Over the past few months, Pope Benedict XVI has been calling on the Catholic Church to get more involved in Web 2.0. In a video released by the vatican on YouTube, Pope Benedict states that the Church should continue to be present in the “ever-evolving communications system that surrounds our planet.”

To date, the Vatican has created a YouTube account, a personal Facebook page for Pope Benedict, an iPhone app and Facebook app. Outside of the Vatican, many of those in the Church have heard the call and started blogging and creating other online resources like Open Source Catholic.

Okay, I admit that it’s not exactly a burning bush, but it’s certainly a clear sign that times have changed.

Religious groups have long been associated with traditional outbound marketing techniques. Think about men in ties and backpacks knocking at your door, religious pamphlets left on your windshield or people handing out flowers at the airport.

Why have these devotees gone to such great lengths to spread the “good word?” Because people have been searching for it.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, about 92% of Americans believe in a higher power, 28% have left the religion of their childhood and 16% consider themselves unaffiliated. This means that there is liquidity in the religious market, and many Americans are actively searching for spirituality. It also explains why religious groups have spent so much time, energy and money trying to get attention.

The Catholic Church’s embrace of blogging and social media is yet another clear sign that, no matter what your audience, the conversation has shifted online. In a statement, the Pope Benedict notes that, “Church communities have always used the modern media… for encouraging dialog at a wider level.”

The key business takeaway is this: If the 83-year-old leader of one of the oldest organizations in the history of Western civilization has embraced Web 2.0 and recognized the benefits of inbound marketing techniques, you’re officially out of excuses for why social media won’t work for your company.

Our recommendation? Follow the Pope’s lead (at least in regard to your marketing efforts): Get involved in social media, especially Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Start a blog, and join the conversation in your industry.

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5661/Thou-Shalt-Blog-What-Marketers-Can-Learn-from-the-Church-s-Foray-into-Social-Media.aspx?source=Blog_Email_[Thou+Shalt+Blog%3a+Wha]

On the web, you’ve got to embrace the fact that syndicating content (using these traditional models) isn’t a great idea. That’s why even Wikipedia distinguishes between broadcast, print, and web syndication. They are entirely different.

EXAMPLE: AllTop is a great place to find content that’s curated from specific users or around niche topics. This kind of content syndication is becoming more and more commonplace. We believe paid access to specific syndicators who provide human edited content will become more and more relevant and reliable as the information overload continues. 

2. Re-Contextualized Content Syndication

Even more effective, intimate, and valuable in our world is the generation and distribution of content designed to be embedded and re-contextualized by your distribution partners. Using content distribution and creation platforms, like YouTube or Vimeo for video, Flickr or Picassa for images, or Scribd for documents (as just a few examples) you can create valuable content and build a content syndication network that invites your partners to re-contextualize and re-distribute your content to achieve overwhelming success. 

A quick example: Let’s say you’re a B2B company selling products through a series of channel partners. You create a video that delivers your message to your channel’s customers for a new product release. You distribute the video on YouTube and create a series of ideas for your channel partners to re-distribute that content on their own platforms and invite them to embed the video in an e-mail blast to their customers. That approach gets your content syndicated to your end audience while you add value. 

EXAMPLE: Here’s a great example from the gang at Espresso. Marta Kagan, created a wonderful presentation that helps educate potential clients and partners about the virtues of social media. She distributed her presentation via SlideShare and to date it’s been re-contextualized and viewed more than 62,000 times. That’s powerful content syndication that’s measurable.

 3. Curated Content Syndication

There are tons of content curation engines out there: Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, and Delicious to name a few. All of these sites allow you to curate content you find valuable and invite your distribution partners to syndicate your feed on their site. This is valuable content curation that allows you to appropriately give credit to the content creator while it strengthens your brand and enhances your reach. 

EXAMPLE: Okay, so I’m using a Tippingpoint client as an example of this, only because I don’t see enough people doing this well. Josh Cole and Brett Virmalo on our team have started curating a set of ‘Food Finds’ for Breville’s FoodThinkers. This is a perfect example of curated content syndication that adds value to the Foodthinkers platform and has been successfully positioning Breville’s brand as a high-quality source in social spheres like Twitter. 

