Tim Parker's blog

This is a question posted by Ian Mavorah in the LinkedIn Marketing Executives Group a week ago  which has generated a lively discussion. There are plenty of people who think that social media are making us anti-social. I don't. Here's why.

It seems pretty clear to me that social media mostly complement face-to-face interaction. My teenage kids of course use it all the time, but as an adjunct to their normal social lives. Conversations at school can continue into the evening with lots of people at once. Arrangements can be made for the next day and so on.

An example from business: I talked this week with a consulting firm that has a proprietary gated community with several thousand customers and prospects. They have a full time team of 4 maintaining it, adding content etc. They are very clear that it's a complement to their meetings, seminars and other face-to-face interactions (which is why they can't measure the leads that it, per se, generates.)

I'd note that the older generations' (Prior to Gen-Y that is) protestations about how social media are killing social interaction are fundamentally no different than the protestations that respectively accompanied the telephone, the television, the cellphone, the internet, rock and roll, and though it was before my time, I don't doubt the advent of the railroads too. I confidently predict that within five years all the baby boomers and enough of the traditionalists will be using it, that debates like this will seem quaint.

P.S. Of course the question should have been "ARE social media making us anti-social?", but I suspect that battle may go the way of criterion - at least this side of the pond.

Gartner has just announced the publication of a report which says that “Thought Leadership Marketing Can Be a Powerful Tool for IT Services Providers” and is “rapidly becoming an established field within marketing.”

 (This post first appeared on Marketing Profs Daily Fix on 11.25.09.)

 There’s a lot of talk about thought leadership marketing these days, and not a lot of agreement on exactly what it is. At the Bloom Group we define it as “Publishing informative material on a complex issue to position a company as an expert in its field.” Not because it’s catchy, obviously, but because research shows that’s what business readers want. A 2007 survey for instance, found that nearly three quarters of readers search for white papers to help them solve a current problem and they most value those with educational content that helps them do that.

We’ve looked a bit more closely this week at thought leadership marketing in the office furniture sector. I already mentioned that Herman Miller publishes lots on its site covering ergonomics and workplace productivity. Well so do its competitors. Several have research sections of their websites with white papers and reports covering similar topics. This is interesting, because there are other B2B sectors—contract manufacturing for instance—where it’s pretty hard to find thought leadership material at all, so outside of professional services it’s not a prerequisite of doing business.

I’m guessing that Herman Miller’s leadership has led its competitors to believe that they must follow. Unfortunately, they don’t compare for quality.

I just received a newsletter from ZDNet which has links to 2 white papers; one about Business Intelligence in Financial Services and the other about Business Technical Support. Between them they illustrate well what differentiates good white papers—the minority—from the rest.

The Financial Services paper contains all the critical ingredients of a good white paper:

• Explains problem/opportunity: e.g. “Consolidation continues unabated, causing the competitive landscape to change frequently and dramatically”
• Prescribes solution: e.g. “BI can significantly increase insight into customers, financial health, risk and compliance, and operational processes”
• Gives examples: e.g. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and others
• Describes Benefits: e.g. “Finalized their budget process sooner than they ever had before; ”
• Is useful in its own right: e.g. explains the differences between strategic, tactical and operational BI
• Has a point of view: e.g. BI doesn’t have benefit until someone acts on the insight—reducing the latency from insight to action is a key component of value
• Is well written: e.g. well organized and doesn’t presume that the reader already knows the industry’s terms

Because it has all these things, although it was written in 2008, it is still one of ZDNet’s most downloaded white papers.

The other paper avoids saying anything useful at all. For example: “The first step in choosing the right metrics is to establish what is going to be measured… Properly selected indicators will provide a summary level view of how support is performing… These may change over time as the business needs change.”

I can’t use this to do anything, and neither can anyone else. Not without calling the author—a company, not a person, that happens to “specialize in helping companies develop and execute service and support strategies.” There are incidentally, no examples and no demonstrated benefits of doing things the way the paper recommends.

As I mentioned in my last post, our research shows that readers value white papers that are educational and non-promotional. Since papers like this second one aren’t valued, I am still wondering why people continue to produce them.

Here at Bloom Group, we have a particular view that a white paper, if it’s to get traction in the marketplace, should conform to the usual standards of quality business writing; that is, it should address a complex problem or opportunity relevant to its target audience, it should be informative and non-promotional, and its prescribed solution should be underpinned by evidence that it works.

However, there is a different kind of white paper loose in the IT sector. Of course every sector has some publications that don’t exhibit high standards. But in the IT sector in particular, it’s actually acceptable for a white paper to promote a particular product or service. Here’s one from Oracle, “Seven Tips for Profiting from Lean Times with CRM.” Each of the seven tips is actually a feature of their CRM software. You can’t use the tips without the software, and so as stand-alone thought leadership, it’s not much use. And because the product features are buried in pseudo-educational prose, it’s not a lot of use as a product spec either.

In a short survey of IT white papers, we discovered that around 70% promote a particular product or service, and that only about 10% have any real educational content, beyond promoting the offering.

So is this OK in the IT sector? Are IT execs somehow more accepting of biased promotional material than buyers in other sectors?

Apparently not. We looked at the current most popular papers on TechRepublic to see how objective and educational they were. As we expected, 90% are educational and non-promotional. This one from CA (a software and services firm) is typical of the top 10: Practical Disaster Recovery Planning: A Step-by-Step Guide. This advice is useful absent CA’s products or services, and the paper ranks 2nd of around 25,000 papers at TechRepublic.

