5 Tips on Content Marketing for Business

I went to an excellent talk by Jasper Martens from Simply Business this evening.

Simply Business are an insurance company, but you wouldn't know that from their content (more on that later!). Jasper was brought in to manage their social media output and revolutionised their marketing approach through clever use of shareable content such as free user guides.

Here's the top 5 tips I took away from the talk:

1) Content doesn't have to be about your product as long as it is in line with your BRAND.

Jasper found that he didn't end up creating content about insurance - customers found that a turnoff and wouldn't share it. Instead he focussed on a brand 'attribute'  which was that Simply Business wanted to be known for positivity towards small businesses. From this it was a natural step to creating guides aimed to help and advise this market.

2) Don't waste time trying to grow platforms that don't work for you.

Simply Business recognised that Facebook was not very successful for them in their B2B marketing efforts. Instead of trying to improve here they focussed on producing great content which could be shared on Facebook but did not depend on that channel for success.

3) Activities can BE content!

Similarly, Jasper found that his Google hangouts were only attracting double figure live audiences, despite telling people about them via mailouts to a six-figure email database. Not deterred, he recognised that the discussions held on the hangouts made great short videos and put them on YouTube, where they continue to reach a much wider audience.

4) Benefits of content marketing aren't easy to quantify.

A question from the audience (and a very common one at all social media talks I've been to) is how does this improve acquisitions? The answer is it is very hard to tell - difficult to track a sale back to the free download which created the initial brand awareness. At this point I thought it might be an idea to experiment with offer codes unique to the user guides, to help prove business worth, although you would have to tread carefully in order not to erode goodwill by appearing salesy.

5) The content has to be GOOD.

Easy to forget this one. 'Content for content's sake' will be without substance and won't help anyone, least of all you! Simply Business produced a Google Analytics guide of such good quality that Google linked to it from their help pages. It doesn't take an SEO expert to guess what a link from Google will do to your search rankings!

Rowse Honey Facebook Campaign

At first I was skeptical. To be honest, any time someone on my television screen directs me to their Facebook page I'm somewhat sceptical. It seems a little convoluted for businesses to advertise social campaigns  - paying money to direct people to another promotion.

In this case, however, I was pleasantly surprised, both by the quality of the campaign, and the amount of interaction.

The concept is that staff have made their own adverts and the public vote for a winner to be aired on national tv. Not an entirely original premise (I'm pretty sure I remember a few campaigns like this using YouTube as a platform) however it is well executed and with a couple of nice extra touches.

The videos are good - bit arty but still with a homemade feel so not pretentious - and have sparked a few hundred comments on each one. There are also nearly a thousand votes or 'likes' for each video too.

An appealing feature of the page is the box on the right hand side - people will be more inclined to do something if they know their actions will cause some good, however small. And everyone likes fluffy little bees! 

The next appealing feature is an offer of a free pot of honey. Freebies are always welcome. The only slight hitch is that it's not very obvious where on the page you can sign up for a free pot, unless you spot this bit in the menu under the 'save the bees' feature:

They may not want to give honey away to all and sundry (in fact, the page now says they have run out), but making it less obvious will frustrate the user, and may lead to comments like this:

However although Rowse haven't dealt with the comment above yet, there are some good official responses on the discussion pages. The first one is a nice example of how companies can emphasise their social goals and allay claims of pure commercialism:

And this one below is a good demonstration of how brands can instil trust by being truly knowledgeable  about their product and issues surrounding it, in this case nature:

In conclusion, the Rowse Facebook campaign is a good example of how to use social media to encourage interaction from the consumer, asking for their input on a decision, offering them freebies, and adding an element of charity. It does have usability flaws, yet the friendly transparent nature of the company communications goes some way to mitigate any frustrations.

Overall 7/10   

Digital Recruitment Confusions

Confession: I am a jobseeker. Otherwise known in recruitment as 'talent'.

Since leaving my previous job (end of 2010) it's been an interesting experience to say the least. The digital landscape is so new, and changes so rapidly, that it seems to be a confusing time for both the jobseeker and sometimes even the recruiter!

