Jessica Langer, PhD

I read with interest Patrick Hanlon’s Forbes article on the “3 Ps” of marketing: Push, Pull and Portal. It’s a good and important read for anyone who makes, or who hopes to make, their living in marketing. And ultimately, Hanlon writes, the key to all three is content:

Push media is still needed to create brand awareness and purchase intent—but media agencies are finding it harder to achieve reach from one program (or even one platform) alone. Pull media like advertising is still critical to tell your brand story the way you want it told. Becoming a portal through owned media is also not a standalone solution. So all the tubes must be open to provide push and pull and portal. Media drives social, and social drives media…

…It doesn’t take Aristotle to understand that dialogue offers the opportunity to persuade. And the way in, is content. Done smartly, brand communications are no longer an interruption. Instead, your brand becomes the content. [Bolding mine.]

In this post, I take Hanlon’s excellent idea and zero in on the concept of content. Of course, as a social media marketer, my goal is to make my clients’ media drive sociality around its brand, both online and in offline word-of-mouth environments, in order to drive sales. However, none of that can happen without good, strong, proprietary content. If you want people to engage with something, it has to be worth engaging. If you want people to share something, it has to be worth sharing. This is the lesson of “your brand becomes the content”. Instead of an interruption, your brand becomes seamlessly integrated into the daily lives of your customers. Instead of an imposition, it becomes a desire.

Strong proprietary content is the best search engine optimization for your website… and the best way to get people to stay once they’ve found it.

SEO is a lot more complicated than it used to be, especially after the introduction by Google of targeted search, which means that its search engine rankings change based on things like your location, search history and other variables. Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble – and his associated TED talk, if you have 10 minutes – is an interesting study of the increasing personalization of the Internet, a trend that poses interesting challenges for online marketers who are looking to capture particular segments.

Although it’s tempting for those of us who spend much of their days on social media to think of search as somehow obsolete – after all, we get most of our information via Twitter, right? And our artistic inspiration via Pinterest? – for the vast majority of potential customers and clients out there, Google is still the primary gateway to information. And search position matters. You can have the best content in the world, but if no one sees it, it’s useless.

On the other hand, you can optimize your website all you want, calculating keyword densities and pushing it to the top of the Google rankings for your desired keywords, but if a visitor gets to your site and doesn’t find something to keep them there, they’re going to head right back out the virtual door.

I’m going to repeat my message above: if you want people to read, engage with and share something, it has to be worthwhile. Creating strong content that is both SEO-friendly and reader-friendly is the single best thing you can do for your online presence.

Make yourself useful and people will use you. (In a good way. And pay for for it.)

It seems at first couterintuitive that the more good content you provide for free, the more people will pay you for it. The thing is, though, it’s often true. Hanlon uses the example of foods giant Kraft, who create great recipes using their products and publish them for free online (and on packaging). They also have an online space for customers to share their own Kraft-based recipes. This is the perfect use of content: the time, effort and investment that goes into recipe development is more than paid back in increased sales of Kraft products, and the community message boards allow for sharing of content – and amplification of message, and of desire for product.

Another example is former hiring manager Alison Green‘s popular Ask A Manager blog (to which I will admit a small addiction!). Green updates the blog fairly religiously, providing free expert advice to readers in solving their work-related issues. Green also blogs professionally for various high-profile corporate sites, like the Intuit QuickBase Blog, and consults with various organizations around management issues. Using the content of her website to establish her expertise – and she is truly expert – around workplace issues has helped her to build a successful business around providing similar services for a fee.

Write as you’d like others to write for you.

This is a common piece of advice given to writers of fiction – “write the book you’d want to read” – but it’s just as useful for content and social media marketers. When you’re writing content for a client, think about what you’d want to see on a website or blog or in a tweet or a Facebook post if you were looking for a product they’re selling or a service they’re providing. What questions would you want answered? Do the research and answer them. What (true) story about the product or service would captivate you? Tell that story.

The upshot? Your online presence is often your first impression, so make it count. Strong proprietary content is one of the best ways to attract new business online, and to establish and present your company to potential clients or customers as an expert, competent source of the product or service you’re selling.

Yesterday morning, I came across an interesting post by marketing expert Heidi Cohen about the differences between social media and content marketing. Cohen has included in her post a handy chart explaining the difference in utility between the two.

Social media marketing and content marketing are two terms that are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are actually complementary halves of a whole strategy, not the same thing at all. In this post, I’m going to provide basic definitions of social media marketing and content marketing, and then I’ll give you three important reasons why you need both in your online marketing strategy.

What is social media marketing?