So IT buyers aren’t gullible after all. But why on earth are IT vendors producing pseudo-educational ‘white papers’ that promote their offerings, 90% of which are of little interest to their readers?

I wrote an article on sales presentations a couple of weeks ago which is posted here. In response, Joey Asher, a veteran communications and selling skills coach, sent me a copy of his latest book ‘How to Win a Pitch.’ The book is great—Joey narrates his rich experience and drives home his eminently sensible recommendations in an easily digestible style.

There are many fundamentals we agree on, but for now at least, I’ll pick just one. Joey says; don’t be afraid to give away your solution in your sales pitch. Too many professionals use a sales presentation as an occasion simply to present their credentials. He gives the example of four law firms in a bake-off for a large class action litigation defense for a Fortune 500 company. Three firms used their hour in the spotlight to present their—equally impressive—credentials. The winning firm had taken the time to investigate the company’s workplace practices and created a strategy for the defense, as well as changes to the practices to that had led to the lawsuit in the first place. They shared them in the pitch and won the job.

Many professional firms are afraid of giving away solutions before they start billing. However, an increasing proportion realizes that it’s often their best differentiator in a sales situation. This applies to marketing too—if you want people to think that you have unique insights and expertise on a topic, just saying so won’t cut it; you have to publish them. You shouldn’t be afraid that people will run off and use the ideas without paying you. Sure, sometimes it happens. But most of the time customers are looking for a partner they can trust to look after their interests; sharing your insights is a good way to start a partnership.

As I mentioned in the last post, we have recently been looking at thought leadership outside of professional services; there are some good examples and some not so good.

One that intrigues me is a large section of ‘Thought Leadership’ on the FedEx site on the subject of Access (their capital) which is “the force that makes all forms of interaction and exchange possible between people, businesses and nations.” FedEx have published an index of ‘Access’ for 109 countries comprising 23 variables as diverse as server security, internet tariffs and airport infrastructure. There are no surprises in the ranking; Hong Kong is top, Singapore is next, the US is 10th, and Uganda is 109th, for instance.

There are many eloquent words written about ‘Access’; for example that it “…might just offer a grand unified theory of our social existence.” But it feels to me a bit like eating ice for lunch (as Simon Cowell recently remarked). The increasing interconnectedness of the world is an impressive phenomenon, and countries with more of it are better off (or have more of it because they are better off). But, so what?

Effective thought leadership marketing addresses a problem or opportunity that people (in the target audience) care about. If this topic resonated, we’d expect to see other people writing about it, especially since the campaign has run for 4 years. If you look at the, say, top 50 search results for a successful thought leadership marketing campaign, as many as half the results will be articles, blog posts etc. written about it by others.  For FedEx that proportion is 6%: most of what is written about ‘Access’ is written by FedEx.

No matter how good the marketing, I wonder if FedEx have picked (or created) a topic no-one else really cares about….

We have been looking at the use of ‘thought leadership” marketing outside of professional services (specifically management consulting, IT services, accounting and law). Although that’s where it started, arguably with the founding of McKinsey Quarterly in 1964, we think we’re increasingly seeing companies outside of professional services use quality content to attract customers, instead of, or as well as, traditional advertising.

A few examples; MetLife just issued a big research report on the state of the American dream. FedEx has a whole thought leadership section online about what it calls Access – the interconnectedness of people and places. Herman Miller, the office furniture company, has lots of research and opinion online around ergonomics and the work environment. Even Pitney Bowes, the mailing equipment company, has some original and unbiased material available for its direct mailing customers to help them understand, for example, how to be greener in mailing.

Herman Miller is no newcomer to the game – its published thought leadership has apparently been integral to its product development research for years. But others, such as FedEx apparently are. We don’t have the data to see if there is an increase in quality content or thought leadership marketing in sectors outside of professional services, but it might make sense if there were. We all know that interruption marketing is declining in effectiveness, and is especially problematic with the sophisticated buyers of B2B.

Perhaps that’s the driver.

This title is from a subtitle in a post on Chris Koch's blog. Chris makes the point that if we are selling complex offerings to highly educated people who expect a degreee of intellectual rigor in their reading materials, that's not a formula for brevity. The MetLife study I mentioned in the last post is an example of the sort of quality content marketing that we are seeing in ever more sectors.

At the same time, blogs, twitter, YouTube and others are cutting our news and information into ever smaller chunks so that we can fit it into our attention-challenged schedules.

How, I wonder, do we reconcile an apparently increasing appetite for quality content, (and disdain for mindless advertising), with a readiness to digest that content in little bites?

Maybe the MetLife study gives some clues. The full report is 39 pages long. There are about 20 blogs that have chosen to say something about it (including this one) and many of us have taken a unique angle.

I took 200 words to talk about the report as an example of thought leadership marketing breaking into B2C. Housingwire.com focuses on the frightening proportion of Americans (50%) who are only two paychecks from insolvency. GenerationalAdvisor, a blog for financial advisors, focuses on the implications for more conservative investment products.

Each blogger delivers an angle they expect their audience will appreciate. So the blogs and the content complement each other. Metlife gets  exposure for its study from the bloggers. But the bloggers need someone to have developed good content in the first place so that they have something to write about.

Thank you MetLife.