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Content Truly Is King In the middle of this amazing "lost" Steve Jobs interview is some of the best thinking on content and product development I've ever discovered. Jobs discusses the very important distinction between process and the masterful craftsmanship required to develop great products. Listening to this extraordinary segment I thought Jobs was contradicting Dov Seidman's book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything . On repeated listening not so much. Jobs is warning against process police taking over and attempting to substitute hollow business process where passion, commitment and genius should rule. Seidman is suggesting that creating the kinds of teams Jobs was famous for leading is the only business process anyone owns. There are no secrets and intellectual property is a poor substitute for fast moving new market creating genius (iPad, iPhone for example). "People get very confused that the process is the content." Content Greatness Unde...

Pebbles and CATCH-22's What does it mean when a cool idea for a watch earns $11M on Kickstarter? Certainly one clear and loud implication is crowdfunding is ready for prime time, but there are more sweeping and profound implications. Why would anyone make anything without testing and creating a digital market long before materials are purchased to make something material. Pebble's brilliant Kickstarter campaign proves the man, machine, mountain parable. Match the right man (or product) to the right mountain and supply him (or her) with the right tools and the mountain will be climbed. Make the Pebble pitch to Walmart and it is a nonstarter. Pebble Smartwatch 2013 video from Pebble Technology on Vimeo . This "match the hatch" of product to market and marketplace has never been more important. You have one chance to make a first impression so matching your idea to favorable audience is critical. There is a CATCH-22 hidden in our new distribution model. You can't ...

Stories Matter The web moves in phases. The first phase was presence. In 1999 when I built my first website, FoundObjects.com (now RIP sadly), having a website was sufficient to generate Return On Investment (ROI). The next phase was the battle for commerce. The move from "brochure-ware", websites that were little more than printed brochures that happened to be online, to limited interactivity. Once the conversational door was open the social tsunami began. Where once we lucky few Internet marketers lectured now, in the social era, we listen and curate. Having conversations means we develop different kinds of websites. One easy to spot difference is the ubiquity of social share buttons. Social signals such as Facebook Likes and Tweets confirm our claims and the conversations taking place on our new more social websites. Why Stories Matter NOW No one speaks first, so conversations must be present and robust. Speaking in stories creates more vulnerability than "marketing ...

Content Marketing As A Virtual Cycle When the great curator Robin Good's Scoop.it feeds hit 1,000,000 views every content marketer should take note - curation is the key to successful content marketing. I created controversy recently at Phil Buckley's SEO Meetup , the largest such Meetup in the country, suggesting curation should be 90% to 10% creation for successful content marketing. Curation isn't alone. My ratio left out important gears such as social (the blue gear above) and e-commerce (the green gear). Content Marketing's Gears create a "virtual cycle" where the gains and momentum of one creates gains and momentums in others. Content Marketing's Gears, when balanced, function as a positive perpetual motion machine where any turn of any gear helps all gears. TIME is the most difficult dimension to illustrate. Content marketing has a longer gestation. Time is part of Google algorithm. Your website creates expectations. New websites don't have mil...

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad What kind of hero story does your website tell? Sharing Hero Stories Stories are the key to engagement and conversion online. Marketing is, has and will always been about stories. The stories we tell ourselves, believe and tell others form the core of human aspiration and marketing is nothing if not aspirational. In Hero With A Thousand Face American mythologist Joseph Campbell explains that every culture is built on stories, stories with more in common than many realize. The "hero's journey" is at the core of many myths, legends and popular movies. Websites tell "hero stories" too. Here are 7 types of hero stories websites tell:   7 Kinds of Hero Stories Told Online Enlightened. Vicarious. Altruistic. Rescue. Stranger. Like Us. Heroes Together. Examples (with links) of each hero story: Hero Story Examples  . Submit Your Hero Story Examples: Hero Story Search (will eventually put a contest on this link...

Diversified Content Marketing No one cared when I preached, "Content marketing" in 2003. Now everyone is creating "inbound marketing". Some good things happen when everyone does something online. Overall quality of whatever the group marketing is doing tends to go up. One very big bad thing happens too. Chances for your content to shine are reduced by the noise of success. This post is about how to fortify your content marketing with the four horsemen: Four Horsemen of Content Marketing * Content creation. * Content curation. * User Generated Content (UGC) engine. * Ecommerce. Content Marketing Horseman #1: Create Daily When you don't know what you don't know create a lot of content every day, but always have "narrowing the funnel" as your goal. Narrowing the funnel is when you can safely reduce your traffic net because you know what content brings converting traffic. The key is connecting the top of your content marketing funnel (traffic generatio...

I'm lucky to have REALLY smart friends. Here are five ideas a recent survey of some of the smartest turned up in anser to the question, "What cool stuff are you doing this holidays?" Names and identities are being withheld until 1.1.2014 as promised :). M Idea 1: Mobile Games As a recent Forbes article noted mobile games are ROCKING. Digital games are expected to hit $1.1B growing 54%. Not suggested your ecommerce or B2B website goes into the digital game business, but finding a way to be FUN and MOBILE this holiday is a "genius idea". Tips to keep in mind as you make a digital game out of shopping or forming a relationship with your website: Mobile Game Tips Keep mobile games simple.  Develop games that play OVER TIME.  Don't forget the leaderboard.  Curate "winners" so everyone learns.  Align your game with core brand values (see Stengel's Brand Ideals ). Idea 2: Disrupt Convention This holiday season don't do the usual thing in the expe...

