What tools do you use in conjunction with your content marketing program?

What tools would you like to use?

Marketers aren’t holistically considering content needs before investing in tools. Far too often, they procure solutions with overlapping capabilities.

To date, there hasn’t been a detailed map of the content vendor landscape (though Curata maintains a good list). More important, the available content solutions haven’t been mapped to actual use cases.

There are tools out there for creation, curation, collaboration, compliance, and plenty of content chores that don’t start with the letter C, such as distribution and syndication, measurement and analytics, optimization, topic discovery, defining and finding an audience, and workflow management (among many others).

Who buys these solutions? How are they sourced? Who uses them inside of enterprises and agencies? Do those end-users actually have a say in the selection? Is there a budget for content technology in the enterprise? If there is, what types of solutions will it be spent on?

This is where I could really use your help. We’re researching the above questions to hopefully bring clarity to what is a somewhat confusing and tangled landscape of vendors and tools. We believe more clarity will emerge around the content vendor landscape, but not without marketers weighing in and making their wants and needs known.

May I ask for less than 10 minutes of your time, if you’re at all involved in content marketing, to respond to our research survey on the topic? The findings will be published and made publicly available.

The purpose of our research is to explore the plethora of content tools available, and map them to marketers’ actual needs and use cases, as well as how content tools are sourced, evaluated, and purchased. Some of the questions we’re trying to answer include:

• How do real world content marketing cases use map to specific content tools?
• What types of content tools are available to the market?
• How do companies select/purchase content tools based on needs and use cases?

Once we have your responses, we’re going back to the vendors (more than 100 of them) with a questionnaire designed around the survey responses. In other words, we don’t want to evaluate content tools from a research analyst perspective or base our evaluations on what the vendors say they do. Rather, we are digging to uncover the needs and the processes in the marketplace.

Thanks very much for taking the time to weigh in on the survey. (And for passing the link along to your colleagues).

This post originally published on iMedia.

All prognostications for 2014 (including my own) point to native advertising as A Big Thing to watch this year – and it is. The FTC’s December workshop thrust native into the spotlight, but nothing has amplified the fact that native advertising has arrived more than the New York Times launch of Paid Posts, its native product that launched this week with Dell as the first advertiser.

Late as the Grey Lady may be to the party (virtually all other members of the Online Publishers Association already have some form of native advertising on offer), the Times is the Times; a standard bearer in media, publishing and journalistic best practices.

Native advertising has been both delayed and controversial at the newspaper of record. Executive Editor Jill Abramson has expressed strong reservations. Publisher and Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. very recently distributed a native advertising “manifesto” to staff.

So with the new product finally launched, I caught up with the Times’ EVP Advertising Meredith Kopit Levien to pose some questions about native advertising at the Times. Most are based around the best practice recommendations in my recent research on the topic of native advertising (download available here).

Q: Native advertising is highly labor intensive and requires “feeding the beast” with content. Your first advertiser, Dell, is led by Managing Editor Stephanie Losee, who has  a very strong editorial background. Will the Times have difficulties finding other clients up to this challenge?

Levien: We see a lot of clients who have developed their own newsrooms or who have always-on content strategies. Social media gave everybody the opportunity to be a publisher. The amount of maturity in the marketing is growing. There are a whole lot of marketers who have an always-on content strategy. Using that in conjunction with the Times’ content division is how we’ll produce content. Intel [another enterprise with a very mature content organization] and a handful of others will launch this quarter.

Q: What formal policies does the TImes have in places around church/state divisions? 

Levien: We’ll establish more over time. The brightest, clearest, most important is the newsroom is the newsroom. It does not touch [Paid Posts]. That will not change. That’s an important separation to keep. The others fall out from that. Also, Paid Posts carry a label and full disclosure.

Q: The Times is hiring freelancers to write Paid Post content. Can these same freelancers also write for the editorial sections of the paper?

Levien: That’s an evolving discussion.

