Watch this quick video to hear Stephen talk about his vision for enterprise content management, ideas around how to measure content marketing initiatives and also how his team and other groups at Microsoft leverage Content Cloud to programmatically deliver amazing customer experiences.

The post Thismoment in Content Marketing with Microsoft’s Stephen Bury appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

Internet content is becoming “numb.” The worldwide web has increased from one page to 4.57 billion indexed pages since going public in 1991. Blog posts, digital magazine articles, web copy and social posts account for much of that growth, yet most of it seems…vacuous and pointless, to put it nicely. The readers feel numb and indifferent. Great content has always been the exception rather than the norm, but the internet magnifies norms. Unlike a print editor or publisher, the web turns nothing down. The cheapness of publishing often cheapens what’s published.

After writing for my 200^th company a few weeks ago, I started to analyze the sources of numb content because I want to fight it. I call one source the “Suspension Bridge Effect.” It helps to explain why words like “engagement,” “connection”, “innovative,” and “personal” have lost their meaning. Like one little hole in an air mattress, their ambiguity deflates whole pieces of writing and entire marketing campaigns. To dismiss them as “buzzwords” and move on is to gloss over how we choose and use words.

My goal here is to illustrate what the Suspension Bridge Effect is and show how content marketers can overcome it. This is a piece about how we can re-imbue words with power – and hopefully create content that is alive rather than numb.

Simulating the SBE

Imagine a vast, thundering river. Your audience is on the left bank and you are on the right bank. Whatever your intention – to sell, inspire, educate or entertain – you have to bring audience members across the river such that they share your perspective. Content is an invitation to a new perspective.

Marketing words and writing are the “suspension bridges” that allow individuals to cross the river. When a company grows dramatically, the public gets exposed to their marketing language. It appears in news media, social media, conventions and conversations. Other entrepreneurs and marketers start to borrow that suspension bridge.

Why? One, the language is already associated with a successful company, so it seems powerful. Two, companies want the public to know they’re in the same space as this champ. The competitor talks about “engagement,” so we need to tell everyone that we do “engagement” too. Three, originality feels dangerous. Often, companies that try too hard to brand new terms and language get ignored because nobody knows what they’re talking about.

So, tons of companies use the same suspension bridge, but for each company, that word means something different. “Engagement” in a CRM company versus a mobile game company versus an HR consulting firm versus an event planning company versus [fill in the blank] means something different. The more marketers appropriate a buzzword, the less the public understands what the word means. Consequently, the Left Bank becomes reluctant to cross the bridge. Why would people share your perspective if they can’t distinguish it from 200 other perspectives?
This is the Suspension Bridge Effect. It destroys the power of words by spreading their meaning too far and thin. The Left Bank no longer understands what’s on the Right Bank. The Right Bank loses the ability to empathize with the Left Bank – a marketer’s insistence on using words no one can understand is good evidence of this.

When a company dares to create a new suspension bridge, and succeeds, companies flock to it. The process repeats.

Two Types of SBEs

Now that you have a visual of the SBE, let’s talk about how to recognize and cure two common cases.

The Suspension Bridge Adjective. This is when a buzzy adjective is used as filler. The best example is the indiscriminate use of words like “innovative”, “disruptive”, “pioneering” and “leading edge”. Another common case is when marketers toss words like “real-time”, “personalized” or “customer-centric” before words like “solution”, “platform” and “service.”

Think about the last time you saw the word “innovative” in a press release, piece of web copy or a self-promotional blog post. Did it change your perspective about the company or its technology? Did you suddenly realize, “Wow, they do make ground-breaking stuff!”? Or, more likely, did the word numb you – did you even notice it?

Consider these two lines:

• A: Acme Company, the leading-edge maker of highly innovative and real-time mobile widgets,…
• B: Emca Company, a provider of mobile widgets,…

Who do you trust more? Why is Acme so much more self-aggrandizing than Emca? Did those three bolded Suspension Bridge Adjectives tell me anything useful? Hell no.