The bottom line: redefine syndication

At the end of the day content syndication is changing. The print media and their online outlets, the unions, and even talent agents are struggling to understand how to syndicate content and manage it’s usage online. But if you’re going to really be successful offering content syndication to your clients, partners, or affiliated brands start by redefining content syndication.

 For most forms of traditional media, consumption is the primary activity: we read newspapers, we watch TV, and we listen to radio and podcasts. Even in the case of “social” media, the majority limit their involvement to reading a blog post or watching a YouTube video. While this can be very helpful in terms of pure message or content spread, it does little to connect people to your brand, product, or service in the social sense. In other words, in a social context, consumption is not all that engaging.

To get beyond pure consumption – and into real connection – it’s important to get yourself and your customers into the action. The easiest way to do this? Involve your audience in social activities, preferably happening at a place where your audience spends time.

The Value of Curation

On the activity front, consider curation. Curation is the act of rating, reviewing, and otherwise passing judgment on content available in a social setting. Rating an article as “useful” (or not!) is an example of curation.

Curation is important in two respects. First, it is a reflection of the audience or community members’ value system: curation helps weed the garden, so to speak, making it easier for others to quickly find what’s valuable. In this way, curation helps create a better experience.

Curation also teaches people how to participate. If you allow for a moment that the majority of people on the social Web are consuming the content produced by a minority, then one of the big levers you have in your hand involves getting more people to create content. Curation is a great first step: the relatively simple task of rating (like clicking “4 stars”) not only elicits interaction but it also leaves an artifact of participation – the rating itself. When new members see their own ratings, for example, they see their impact, contribution, or mark left for others to see. They see themselves beginning to engage. However small this may be, these members are now looking at their own participation, and in doing so are beginning the process of real engagement at the social level.

No doubt you missed Pepsi’s Super Bowl ad this year (because there wasn’t one). As with other consumer brands, Pepsi is looking to increase social connection points with its customers to complement and extend its overall integrated campaigns. (Yes, traditional media remains very much a part of PepsiCo’s marketing mix.) Efforts like “The Juice” and other social campaigns are increasingly seen as an integration play that connects the brand into the communities where customers and potential customers are found. Curation and basic content creation occur naturally in these communities, making them ideal for your participative (aka “social”) marketing efforts.

Beyond consumption, curation, and content creation, what other types of activities might you encourage? How about getting people in your audience to work together?

Collaboration is what you’re looking for: people working together to produce a shared outcome. On the social Web, it’s your customers and constituents talking about what they find valuable with regard to your product or service, working together to make smarter choices. They create more and better information to further inform the purchase choices they have and to generally become sharper consumers. It’s this sharing and working together that defines much of what happens on the Web now.

The challenge is to connect all of this to your business or, looked at the other way around, to connect your business into this participative channel. Starbucks and Dell, using the Salesforce.com Ideas platform, have done well for themselves by inviting collaboration. You can use Google to find plenty of analysis and commentary on both of these cases. Who else? Read on.

Threadless.com has offered t-shirts for sale for about 10 years: people submit designs for t-shirts, which are voted on by Threadless members. Threadless produces the winning designs for sale. The customers – through collaboration with each other and with the business itself – have a direct hand in shaping the product that is offered for sale. For a business like Threadless – literally born on the Web – directly involving customers seems natural. What if the fit to your business isn’t quite so obvious?

 Coke and Dell: Fish Where the Fish Are

There are lots of ways to involve your brand in participative processes. Branded microsites – a staple element of nearly any marketing program – suffer from what blogger and author Jeff Jarvis describes as “making your customers come to you.” Instead, Jeff recommends going to them, and becoming a part of the communities that they are already participating in.

Consider the approaches of Coke and Dell, both Fortune 100 companies.

Coke said it will no longer pursue branded microsites as a primary component of its online marketing. Instead, it will build its presence in networks like Facebook, where it has millions – literally – of fans collected around its business page. Coke is also investing in its YouTube channel. The rationale is simple: fish where the fish are. Respect your audience by getting involved in the activities that they enjoy. Become part of their communities.

