Dragon Dictate and Dragon Naturally Speaking Deliver Awesome Results for Users. Their eNewsletter. Not So Much.

In perhaps the ultimate  irony, I am using Dragon Dictate from Nuance to write this blog post which criticizes their eNewsletters.  I use Dragon Dictate to compose 80 to 90% of everything that I write from blog posts to book content.   So, it does pain me a bit to brand their eNewsletter as mediocre.

Oddly, even though their eNewsletter is a major missed content marketing opportunity, Nuance has a tremendous amount of content available. As an example, they have a wonderful series of YouTube videos that teach you how to get the most out of Dragon  Naturally Speaking, the PC version of their software.  That’s compelling because, although dictation is the most critical component of their software, you can also use Dragon to  search the web, give application commands, find documents, etc.  In addition to the YouTube content, their website actually provides very useful and well organized training tools to get you started and to turn you into an advanced user.

In other words, they have a ton of raw material that could make for an incredibly useful and compelling E-news letter that would be must reading whenever it arrived in your inbox.  Alas, hardly any of that content found its way into their May 2012 eNewsletter.

5 Ways Their Newsletter Misses the Content Marketing Boat

1.  Their email header gives you no information about the content of the eNewsletter itself. For those of us who receive tons of e-mails every day, we need a headline that hits us on the head about why we have to open this e-mail right now.
2.  The eNewsletter itself has no headline that clues us into compelling content to follow. Headlines! We need headlines!
3. 2 of the 3 lead stories are really all about Nuance. The 1st story urges us to buy a Dragon product for our mom if she happens to be a PC user (of course, this newsletters aimed at Mac users).  I’m not sure that moms, generally speaking are the ideal target for Nuance products.The 2nd story asks us to ‘Like’ them on Facebook.  Why?  Well, so they can “keep you up to date on all the latest happening, special deals and offers, and much more.”   Why not offer to tell us how to use our Dragon product more effectively?Finally, the 3rd story is a great case study about a gentleman with Parkinson’s disease who uses Dragon Dictate to stay productive in spite of his illness. This is terrific and inspirational.
4. The newsletter is chock-full of words–more than 800 of them–but  essentially bereft of useful tips on how to use the product.  In fact, the only tip offered is a minor process point that even a casual user would certainly know.  And, that comes three quarters of the way down the newsletter page.
5.  Although the newsletter refers to a number  of useful resources, the reader is forced to click on a link to their website without knowing exactly what help will be available at the end of that link.  In fact, there is great stuff on the Dragon website. But, that’s not obvious from the content of the newsletter.   The newsletter could and should have been chock-full of tips that, in turn, linked to their website, to YouTube, to Facebook, etc.

 Deliver Great Content That’s All About Your Customers

Unlike Lynda Foster’s helpful and inspirational Monday morning newsletter, the Dragon folks make us work way too hard to find nuggets of useful information. Moreover, whereas Lynda’s newsletter is all about her customers and colleagues, the Dragon newsletter is mostly about Dragon.  The good news for entrepreneurs, who are also content marketers, is that you can clobber even large companies by delivering great information that reflects the needs of your target customers.

 Nuance has terrific products that I love and use every day.  If they would create a monthly eNewsletter that’s just as terrific and targeted to the needs of their customers, they would directly benefit both their customers and themselves.

Lynda McNutt Foster Delivers with Her Weekly Launch List

Lynda  overflows with brains, enthusiasm, creativity, and fun.

So, I wasn’t surprised to find her new weekly newsletter unique in its approach to its recipients. The ‘Launch List’ is a quick read that delivers much-needed Monday morning inspiration. Although it reflects Linda’s positive personality, it’s not all about her. It’s all about her customers, colleagues, and friends.

For example,  the headline of her April 30 newsletter was Will you make time for the people part of profits this week?  The content focused on improving high-level relationships and began:

A high level connection is one that empowers you and the other person.  Fast is slow with people and slow is fast in building empowering relationships. (Stephen Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People).  Are you trying to be too efficient with people? Try some of these techniques this week to build stronger connections with the people that matter most and who will help you reap profits professionally and personally.