The cure is to remove the empty adjectives. In the press release or web copy, you describe the purpose and function of the technology to illustrate that it’s innovative. In content marketing, you create a suspension bridge that no one else can copy – it consists of good stories, not an abused buzzword. To be clear, when I say “story,” I am talking about real events that have a beginning, middle, climax, end, characters, etc. You know, real stories.

The Suspension Bridge Noun. The SB Noun is usually delivered within a value proposition. Here are some common examples:

• We power deeper connection and engagement with your audience.
• Increase sales efficiency and productivity
• Widget C powers marketing personalization automation
• We ensure customer success across all touch points
• Engage your audience with data-driven marketing insights [Combo: noun and adjective SBE together]

These lines come from my head. If your company does use one of these generic taglines, consider it worrisome that a random writer came up with it under these circumstances.

These are trickier to deal with than SB Adjectives because you have to replace rather than delete them. Step one is to define the nouns you currently use. I call it the “What does that mean?” game. I play it daily.

Let’s say we make text message technology for marketers (random choice), and let’s do this game with the first bullet: “we power deeper connection and engagement with your audience”. “Connection” means that marketers can send text messages to people. Maybe “engagement” refers to the feedback marketers get from those text messages. We keep track of who opened the text message, where, how quickly, etc. so we learn which messages attract readers. So in simple language, “We let you send mass text messages to your audience. We show you how people react to those messages.” You might spice this up a bit…but if you revert to SB Adjectives and Nouns, no one knows what you’re talking about.

From plain, understandable English, we can create stories about how “connection” and “engagement” actually work. For example, what if a medical mission in Nepal used our tech to reach people in rural communities where cell phones are common but other digital tech is not? It could be a darn good content marketing piece about how the tech was used to reach patients, treat common ailments and save lives.

We started by using the same Suspension Bridges as everyone else – connection and engagement. We broke them down into definitions that make sense. Then, we found a story that illustrates why this technology is important. It happens to be a story that no one else can write or use – therefore, it’s unique and could be powerful, if the content is done well.

Don’t Hate Buzzwords – Just Understand Their Limitations

The Suspension Bridge Effect illustrates that buzzwords are problematic because they can’t change people’s perspectives. When we read an ambiguous buzzword – especially in a blog post or article that was supposed to inspire, inform and entertain us – we instead go numb. With enough exposure to the Suspension Bridge Effect, we grow numb to most content. That is bad for the entire marketing world.

Some writing still overflows with meaning and courage. We tell people about this content, not just for the sake the dopamine it produces, but because we believe people will be better for reading it. This content tells great stories that can’t be found anywhere else. It overcomes the Suspension Bridge Effect.

Although I used B2B examples to make my point, consumer examples abound, and I hope to discuss them in the future. My goal is not to disparage buzzwords and discourage their use altogether. Buzzwords are useful. Consider “software-as-a-service” or SaaS. Using that one abbreviation, I can communicate a lot about a company and its business model. I just can’t distinguish that company from other software companies. Or, consider my recent blog post about “user-generated content,” a.k.a. “UGC.” With a marketing audience, that word allows me to talk about a whole category of content without awkwardly redefining it in every sentence.

When we communicate with the Left Bank of the river, let’s choose words that haven’t come to mean everything and therefore nothing. Let’s have the courage to create and define new words when English fails capture what we see. Let’s break the mystery around marketing language by returning to the basics. Who, What, When, Where, Why and How still rule.

My favorite antonym for “numbness” is “liveliness.” If we build suspension bridges from stories instead of buzzwords, I think we can make the internet a far livelier place.

The post Have Words Like “Engagement” Become Meaningless? The Suspension Bridge Effect and How to Overcome It appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

“The problem with marketing is that they don’t know what content we really need in the field, and 90% of the time I don’t have what I need for a specific customer.”

Anonymous Salesperson

“The problem with sales is that we produce a crazy amount of content for them, but we have no idea what they find useful, what they’re sharing with customers or what’s really moving the needle on deals.”

