Bill Gates was right in noting that content is king. Today, we are all publishers. It’s a daunting prospect. New content curation tools make automating the job easier–but easy may not always be as effective. It would be a mistake to let algorithms do the entire job for you. No one knows your audience like you do. And, keeping the human touch in the process is more real, which is really important to today’s info-overloaded consumer. 

Link: The Content Conundrum: To Create Or Automate? via www.fastcompany.com

This is an excellent article, and I encourage you to read it.

My perspective is that you should turn to online tools to automate the busy work involved in creating and curating content. This includes filtering, organizing, posting to multiple destinations, and so on. If you automate the grunt work, you will have much more time available for value added activities, such as creating original content, adding your perspective to 3rd-party content, and listening to and interacting with others on social media. 

There’s another benefit to staying personally involved in content creation and curation. As you create and curate content you’re staying on top of your market. As you research, write, and offer your perspective, you’re further developing your expertise and staying at the frontier in your field. When you share content with others you’re then conveying this expertise to others, establishing yourself as a thought leader in your domain.

In short, it’s not a question of whether you should automate or not. You should automate the repetitive, time-intensive work where technology excels, and apply a human touch to add unique value. By marrying technology with a human touch you will see the largest return on your online marketing efforts.

There’s growing discussion around companies using customer support (or service) as a form of marketing. It’s a simple but powerful idea. If you treat your customers extraordinarily well, your customers will love you. These happy customers, in turn, will become evangelists for your company, spreading the word about their happiness to family, friends, and colleagues.

While many companies pay lip service to this concept, few get it right.

From my experience, MailChimp is one company that seems to “get it.” Through their customer service, they’ve turned me into a happy customer and now I’m an evangelist for their products and services. Let me explain.

At Intigi, we first gained experience with MailChimp when we created a beta sign-up list. This was a simple application and didn’t require any interaction with MailChimp support. Over time, however, we started using MailChimp for more sophisticated and complex applications. We soon were stuck with some technical issues and needed support.

What next? If you’re logged into MailChimp, there’s a “Search Help” box in the upper right hand corner. It looks like this:

I typed our question into that box and was provided with a series of support documents. Nothing unusual so far. But wait, there was an “Email Us” and a “Chat with Us” box just adjacent to the search box on the next page. The top of the page looked like this:

These two buttons caught me off guard, especially the button marked “Chat With Us.” First, many online companies don’t provide an avenue to speak (synchronously) to a living, breathing person. Second, of those that provide such an option, it typically takes jumping through several hoops before you’re presented with an option to speak with technical support. From my experience, it’s very unusual for companies to present this option as a primary call to action on their main support page. Third, and most surprising, MailChimp provided this support option and we weren’t even a paying customer. We were using their free tier of service.

In any event, not finding what I was looking for in the support documentation, I clicked on “Chat With Us,” albeit with some skepticism and hesitation. When was I going to be pitched the 5-year, prepay plan with a 10% discount (i.e., sales dressed up as support)? But this concern quickly faded as a real support specialist jumped into the chat within a minute or two and was able to efficiently address all my technical questions. And there was no sales as part of the process. I used the “Chat With Us” feature at least three more times while I was a non-paying user and had a similar, positive experience each time.

As we further expanded our email marketing efforts, it was a no-brainer. I signed up for a paid MailChimp account. My thinking was, if MailChimp treats its “free” customers so well, just imagine how they’ll treat me once I start paying for the service.

Now if anyone asks me what service I recommend for email marketing, I confidently say MailChimp. And when anyone on my team suggests we shift to a different email service, I’m hesitant and look for a way to achieve a similar capability in MailChimp. In other words, we’re now a paying customer, I’m spreading the word, and I’m highly committed.

How did MailChimp turn me into a paying customer, and even more important, into an unpaid brand evangelist? They just made my life easier by quickly helping me understand how to get the most value from their product, given our specific needs at Intigi. It’s a simple idea, with very powerful implications.