Lynda  then offered quick tips for optimizing relations with your team, your clients, your family, and yourself.  She also included a cool link to a TED talk  by Sherry Turkle that deals with how we make connections through technology.

Each of her newsletters is a quick read.  But, I’ve found that she often forces me to think about things that I could and should be doing better. That then leads me and, I’m sure, dozens and dozens of her readers back to  one of the things that Lynda does for a living.  She teaches leadership and business skills.  In the April 30 newsletter, she does mention a workshop that she’s doing with the appropriate link. But, that comes naturally and at the end of all the great content. Moreover, in many of her newsletters, there is absolutely no self promotion whatsoever.

 6 Lessons We Can Learn from Lynda’s  Launch List

1.  Make sure that your communications with your customers and prospects are all about them–and not all about you.
2.  Develop content that that is so engaging and enjoyable that it becomes must reading whenever it arrives.
3.  Find a way to demonstrate your knowledge and skills–in Lynda’s  case it tends to be about leadership–through the quality of the content that you are delivering.
4.  Don’t be afraid to include meaningful links to other thought-provoking content that reinforces what you yourself are providing.
5.  Make your content easy and fun to read. Lynda writes in short paragraphs with colorful highlights that emphasize important points and just the right amount of graphic images that support her topic.
6.  Let your content reflect your personality. The Launch List certainly reflects Lynda’s  and makes it obvious that she is the kind of person we would surely want to do business with.

I was impressed with Lynda before her new newsletter began to arrive.  Now, I’m blown away and newly inspired to improve my own communications.

Pay  Careful Attention to the Upper Right hand Corner of Google Search Results

If you have recently checked your category’s Google search results, you may well have been as surprised as was when I recently checked  our first page placement in the  ‘content marketing’  topic.

In weeks and months past, text ads would have appeared in the upper right-hand corner. Those ads still appear, but they have been bumped down by a gigantic Google+ area that features 2 content marketing gurus,  Joe Pulizzi and Brian Clark.

Interestingly, the Google+ content has exactly the same prominence as the major sponsored search results that appear above the organic search results. I cannot imagine that advertisers are overly pleased by that.

Happily, Content Marketing Today still appears on the 1st page of search results. Of course, that’s a direct result of picking the right website name early on, having been around since 2007, and posting lots and lots of content about content marketing.  But, our organic search results and those of many other organizations may soon seem less important than any company or individual who is featured in that upper right-hand corner Google+ sweet spot. 

Even worse, Google also encourages you to click through to a follow-up page that shows more individuals and organizations who are active Google+ users. Fortunately, we show up there, too. But, because we haven’t taken Google+ all that seriously, our presence lacks punch and pizazz.

The bottom line seems to be that Google+ must become a key part of our collective content marketing efforts. That’s not necessarily because of its intrinsic merits, but because of the way Google is leveraging its omnipotent control of upper right-hand corner of the search results page. Your search terms may not yet show that upper right-hand Google+ content, but I’m guessing that we’ll soon find it everywhere.
Yikes!

Rethink Your Content Marketing by Aiming at Billions of Buyers on the Move

For those of us who been around computing since the early days of PCs, the consumer move to mobile devices and away from desktop and even laptop computers is astonishing–and maybe a little terrifying.

Smartphones Soar

First, smartphones such as the Blackberry, Nokia, and iPhone entered the picture. But, as recently as 2007 total smartphone sales were only 122 million. Alex Cocotas of BI Intelligence predicts that annual smartphone sales will hit 1.5 billion units by 2016. That’s 10X growth in less than 10 years.

Tablets Triumph

In the first year of its existence, 1981, the IBM PC sold 100,000 units. Most of those buyers were geeks or leading-edge business users. Apple’s new iPad sold 3 million units in its first weekend and more than 50 million units since the introduction of the first iPad just 2 years ago.

