Two New Little Additions to the SE2 Family!

We’re so happy to announce that the extended SE2 family has grown by two!

Sarah Kurz and her husband Brian, and Amy Guttmann and her husband John all became new parents within two days of each other.

Amy and John welcomed their son, Asher James Guttmann, on Christmas night! Asher weighed 6lbs, 13oz and measured 20" at birth.

BABY GUTTMANN

Sarah and Brian welcomed their daughter, Emerson Blanche Kurz, just two days later. Emerson weighed 6lbs, 12oz and was 20” at birth.

BABY KURZ

The SE2 employees were pleased to see that both babies were equally matched in both height and weight. This will make for an evenly stacked match come SE2’s first annual baby race! That’s right… in just a few months from now we’ll race both Asher and Emerson drag race style down the main hall in the office – with the babies playing the role of the race car. Two lanes. One little winner. Which baby will come out on top?

Congrats Sarah, Brian, Amy and John on the new addition to your families! We couldn't be more happy for you!

If You Give a Mouse Some Content...

There’s no captive audience online. The captive audience is long dead. There are literally billions of choices on what someone can view online and I assure you they don’t want to be viewing lame content -- not with so many other choices out there. They’ll either ignore it or go elsewhere.

Those billions of choices aren’t just your direct competitors either. You are competing with YouTube videos, blogs like perezhilton.com or peopleofwalmart.com (love it!), news websites and online games. You compete with all of them for your audience’s attention.


We are publishers.

So what are we to do as marketers/public relations professionals/advertisers? The answer is… publish.

Does your organization think of itself as a publisher? Think of how much content your organization publishes. I believe that it is much more than you’d suspect; a whitepaper, a blog post, an email newsletter, a pamphlet, a Facebook status update, an article, a story, a podcast… I could go on forever. That is all content that we publish.

As publishers our goal must be to deliver valuable information to “customers” so that over time, they see the value of our content and reward us with their loyalty and support. It’s a reciprocal relationship. We give something to our customers and they give something back to us -- it could be an email newsletter sign-up, a “like” or a monetary donation.

This need to deliverable valuable and interesting content to your audience has created a whole new branch on the tree of marketing. This new branch is called content strategy or content marketing (I use them interchangeably), which I define as the practice of creating and disseminating content to enhance organizational goals and inform action.


Content matters.

Marketers have caught on. A recent study performed just this year by Junta42, an agency that focuses on content marketing, conducted a survey and found that of the 300 organizations that participated in the study:

• spend 33% of their total marketing budget (up 11% from 2008) on content marketing;
• smaller organizations spend 2x that of larger organizations on content marketing;
• and 60% of organizations plan to increase their content marketing this year.
  

This demonstrates to me that content is just too important, and provides too many benefits, to be ignored. When done right, content strategy reinforces your branding and messaging, educates your audience, drives traffic, conversions and action, and increases your share of voice online.


Get it going.

Because content strategy as a practice is relatively new, many organizations still don’t know how to get it going. Here’s my six step process for establishing your content strategy:

• Step One - Audit. In the first step you want to figure out where you stand in terms of your content strategy and where your competitors stand. When you think about that, don’t necessarily think of it just in terms of strategies and tactics. What about organizational buy-in. Do your superiors have enough information to make an informed decision that allows you to spend money on content strategy?
  
  
• Step Two – Plan. So now that you know where you stand you can figure out where you want to go. What are the organizational goals? How do you reinforce them with your content strategy? Where do your stakeholders engage with you online? The answers to these questions should strongly influence the direction of your content strategy. By answering these questions you should be able to establish the framework of your content strategy strategic plan.
  
  
• Step Three – Spec. Now you need to start thinking through the logistics. Who is going to own this content strategy within your organization? Do you need a content strategist or will you tap your subject matter experts to generate and disseminate this content? Where is this content going to live and what are the limitations of this platform? For example, if you decide that YouTube videos are one of the tactics you’ll employ as part of your content strategy, you are going to need to know the parameters of that platform (e.g. file size, file type)
  
  
• Step Four – Create. Now you are at the point of really having a strategy so this is the point where you’ll want to start collecting content that supports your strategy. In some cases this might be content that has already been produced that simply needs to be re-purposed. In other instances you may need to create this content from scratch. At the heart of this process needs to lay the “Why?” Why have you selected this content and is it relevant to the audience? If you can’t confidently provide an answer to the “Why?” than it shouldn't be part of your content.
  
  
• Step Five – Market. At this point you are ready to being marketing the content. You do that by integrating across multiple channels or by tapping the relationships that you have already established in the digital space and asking them to share your content. As an example, what if you produced a whitepaper that pointed people to your blog to read more articles and commentary that deal with the issue. Or, if you produce a print brochure why not turn it into a digital brochure with interactive features and post it to a campaign landing page. That’s integration.
  
  
• Step Six – Measure. Finally, measure the success of your strategy. Use analytics to see what is working and what is not. Analytics will also help you identify new audiences. Pay attention to what your online audience is talking about and use that to help tailor your content strategy.
  

Closing thoughts.

Before you venture into content marketing there are a few final items you should consider.

Don’t forget to communicate. You cannot expect to have a strong content strategy if people are working in silos. The owner of your content strategy needs to work with subject matter experts, your research team, your communications team, etc. to source great content.

It is also necessary to add sizzle by taking risks. Be provocative – it encourages conversation, debate and sharing. It also makes the content sticky (meaning that people come back again and again to check it out.)

Finally, I will leave you with this… content marketing is like the mouse in the children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. If you consistently produce good content that your viewers enjoy and engage with you will start to build a habit with them. They will come to expect good content from you and they will want more – just like how the mouse wanted a cookie, then milk, then a napkin...

Do your organization engage in content strategy? Share your experience in the comments below.

Ch ch ch ch changes

If you’re looking for a gift for someone on your list who likes to read, I’ve got a suggestion for you. While authors (and brothers) Chip and Dan Heath proved their relevance in their first New York Times bestseller Made to Stick—a book about why and how only the best ideas survive—their second book is about something we help our clients do all the time: ignite change.

Rocky relationship? Dysfunctional workplace? Public opinion not on your side? Let’s face it: change is hard. There are some Myers-Briggs types that will resist change with every ounce of energy they have. Others embrace it. But neither type of personality necessarily understands how to bring about change in others.

The book is called Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. (You can read the whole first chapter here.)

Of course, change is not only hard, it’s complex too. The Heath brothers understand something we have to convince y'all of all the time: creating change is not as simple as presenting a logically sound case; it involves overcoming the attitudes, emotions, motivations and fears of your audience.

Throughout the book, Chip and Dan use a simple metaphor about an elephant and its rider (BTW, did you hear that there was an elephant in Nicole Richie’s wedding over the weekend?) to help dispel key misconceptions about change:

Our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reigns and seems to be the leader. But the Rider’s control is precarious because the rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose.

The bottom line is this: successful changes share a common pattern and by learning that pattern, you can begin to create the kind of change you’re longing for.

I liked that the authors made their points through a combination of research and storytelling (and thereby backed up the entire premise of the book!) Reading it sparked tons of new ideas about how I could tap into the change efforts I’m currently working on with my clients at SE2.

So whether your gift recipient is a volunteer at a local nonprofit, serves on a board of directors, or is leading a change effort at work, he/she can certainly benefit from this easy read that will shed new insights on the psychology behind change and how to harness the pattern of successful change for their own efforts.

Merry merry!

P.S. I'd like to thank David Bowie for inspiring the title of this post.