THE ACORN GROUP: Your content, your audience.

MeatCrafters Makes its own Meat, and its own Media.

There is a Farmer's Market every Sunday in downtown Bethesda, MD that has grown in three years into a gastronomic, community and social staple in town. Bethesda Patch has a nice write-up of what the market is all about, but I'm more concerned here with how it is all about.

It turns out that the person who founded and runs the market is a guy named Mitch Berliner. I've met Mitch a dozen or two times, buying half-smokes and kielbasa from his MeatCrafters stand in the market. It's the first place my sons always go because he has sliced sausage on toothpicks as samples. I'm pretty sure it's Mitch's fault that every time we serve sausage at home the kids insist on eating it with toothpicks. He ought to give away some with tiny "MeatCrafters" flags on top.

Did you see how I glossed over the important part there? Patch did too, and it was a full week after I read the article that I realized what was going on. Instead of finding a Farmer's Market that MeatCrafters could pay to participate in, Mitch Berliner built his own Farmer's Market in which to showcase his wares, and charges other merchants for the right to give him this valuable sales and marketing platform.

Mitch Berliner isn't just a content marketer - he's a content marketing ninja.

He's not the first person to come up with the idea of creating content that perfectly merchandises your brand. That honor is commonly attributed to John Deere (the company, if not the person), who launched The Furrow magazine in 1895 (not a typo). The Furrow didn't include advertising when it launched and it doesn't today either, so the comparison to the Bethesda Farmers Market is not entirely accurate. A closer example would be the magazines published by trade associations that generate advertising revenues. The magazines' principal objective is to promote the issues of the industry they represent, and they are funded by the same companies that want to reach professionals in that industry. In this way, they're very much like the trade shows and conferences the associations produce, and are often financed by the same advertiser / sponsor companies. But even these are not quite the same thing as we're seeing with the Farmers Market. The closest parallel I can think of is P&G creating the soap opera, an initiative they only recently abandoned in order to move into social media instead.

It's a fascinating model to me - the concept of creating precisely the right media for your business to advertise in - and then double dipping by getting paid for advertising by complimentary companies (maybe even competitors). Not only does it make for good media from the advertiser's perspective, but it can also aim more squarely at a customer segment, and win against broader media that has to appeal to as many advertisers as possible. 

License to Screw Up

People make mistakes. But companies - highly organized machines comprised of processes, layers of management and entire departments dedicated to quality assurance - should not. At least, that's how most of your customers think, and how you think when you're a customer yourself.

Here's where an effective content strategy can be a lifesaver. If you publish content not as a company, but as people within a company, your customers start thinking about you as a group of people instead of a soulless machine. Here's what I love about this approach - it's the truth, not a trick. Mistakes happen in a company because people actually are fallible. Pointing a finger at an individual perpetrator only when something goes askew isn't a candid content strategy - it's scapegoating. Scapegoating is not an effective customer engagement or loyalty strategy.

Let me give you a real-life example I just experienced. One of the businesses I work on is called November Bicycles, a new company that supplies high-end racing wheels and bicycles through an innovative model designed to strip out as much expense as possible (to sell at lower prices, not reap higher margins). We made a mistake with an order about to go out to a customer, and because of the nature of our supply chain, fixing it would take about 3 months. So we sent an email to the customer expaining the mistake we made (actually pointing out which part was our mistake and which was a supplier's mistake), and offered a reasonable temporary solution until we'll be able to fully fix the situation.

I need to back up a bit here. This customer knows us - the November Bicycles people - as people. Everybody in contact with the company does, owing to an aggressively candid content strategy where we identify ourselves personally and go to great lengths to explain the business, its economics, our decisions and the reasons we make them. If we had a velvet rope, everyone would be inside it.

So when we apologized for screwing up to our customer, it wasn't the customer service department sending a form letter. It was the guys our customer already knows, explaining what had happened in the way that one person would talk to another person. If it were the first time the customer had heard our voices, his instinct would be not to trust them. But he recognized our voices from the site and other emails and elsewhere, and he knows us as people, not a soulless company. And people, he knows - we all know - make mistakes. So his exact response was, "No worries. Many thanks for the explanation."

