Couldn’t resist this XKCD comic from last week. (In another life, I earned my keep doing character generation at a video post production house: on-screen titles, “lower thirds,” and so on. Thrilling stuff. Typefaces and kerning were my life …)

Wasn’t much of a life, but it did give me a great appreciation for how good typography can make or break design work.

(Just used this stat in a my Social Media Week presentation on Tuesday. Too good not to share.)

According to a CMO Council study, 67% of consumers Like a page for the discounts or giveaways.

Meanwhile, back in LaLaLand, 57% of marketers thought their Likes were a reflection of the quality of their content.

Beyond the enormous disconnect that these marketers seem to be experiencing, the lesson is that active engagement matters more than passive signing up. If you’re running a promotion or give-away, track not just raw numbers of fans, likes, subscribers or whatever. Track engagement with content over time for a more accurate picture of whether you’re really connecting with your audience.

That means, once they’ve signed up signed up for the promotion, do they Like or comment on your subsequent posts? For email lists, what are your open rates? Do they grow (or hold steady) as your list expands? If not, your content is not a good match for your audience. Time to adjust …

The most recent was an article in the Times Book Review this past Sunday (2/5/12) about Lori Andrews’ new book, “I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy,” which talks about the truths we all already know: those pictures of you at last weekend’s party can hurt you at tomorrow morning’s interview.

Nothing new about that. But the path we seem to be headed on here is. If these snippets of ourselves never really disappear, can they be used against us for all time? Suddenly, we all find ourselves in waters familiar to politicians seeking office, hoping nobody discovers what we did during our junior year abroad in Paris. And that those we were with aren’t motivated to tell all …

(On a side note, it will be interesting to see, if things do continue down this path, whether we change the unrealistic standards we seem to hold public figures to these days. Not that I’m looking to give anyone a pass on bad behavior, but that’s a whole other topic.)

And why do those tidbits follow us around year after year? Can’t we delete them. Some we can, but some we don’t control. We don’t control them because we don’t own them.

“If you’re not paying a company for the goods or services it’s providing, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

(Does anyone have a solid attribution for that quote – or its original wording? Countless variations abound …)

In his Bits blog post recently, Nick Bilton is wondering where his – and our – cut of the Facebook billions is. He’s asking why, if Facebook’s worth is built on the data that they have amassed on their members and sold to advertisers, why aren’t its members entitled to a cut?

The question comes down to whether the data belongs to them or is just about them.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out for the next generation. In some ways, there are parallels with broadcast media, where we’re provided content without cash payment, but give our attention (to advertising) in exchange. But broadcast media consumption is largely anonymous. Facebook and similar membership-based online consumption (and publishing) is 180 degrees opposite.

In Europe, there are already consumers who are fighting against what they say is Facebook’s disregard for privacy. Max Schrems is an Austrian law student. Accounts of his filings against Facebook are everywhere online. This Forbes article is an good starting point.

They may decide that what they’re getting is worth what they’re giving up, or they may move to the future equivalent of premium cable for a better experience.

If future online consumers refuse to give away their personal data for free, boy does that change the landscape of online business.

Finally, moving a bit further afield, this post from John Battelle asks whether the rise of Facebook and similar services is bad not just for Google (it is) but for us and the web in general.

Google depends on access to the web’s data to make its search results relevant and comprehensive. Google can’t access all the data that Facebook and other member-based services collect. Only members can access these walled gardens. (They won’t have access to everything, of course, but then, they don’t in the free and open version of the web, either.)

This becomes a larger issue than just Kindle vs. Nook or iTunes vs. other music services. It’s potentially the entire web experience being carved back up into what those of us with a few years under our belt remember as the days of AOL and CompuServe duking it out. Not pretty.

I hope I’m not coming across as Chicken Little here. I don’t think the sky is falling. It simply seems like the pendulum is swinging back from the semi-anarchist, “information wants to be free” early days of the web to something more in tune with our economy and society. That’s a good thing – creators should be paid for the content they create – but the road back to the middle turns out to be more twisted and interesting than I think anyone had expected.

How Content Marketing Improves Lead Generation and Sales
Tuesday, February 14th at 2pm
More info available here.

But you’ve also got to see a return on your investment. Achieving both means a balance between two big concepts: content and marketing.

In some cases is simple and straightforward. For example, deciding to post 4 “here’s a tip you’ll find useful” updates to your stream for every “check out our new product offering” message.

But the bigger picture is how to achieve that kind of balance with your content marketing activity overall, not on a per-item basis. All your content should provide value to your target audience, and it all should fit into your plans for realizing a return on the time and resources you’re investing.

The key there is “plan.” You will not achieve any sort of success with your content marketing if your focus is on tactics rather than a strategy.

“Let’s create a series of white papers offering our clients insights into market changes that will affect them in the coming year”

vs.

“We’ve got to be Tweeting twice a week!”

Twitter may be how you get the word out about your white papers, but you’d better know your audience and your goals before you dive in to Twitter or any other tools. Point being, you need a strategy to know that Twitter is the right channel, that white papers are a format that will resonate with your audience and that the topics you’re covering speak to their needs.