 Q: Dell’s commitment is three months. What about other advertisers’ commitments? And given this is a premium product, will you limit how many advertisers can run Paid Posts at any given time?

Levien: We are establishing minimums. We don’t want to do this as a one-off. We also require that all content be original, not repurposed for the Times.  We’re not in any danger of the consumer thinking there’s too much of this on the site.

Q: If advertisers can’t bring their own content in, can they get your content to-go, so to say?

Levien: Once we co-produce the piece, the marketer can do with that what they want – the marketer has ownership. That’s the to-go model: using our content for their purposes.

Q: What metrics is the New York Times tracking to gauge the success of this program?

Levien: We are using an incredible vendor named SimpleReach. They have built a custom metrics dashboard. They give a marketer the same metrics the newsroom uses: pages, views, etc., also social referrals. How much traction is the content getting compared to editorial content? Secondly, is it trending on the social web, and if it is, what can we do to amplify it?

Q: Many publishers offering native advertising solutions, like Hearst and Buzzfeed, are offering training and educational programs to advertisers and agencies. Will the New York Times follow suit?

Levien:  Certainly in the early months we’re going to do collaborative education with the partners we bring on. It’s not out of the question we wouldn’t turn that into a program.  We have a  lot of knowledge about how content moves through our platform.

Q: There’s a great deal of role confusion when it comes to native advertising. Brands, their advertising agencies, PR agencies – everyone is jostling for position in this space. Who do you anticipate you going to work with?

Levien: There is  much more transition that will happen between paid owned and earned media. We’re mostly working with the brands, but there’s a huge role for the ad agencies and the PR agencies. Lots of brands have agencies who are helping to add to their content capabilities. We’ve tried to organize in a way that’s friendly to an agency buying.

Longtime readers know not to expect a list of annual “predictions” so prevalent in trade publications this time of year. After all, I’m an industry analyst. Un-endowed with the psychic abilities that would enable me to read crystal balls or entrails, I must instead rely on my innate powers of observation and analysis.

That’s not said casually. Observation and analysis of digital marketing and media is what I do.  Based on industry movement, technology developments, and industry trends, these are the areas I’ll be watching most closely in the new year.