As Tim Bajarin reported in Techland.Time.com in April of 2012:

While the iPod and even the iPhone have been groundbreaking in their own right, it is perhaps Apple’s iPad tablet that may have the most profound impact on the world of personal computing since it is the first computer that is truly portable and easy to carry with you everywhere you go. Yes, the iPhone and smartphones are more portable, but because of their small screens, their computing capabilities are limited. But with their larger screens, the iPad and similar tablets deliver much of the power of a laptop (minus the keyboard) and almost as much flexibility as you can get from bigger portable computers — but in a much smaller package.

IPad users still include geeks and business types but they’re just as likely to include your six-year-old and your grandmother. When I visited our local Apple store, the average customer was a senior citizen who really wanted to learn how to use their iPad effectively. Of course, they all seemed to be carrying iPhones, too. You can bet that their mobile devices will soon–or may already have displaced their PCs.

Social Media Goes Mobile

In research released April 13, 2012, eMarketer predicted a massive shift to mobile devices:

… by 2014, 33.3% of the U.S. population will visit social networking sites using their mobile phones at least once per month. That’s up from 18.7% at the end of 2011. Most of those visits are expected to go to Facebook. In fact, eMarketer estimates that the number of mobile Facebook users in the U.S. will jump from 49.4 million at the end of 2011 to 93.9 million in 2014… In other words, not only will people consume more content via mobile devices in the coming years, but they’ll find much of that content through mobile social networking activities.

IPad and Its Mobile Cousins to the Information Rescue

The iPad, iPhone and their competitive cousins are what we really want from our information devices. They turn on immediately. They’re super responsive. They connect easily to the Internet. They are both powerful and portable. And, perhaps best of all, they don’t rely on a resource hog of an operating system that hangs up when you most need it.

For those of us who do a lot of writing, building complex spreadsheets or other very sophisticated applications, we will probably have to hang on to our desktop or laptop computers. But for many of you and, most importantly, for many of your customers, the use of computing devices is primarily:

• to connect and communicate wherever we are whenever we want
• to consume information via the Internet, including e-mail, news, web-based content
• to get our social media fix
• to consume locally based information from word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDF files, etc.
• to write a e-mail or text messages
• to listen to music, watch videos, watch TV or movies
• to play games
• to research purchases.
• to shop online
• to pick a local retailer so we can buy right now.

We can do all of that with an increasingly rich and robust set of mobile computing devices that include not only the iPad, the Kindle Fire, Android tablets but the iPhone, Blackberry, Android smartphones.

That means that just when you thought it was safe to go back into the content marketing water, you will have to do substantial rethinking. But I think it’s more a matter of adjustment than a dramatic change in your approach to your customers.

How to Take Advantage of This Content Marketing Mobile Inflection Point

You are almost certainly using the Internet as a primary content marketing weapon.  And, it is probably delivering significant a better results than many of your traditional advertising and marketing practices. Now, begin to think slightly differently as your customers go mobile for much of the information they consume.

• Make sure that your website is fully readable on the most important mobile devices which would include the iPhone, the Android, and the iPad. That may mean giving up Flash. At a minimum, it’s critical that any flash on your website takes a secondary rather than a primary role on your home and on your landing pages.
• Consider working with a developer to create an iPhone or an iPad app that will take advantage of the unique capabilities of these two pervasive computing devices.  In particular, think about how the touchscreen might improve your users interaction with your content.
• Get social with Facebook, Twitter or other applications that can reach out to your customers with special offers while they’re on the move and in a buying mood.  
• Provide special offers, coupons, or dedicated discounts that mobile users can bring with them directly on their smart phone or iPad.  Don’t make them print something out if they can to show it to you on their mobile device.

We are at the beginning of a fundamental transformation in the way that we all consume information. Our customers and their computers are on the move as never before.  Just as you may have tried to reach traveling prospects with billboard ads on the highway, now it’s time to make sure that you’re connecting with them on the virtual highway.