Making sure you’ve got metrics in place is an important of the strategy, too. You have to differentiate between proxy metrics, like how many times those white papers are downloaded, and business metrics like how much revenue they generate and how profitable that revenue is compared to business won other ways.

Know who’s in between the front runner and those other search engines? Twitter and YouTube.

(Google owns YouTube, so they’re traffic numbers are frequently combined when the data is reported, as it is here. http://blog.websightdesign.com/2011/12/07/twitters-monthly-searches-exceeds-that-of-yahoo-and-bing/)

What’s interesting from a content marketing standpoint is how important Twitter and YouTube have become.

And while we encourage our clients not to bite off more than they can chew, we do encourage them to consider both Twitter and YouTube as key components of their content marketing plans. Twitter is a real commitment to stay active enough to fit the community norms – you really can’t Tweet once a week – and many view YouTube (and video in general) as being too expensive or time consuming to tackle. Not to mention not wanting to be on camera.

The value is clear, though. Creating content to get you into these search results can have a great impact on your online marketing results, especially if you’ve done the research that indicates these channels fit your target audience well.

So if you’re not active with these tools and you’re not getting the results you expect, consider creating a content plan for one or the other and diving in. Reviewing your analytics data should tell you pretty quickly whether you’re on the right track and the results are worth your investment.

If, for example you sell medical information systems products and services, you might be tempted to list your x-ray-related goods in one area, your lab-specimen items another, and your medical equipment in a third.

But if you sell to different audience segments – say, small practices, larger clinics, and hospitals/medical centers, you’d be better off organizing your site around their needs. Yes, you should probably still have products pages for each product line, but those are silos, and they shouldn’t be featured as prominently as links and landing pages focused on individual audience segments, particularly on your home page.

Continuing with our example, the home page should feature portals for each audience segment, and each audience segment should have its own landing page. (Which should be keyword optimized.) The landing pages should feature links to the 3 different product “classes” mentioned above – but those should show only the products of interest to this audience segment.

You’ll wind up duplicating listings in these segment-specific site sections, but if you’re using a CMS (content management system) and it’s been configured properly, maintaining these kinds of overlapping categories is easy.

A well-configured CMS should also make it easy to cross link between, say, client listings, case studies and products/services. It’s doubtful that any one site visitor is going to be interested in all of your case studies, but she probably will be interested in whichever services are highlighted the case studies she digs deeper into.

Presenting your content vertically and horizontally makes it easier for your audience to find the information they’re looking for, and gives you a better chance of keeping them on the site long enough to understand the value you provide.

According to February 2011 InSites Consulting study (via MarketingProfs), a majority of US firms have social media presences, but very few are integrating their social media efforts broadly.

A majority of companies report that they fall into one of three categories – doing nothing with social media, taking first steps, and piloting social media programs. Only 16% report having integrated social media.

InSites reports that social media integration improves marketing communications, customer satisfaction and (not surprising given the preceding two) overall revenue, so it seems only a matter of time before the majority move to get serious.

Small companies lag their larger counterparts. That seems counterintuitive to me. I would expect that innovation would be easier in smaller firms where there are fewer barriers. Presumably, resource restraints are a larger issue for smaller firms.

Resource issues or not, if you’re not making use of social media in a tactical and strategic way, you’re in good company, but you’re missing an opportunity to establish your presence. And the window to achieving real returns continues to expand.

(Believe it or not, there is a window between the  super-hype period – aka “everyone’s talking about it and no-one’s doing it” – and the point of super-saturation.)

Hard to say how long that window will last, but it’s worth hitting. And for most, being too early is better than being too late.

He very rightly points out that the legal risks that social media entail are a poor excuse for avoiding involvement. As he says, “You can choose to embrace it now or wait until your company is the last one in.”

It certainly makes sense to hire an attorney experienced in social tech (and other tech tools) if you’re concerned about social tech risks.

Laws in the area still lag behind the reality, as is the case with most new technology, which is why hiring a specialist makes more sense than going to your everyday law firm or even relying on in-house counsel.

The best use of legal help here, as in so many places, is before you dive in. Craft a corporate policy on acceptable social media activity and content, and have it reviewed and expanded upon by your legal specialist.

That said, and I know this will make Mark and other lawyers uncomfortable, be sure the policy is simple enough that it doesn’t scare your team away from actively participating. They should be aware of – and follow – your company-wide policies regarding any content for public consumption, and a process for regular review should be in place before your first posts. But don’t make the language scary and don’t make the document too long. (I’m partial to the idea that if you wouldn’t discuss something openly with your Mom or your boss, don’t post it, but that’s not a good rule for every situation, particularly in fields with regulatory compliance issues.)

Be careful with other people’s intellectual property and be sure to cite all sources. Don’t post something as fact if you’re not sure of its veracity. Even such buttoned-up publications as The New York Times have mistaken the echo chamber of the Web for actual fact. Don’t make the problem worse by repeating info you can’t source.

Mark’s article goes into more detail on advertising, spam, and other areas, and I’ll leave it to him and other lawyers to provide more complete guidance, but at a minimum your takeaway should be:

1. There are risks with empowering members of your firm beyond the marketing team to participate in social media.
2. Those risks are manageable; they are not an excuse for sitting on the sideline.
3. Get specialized legal help in any areas you’re not fully comfortable.