1. Enterprises Organize for Content  The hue and cry up to a year or so ago from content marketing evangelists was “hire a chief content officer!” The sentiment behind this exhortation was and remains correct: content strategy is the foundation of content marketing. To create, maintain and enforce strategy, guidelines, processes, governance and guardrails are entirely necessary. However not every board is disposed to create a new C-level position. That’s why companies are taking seriously the need to organize for content marketing.  Last spring we identified six real-world models. Expect to see companies begin to adopt these with some alacrity in 2014.
2. Native Advertising Will Surge Brands, publishers, agencies, technology vendors – virtually the entire digital advertising ecosystem has a stake in the ground when it comes to native advertising. The IAB and the FTC have chimed in with the beginnings of defining the space and the rules of engagement. Virtually all the members of the Online Publishers Association now offer some form of native advertising, and major brands are allocating budget for serious experiments. You’re going to hear a lot more about this form of converged media (paid + owned) in the coming months.
3. Real-Time Marketing Another form of converged media is real-time marketing,  the strategy and practice of reacting with immediacy in digital channels.  As more channels and media operate in real-time, and as real-time events such as television converge with digital channel on mobile and social media platforms, virtually all marketers will be challenged this year to define a real-time marketing strategy, and indeed to determine what real-time means for their organization and marketing efforts.
4. Content Marketing ‘Stacks’ Emerge It’s already happening. Adobe has formally announced what we’ve long known they would: their Marketing and Creative Clouds will merge. Oracle bought Compendium and Eloqua (expect Salesforce to do something very, very similar quite soon – ExactTarget isn’t quite in the content bucket).  This trend indicates 2014 will usher in an important new chapter in content marketing maturity: end-to-end, cloud-based technology solutions similar to ad stacks, rather than the boutique array of much more limited solutions that are currently available. This matters not just as a technology play, but as something that will make content a safer and more integrated enterprise investment.
5. Media Continue to Converge Paid, earned and owned media continue to collapse into blended forms of marketing. This trend is only accelerating with consumer trends such as cord-cutting, that make platforms such as television even more digital than they formerly were. Concurrently, OOH signage and other forms of media are more digital, too, allowing owned content and forms of shared media such as tweets to circulate freely through media ecosystem.
6. Breaking Down Silos If number 6 comes as a surprise, you clearly haven’t read the first five trends. Media converging, a greater emphasis on content marketing, native advertising, real-time marketing and other blended forms of marketing means teams must collaborate more than every before. Goal alignment, resource sharing, and content portability – none of this happens internally, much less with vendor and agency partners, unless barriers and divisions are smashed.  There’s no more time to wait. Silos must be abolished now.
7.  Interoperability Much more than a byproduct of convergence, apps, gadgets, devices are becoming interoperable – seamlessly interoperable. AS a for instance, my personal fitness monitor smoothly syncs with my Android phone, laptop computer, iPad, Walgreen’s loyalty card, stand-alone weight and food trackers, and (if I wanted, which I don’t) with all my social media accounts. All this at the flick of preference radio buttons. The days or “either/or” “Mac/Windows” customer experience are over. Customers expect – and demand – seamlessness from their digital life.
8. More Mobile Yeah, we hear this every year, but mobile really has come to the fore. More smartphones and tablets are flying off the shelves than PCs and laptops, and mobile finally commands more consumer time than the boob-tube.  This means new experiences, media strategies and (looping back to the top of the list) more content, real-time and native in marketing plans.  “Mobile first” is no longer a hollow mantra. It’s really, actually true.
9. Measuring What’s Undefined  Is this really a genuine trend? I hope it will be. There’s this unrealistic expectation in digital that everything’s measurable. It is, but not necessarily right out of the box. That’s why publisher metrics are applied to native advertising campaigns (though goals are widely divergent), and way too much stuff is measured in terms of “engagement,” which means something different to everyone who utters the term. A trend I’d really LIKE to see in 2014 is, in additional to all kinds of good metrics such as the ability to attribute ROI and measure accountably and aligned with goals, is a readiness to admit that it’s just too early to apply hard-and-fast, unalterable metrics to brand new stuff we’re all still trying to figure out. Square pegs, round holes.

Part one of this two-part series examined how organizations plot strategy for real-time marketing (RTM), based on “Real Time Marketing: The Agility to Leverage ‘Now,'” research Altimeter Group recently published on the topic.

Once strategy is in place, it’s time to turn to RTM execution, in particular enabling it to happen in a seamless, scalable way.

Assemble team and tools

Successful RTM requires that the right constituents be available, informed, educated, and empowered. Assemble the proper teams (i.e., social, creative, copywriting, legal, PR, etc.) and tools (i.e., listening, analytics, design, digital assets, publishing tools, etc.) to ensure streamlined execution. Multiple companies we interviewed underscored the importance of having a “war room,” akin to a newsroom, where all team members are literally present and able to collaborate — in real-time.

For unplanned, reactive RTM execution, the existing content hub or social media team takes the lead. Alternately, a pre-identified and trained virtual team leaps into action.

For anticipated events, a war room is often the hub, driving real-time approvals, design, triage, and publication. Even brands without 24/7 RTM teams can assemble trained and prepared teams for special events, as Oreo did for the Super Bowl.

For anticipated or planned events with content created in advance, assemble teams with regularly scheduled meetings to discuss event strategies and guidelines and identify areas of opportunity.

Establish triage

Scenario-based triage is one of the single most effective ways to streamline RTM execution. Certain cues or events trigger repeatable workflows. Community managers should be able to identify what types of language indicate threats or risks for the brand, and how and when to escalate them to legal, PR, or the appropriate team. When developing RTM content, consider how users may respond, then identify what warrants response and build workflows based on positive and negative interactions or needs. The more detail provided, the more teams accounted for, and the more scenarios planned for, the better.