The good news is that, unlike driving a Corvette on Route 66, your prospects can slow down to pay attention to what you have to say. Just make sure that the new mobile information you’re providing is still relevant and compelling as all good content marketing must be.

It’s All About Making It Easier for the Customer to Buy

OK, I’ll admit it. I not the primary grocery shopper in the family. But, I’m always happy to hop over to Publix, Fresh Market, Whole Foods or SweetBay to buy stuff.  Since I’m not a grocery aisle guru, it usually takes me way too much time to find the items I have been entrusted to buy and bring home.    Occasionally, that makes me a little cranky.

SweetBay Shopping Carts Saved My Day

But,  Sweetbay has achieved the equivalent of a user-friendly e-commerce interface with its shopping cart. In a move that is as brilliant as it is inexpensive to design and deploy, they have equipped each shopping cart with a sheet that lists major grocery items alphabetically and shows the aisle in which they can be found.

At Sweetbay I was looking for coffee. Because my shopping cart helpfully listed coffee in aisle 6, I found it within 30 seconds rather than the 5 minutes of aimless wandering it would usually take.

The genius of the Sweetbay shopping cart content marketing strategy contrasted with my Publix experience.
While there, I went through the frustrating aisle-wandering exercise to find when I needed. Publix is an excellent supermarket. But, they sure made it much harder for me to buy what I needed to buy.

If a supermarket were a website, I would’ve been off like a shot from Publix to Sweetbay, knowing that they would take me by the hand to find exactly what I needed in a minimum of time.

I don’t know who came up with the idea to put that helpful guide on the shopping cart, but I hope he or she got an enormous bonus. I also hope for Sweetbay’s sake they can patent this brilliant content marketing invention.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that make all of the difference. Thank you Sweetbay for saving me so much time and inspiring me to connect shopping carts and content marketing.

We Got Coverage and Kudos from David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, and All Top

Yesterday, we discussed how Sasha Baron: successfully newsjacked the Oscars with his successful Red Carpet stunt. Posing as the Dictator, he spilled the alleged ashes of the late North Korean dictator Kim ill Jung on  Ryan Seacrest.   Although we loved the stunt for its own sake, we also hoped that we might pull off a bit of newsjacking ourselves. And, it worked, albeit on a more modest scale.

Because it was a hot Hollywood story, the Red Carpet stunt got all kinds of attention on TV, online, and in print–with lots of YouTube coverage.   So, I decided to see if we could inject ourselves however modestly into that same story.

Grab a hot story that conveys a key concept to maximize  the reach of your important message

If I had been writing a basic, just the facts, ma’am, story that described what newsjacking was and why it might be useful for public relations and marketing professionals,  I doubt that much would’ve happened. Regular readers of our blog would have benefited. But, I probably would not have generated much attention or additional readership.

Because I was able to inject a real-time element  into our story that incorporated both a hot concept–news jacking–as well as a hot event–the Oscars, we achieved a level of visibility that would’ve been otherwise impossible. 

Interestingly, one commenter on our article hated our newsjacking example because he found the Red Carpet monkey business in appallingly bad taste. He was right about the bad taste, but he was all wrong about the powerful impact that Sasha Baron Cohen achieved.  With minimal investment in dollars and maximum chutzpah, he almost certainly got more value on behalf of his new movie, The Dictator, then he would have by spending $3 million on a 30 second Super Bowl ad. 

 We sure didn’t get $3M of value but here’s what did happen:

• David Meerman Scott tweeted about our article to his 65,000 twitter followers and got 7 retweets
• Chris Brogan commented on our post to his 87,000 Google+ folloowing: “Great use of +David Meerman Scott ’s Newsjacking principle” and got numerous plus ones and comments
• If you search Google News for ‘newsjacking’ as of now(6:16pm, 2/28),  our story is at the very top.
• We wound up at the top of  All Top’s content marketing category. That doesn’t happen very often.

I guess this may sound a bit like bragging. But, I’m always delighted when something we try does work like gangbusters. And, I’m happy to prove once again that David Meerman Scott really knows what he’s talking about.