Taking a further step, Coke created a new collaborative application for NCAA fans. Instead of building it around the brand, Coke built “Department of Fannovation” around being an NCAA fan. Dell used a similar approach when it launched its “Digital Nomads” and “Take Your Own Path” communities.

To be clear, Coke is a participant in the application, located at the Coca-Cola Zero site. But unlike the actual branded microsite, at the center of “Fannovation” is the interest of the fans rather than the brand message. This carries right into collaboration and the social engagement process by encouraging fans to create and submit their own ideas and then vote up or down (“curate”) on other ideas. The end point is more learning for Coke, learning that can be used to further improve its social presence and related activities as it moves in this new direction. Did I mention that Coke is also measuring this? They are.

So, here’s your challenge: consumption is good but curation is better. Curation leads to creation and collaboration, and collaboration translates into social engagement. As a marketer, you’ll want to be looking for the places where your customers and potential customers are already spending time. Go there, and implement collaborative activities that are built around their shared interests. You’ll strengthen your own social presence in the process.

http://www.clickz.com/3636488

http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2010/02/22/newscolumn1.html

Great article from the Portland Business Journal – by Kevin Renner

Thanks to Lynn from our PDXMarketingPros Linkedin Group for the article referral

When Bode Miller comes out of the gate, he only knows one way to approach each race and that is to go all out — to hold nothing back and just try to get from start to finish as fast as humanly possible. Sometimes this means nearing 80 miles per hour while navigating unfamiliar and uncertain terrain. Guess what, folks? When you take an approach like that every time you leave the gate, you are bound to make mistakes.

When the world is watching, on the surface, a major wipeout or even a simple DNF (Did Not Finish) looks like a failure to a lot of people. Not to Bode Miller. He understands the risk involved the way he skis and he chooses to take that risk and learn from any mistakes he makes along the way. His focus isn’t on the medals; his focus is on the moment. “What can I do today that makes me a little better than I was yesterday?” Sometimes he strikes gold, sometimes he strikes snow and ice.

The bottom line is, we don’t watch Bode Miller ski because of his Olympic medals or World Cup wins (I don’t even know his World Cup record). We watch Bode Miller because we know we are going to see something special…every time. Sometimes that results in a gold medal, sometimes it results in a wipeout. Either way, Miller has found a way to overcome the fear of what other people might think; instead, remaining confident that if he gives everything he has to give, his performance will be remarkable, if not inspiring.

Why Bode Miller is an Example for Inbound Marketers:

One of the cornerstones of inbound marketing, perhaps the cornerstone, is content creation. There are several ways to create content: pages on your website, blog articles, webinars, videos, PowerPoint presentations, photographs. It’s all pretty low budget, yet most companies don’t do a great job of it. Why not? When you publish something on the Internet, it’s out there. People consume it and judge it. Your reputation is on the line. That can be pretty scary, and I believe that fear keeps some really smart people from sharing their thoughts.

Marketers can learn a lot from Bode Miller. Anyone who has been paying attention at all knows that the most successful people and companies online are those who aren’t afraid to take a risk. Sometimes the risks are small; commenting on a blog post or even launching your own blog to share your thoughts, ideas and expertise. Other times they could be greater; your first attempt at video marketing or taking on a Goliath like Google or Microsoft.

No matter what, if you have the right approach, you can only win. If you crash and burn, you learn. If you execute flawlessly, you reap the shiny reward of more traffic, greater visibility and more customers for your business. There really is no secret. If you are honest in your approach to creating content it’s going to work out in the end. There might be some bumps along the way, but the satisfaction of knowing you gave it a truly honest effort will be rewarding in and of itself. Additionally, you will definitely gain a following. There is no reward without risk and there is definitely a market for authenticity.

 ”I prefer talking to actual people, not websites and computers.

At my age, I’m more of a ‘people person.’”

 ”My customers are all baby boomers, like me. They aren’t using Twitter or Facebook.”

If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a moment to demolish some of these persistent myths about social media right now. The first, most widespread, and most pernicious among them is the concept that social media is a young person’s game, and that kids these days are simply wired differently than older generations to be more capable of understanding and using social technologies.

 Hogwash.