When people think of social media, they often think of Facebook and Twitter, and maybe Pinterest by now. These are the biggest social media platforms. However, social media is best defined by its essence, which is: an online medium or collection of media whose primary purpose is to foment and encourage the building of relationships, and which provides the tools necessary to build those relationships. Social media is personal, not institutional. It is, at its heart, small-scale. As I explain in a previous post: social media isn’t really about marketing, but rather about relationship-building.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is basically what it says on the tin: it’s content-based media belonging to your business, from your website to your print materials to your blog. The important thing about content marketing, though, is that it relies on proprietary content. Content marketing isn’t about tweeting a great article from the Wall Street Journal or about linking someone else’s blog post on Facebook: it’s about building your own content base and establishing your expertise – and your brand identity – through fresh, useful, excellent content. I’ve written before about the importance of building a blog as an encyclopedia of collected knowledge; the same principle applies to everything else you release publicly, across print, traditional and online media.

So basically: content marketing is what you’re saying; social media marketing is where and how you say it.

Why do you need both?

Here are three big reasons:

1. Each is much less effective without the other.

You can blog your heart out every single day, but unless you’re actively promoting that blog on social media channels, few people are ever going to read it. Even if you have the best SEO strategy in the world, and you’re #1 in Google search results for all of your most relevant keywords, you’re missing out on a huge amount of potential traffic from focused, interested readers if you don’t engage on social media.

Similarly, social media without proprietary content is, to adapt Macbeth, merely “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” You can tweet interesting articles as much as you want, and you can build relationships with other experts in your field by retweeting their content and engaging in their spaces, but ultimately you need your own content in order to ground your social media strategy in something substantial. At the very least, you need a good website full of useful information; ideally, you’ll have dynamic and fresh content. You want other people to tweet and retweet your work, too.

2. They boost each other’s signals.

Not only are content and social media marketing complementary strategies, but they also significantly reinforce each other. As I mentioned, social media channels are very effective in disseminating proprietary content to appropriate audiences, and the nature of social media is that good content will also be reproduced and shared by others. Think of an echo: a good loud shout will reverberate off the face of a cliff for far longer than the duration of the initial sound. Or, if you’re a theory-head like me, think of it as “The Work of Art in the Age of Social Media Reproduction”.

Similarly, your content should reinforce your social media strategy. Include the Facebook and Twitter logos on all of your print materials, on your billboards, in your commercials. In all of your web content, include the option to share via channels like Digg and Reddit along with Facebook and Twitter, and add an RSS button to your content. Make your content easily shareable and people will be more likely to share it.

3. They are important parts of a more robust marketing program.

Marketing is multifaceted, as any marketer will tell you, and there’s a reason why most large companies have several marketing specialists who all have different foci. Social media and content marketing have grown in importance relative to the whole picture, though, and it’s important to pay attention to these aspects of your program if you want to maximize your market share and reach as many potential customers/clients as possible.

Not every business will be able to engage on every level, of course. There are always decisions to be made. But proprietary content, supported by a good, consistent social media campaign, is essential for any business that wants to maximize its online presence. As more businesses develop a robust and dynamic online presence, those that don’t will be left behind.

The academic job market is bad, and it’s getting worse.

This isn’t a new phenomenon; it’s been happening for the last 10, 15, 20 years. The famous Bowen and Sosa Report in 1989 predicted a wave of faculty retirements, triggered by the aging of the current professoriate, which would lead to increased tenure-track hiring by universities and colleges. That hasn’t happened, though; instead, there’s been a progressive adjunctification of higher education, particularly in the humanities, with somewhere between 40-70% of classes being taught by part-time contingent faculty. (A crowdsourced Google Doc, updated anonymously by these contingent faculty, demonstrates exactly how little they are often paid to teach.) This makes good business sense for the university, at least in the short term, but it’s led to significantly reduced opportunity for new PhDs to achieve traditional academic careers.

Okay. This is sad, but this is not news. The academic job market has been bad for a long time, and the fact is that many – in some disciplines, most – PhD graduates will not get a tenure-track job.

So what then? What can these PhD-holding folks actually do with the skills they have worked so hard to develop: reading, writing, research, analysis, public speaking, presenting, teaching?

The answer is: oh my goodness, so much. There is so much opportunity out here in the marketing world for people with precisely that skill set.

My Own Path Into Marketing

I started out in social media marketing in 2001 by being the receptionist at studentawards.com, which was at the time a smallish web startup and was exclusively a scholarship search engine. I was at the time an undergrad and was really into online communities, so I suggested that, since students were coming to the site anyway, we give them a way to talk to each other. Soon I’d been promoted to marketing assistant (though I still answered the phones – startup life!) and worked with their programmers on getting a web forum up and running. It’s still there.