Anonymous Marketer

There’s a growing chasm between marketing and sales

Marketing creates content for the field. Sales teams need content but can’t find it, and don’t have what they think they need for their deals. The feedback never makes it to marketing. Marketing keeps creating more content that is off the mark. Sales keeps getting more and more frustrated. Deals stall. Rinse, recycle, repeat.

It’s a constant cycle that I’ve seen first-hand. And, no amount of phone calls, Salesforce notes or feedback process can fix this problem. It needs technology to make the cycle more transparent, the content more accessible and relevant, the feedback loop more evident and the salesperson more effective at moving deals along with the help of situationally-perfect content.

That’s why we created Spark

Spark is a mobile tool that gives sales teams the content they need to help them close deals – when they need it, where they need it. It’s the newest addition to our portfolio of solutions built on top of our widely-adopted Content Cloud content marketing platform. And, it’s game-changing for our customers who want to arm their sales teams with content on demand to help them close deals.

Spark is the next step in an evolution of sales enablement solutions

We purpose-built Spark to solve big content problems in sales and marketing organizations. We were of course aware of all the sales enablement solutions that came before it. It’s a hot category because of the high demand for better systems to distribute content to the field, and it’s a very expensive problem if that content isn’t accessible.

What we’ve found, however, is that almost all the solutions available today are just solving a fraction of the foundational problems that organizations face when it comes to enabling their sales forces with content. They help solve the accessibility problem by making content available on mobile devices, but they don’t begin to solve the bigger problem – ensuring that salespeople have the right story for any customer situation. Not just the right piece of collateral, but the most effective story to move the deal along.

Spark is a comprehensive solution for companies who want to tackle all the problems that make sales enablement such a tricky and expensive challenge. It is what we believe to be the next generation of solutions built to empower large sales organizations. Here’s a brief history of sales enablement solutions, which will help you to understand why we think it’s such a big deal.

• 1959: The Xerox machine creates efficient content distribution

This amazing invention solved the problem of distribution of content. For the first time ever, marketing teams could create sales material and give to their sales people en masse. The sales binder was a huge step forward in the industry!

• 1984: The Laptop computer brings portability to content

When the laptop first arrived to market (well, actually years later once the graphics became more sophisticated), salespeople finally had a digital way to present material. Combined with the projector (which arrived much later in the 90’s), they could more easily support new content when they received quarterly content updates on floppy disks from marketing.

• Early 1990’s: The VPN creates content accessibility

Giving employees in the field access to firewall-protected content stored on the company’s file servers was a big deal (and still is for many companies who haven’t adopted newer cloud-based technology). Although clunky and not user friendly (ever tried to log into a VPN with a key fob?), this new tech made content more accessible in the field and began to create a stronger connection between marketing updates and sales utilization.

• Mid 2000’s: Cloud storage systems make content convenient to store and access

Box, Dropbox, Google Drive – all amazingly powerful cloud-based systems for companies to store their content. And, for many companies, they represented freedom from the clunky VPN, and more convenient access to files through user permissioning. Cloud storage systems provide high value to organizations as they shed their expensive server infrastructure, but have been bastardized to become sales enablement systems for many. But, really, they aren’t solving the sales enablement problem, and were never really meant to.

• Early 2010’s: “New” school sales enablement tools improve mobility of content

According to chiefmartec.com, in the past two years alone, around 20-30 new “sales enablement” startups have emerged. In looking at them, almost all are focused on solving two primary pain points: 1. Make content easier to find in the field; and 2. Allow salespeople to use their tablets and mobile phones to access content. These solutions have advanced the field considerably, and are a huge step forward from cloud storage systems. But, they all fall short of solving the really expensive, deeper and more foundational problems that Spark now solves.