We  earlier newsjacked Amy Adams, too–but nicely

If you’d like to read a story that’s a little bit sweeter as an example of newsjacking, we wrote about content marketing, Amy Adams, and The Muppet Movie. Our goal was to take those newsworthy elements and tie them directly to content marketing.   Happily, once again, we achieved excellent readership by integrating current news with our timeless subject of content marketing. Although I’m not sure how many people would search for both Amy Adams and content marketing at the same time, those intrepid souls who conduct that search will find our story at the very top of Google search results.

Check out the story: How Content Marketing Convinced Amy Adams to Join The Muppets Movie

Sasha Baron Cohen Grabs the Spotlight with Only a Beard, a Uniform, 2 Pretty ‘Security Guards’, and the ‘Ashes’ of Kim Il Jung.

Every year the American Academy Awards attracts tens of millions of viewers, no matter how boring the 3+ hour television event might be.  In 2012, the ceremony itself may have been even more irrelevant than usual, featuring movies that hardly anybody saw and hosted by an aging Billy Crystal most of whose jokes were as creaky as the ceremony itself.

But, never mind, because the real story of the  Oscars in 2012 was the brilliant Newsjacking of the event by Sasha Baron Cohen who grabbed zillions of dollars of free publicity for his upcoming movie, The Dictator (which will never win an Oscar, but who cares?).

Comic Genius Becomes PR Genius, Too

Cohen displayed not just comic genius, but PR genius well. He may not have read David Meerman Scott’s great book, Newsjacking, but he could well have been a case study. The basic concept is that, in these days of 24-hour news cycles and real-time public relations, marketing pros can  newsjack an event  by finding a way to do something that is highly newsworthy and is somehow connected to that event.

Thus, Sacha Baron Cohen made a huge stink about the Academy not permitting him to show up on the Red Carpet in full Dictator Regalia.  In fact, at one point, and they withdrew his invitation to attend the  Oscar ceremony at all. That goofy fight became newsworthy all by itself with an amazing amount of coverage that made the Academy  seem completely humorless. Finally, they caved in and permitted  the comic to appear on the red carpet as the make-believe Dictator.

Then, the big Red Carpet story: the Dictator, ever so carelessly, managed to spill the ‘ashes’ of the late North Korean dictator, Kim Il Jung,  all over the dinner jacket of host, Ryan Seacrest.  The entire incident lasted only about 3 minutes, But it may linger in Oscar infamy for eons.

Most observers miss the point when they ask whether this was a really funny thing to do–or simply a very rude maneuver. Funny or rude is beside the point. Newsjacking is the entire point.

As I write this, the morning after the Oscars, the news footage I’ve seen both online and on TV is all about Sasha Baron Cohen’s Dictator persona making ashes out of the Academy Awards. There is relatively little about the Oscar winners, their acceptance speeches, and the ceremony itself.

Sasha Baron Cohen is an exceptionally funny guy. Even better, for us content marketers, he is a Newsjacking genius.

Of course, it’s probably obvious but this blog post is my best attempt at doing Oscar-related Newsjacking myself.  Thanks, Sasha for giving me the opportunity.

If, by some miracle, you have not seen the memorable video of his Read Carpet, antics check it out below:

What is it that women seem to love and understand and guys don’t? (about Pinterest, of course)

Perhaps, it’s Pinterest’s self-description which doesn’t make it sound like a guy thing:

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

Check out this great Slideshare presentation  from 6S Marketing to understand what’s going on with Pinterest?

Infographic from CopyBlogger Gives You Both Inspiration and Practical Tips 

I love visuals that communicate complex ideas simply. This is a perfect example. And, I can relate to the need to cook up great blog ideas.

Enjoy the complete infographic below:

Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.

Social media marketing is a trend, not a fad.  Moreover, it’s a terrific extension of your content marketing strategy.

What’s clear from current research is that when we evaluate social media, we are not talking about the marketing longevity equivalent of the hula hoop or the Lambada.