I continued to work in marketing throughout the rest of undergrad and through my Master’s degree – at StudentAwards, at a real estate agency, at a construction company in London, England. I did take a couple of years to focus entirely on academia during my PhD, but in 2008, once I’d defended and hadn’t found a full-time academic position that I wanted, I took a position as director of communications at a private school. In 2010, I left to start my own business that focused on social media and content marketing, and here I am.

I love what I do and I am so happy I’m doing it.

Why Marketing and Humanities PhDs are a Good Match

A career in marketing and communications, particularly social media and content marketing – which are major growth areas within marketing in general – is a near-perfect fit for the key skills that PhD students in the humanities develop over the course of their studies. If you’re a marketing professional, as I am, you’d do very well to hire someone with a PhD in the humanities – and if you have a PhD in the humanities, a marketing career could be a great alternative to a traditional academic career.

Here’s exactly why:

Research and Analysis: PhDs learn to sift through enormous amounts of information to find the relevant bits. They also learn to analyze that same information, make connections, and draw effective conclusions. This is one of the key aspects of marketing: keeping your eyes always open and taking a ton of information from different sources – from sales numbers, web analytics and trends in all sorts of media channels to the tone of communications from key stakeholders – and drawing coherent, actionable conclusions.

Teaching and Presenting: If you have a PhD, you’ll likely have developed some expertise in presenting your ideas to groups of people – students, conference attendees or otherwise – and defending those ideas against criticism. You’ll also have experience in explaining complex ideas in terms that students can understand, and in figuring out different ways to explain the same information to different groups of people depending on context. These skills are incredibly important in marketing. As a marketer, you are essentially a teacher: you’re teaching the public about your client’s product or service, and you’re also teaching your clients and/or your employer why you’re the best person for the job.

Plus, as a former (or even current) post-secondary educator, you’ll be in good stead to offer courses to businesses on effective writing, communications, social media or other areas in which you have particular expertise. I teach social media courses on behalf of businesses fairly frequently.

Writing: This is a no-brainer. If you have a PhD in the humanities, you can probably write. (At least, I hope you can.) You’d be surprised at how crucially important it is in the business world to be able to craft effective messaging to the public, to clients, to stakeholders, to colleagues, to absolutely everyone.

This is especially true in content marketing and social media marketing, which are essentially writing jobs. The key to these marketing subfields is effective writing. If you can write a fantastic blog post and then turn around and write the most compelling 140 characters ever put into TweetDeck, you’ll find yourself hugely in demand.

“You Are Such A Sellout.”

Look, I like academia. It’s fun. But there just isn’t a lot of opportunity to do it full-time for a living, especially if you’re happily established in a particular geographic location as I am. I do keep a toe in, occasionally teaching a couple of literature and film studies courses, and I’ll soon be teaching social media marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University. I also continue publish academic work because I enjoy it: my book, Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, just came out in December.

More important than any of that, though, is that I love marketing. It’s enormously fulfilling to help individuals and companies tell their stories publicly, and to help them offer their products and services to enhance people’s lives in some way. It’s a great way to make a living, and it uses a lot of the skills I developed in academia. I teach and write and research and do interesting things every day.

So come on in. The water’s fine. And if you’re a PhD or are ABD in the humanities and are looking at making the leap, please do comment or get in touch, eh? I may even be hiring soon…

(Next time: what to do now to keep your options open when you finish.)

Twitter is full of folks promising the “secret” to 40,000 followers in a month or to using Twitter to achieve specific business goals, or even just the “secret” to Twitter itself.

To quote Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The real “secret” of Twitter is that there is no silver bullet. There are best practices, there are strategies, and there advisable and inadvisable methods by which to use Twitter. But there is no singular secret that will suddenly make you a Twitter star.

Why?

Ultimately, social media isn’t advertising. It isn’t even marketing, really, not in the traditional sense. It’s direct relationship-building. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn function as tools to foster these relationships. They aren’t ends in themselves; they’re means to an end, which is to build strong, lasting, personal and, yes, profitable relationships.

Once you understand that, you’re much closer to understanding how best to use Twitter. But that’s still not a secret; it’s just a conceptual shift, a necessary one if you’re looking to understand the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of Twitter.

What Not To Do

When I first joined Twitter and started following some social media marketing folks, I was struck by the strategy of one particular tweeter, who shall remain nameless, who sold himself as a social media expert. He didn’t reply or retweet or blog or post interesting links. Each one of his tweets consisted of a short sentence addressed to no one in particular: “Need help making the most of LinkedIn?” “Want help with using Twitter?” No link to a contact page, no more details. Just a short, almost rhetorical question.