Train and test all parties

A big part of operating in real-time is enabling key employees to feel trusted and empowered to act. This level of confidence is only achieved via education and training across all stakeholders — not only those posting and responding but those creating, approving, distributing, and monitoring, both internally and externally (i.e., agencies and vendors). Training should include both strategic and tactical elements.

Training tools and testing will vary by organization based on resources and stakeholders. The goal of training and testing, however, is universal: to establish confidence for those executing and trust in them by all stakeholders, management, and the brand at large.

Please read the rest of this post on iMedia, where it originally published.

When the curtain went up on the Emmy Awards, HBO was ready.

As usual, the cable network was nominated for a plethora of awards. Naturally, there was no way of knowing who, or what programming, would win which categories. At the same time, there were plenty of knowns: those shows, actors, directors and talent who were nominated in each category.
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So, the social media team, led by VP of Digital and Social Media Sabrina Caluori, sprang into action weeks before the actual event. They created content for every possible award outcome. But first, they informed internal stakeholders (management, legal, communications) about their overall strategy and what the team planned to do and react to. From this, guidelines and rules of engagement were developed around the content, much of which was locked and loaded in advance of the event.

“We know we need freedom to develop content on the fly, but we need to know the guardrails [and] if anything we did needed to be escalated,” she said. “There are built-in parameters for the campaign.”

HBO aced the evening (mostly on Twitter) with responses to the awards, winners, and show itself that were immediate, timely, on-message and on-brand.

HBO is just one of the many brands we spoke with for a new research report, “Real-Time Marketing: The Agility to Leverage ‘Now’” (download available at no cost under Creative Commons).

We’ve identified six business use cases for real-time marketing (RTM) and outlined best practices based on our research. But if successful RTM boils down to just one thing, it’s having a clear, mature, fully developed content strategy in place before leveraging the “right now.”

RTM initiatives fall into a quadrant of initiatives that fall on a sliding scale between reactive/proactive and planned/unplanned. Being proactive and planning is ideally where you want to be when marketing in real-time, as illustrated in the above HBO example (there are many other such case examples in the report).

Please read the rest of this post on MarketingLand, where it originally published

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As digital channels operate increasingly in the ‘now,’ all marketing organizations must consider to what degree they will function in real-time, and even define what real-time is relative to their operations and marketing organization.

The payoff? That digital marketing ideal: the right message to the right person at the right time. The right instant, even.

Real-time marketing (RTM) can add tremendous value to customer interactions; making brands appear relevant, with-it, informed, dynamic and buzzworthy. The movement toward RTM is also driven by consumer expectations as immediacy, relevance and access increase with technology.

Our new research report, Real-Time Marketing: The Agility to Leverage ‘Now,’ identifies six business use cases for real-time marketing that fall into a quadrant of planned/unplanned and reactive vs. proactive interactions. In numerous interviews with agency and brand-side practitioners, we found all successful RTM requires enormous strategic and tactical preparation, beginning with a strong , clear and well-defined content strategy.

RTM Use Case #1: Brand Events
Brand events include product launches, conferences, media and customer-facing events where content strategy, pre-approvals, media plans, hashtags, creative, editorial calendars, etc. can be prepared in advance. During events, staff are available to push out content and react to posts in social media.

RTM Use Case #2. Anticipated Event
A growing number of organizations are preparing for real-time events that are anticipated in advance. Business goals, strategies, teams, and approvals are ready, content is locked and loaded.

RTM Use Case #3: Location/object-based
A small but promising use case of RTM taps into location and object-based triggers. Hand-crafted examples of this type of RTM include local food trucks publicizing specials and current locations. Increasingly sophisticated technology, such as iBeacon, target a consumer’s location down to the store-shelf level and push a promotion to that person’s phone in the moment. That’s literally targeting the right person at the right time and the right place.