Best Visual Thinking Tool Internet marketers are a strange group. We lucky few Internet marketers must harness power from both sides of our brain. We need the right brain's creativity to be equally matched by the left brain's engineering and analytics. The problem with most tools created to assist Internet marketers is they are developed by engineers. Engineers are GREAT people, but they tend to be hyper LEFT BRAINERS. Most of my almost 15 year Internet marketing career has been spent learning a series of counter intuitive tools. I say "counter intuitive' because for visual thinkers (as most Internet marketers are) learning to use a Google Analytics, your average Content Management System (CMS) or other support tools means learning THEIR way of thinking. Learning THEIR way of thinking can mean suspending ours. The net effect of using a "counter intuitive" tool is marketers must translate between how we THINK and what we are DOING. This "translation"...

  Content Marketing Needs Great Visuals This amazing and very atypical painting by the artist Jean Michel Basquiat is a great example of every web site's limitless need for original visual content. The content marketing tsunami is in full force. Recent surveys by the Content Marketing Institute and Internet marketing guru Brian Solis show 90% of B2B marketers doubling down on their content marketing. Think you can make any money doing things online when and how everyone else is doing them? NO would be the answer to that question. Let's say you are riffing great 500 word blog posts daily. You want to get your thoughts in front of people who can help spread your message. Advocacy is the only advertising left. The old "word-of-mouth" or WOM a misnomer. Social nets inject jet fuel into WOM. Google and other search engines have been water-boarded into accepting "social signals" as an important way to verify claims and index web pages. Advocacy begins with your im...

Amazon As Cautionary Tale I follow Amazon pagecounts closely. Prior to Google's Panda and Penguin updates Amazon was slouching toward a billion pages inside of Google. At a billion pages in Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) the distinction between Amazon and Google becomes less and less. Then Google's Zoo of change (Panda followed by Penguin) hit. Now Amazon is down to 127M pages. I realize "down to" seems absurd with such a large number of pages in Google, but better than 90% of Amazon's "pages" have been swept away. Amazon was LATE to the social game. Amazon's ability to generate new pages via their own machine code was astounding and robust. In platforms vs. websites I wrote about how if the Brooklyn Bridge fell into the Hudson tomorrow Amazon would have a landing page with fully cooked content up within minutes. And such technical wizardry used to be enough. Amazon's ability to create new pages by combining pieces of old used ...

If we think of the web as our first great tsunami of change then the mobile web will make our first storm feel like a spring shower. This @HaikuDeck (a great tool) explores thoughts on a mobile world.

Think Mobile First Holiday 2013 Don't be fooled. Even if your mobile numbers aren't in double digits yet your e-commerce website is being influenced by mobile devices. Email is easy to curate on mobile devices. If your e-commerce website is like most then email marketing is among your most profitable (if not THE most profitable) channel. Friends who run a $100M e-com site report they are processing 25% top line sales via mobile (pads are the majority of their mobile sales), so $25M is being spent on their website via mobile. In one of my most recent "Scoops" I asked if we weren't all " app builders now ". This post shared 40 video tutorials on how to build apps. Today's post is about how to think "Mobile First" for success during Holiday 2013 by creating "Like Me" tribes supported with great mobile content marketing. Mobile Is Here Holiday 2013 is time to think like an app builder. How can your e-commerce team develop engaging, fu...

Why Christmas Happens Now Christmas for e-commerce merchants is happening right now. Christmas happens now because Google is setting their index. There is usually one BIG October Google surprise (to insure PPC payments go UP), but content that is winning now will probably keep on winning right through the holidays (and Vice Versa). Christmas is happening now because Internet marketing teams are looking hard at their numbers to figure out what is HOT and what is NOT. HOT products get special attention (and more inventory). NOT HOT products are moved to the "wait and see" or "not going to happen" areas (a lost limbo of a place). If that sounds like e-commerce is one big GUESS you aren't far off. What is or has been HOT so far is no guarantee of hotness in October - December. There are always 4Q surprises too. 4Q Surprises are products that weren't hot but got an Oprah mention or some other huge boost and suddenly became hot. E-commerce merchants can ONLY play ...

Future of Web Design Triptych Without meaning to I created 3 Haiku Decks about the future of web design: Future of Web Design 1 : No More Boxes or Boundaries (embedded below) Future of Web Design 2: Mobile Ubiquitous Web Changes Everything (embedded below) Future of Web Design 3: Semantic Mobile Web Mean Brands are Context, Social is Confirmation and the only time that matters is an evolving NOW. Here is the snippet I just wrote on GPlus explaining Future of Web Design 3: *Future of Web Design 3: Semantic Web Is A Game*   Didn't want to unpack today. I also had an interesting conversation with  + Nikol Murphy  on Thursday. So a day of productive procrastination is happening (lol).     Nikol reminded me of an important truth. Google doesn't index websites they index web PAGES.  Subtle but important distinction to understand Web 3.0. Web 3.0 will be more WEB and less "website". Design will be a CSF (Critical Success Factor), but very different than wha...

Time Appears To Be The Only Difference For more than ten years I was an e-commerce guy. I built my first website, FoundObjects.com (now RIP), in 1999. Found Objects, the specialty gift company I co-founded with Janet McKean, sold specialty gifts to museum stores around the world AND to consumers online. FoundOjects.com was one of the first B2C and B2B websites. I left ecom to work for Raleigh's leading software and web development agency Atlantic BT almost two years ago. After several years in B2B marketing I can only identify one difference in online marketing - TIME. The TIME Difference between B2B and B2C marketers may be a difference without a distinction. The sales cycle for most B2B websites stretches from weeks to years. Since many B2B websites are selling products or services with large price tags a longer "get to know you" phase is expected. If we were visionary about TIME even this B2B vs. B2C  difference disappears. B2C merchants make offers via email marketi...