Next time you’re thinking about skimping on customer support, just remember me and the monkey!

Google values updated content on your site as much as any other SEO metric; you can kill two birds with one stone by understanding your audience and targeting them with quality content that includes the terms they’re searching for.

Link: SMB content marketing 101: Best practices in an online world via contentlead.com

This post is a great read for small business owners wanting to expand their marketing efforts through content marketing. This author recommends that SMB owners should be updating their site with “fresh content every day.” But owners often say there’s not enough to write about.

One of the reasons we built Intigi is to help with this very problem. Intigi finds you relevant articles in your niche so that you can not only build your thought leadership and share quality content with customers, but also improve the search engine ranking of your site. Google values fresh content as “much as any other SEO metric” and this author clearly “gets it”.

And we’re eating our own content marketing pudding here at Intigi. Full disclosure: How did I hear of the above article in the first place? Via Intigi itself So by posting little micro-posts like this one on our own site we are also helping with our own SEO and page rank while at the same time offering this author a high quality backlink and mention on Twitter.

The getting started process for an application is critical because it’s likely the first real experience that users have with your product or service. It’s also the first and possibly only opportunity to provide some meaningful value to new users, so they’re convinced to continue to engage with your company. The getting started process has to provide value in as little time as possible. You probably have under a few minutes before users give up and go elsewhere, never to return.

I signed up the other day for Contactually, a CRM that integrates with Gmail and other email clients. I haven’t had a chance to dive deep into the application, but their getting started process knocked my socks off. While the process is unique to the Contactually product, I think we can all learn from their workflow. With this in mind, I’d like to describe their getting started process and provide some thoughts on why I thought it was so effective.

1. After you sign-up with an email address (by clicking “Connect My Inbox”), you’re taken to a screen that looks like this:

This is an opportunity for Contactually to learn about you and to offer a customized getting started process. I imagine Contactually also uses this information to customize their sales process, from their email nurturing to the level of human involvement. For instance, Contactually might send different emails if you’re an “Entrepreneur” or “Account Exec/Manager (Sales).” Also, in some cases Contactually may utilize an inside sales approach, with personal emails and phone calls. For the startups out there (or new product managers), this page also helps the Contactually team hone in on their initial target market. Over time, if Contactually sees a disproportionate number of “Real Estate Agents” signing up, for instance, then Contactually can focus more attention and resources on this particular niche market.

2. I selected “Entrepreneur,” and then the following appeared:

I selected “Entrepreneur” and Contactually presented me with categories tailored to my particular role. You can see customers, investors, advisors, and so on. These custom categories make Contactually much more relevant to me, and relevance is a big part in providing value to customers. One small critique of this section, there are a lot of choices to make, when you consider all the check boxes and the timeframes.

3. After you click “Save Buckets,” you’re taken to the following page with a video tour and some additional options below:

I have to admit, I didn’t watch the video, but it was a nice option to have as I waited for Contactually to scan my inbox. I also appreciated the fact that I could leave and Contactually would email me once the processing was completed. One critique of this page, there’s an option to “Install Chrome Plugin,” but there’s no copy on explaining the purpose or functionality of the plugin. Maybe it’s explained in the video, but as I mentioned, I didn’t watch it. In any event, I clicked on “Show me my Dashboard” because I wanted to quickly dive into the live application.

4. After you click “Show me my Dashboard,” you’re taken to a brilliant product tour, which looks like this:

This is the first step in the tour. It highlights the top portion (“the dashboard”), grays out the bottom portion, and then provides some well written copy explaining the purpose of this section of the application.

An aside, there’s part of our Intigi team “In the spotlight,” and it looks like I email them a lot. I’m sorry!