RTM Use Case #4. Predictive Analytics-based
Another relatively small but growing area of triggered RTM is based on predictive analytics. Amazon has long used predictive data to display recommendations to customers based on browsing and purchase history. This trend will gain momentum as data solutions become more accessible and simpler to implement.

RTM Use Case #5. Customer Interaction
Customer interactions take many forms: CRM, customer service, handling complaints, and community interactions being primary examples. While many organizations handle such interactions to customer service, the very public, visible and occasionally even viral nature of these interactions in social channels means they are increasingly becoming a marketing function. This holds particularly true now that customers have come to expect brands to respond to their digital queries and complaints in near-real time.

RTM Use Case #6. Breaking News
The most reactive form of RTM is responding in a legitimate, relevant manner to unanticipated breaking news. This can also be the riskiest, most spontaneous, and difficult type of RTM. Advance preparation is all but impossible. Breaking news isn’t always good news, so an acute degree of sensitivity is called for. Often, this also requires following a story as it unfolds. The opportunity is hitting it over the fence by appropriately leveraging the event in a way that is relevant, both to the event and to the brand.

As with all Altimeter Group research, Real-Time Marketing: The Agility to Leverage ‘Now’ is available at no cost under Creative Commons.  Help yourself!  And please let us know your reactions, as well as how your organization is functioning in real-time.

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Cross-posted from the Altimeter Group blog

Quick housekeeping note:

As an analyst, I receive up to a dozen briefing requests per day from companies ranging from the smallest start-up to the largest enterprises. Conducting briefings is an essential part of what analysts do. It’s a big component of how we stay abreast in our coverage area and research agendas.

There’s an art to conducting a good briefing, something discussed in this space before. There’s also a great deal of logistical heavy lifting. Companies that request a briefing from me directly, no matter how well I know the business, or the person making the request, always receive this response:

Thanks for your inquiry regarding a briefing with Altimeter Group.

I must ask that you please fill out our briefing request form. It’s very much to your advantage to do so. All the analysts and researchers are alerted to the opportunity, so one briefing (if accepted) potentially goes much further inside the company. This also greatly streamlines the scheduling process on our side.

Briefing requests are circulated within the company weekly, so please allow at least two weeks for a response.

Appreciate your following our protocol on this.

I’d love to hear from you, but please – it’s got to be via the form, not my email address. I may not be able to accept a briefing due to scheduling conflicts, or incompatibility with my current research agenda. Wait a few months and try me again. But bear in mind that if we’ve conducted a briefing already in the past year, chances are very slim that we’ll be doing so again until 9 to 12 months have elapsed. If there’s company news, or a new product, a briefing isn’t necessarily in order if we’ve already gone over company background together – just send over the update.

Oh, and if you haven’t launched yet, it’s too early for a briefing. We’re going to ask you about clients and specific problems you’re solving for them. You need some real world traction before you’re ready to discuss your business with us.

Thanks for reading – and thanks for sending those briefing requests via the form!

As the company recently strongly hinted it would, Instagram today announced it will debut advertising on the platform early next month – native advertising, that is.  Aligned with the definition of the term in the research I recently published, the ad creative will be photos from the advertisers’ own Instagram accounts that appear in the feed, differentiated by a “Sponsored” notice in the upper right corner which users can tap on for deeper disclosure.

Just prior to today’s announcement, I discussed the launch with Instagram’s Emily White, director of business operations and Jeff Kanter, product manager. Their approach to monetizing the platform is so careful you could almost characterize it as curatorial. Ten brands were hand picked as launch advertisers based on the “great things” they’re already doing on Instagram: Adidas, Ben & Jerry’s, Burberry, GE, Lexus, Macy’s, Michael Kors, PayPal, and Starwood Hotels.