I'll give a couple of personal examples here and then a few thoughts on what could be causing all the confusion. The first example is a real conversation I had with a recruiter, X who rang me up after finding my CV on Monster.com :

X:   So, I see from your CV that you have worked in social media?

me: Yep, most of my roles have involved social media work, and it is definitely something that interests me.

X:   Great, so in these previous roles were you involved in structuring social media?

me: Uh, I was involved in developing the social media strategy, for the companies I worked for, yes.

X:   Yes but what about the structure? 

me: I implemented staff social media training, so I had a positive influence on the communications structure...

X: [long pause]

Me: Or do you mean the structure of the platforms? I'm not a developer so unfortunately I can't claim to have built or altered the structure of a social media platform...

At which point I was cut off. I'd be really interested to see what the brief for that job actually was! Was he talking about being a thought-leader, how I had shaped  and structured the social sphere itself? Was he trying to get me to describe myself as a social media 'guru' (I wouldn't, I hate the term)? Or had he just got the wrong end of the stick when my CV said I developed a strategy and thought I built a new Twitter? I guess i'll never know. He had called from an unknown number, and I didn't catch his name.  

Experience number two was with a recruitment company I sourced myself. I found their website (a bit flash heavy, but creative and professional) and sent them my CV. They called back for a chat and told me they'd email over a job description that suited what I was looking for. Less than 10 minutes later, someone else called from the same company, to ask if i'd be interested in a job 6k under my expected salary and for a fluent French speaker. He said he saw I had a French A-level and wondered if I'd be happy doing SEO in French??

I realise these two examples won't be indicative of digital recruitment as a whole, and I am also (of course) grateful that my CV is attracting calls at all, but it does seem a bit concerning. I think I may also know one of the problems: terminology. As I said at the beginning this is a very rapidly changing environment, and the English language is slow moving. Unsurprisingly there is a bit of disagreement about we call these people that do all these newfangled things! For example:

Content Manager - this is not necessarily a managerial level role. It could be executive or even entry level. What matters is that the individual is managing content i.e curating what copy and images are on the website. They could be writing the copy themselves or just co-ordinating and sub-editing it.

Web Editor - pre web 2.0 this used to mean the guy/girl that had built the website. This now more commonly means someone who edits the copy on the website, so needs much less technical experience. Of course the web editor should preferably know some HTML, and the principles of SEO but will nowadays be more likely to be editing text via a content management system (not to be confused with the content manager, above) than coding anything.

Q: What do you call the person hired to run the company Twitter, Facebook and Youtube presences? 

A: Social media Executive/Assistant,  Social Media Marketer,  Digital Marketer,  Online Marketer, Social Community Manager (again not managerial level), Community Moderator and many many more. If they also run the blog, this can extend to job titles including the aforementioned 'content' and 'editor' keywords as well.

I have held (and also applied for) many of these roles, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have a skillset to put a swiss army knife to shame! What it does mean is I have looked past the sometimes arbitrary titles, to what the role will actually involve on a day to day level, and seen whether my experience matches this. 

For the moment, until there is an established nomenclature for positions within digital, perhaps this is the best we - as individuals - can do. Recruiters can try to gain deeper knowledge of the digital sector, listening to their clients, and listening to the jobseekers and really trying to get what the person will be doing. This is no longer as simple as "agency side (check) , account manager (check), digital experience (check)" as that last term could me a whole lot of things, in a whole lot of contexts, with a bunch of different names! 

Of course I wouldn't tar all recruiters with the same brush. Some agencies specialise in digital, and others are just genuinely very good and take the time to get to know the client and the jobseeker. I have had the pleasure of meeting and dealing with both these types. I am just interested in the way recruitment has been affected by the myriad of changes in this developing sector, and what might be causing the communication difficulties which appear to be faced by jobseeker and recruiter alike. I'm interested, as always, to hear your thoughts.