It seemed almost lonely, that little snippet of text in the midst of plenty. A lonely, piping little call in a sea of content.

One day he just stopped. I sometimes wonder what happened to him. But I’ll always remember him as a prime example of how not to use social media.

Personal Connections are Crucial

There’s a reason Twitter’s tagline is “join the conversation”. Twitter is like a big, crowded, constant party – much like a networking event, if you think about it. The goal is to forge personal connections with others. Even if your connection is also for a business purpose, it should be personal. No one likes to feel used, and everyone likes to feel cared for: these are fundamental truths about human relationships, and they’re just as true on Twitter as anywhere else.

This is the case even – perhaps especially – if you are a social media manager representing a large brand, as I often am. By reaching out personally to potential customers and contacts, you can mitigate what is often seen as the “facelessness” of a brand or conglomerate: you change the interaction from brand-consumer to individual-individual, which is a powerful generator of goodwill if the interaction is managed well.

The Upshot

Twitter is an unprecedented opportunity for companies to forge consistent, ongoing relationships with consumers, and to create brand ambassadors who will hopefully use those same social media tools to spread goodwill about the company. Unlike traditional marketing, which is largely (though not exclusively) about explicit self-promotion, Twitter represents the opportunity to speak directly and effectively to individual consumers.

To claim that there is a single “secret” to those interactions, though, is like claiming that there’s a secret to human interaction in general. There are, like with Twitter, best practices: be kind, demonstrate interest in the other person, listen as much as you talk.

But beyond that, it’s up to you.

Ah, Twitter. Those of us who work in social media marketing have generally learned to love its constant, ubiquitous, almost soothing stream of information. Granted, there’s a lot of it, but most of us have shaped and trimmed our follow lists into an information flow that is both informative and interesting. And, of course, every so often, we click on a link that promises to lead us to more sweet, sweet content.

The thing is, not all of that information is news. Much of it, in fact, isn’t. It’s strategies, ideas, musings, pep talks, top-3 or -5 or -15 lists of things to do or not to do. In short: it’s non-time-sensitive.

Now, with that in mind, let’s talk about blogs. The original “weblogs” were essentially online diaries, and they were generally personal rather than professional. Those of us who are of a certain age will remember Diaryland, Xanga, the early days of Livejournal and Blogspot, even early media-rich social networking sites like Myspace in its heyday. They were places to put and publish our thoughts, to connect with others, and to track our own development from one year to the next.

A professional blog, however, is generally different. Of course, there will be time-sensitive content, depending on the industry: news stories, PR coups, responses to new developments in the field. But there’s a lot of content on most professional blogs that has more staying power, like field-specific advice.

Let’s take as an example one of my favourite entrepreneurship coaches: Anne-Marie Cross. I follow her on Twitter, and almost every day I follow a link or two from her feed. She tweets about women in business, strategies for selling and branding and getting paid what you’re worth and all sorts of highly useful, well-written content from her website. But she doesn’t just tweet articles when she writes them: she tweets each article fairly frequently, on an ongoing basis, which makes it much more likely that her target audience will intercept the tweet and read the article.

So how does this affect Twitter strategies? How can you use this understanding of the non-sequentiality of most blog content to improve your use of Twitter? Here are a couple of suggestions:

Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. On a blog, once you’ve made a post, it’s out there and done. You might link back to it in a subsequent post, or put it in a category or tag it, but the blogging platform has limited ability to promote that post a few days or weeks later. Because of Twitter’s fast pace, you’re likely to have a different audience at different times, which means that you can continue to link to an article for as long as it’s relevant. Anne-Marie Cross’s article on building your personal brand, for instance, or my article on avoiding the Internet detritus of failed social media campaigns, are just as relevant now as they were when they were first published, and there’s no reason to stop promoting them on Twitter.

That said, if you tweet the same stuff every day, your followers will start to tune you out. There’s a delicate balance to be found. But there’s nothing wrong, and potentially a lot to be gained, by re-tweeting a good article every week or two.

Look at your blog as an encyclopedia, not a diary. You’re a professional. You have a lot of interesting, important and relevant things to say. When you blog professionally, do it as if you’re writing a compendium of collected knowledge and wisdom about your field. Because that’s what you’re doing, and that’s the approach that will get you the most readers – and will help those readers the most. You never know when a particular reader will be interested in, say, a post about emerging media markets; if you posted about it in September and they’re looking in January, they may not find your post. But if you post about it in September and tweet about it every week or so from then on, your target audience is much more likely to find you.