White says Instagrams’ users come to “be inspired,” and these brands maintain a level of quality that’s inspirational. Which is why the initial metrics for the campaigns will be heavily brand centric: recall, brand lift and awareness. “There’s a lot of value in impressions and views that may not be captured in likes or comments. Instagram will guarantee a certain number of impressions initially, which will vary by campaign. This is a premium brand advertising product. Success is brand lift over a longer period of time.”

The ads will initially appear in the feeds of U.S. users who are 18 and older with very minimal targeting by segment. No social data will be used in targeting, instead broader segments (e.g. male vs. female), “Somewhat like a magazine experience,” says White.

“We’re really focused on maintaining a high bar and will publish quality guidelines,” added Kanter, who explained that users can opt out of ads, Facebook style, on a case by case basis (but not opt out of the entire Instagram advertising experience).

While not having seen this in the wild (the ads don’t launch for another week or so), I’m impressed. We’ve mapped eight critical element for success, and Instagram is apparently conforming to each of them right out of the gate, from disclosure and transparency (that “Sponsored” link) to education (published quality guidelines for advertisers).

Next? Let’s hope we hear from the advertisers by the end of the year with a progress report, as well as lessons learned. This is new terrain not just for Instagram, but for the industry as a whole.

Today Oracle announced that it’s buying Compendium, a company that offers cloud-based content marketing workflow solutions.  Compendium will be integrated into the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud.

There’s one sure way of telling if a new form of digital marketing is becoming legit: the FTC decides to take a long, hard look at it. And that’s exactly what they have announced they’ll do with native advertising, holding public hearings in Washington on December 4.

We’ve danced this dance before. Back in 2003, I testified at the FTC’s Spam Forum, which led to the enactment of the CAN-SPAM act passed by Congress the following year. The previous year, the FTC published guidance on search engine advertising. In 2000, the FTC published its first guidance on .com Disclosures, aimed at eliminating deception in digital advertising. Guidelines governing endorsements and testimonials (and, by extension, word-of-mouth marketing practices), were published in 2009.

Having published the first independent research report on native advertising just days before the FTC called this public hearing, it’s pretty gratifying to see what was clearly inevitable happy with such alacrity. Almost synchronously with the FTC’s announcement of hearings, brands ranging from the hyper-established New Yorker to not-yet-monetized start-up Pinterest were announcing new native advertising plans and offerings, joining a host of other publisher and social media platforms.

The IAB, anticipating the FTC’s move, already has a native advertising task force at work (disclosure: I’m not an IAB member, but I am a taskforce member).

In December, the FTC hopes to begin to answer questions about maintaining editorial integrity in the face of new advertising products that look a lot like content. The hearings will examine how these messages are presented, differentiated and disclosed to consumers as sponsored content. I’m particularly interested in learning more about consumer perceptions of native advertising (so little research has been conducted in this very nascent discipline), and how disclosures will transfer when native ads are shared and amplified in social channels.

Doubtless much will emerge from the hearings, as well as in the coming months around industry self-regulation for native advertising. (It’s highly unlikely that actual legislation will emerge on the issue.) In the meantime, I’d like to share the recommendations we make in our report on the issues of transparency, disclosure and trust in native advertising:

Transparency, disclosure, and trust: We’ve been through this before, collectively as an industry. As with the early days of search advertising, when paid search results required clear delineation from organic ones, or word-of-mouth marketing and pay-for-play blogging, industry standards will emerge around the disclosure of what’s paid and what’s editorial content on a variety of media platforms in addition to individual publisher policies. In addition to overt disclosure on publisher and social media platforms, a code of ethics is required to maintain editorial objectivity and the boundaries between publisher and editorial work. Until industry self-regulation emerges (the IAB already has a taskforce at work on the issue), it is absolutely imperative all parties err on the side of caution: too much, rather than too little, disclosure.

1. Disclose that the placement is commercial in nature.
2. Link to policies that govern such placement.
3. Provide a channel for inquiry.

This column originally published in iMedia