In any event, you are taken through a few more screens like this, where various portions of the application are highlighted, and there is copy that carefully explains the purpose of the section. Here’s another example:

There are a few additional steps in the getting started process. For instance, I recall a step to manually assign contacts to the various buckets/categories I selected in step 2 (customers, advisors, investors, etc).

So let me finish by summarizing why I think this getting started process is so effective:

• The process progressively exposed me to different and more sophisticated aspects of the application. As I’m setting up my account, I’m learning about how the application functions and how to obtain value from it.
• The process customized the application to my particular role as a startup founder. I suspect Contactually will also use the data from this process to customize its sales and support process. I’ll keep an eye on this.
• The tour through the application showed my real data (e.g., actual names of contacts). This reduces any confusion between a video tour, for instance, and the live application. The tour also provided a clear explanation about each section, in easy to read caption boxes.
• The application and getting started process is beautifully designed and the copy is well written, giving me confidence in the Contactually product and the team behind the company.

Hats off to the Contactually team for designing a brilliant getting started process. While it looks like Contactually is still in “Beta,” this process suggests the startup has a very bright future in the CRM market.

A study by Burson-Marsteller showed that social media usage in the Asia-Pacific region went through the roof in the past years, showing growth rates ranging from 107% (South Korea) to 12,305% (Vietnam).

Link: What’s the State of Social Media in Asia? via mashable.com

Social media is booming around the world. People are social creatures and like to interact with others. The success of social media across continents, countries, and cultures is not suprising.

The Social Media for Business Leaders Series is presented by by The Awareness Social Marketing Hub, the leading social media marketing software for marketers to publish, manage, measure and engage across all their social channels.

Link: How Big Brands Create Social Media Campaigns via mashable.com

What’s the role of advertorials in content marketing? Here we have what looks like an advertorial in Mashable. It’s a blog post, written by Todd Wasserman, and sponsored by Awareness, a social marketing software company. Because the article is thin on actionable advice, and has a conclusion that firmly supports the interests of the sponsor, there’s a backlash in the comments:

Sorry, I stopped at “The Social Media for Business Leaders Series is presented by by The Awareness Social Marketing Hub, the leading social media marketing software for marketers to publish, manage, measure and engage across all their social channels. Request a free trial here.” When did Mashable turn from a news site to a paid advertising site? Can no longer trust its credibility. Just ruined it for me.

And…

Hear hear. I’m personally okay with sponsored posts but this one is a bit much (and written in a hurry with a pre-defined point in mind).

It strikes me that many advertorials (including this one) are missing a key aspect of effective content in content marketing.

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action. [bold added]

That is, advertorials are typically thin on relevant and valuable content for a target audience. Without relevant and valuable content, advertorials will fall short of their marketing potential and may backfire with customers, as is the case here.

In Part One of this series, we discussed Techmeme and DaringFireball as two different but equally impressive examples of sites that rely on content curation as a major – if not exclusive – means of satisfying readers in the competitive tech niche.

For this post, we’ll look at two popular sites using curation to report on politics and the news: The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report.

The Huffington Post

There’s no way you haven’t at least heard of The Huffington Post, even if you don’t go there regularly. One of the web’s largest and most influential news site, The Huffington Post has achieved an Alexa ranking of #95, following only two news sites, Yahoo News and CNN.com, in that measurement.

As noted in a Mashable article called 5 Tips for Great Content Curation, Steve Rosenbaum noted:

The most successful curators include sites like The Huffington Post, that embrace the three-legged-stool philosophy of creating some content, inviting visitors to contribute some content, and gathering links and articles from the web. Created, contributed, and collected — the three c’s is a strong content mix that has a measurable impact. Why? Because your visitors don’t want to hunt around the web for related material. Once they find a quality, curated collection, they’ll stay for related offerings.

Although the content mix has evolved since 2005 when the site was launched, this “three-legged stool” has always been the basis of HuffPo’s strategy.  The very first issue, May 9, 2005, featured a “Huffington Post Exclusive” story regarding controversial Saudi defense plans, 16 curated news stories headlined and briefly summarized on site with links to the originals at various established media outlets, and 14 “featured posts” by celebrity bloggers.