(I know I’ve promised a couple posts on other things – and don’t worry, they’re coming.)

It’s awards season again in the world of science fiction and fantasy. Normally my role is as a voter, but this year, for the first time, I have a nominable work: my book Postcolonialism and Science Fiction is eligible in the category of Best Related Work. I’m specifying its eligibility mostly because paper copies seem to be taking their time to get to the US Amazon site, but the book was published in December 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan. If you’d like a copy now instead of waiting for Amazon.com, you can head to the Palgrave website or to Amazon.co.uk, or you can get it online via Palgrave Connect, my publisher’s ebook platform.

An excerpt from the book has been featured on io9.com, 3 Quarks Daily and the World SF Blog, if you’d like a taste of what to expect from the text.

In order to nominate and vote in the Hugo Awards, you must be an attending or supporting member of last year’s, this year’s, or next year’s Worldcon. The cost of a supporting membership is $50, which is an incredible deal, considering that you will receive e-book editions of all – yes, all – of the nominated works. However you choose to vote, a ChiCon membership is a great investment if you’re a fan of science fiction and/or fantasy.

Finally, if you yourself have an eligible work this year, please feel free to share in comments or directly by email.

I promise I’ll post more on consumption and desire soon – and I’m also working on a post on science fiction, economics and colonialism. As in, it bothers me that there isn’t a whole lot of science fiction that takes a good long hard look at the practical economics of a multi-world, and sometimes multi-universe, system. I’m especially interested in how marketing is portrayed – or, more often, how it isn’t.

However, the big news today is that my book, Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, is being excerpted on io9.com, the biggest and arguably greatest science fiction blog on the whole Internet.

Pretty cool, eh?

Those of us who make our living, partly or wholly, in marketing are often subject to a very specific criticism. We’re told that we’re creating – presumably out of whole cloth – a desire in consumers, specifically in order to fulfill it. This is often done by creating a sense of lack in the consumer, a sense that s/he is missing out in some way, and presenting the product or service as the antidote.

(The whole thing sounds very Lacanian, eh? Desire stems from a lack – and as we are desiring creatures, we are tormented by constant lack, which we attempt to fulfill, partly, by consumer behaviour. But I digress.)

There are wrong ways to do this, of course. For instance, Skinnywater used the tagline “Skinny Always Gets The Attention” in a campaign ripped apart by the feminist website Jezebel, and a salon in Edmonton went for the classy approach by suggesting that domestic violence is OK, as long as you look good afterward. I call this approach “negging”, after the term made trendy in the past year or so by the “pick-up artists” who have popped up all over pop culture. It’s essentially a cheap trick: insult consumers so that they feel bad about themselves, and offer your product as a solution. This approach is also risky from a business perspective: it can be effective, but can also result in backlash and in the (justifiable) tarnishing of your brand’s image.

I think it’s important to make a further distinction, though, between creating desire and responding to desire. Yes, as marketers, it’s our job to match up consumers with products and services – and sometimes to convince skeptical consumers that our products and services actually have some benefit to them. But I see good marketing as responding to a desire, whether latent or active, that already exists. James Gilbert’s article on marketing in IT distinguishes the two: “While I am not suggesting that you simply make people “afraid” to the point of dependency, it can be useful to educate your customers in some of the ways in which things can go wrong with their I.T. After all, they can’t ask you for a brand new backup system if they don’t know they need one.”

Let’s take Crest teeth whitening products, for example. White teeth are a desired trait in modern industrialized societies, and Crest knows this; it’s got a product to make your teeth whiter, and therefore will make you more beautiful or handsome. And that’s how it markets the product: not as something that will make your teeth less yellow or will make you less ugly, but as something that will make you look better. They mean the same thing, but at the same time, they don’t, in the same way “Your hair colour looks gorgeous!” doesn’t mean the same thing as “Your roots were so awful, I’m really glad you got them fixed!”

This begs, however, the question of where desire comes from in the first place. Why do we want to have white teeth? Is it because we’re told by marketers – by people like me – that we should want them, or does the desire come from society at large? What is society at large anyhow, and how does marketing fit into it? That, my friends, is a subject for Part 2, coming soon.

For those who may have tried to email me since ACR (and I know there are at least a few of you): my email provider managed to do something wonky – routing my emails through a defunct server in Europe, I think – which meant that all of my emails have disappeared into the ether in the past week or so. They claim to have gotten it fixed now, though, to my contact details should work again. You can email me at jessica[at]jessicalanger.com.

Technology, eh?