Social media marketing is here to stay.  If you are not already active in venues such as a business blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Slideshare, and YouTube, you should be asking yourself whether it’s way past time to jump in with both virtual feet.

The answer to the question is yes with an important caveat…

…Before making the commitment to one or many possible social media outlets, it is vital to determine whether:

• you understand the target audience that you intend to reach
• you have something valuable to communicate to that target audience
• you have someone with the time, skill, and enthusiasm to execute a consistent social media program–either inside or outside your organization
• you will make the time to listen and respond to your social media audience.

There is nothing sadder than a business blog whose most recent post was a year ago. And, there is nothing less impressive than a Facebook fan page with only a few fans and hardly any messages to or from those fans.

Yes, social media can be an extremely effective marketing tool. But, you will need to make a serious company commitment to ensure that it is effective for your organization.

Social Media is the First Cousin to Content Marketing

Social media is really all about content marketing. We have often written about the need to develop a content marketing mindset. This requires companies to think like publishers.  And, that sounds an awful lot like social media as Wikipedia defines it:

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

Because social media is in a constant state of flux with new technologies and tools coming and going you might feel intimidated at ever trying to understand the essence of social media. But as Paul Gillen explains in his excellent book Secrets of Social Media Marketing, “there is nothing mysterious about social media. The practices that we all use to maintain meaningful relationships in our personal lives apply just as well online. It’s just that the media is different.”

In a sense, social media goes back to the earliest times, when people gathered together in the marketplace and shared information about crops, food, neighbors, the evil King, and rumors of a scary dragon lurking in the forest.

In the 21st century, we talk about the same sort of stuff, but much of it has moved online and become highly mobile thanks to the Internet, iPhones, iPads, and a host of other leading-edge devices.

Just a few years ago, social media was a relatively marginal phenomenon. Today,  just like the Internet, it is absolutely mainstream and therefore belongs as a core part of your marketing mix.

Five Reasons Why You Should Begin Your Social Media Marketing Efforts Now:

1. Your customers are using it to make buying decisions. Millions of web users, both in the business to consumer and business-to-business markets, are reading blogs visiting Facebook, and tweeting daily. They are relying increasingly on social media for buying information in both the b2b and b2c worlds.

2. Smart news organizations are with the social media program. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and your local newspaper have made social media fundamental to how they learn and how they report.  If it’s good enough for their information gathering and sharing where it really counts, it’s certainly good enough for the rest of us.
3. Your competitors are using it. You’re almost certainly paying attention to your smartest competition.  I’d be surprised if most of them haven’t already dived headfirst into social media waters.  Organizations as diverse as law firms, interior designers, real estate agents, and roofing companies are using blogs, podcasts, videos, and user communities such as Facebook to demonstrate their expertise and thought leadership. Don’t let those tough competitors outmarket you via social media.
4. It can be your most cost effective marketing strategy.  The required financial investment in creating a blog, for example, can be close to zero.  The real investment will be in time and thought required to craft a content marketing strategy which provides valuable information to your customers and prospects.  You may need to hire specific content creation resources either internally or externally.
5. Your old-style marketing is less and less effective. Because buyer behavior has changed, you cannot expect traditional advertising and public relations alone to drive buyers to your business as it did a decade ago.  You may certainly want to use those traditional tools to drive them to your online home. That’s where you can prove to prospective customers that you are a reliable supplier who can be trusted, based on your knowledge and understanding of your their problems.  A regular blog, a Facebook fan page, an uploaded Slideshare presentation or a series of informative YouTube videos may be just the ticket to prove that you are the best choice to provide essential solutions.

Summing Up the Social Media Marketing Imperative

You can use core social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, both effectively and inexpensively to compete against competitors large and small. But, as with every content marketing effort, it’s vital to make a consistent long-term commitment and to build your social media strategy on a solid understanding of your target customers. By understanding those customers, you will be able to communicate and to interact with those customers in a meaningful way.

We’ll be writing more extensively about the how and why of social media marketing tools in the weeks ahead.