People who practice using specific tools get really good at using those tools. Period. Think about it — you grew up playing catch in the backyard with your friends, and now you can catch a ball without a second thought. Were you hard-wired to catch and throw a ball? Of course not. You practiced. You practiced because you were a kid and because back then you had lots of free time to do as you pleased. Other people, like your parents, had less time to practice, because they were busy doing more important things, like earning a living.

Generation X and Y were kids when technology advanced by leaps and bounds each year. They had the time to play with, adapt to, and learn each new technology. While you were out doing other things, like earning a living, those kids had nothing but time to practice, practice, practice.

So let’s demolish Myth #1… You’re not too old for social media; you just haven’t practiced enough. And the learning curve is not nearly as steep a climb as you think.

Myth #2: “I prefer talking to actual people, not websites. I’m more of a ‘people person.’” So let’s say you build a profile on Twitter or Facebook. You’re a person, right? Looking to make connections, build relationships, help others, and grow your business. That’s exactly the kind of person that is behind almost every single other username, avatar and profile on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. A real, living, breathing person, sitting at a desk somewhere with their fingers lightly poised on their keyboard. Just like you. So social media is really tailor-made for a “people person” like you. (Are there automated profiles and robot-powered tweets out there? Certainly. Just don’t be one of them.)

Myth #3: “My customers are all baby boomers, like me. They aren’t using Twitter or Facebook.” The largest, fastest growing group of users on Facebook today is men and women over 55. Yes, really. The fastest growing groups of users on Twitter are teens and young adults between 12 and 24 years old — while the largest retained, active group is still men and women over 35. Surprised?

Your customers are using social websites and applications in ever increasing numbers to find products, buy services, answer their questions and solve their problems. Shouldn’t you be there to provide answers and solutions when your customers need them?

Wouldn’t that be the mature, responsible thing to do?

1. Determine how you’re getting found through organic search. These analytics are incredibly helpful in terms of seeing how effective your SEO strategies have been. For the keywords that you’re targeting for your site, measure and determine how your efforts are actually working. You can also use this data to make specific decisions on exactly which keywords to target to improve your rankings moving forward. You should also add the keywords that are getting you found onto your keyword list and add some sort of relevance to them that works for you. If you want to improve on a particular keyword, create more content, optimize it around that keyword and try to get that content linked to.

2. Check out your landing page analytics and work on your conversion paths. If Internet marketers were really honest with themselves, the one statistic that would always be on their mind is the conversion rates of their landing pages. If you’re not measuring how effective your offers, calls to action and landing pages are at converting your website visitors into leads, then you’re not giving yourself a knowledgeable way of improving. Conversion rate analytics take into account two major stats: 1) landing page views, and 2) form submissions. Typically, the general rules of thumb around these stats have to do with monitoring your landing page views first. If you’re not getting as many landing page views as you think you should be getting, then most likely your offers need to be revised or further developed. If it’s your conversion rates that are down (below say 5%), then perhaps optimizing your landing pages is the route to take. Either way, these stats merit constant monitoring.

3. Monitor your brand in blogs and social media. Whether you’re involved in it or not, the conversation is happening out there in the social mediasphere. How attuned are you to what’s being said not only about your company and brands, but about your industry in general? Ever wonder if you’ve missed a potential opportunity to generate a lead or even make a sale because you missed a tweet or LinkedIn group update? Get involved in social media by tracking buzz around your company, brands and industry in a manageable way. HubSpot has some great social media monitoring tools for this, or learn about how to use other social media monitoring tools such as Google Alerts (especially for blogs), HootSuite or TweetDeck.

4. Obsess over your inbound links and indexable pages count. Two of the most important stats to monitor are your inbound links and indexable pages. If you don’t have some sort of way to determine whether you are getting inbound links, you should get one ASAP. Celebrate your new inbound links and try your best to provide some sort of value to the good people who give you link love. Develop rapport with them, which will enable you to generate more links in the future. In terms of your indexable page count, the idea is to increase this number as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to give yourself more of a chance to get ranked in search engines for your targeted keywords. How do you accomplish this, you ask? Simple: blog often. One of the biggest advantages of business blogging is its SEO benefit. There are certainly times when understanding Web analytics can seem overwhelming and confusing. But like anything else in inbound marketing, remember to take it slow, one step at a time. If you do, you’ll find that your analytics will help lead you down the path to success.