In a thoroughly researched and extensive article written for the Columbia Journalism Review, called “Six Degrees of Aggregation“, Michael Shapiro discusses the evolution of the Huffington Post from a germ of an idea into a Pulitzer Prize winning, blog-based news site that would provide a left-leaning counterpoint to the popular Drudge Report. In discussing the content considerations, this interesting commentary is included:

Huffington Post, they understood, was not an enterprise whose core purpose was the creation of works of journalism—as significant or mundane as that can be. It was in the content business, which created all sorts of possibilities of what it could gather and, with a new headline and assorted tags, send back out, HuffPost’s logo affixed. Content would come to mean original reporting by Sam Stein or Ryan Grim from Washington, as well as Alec Baldwin’s blog, Robert Reich’s rants about the forsaking of the American worker, a “Best Retro Bathing Suits” slide show, “Why Women Gladly Date Ugly Men,” David Wood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 10-part series on wounded veterans, “Nine Year Old Girl’s Twin Found Inside Her Stomach,” campaign dispatches from the Off The Bus citizen journalists, “Angelina and Brad Wow at Cannes,” and “Multitasking Wilts Your Results and Relationships”—as well as Nico Pitney’s blogging on the violence after the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential elections and the 111,000 comments it generated. Because comment was content, too. Comment was like blogging, but at scale.

Although the size and popularity of the site have necessarily changed the mix to some extent, the basic principles remain the same. The Huffington Post currently employs over 1,500 journalists, paid to report original content and/or provide context and depth to curated stories. They also rely on a huge network of over 9,000 bloggers who contribute stories in exchange for visibility via publication.

At this stage, with over 1,000 stories posted per day, The Huffington Post relies on thousands of blogs, the Associated Press, Reuters, individual news sources and submitted press releases to supply content on upwards of twenty major topic verticals daily. This huge volume of information can lead to a somewhat crowded and confusing home page, but a rotating “top story” headline dominates the top of the page:

Below that, readers could either enjoy (or be frustrated by) getting lost in the day’s additional stories:

In the middle of The Huffington Post’s Home Page – a little confusing

But each main topic has its own dedicated page as well, allowing readers who have a specific intent to focus on what they came to read:

The Footer on the Huffington Post – sources and attribution

The Huffington Post’s style of content curation and aggregation has been criticized because some of their content is submitted by bloggers and journalists who are not compensated, while the site makes significant profits from the content.

A lawsuit from last year brought these complaints to light, but the site continues to operate as usual and shows no signs of slowing down. In an interview with El Pais regarding HuffPo’s move into international waters over the last year, Arianna Huffington discussed the controversy:

The Huffington Post and similar new media companies are a combination of two things: we are journalism companies with professionals – in the case of The Huffington Post, including the local Patch sites, we have approximately 1,400 journalists who are pretty well paid. We are also a platform that offers distribution to thousands of people who meet our quality standards. We don’t let just anyone in. But if you do make the cut, whether you are well known or not, you can be on The Huffington Post platform. That way you can reach a wide audience, in our case enormous, thanks to our union with AOL. Comments are moderated, so that you join a quality conversation.

She also made an interesting comment on her personal view of the Huffington Post’s reliance on curation and aggregation:

As for aggregation, even if I had an unlimited budget I would still do it. It is a service to my readers. If I am committed to showing the best, some stories will be produced by us and others we will pick and filter from other sites. [italics added]

The Drudge Report

Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report holds a very unique place in online news aggregation.  Now 15 years old, the site continues to follow the same content formula it always has.

With an Alexa ranking of #414, the conservative-leaning news page trails The Huffington Post in traffic, but still ranks among the most popular sites in the world, with a U.S. site ranking higher than USA Today or ABC News.