• March 26, 2015: Spark makes content more powerful, more accessible, more measurable and more effective

Spark has an incredibly rich feature set that connects marketing and sales teams in a way that other solutions do not. The reason for this is our roots in content marketing and our focus on building technology that fundamentally helps our customers to engage with their customers in unique and meaningful ways. Spark builds on that history, and provides amazing benefits to organizations looking to see meaningful performance improvements across their sales and marketing organizations:

• Better content ROI transparency: CRM integration for personalized experience and content-to-close analytics
• More well-prepared salespeople: Internal-only content for training and meeting prep
• More effective content for any sales situation: Marketing-curated content “playlists” for the most common sales situations
• Greater flexibility for solution sellers: Sales-curated, marketing-controlled playlists for unique sales situations
• More shared learnings in the field: Trending playlists for transparency and collaboration amongst reps
• Better informed salespeople: Curated news feed and UGC to keep the field current on industry current events
• More immediate value for prospects: Native email and texting for instant delivery of content to prospects

Learn more about Spark here. In the meantime, enjoy this 2-minute video that brings the new tool to life.

The post Meet Spark: A Content-First Approach to Sales Enablement appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

These days, many consumers are watching television with mobile devices in their hands. Increasingly, this isn’t simply to be a distraction during the ads. People are using their second screen—smartphone or tablet—to connect with other people as they experience a show or event, to get more information about what they see on TV, or possibly even make a purchase. Some see this as a problem; others might see it as a second screen content marketing opportunity.

More than 43 million people watched the 2014 Academy Awards broadcast live. According to Google, more than half of the Oscar-related searches that day came from mobile devices. This year, during the Golden Globe awards, Google searches spiked for the actors and director of Boyhood each time the movie won an award. And 65-70% of that traffic came from mobile devices.

It isn’t just search that feels the impact from the second screen phenomenon; social media gets a bump during television viewing as well. The act of watching television is becoming more social because of the power of technology to connect viewers and to build shared experiences.

If you are aiming to get attention on a second screen during the time a consumer is watching television, you are competing with everything else in that consumer’s life. According to Millward Brown: 22% of what a consumer is doing on a mobile device is stacking—looking at content not related to what they are watching on TV. Only 14% of that time is meshing—simultaneous use of the second screen for content related to what the consumer is watching.

Whether the goal is to educate, share information, build brand recognition, or make a sale, content marketers can and should take advantage of this growing second screen phenomenon.

5 Tips for Second Screen Content Marketing

Tip 1: Plan, plan, plan

You have an editorial calendar for a reason—because coming up with content ideas on the fly is a recipe for disaster. The same is true for trying to play the real time marketing game for any televised show or event, pre-recorded or live, scripted or filmed from real life.

Tip 2: Be flexible

Planning has its place. But real-time marketing is all about your ability to go with the flow. If you plan a campaign or tactic based on the belief that something specific will happen, you have to be ready to pivot if that doesn’t happen. And, of course, you have to be ready for the truly unexpected, as Oreo famously was during Super Bowl XLVII in 2013.

Tip 3: Be relevant

You don’t have much time to capture the audience’s attention—so the content had better be bite-sized and relevant. This is where the planning comes in…know your brand message and consider how that relates to the show or event. Snickers surely didn’t know that Luis Suarez was going to bite Giorgio Chiellini during a 2014 World Cup game. But they were ready with an on-brand message when he did.

Tip 4: Hashtags are your friend

At the very least, use of a well-timed and relevant hashtag on social media is the way to get your brand involved in a show or event and to get your audience involved with your brand. If you happen to be running any ads during the show, a hashtag is a must to foster social engagement.

Tip 5: Go big or go home

If you want to do real-time marketing on mobile devices, you’ve got to take a chance. Consider more than just a hashtag to involve and engage your audience. Dominos Pizza created a mobile app to accompany the show The X Factor. The app enables users to vote, provide real-time feedback, and connect with their friends. And, also, by the way, order pizza.

As you think about second screen content marketing, remember…the primary purpose here is to entertain. Your audience is already doing something else. This isn’t the time for sharing important information or using a hard sell. This is the time for fun and engagement. With a little preparation and a willingness to be bold, you can use the second screen to your advantage and amaze and impress your brand’s family, friends, and fans.

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