The right content strategy gives a company license to screw up (which every company could use). And when you do screw up, the contact you have with your customer(s) as a result strengthens the engagement, instead of straining it. A company that works hard to dehumanize itself would have to respond to this situation entirely differently, likely by lying or at least burying their own responsibility for the mishap. That might preserve the customer's business, but would begin the erosion of the customer's trust. Which would your brand choose? I'll take trust over business any day.

Ideas I Wish I'd Had: Dr. Haggquist's Fantasy Football Injury Report

My physical therapist is a guy named Jeffrey Haggquist, who runs a practice in DC called QuistMD. The practice specializes in sports therapy and injury rehabilitation, and ends up attracting a lot of athletes.

A few weeks ago I spied a flyer at the office announcing Dr. Haggquist's ongoing participation as a guest on 106.7 The Fan's sports radio program on Fantasy Football. Every Wednesday Dr. Haggquist presents the Fantasy Football Injury Report, where he discusses the condition of some of the more popular fantasy athletes, and how their injuries may affect their performance, and their FF players' scoring.

One way to build a profile is to talk about yourself or your business to an audience of prospective customers. But the audience who will wilfully sit through it are those who are already highly engaged with you, and are in the process of a purchase decision. If you want the attention of people who do not yet have you in their choice set, but ought to, the conversation has to turn away from what's important to you, and towards what is important to them. This is the strategy behind by-lined articles and columns, white papers, and blog entries (like this one, which starts in the first person but is not about me at all).

I love Dr. Haggquist's promotion because it takes full advantage of what content does best. The objective of any sort of promotion is to reach an audience of prospects, but one that relies on content - like this one - goes much further in that it allows Dr. Haggquist to deliver content that he is uniquely qualified for, and which demonstrates his expertise, shows his personality, builds credibility for his business and positions him as an authority - all at the same time.

Show me an ad that can do that. You can't - they don't.

B-to-B, Social Media and Email

Over the past month I've focused on the intersection of email and social media for B-to-B companies. One of my clients, Real Magnet, is launching some pretty innovative tools that give marketers the opportunity to measure the productivity of their social channels alongside email. Most of their clients are B-to-B and associations so my articles for them on the blog and in MediaPost have put the benefits of these tools into a specific B-to-B context.

Here are a few examples:

• Social Media Strategy Do's and Don'ts for B-to-B Part 1, and Part 2
• The ROI of Social Media for B-to-B
• A MediaPost column on Mythbusting the Differences between B-to-B Email and Social

The blogs and articles will roll up (with the appropriate transitions) into a white paper on the topic as well, squeezing twice the productivity out of the same content. Actually three times - this same content began life as a webinar which I've presented 4 times for them, to their own audience and the audiences of their key partners. Here's one of them if you'd like to hear my voice:

Targeting without Segmenting

I published a blog for Real Magnet today on how to use content to target without segmenting. It's part 2 of a series. Part 1 is here.

Remember the Pontiac Grand Prix commercials that touted "Wider is better?" In content, I think the opposite is true. The greatest challenge that email marketers (and anyone else trying to reach customers with content) face is clutter - all the other stuff in inboxes that makes whatever it is you're trying to get in front of people seem only marginally important. In my experience, the best way to cut through clutter is to be intensely relevant to a smaller segment of the audience. You can't be more interesting to everybody all the time, but if you find the population you're uniquely qualified to speak to, and you create content aimed expressly at them, you'll win.

In 2007 I put that theory to the test when I launched a site called GamJams.net. I made the word up, in part so that I could take credit for anything showing up in Google or anyplace on the wild web that used the word. The site covers amateur bicycle racing in the Mid-Atlantic. You want niche? I've got yer niche right here. When I launched, I knew that the total number of licensed competitive cyclists in the region the site covered was about 5,000 people. Within about 6 months, the site was doing tens of thousands of visits per month from right around 5,000 different people, 95% of whom were in MD, DC and VA. Made from equal parts hobby, passion and proof-of-concept, the site still has about the same audience size today.

The point is, I think you can win without being big. I think how important a brand is in people's lives creates more opportunities than the sheer tonnage of people a brand somehow grazes.