Perhaps even more impressive than the site’s traffic numbers (nearly 800 million monthly page views as per InterMarkets,) is the undeniable level of influence it wields in the news industry. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Journalism Excellence revealed these incredible statistics:

In some cases, Drudgereport.com is an extremely important traffic driver. While Facebook never drove more than 8% of traffic to any one site, for instance, Drudgereport.com provided more than 30% of traffic to mailonline.co.uk (the British newspaper site the Daily Mail), 19% of the traffic to the NYPost.com, 15% to Washingtonpost.com and 11% to Boston.com and FoxNews.com.

In other words, the Drudge Report’s influence cuts across both traditional organizations such as ABC News to more tabloid style outlets such as the New York Post. What’s more, Drudge Report drove more links than Facebook or Twitter on all the sites to which it drove traffic.

The Drudge Report’s format is very stripped down, having barely changed since it originally hit the web in 1997:

The Home Page of the Drudge Report – retro formatting for a confused look

Readers enjoy consistent editorial oversight by a small handful of people over the years, primarily founder Matt Drudge himself, who still runs the site from his home in Miami Beach. Drudge has included no “about” page or historical information on his site, but the following information from Wikipedia helps explain how he works:

The Drudge Report site consists mainly of selected hyperlinks to news websites all over the world, each link carrying a headline written by Drudge or his editors. The linked stories are generally hosted on the external websites of mainstream media outlets. It occasionally includes stories written by Drudge — usually two or three paragraphs in length. They generally concern a story about to be published in a major magazine or newspaper. Drudge occasionally publishes Nielsen, Arbitron, or BookScan ratings, or early election exit polls that are otherwise not made available to the public.

Unlike The Huffington Post, the Drudge Report relies almost exclusively on pure curation: linking out to news stories on other sites that Drudge feels will interest his audience.  He writes the headlines and orders the stories according to his own editorial taste, but leaves out additional commentary 99% of the time.

In 2008, Jason Fried of 37Signals had this to say about the Drudge Report and its curation approach:

There’s actually no content on the Drudge Report. Well, sometimes he will post an email or a memo on his site, but it’s 99% links out to other news sources. His site is designed to send you away to bring you back. The more often you hit his site to go somewhere else the more often you’ll return to go somewhere else again. You visit the Drudge Report more because you leave the Drudge Report more. This is one of the secrets to building traffic: The more you send people away the more they’ll come back.

15 years into consistently following a similar content curation strategy, Matt Drudge controls one of the most potent voices in the competitive online news industry and likely generates over a million a year in advertising revenue, certainly providing a solid answer to any who may doubt curation’s power.

Summary

In conclusion, The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report follow two very different strategies for reporting the news:

• HuffPo is building an ever-expanding network of journalists, contributing bloggers, and an extensive editorial staff to create, curate and aggregate upwards of 1,000 news stories on a host of topics every day.
• The Drudge Report relies almost exclusively on a relatively small number of headline-driven links to outside news sources in a stripped down design that focuses on sending people to the stories that matter most.

Both, however, have succeeded where many sites fail: in building a loyal audience of readers who return again and again to learn about the world in an interesting and engaging way.

While the Huffington Post works hard to keep people on the site, the Drudge Report sends them away as quickly as it can. In both cases, people keep coming back. While they are operating on different scales – HuffPo as a multi-million dollar subsidiary of AOL and The Drudge Report as a one-man, home-based operation – both have been able to turn news aggregation and curation into a basis for income and long-term, sustainable businesses.

And both, to their respective audiences, have become trusted news sources to rival any century-old newspaper.

In the last part of this three-part series, we will look at two corporate blogs that rely heavily on curation: CMO.com and Intel’s IQ e-zine.  Please stay tuned for that!

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This is a guest post by Justin P Lambert. Justin is a content marketing specialist and freelance copywriter. He is also a ghostwriter, speech writer and consultant.