Social Media and the Law

Everyone's heard a story about an employee who got sacked because of an ill-judged Facebook status. If you haven't, check this out:

Image from mashable.com

Although 'Facebook firing' is another branch of the personal vs. work profile debate (what is really private? when are you the face of the brand?) it does raise another question - the stance of the law.

Legal precedents are being set left right and centre in the digital sphere, but is there a consistency, or a guiding principle? Privacy law, intellectual property law, libel law all these can easily be applied to a virtual space where people voice their opinions and engage with others. Or can they?


Where are people saying these things, for example? If I tweet something, is that tweet subject to the law of my country or the law of the country where Twitter is hosted?

And what about advertising laws, and the laws that govern fair trading? In the U.K the Advertising Standards Agency are clamping down on social media marketing, but this is considerably behind the times. We needed regulation on how companies promote themselves on social media years ago, as companies saw these mediums as a way to circumvent existing offline rules, creating misleading campaigns and unfair competitions.

Can the law keep up with social media, or will it always be one step behind? I have a feeling this won't be the last blog I do on this topic, and i'd love to hear your thoughts!

The Great Cull - 'Unfollowing' on Twitter and 'Defriending' on Facebook.

The other day I was in an office at lunchtime and a colleague was checking his personal Facebook. Work usage aside (check the corporate social media policy post), it was his exclamation which interested me:

"Dammit Megan, I don't care whether i've survived another friend cull. Who does that?"

I've noticed that many of my Facebook contacts have started 'culling' their Facebook friends. Statuses like this are appearing regularly on my feed:

Announcing that you've de-friended people on Facebook can alienate some people (like my colleague) but judging from the number of 'likes' the post above got, it also has the effect of reinforcing the relationships you value.

But, why delete contacts?

These are two very different questions from a business and a personal perspective. On a personal level when I first join any social network I add almost everyone I know, a few people I almost know and a whole bunch of people of people i've just met (this isn't necessarily best practice, but it's very tempting!) A few weeks, months, years later and i'm left wondering who on earth that person is that has just posted a status about their cat on my feed, but leaving them be in case they get more interesting.

Yesterday I attempted my first personal Facebook and Twitter cull, and discovered it's not easy. I tried to be ruthless, and reasons for de-friending included:

• Irritating/immature statuses
• No statuses
• Couldn't remember who they were! 

To my shame also, a few people were saved from the cull because their work info included something interesting like Google, or UK Parliament. They may just come in handy one day...

Twitter was even more difficult as I tend to follow quite a lot of people and their statuses are generally interesting and informative. I do tend to keep my 'following' count under my 'follower' count as a rule of thumb however. Eventually I only ended up 'unfollowing' the accounts that I don't remember seeing a tweet from, and only then if any tweets on their feed are dull or spammy.

Should I ever delete, block or 'unfollow' people from a business account?


99% of the time, no. If you have a business Facebook persona that has friends (not adviseable anyway) then anyone agreeing to be your friend, knowing that you are a business, must really like your brand. De-friending them would be a complete faux pas. Even if people are posting criticisms or complaints, a complaint that you can resolve, will mean that a customer is 70% likely to do business with you again.

Unfollowing on Twitter is a different matter. Although websites such as TweetEffect can tell you which Tweets gained/lost you followers, it's very hard to find which individual has unfollowed. This means that on a corporate level you can unfollow without causing offence.

Important things:

• Don't be offended. If you are unfollowed learn from it and think what you can do to make your tweets/statuses more interesting.
• Some platforms (especially Twitter) can have 'bugs'. My 'following' count sometimes fluctuates of it's own accord, but is usually rectified.
• People can be useful. You never know when you might need to get in touch with the Ukelele society (well, ok, but you know...). Without sounding too cynical, maybe only remove people who you no longer know well enough to ask a favour!

I don't mean to sound ungrateful in this post. I have a great many people who I am friends with on social media platforms who I go back a long way with, and I truly value their online and offline friendship. Some people, however, I met once, possibly with drink in hand, and added them the next day because they made an impression. I doubt they remember me either by now!

What does anyone else think? Feel free to post your 'culling' experiences in the comments.