few random things (like your membership in the company softball league), your LinkedIn profile, and not much else. Sometimes there is a Twitter feed but frequently it was started years earlier and has been abandoned or it's only updated a few times a month.
With more senior people, I always laugh when the top content when I Google your name is the press release that your company issued a few years earlier to announce you are joining.
Today's marketing and PR is about content creation. Your personal brand is also about content creation.
If you don’t care enough to build your personal brand then why should a company employ you to create a brand for them?
On Saturday at #SXSW, I met with my good friend Jon Ferrara (@jon_ferrara) who is the CEO of Nimble. Jon told me that he has a position open for a senior-level marketer and wanted to get my advice on the sort of person he should hire.
I told Jon to never look at a resume. Just delete it. Instead, administer the "Google test." We agreed that eliminates nearly all candidates from consideration.
People like Jon look for potential hires who are very active on social media and creating content. Jon and the other CEOs and senior executives I work with are not looking for professional managers. They are not looking for agency wranglers. They are not looking for talkers, they are looking for doers. They want marketers (even at the senior level) who are passionate about creating content on the Web.
Insisting on a positive result for the "Google test" makes it tough for CEOs like Jon to find qualified people, but greatly increases the chances that the marketer who ends up getting hired will be a good fit for achieving the company’s goals. Jon told me that anyone who wants to be his top marketer needs to be at least as successful on social networks as he is. Seems reasonable to me!
Prove you are a great marketer
The good news is that you can fix the problem that eliminates you from consideration for the hottest jobs.
You need to show, don't tell. You need evidence that you are passionate about your personal brand. You need to create content. Now. Starting today.
There are a bunch of things you can do, starting today, that might include some of the following: You could start a blog, create a YouTube channel, or tweet more than a few times a month. You could create an infographic about the industry you want to work in or your particular area of expertise. You could get active on some newer channels like Google Plus, Instagram and Pinterest so you can speak intelligently about them. You could sit on panels at events like SXSW and have people in the audience talk about you on social channels. These are just a few examples.
I've delivered this advice to hundreds of people. Sadly for them, I know from experience that 90% of people ignore this advice.
Will you be in the 10%?
I am convinced if you are a job seeker, you need to pay attention to this tough love.
Bonus for reading this far: People who get really clever with this strategy then target companies they want to work for and create content (a blog post or video for example) that relates to that company. Perhaps a suggestion for how that company can do something different. You want to get noticed by the marketing department of your target company? Forget sending a resume. Instead create something interesting and publish it on the Web. Your potential hiring manager will be eager to consume your work and you brand yourself as a player.
Since then, I've been using Boeing as an example of an organization that is creating great content but until yesterday I had never met Todd in person.
We both spoke at the Purina Digital Summit "Feeding the Beast" event in St. Louis. What a perfect tag-team: I talked about how companies can create excellent content and how journalists make excellent content creators (print journalists, photojournalists, and broadcast journalists) because they are skilled storytellers, then Todd outlined how he is doing it at Boeing. Todd and I are both looking forward to Purina taking up the ideas for their marketing programs.
Brakes on Fire!!
For a great example of the sort of content that Todd and his team create, check out this video Boeing 747-8F Performs Ultimate Rejected Take-off where a fully-loaded 747-8 Freighter with worn-out brakes attempted an aborted takeoff on a California runway. The rejected takeoff or maximum brake energy test is one of the most dramatic for a new airplane. The resulting video has 680,000 views as of this writing. The video is great because it is not a product pitch. Rather it is branded content that people want to consume and that shows Boeing in a great way.
"We publish content that supports business objectives and fosters positive opinions about Boeing," Todd told me. "We're not (directly) selling planes. We’re selling Boeing."
Todd understands that brand journalism is not a product pitch. It is not an advertorial. It is not an egotistical spewing of gobbledygook-laden corporate drivel.
Interestingly, many Boeing communicators were former reporters. Todd himself was a former real-time wire service journalist at Bloomberg News who now among other duties manages the @Boeing Twitter feed.
Effective brand journalism is about telling stories. Like newspapers, magazines, and television news reports, Boeing brand journalists publish their by-line with their reports. This shows that real people are behind the stories.
I also like that Boeing's reports end up serving as fodder for the media. They repurpose content all the time, promoting it via social media the Boeing site, on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. And they pitch their homegrown stories to the media.
Here's a quick discussion with Todd on how brand journalism is done at Boeing.
I frequently hear from people that their buyers are not on the Web. This myth is used an excuse not to create a valuable Web site and to avoid creating content.
Sorry to deliver a reality check, but the truth is that very few people are offline, particularly when you include lower cost mobile technology.
I saw this phenomenon in action this week while on a one-week expedition in the Panamanian jungle. Together with seven other international business executives, plus guides, and support staff on a trip organized by Earth Train, we hiked and kayaked the Cangandi River in the autonomous indigenous region called Guna Yala, traveling from the Pacific side of the continental divide all the way to the Atlantic ocean. What an amazing trip.
Even though I was "off the grid" for the vast majority of the time, I ran across people in some of the most remote parts of the world connecting to the Web.
In the village of Cangandi, with about 250 inhabitants, I saw dozens of people on mobile phones. This village has no running water (they drink from the river), they build their own houses from local wood, and they grow their own food. There is no electrical power, so they use solar panels to charge their mobile devices. They built the community on the top of a hill partly to take advantage of a distant cell phone tower.
If you are still clinging to the fiction that your buyers are not on the Web, you might want to ask if they own a toothbrush. I think you're living a myth.
Image: Photos of Former Secretary General of the Kuna General Congress (and Earth Train board member) Enrique "Kike" Arias while in Cangandi, Guna Yala, Panama.
My wife @yukariwatanabe was checking out her Twitter stream a few months ago and noticed one of the people she follows tweeted about Hotel Kakslauttanen in the northern Finland town of Saariselka where you can stay in a glass igloo in winter. You can lie in bed and check out the stars (or if you are lucky the Aurora Borealis). She tweeted back and said: "I want to go there!" Then she emailed me and said the same thing.
We quickly discussed it that evening and agreed: "Why not?" Our daughter is now off to university so we have the time. So we booked it.
Now, I know that a vacation in December above the Arctic Circle might seem insane to some. Heck, the sun doesn't even rise in mid-December (there is four hours of twilight only) but for us it seemed perfect because we've travelled all over the world and are looking for unusual adventures.
How did we know that we wanted to go? By the hotel's website of course. The site lists all sorts of winter activities that you can do. When I saw Husky Safari I was ready to pack my bags. (Bucket list...)
Everybody I know has a story like this. Somebody says something on a social network. It leads you to Google or a website. And you spend some money (or not).
If you are the seller in this transaction, it all comes down to content. What are you creating (like the Hotel Kakslauttanen site)? How does that compare to what are others creating about you (like the NYT article and reviews on Trip Advisor)?
You're in control. You create the content. You bring in the business.
Our time in Lapland was amazing. We had all kinds of wonderful adventures. The dogsledding was especially fun because I got to drive (more like hang on). We also visited a Sami village where Pentti took us on a Reindeer Safari and talked about his indigenous people who live in far northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Kola Peninsula of Russia. Pentti has 8,000 reindeer.
Sadly, it was cloudy most of the time, so we didn't see the Aurora Borealis. But we always said that if we did it would be a bonus.
Photos taken with my iPhone and tweaked with Instagram.
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