Initially, many of the limitations of Google Buzz reduce how effective a marketing tool it can be. At this point, Google Buzz is designed to be used by people more than companies.  But, just like Facebook ended up creating Business Pages for companies to use instead of personal profiles, Google Buzz may in the future create some sort of business account to make a better way for businesses to interact in the community.  Given these limitations, there are still some useful tips for getting started on marketing using Google Buzz.

Note: Currently most people cannot access Google Buzz from a computer, it is only available by iPhone or Android phone until Google slowly makes it available to all Gmail users, so you may have to wait to play around with it. 

Marketing Tips for Using Google Buzz

1. Get started right away. Create a company Gmail account (hopefully something close to companyname@gmail.com) that you will use as a company Google Buzz account. As an individual, you hopefully already have a Google account with Gmail for RSS and other things, but if not, get one for yourself too.
2. Find people in your industry, and follow them. Following more people gives Google Buzz a better idea of what you like and don’t like, and it does encourage other people to follow you back because they do get notified that you followed them. Note: right now you can only use Google Buzz on Android phones and iPhones, so you may need to wait to get started on this.
3. Multimedia, multimedia, multimedia! The golden rule in social media is to be interesting, and Google Buzz allows you to be more interesting more easily using multimedia (photo and video) content. Just like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, your status updates alone are not very interesting to people. You need to create useful and interesting blog articles, photos, videos and more, and post that type of information. Google Buzz has multimedia support built-in, so use it!
4. Encourage everyone in your company to be active on Google Buzz. Marketing is not just for the Marketing Department anymore. You need to get lots of people in your company to blog, to be active in social media and to reach out to the community of people in your industry. Just like you encourage them to be active in other social networks, encourage them to be active in Google Buzz.
5. Remember that social media affects SEO too. Google has already started to put social status updates into search results, and they recently launched social search. All this means that even if you think everyone you sell to will never use social media, you still need to have a presence in social media as a company. Building a larger presence in social media and using social media to promote your content will help you rank more often in plain old search results (which are no longer so “plain” or “old”), which is important for every company.
6. Viral content is more important than ever. The one thing that Google Buzz does differently from other social media services is that it curates or filters the content from the people you follow, meaning that only the best or most popular content bubbles to the top. Google Buzz will also show people recommended Buzz from people they are not following, based on popularity. So, the more viral and popular your content is, the further and faster it will spread. This recommendation feature is somewhat unique to Google Buzz, and makes viral content even more important to being successful using Google Buzz.

Are you ready to get started with Google Buzz?  What else do you think you should do to use it effectively for marketing?

According to the latest survey, the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company has dropped from 45% in 2008 to 25% in 2010, decreasing almost by half!

I don’t know about you, but as social media continues to be a marketing hot topic, I’ve seen a lot of discussion emphasizing the importance of company/product referrals and word of mouth marketing.  So do these findings about the decline in peer-to-peer trust completely undermine the power of referrals?

Not exactly.  As we mentioned in this morning’s post, referrals from friends continue to carry their weight in social media.  Still, something has to have changed since 2008, right?       

Why the decline in peer-to-peer trust?

One possibility includes the reach of social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  Now that social networks are increasing in popularity, users are maintaining larger groups of “friends” that include more casual acquaintances, possibly dulling the credibility of peer networks. It’s no longer a matter of trusting the opinion just because it’s the opinion of a peer.  Now people are less likely to trust an opinion unless it’s from a person they know.

Another possibility?  Now that marketers are getting a firm grasp on social media, consumers are becoming more skeptical about the influences behind peer referrals.  Again, this skepticism increases if it’s the opinion of a peer they don’t really know.

Be smart about your social media interactions.

For marketers, this means that building credibility in people’s social media reactions is crucial. The best way to do this is by creating valuable content that people will want to share with their networks.

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, people still need to hear things in five different places before they actually believe it.  Therefore, a social media referral isn’t the be-all, end-all.  People still look to different sources before making decisions.  Allocate your marketing budget smartly by putting some aside for social media interaction and dedicating some to other inbound marketing initatives like creating content.