Results show that 34.8% of respondents are planning to focus on Content Marketing in 2013, beating Social Media (24.7%) by over 10%. It’s a huge jump over 2012, and while it might possibly be off-target for marketers in Canada, it certainly indicates a trend.

What is content marketing?
Our definition of content marketing is anything written or visual that is designed to educate your audience about what you do (and sometimes about other stuff, too). It can be sales copy, but if it’s not then the sell is very soft. It’s essentially didactic material, which creates both knowledge and preference for the brand that does the educating.

CopyPress draws a distinction between email marketing and content marketing, which for many (including us) is a fuzzy one. The only reason I can see for separating the two is that email marketing is so darn big that it eclipses the other kinds of content marketing…or used to.

Their ROI chart clearly shows where the returns are, and also how they define content. Oddly enough, blogging isn’t on the list and that’s certainly an excellent, informal and potentially fun way to get valuable content to your key audiences.

Articles on the rise
I’m totally with them on feature articles. One series of thought leadership articles that ¡Outwrite! has been writing for Nordic ID is in its third year and we’ve upped the frequency. How else can you get the equivalent of multiple pages of advertising space, at many times its effectiveness, for the cost of writing an article?

Some interesting survey findings:
• Featured Articles still yield the best ROI across industries
• Videos are an ROI-rich media format, but marketers are having issues finding them, and within budget
• Authorship is a big focus for marketers this year, but overall they aren’t willing to pay more for a premier author to create a piece of content

The authorship piece is an interesting one. Our strategy is typically to position a senior clientside exec as a thought leader, getting him/her to ‘write’ (read: sign her name to), quote or otherwise opine vis-à-vis articles, white papers and the like.

And that’s a snapshot of the state of content marketing in 2013!

Up till now we’ve been calling this ‘content marketing’ at ¡Outwrite! but the Globe writer calls it ‘utility marketing’. Okay, we’re down with that. Sounds a bit toolbelt-ish, but whatever…datadummmm (drum roll)…¡Outwrite! is a proud purveyor of utility marketing services!

We just finished creating the content for Business IT Auditors’ new website. Sound boring? Guess what: anyone other than an IT auditor reading that Web copy will learn something they didn’t know. They will clearly see the advantages of an IT audit, and I would hazard that they might even be inclined to drop a tidbit or two of that newfound knowledge into their next IT-related conversation.

Whatever you call it, writing in-depth content that spins information in a captivating way is always a winner. And it’s doable in every industry. If you know a lot about what you do, you’re a subject matter expert. We can tease that information out of you and make it sound pretty darn exciting.

Our Globe article continues: ‘“There’s an amazing opportunity for brands to create a true value chain for the consumer. It doesn’t have to be an interruption,” said Mitch Joel, president of Montreal-based agency Twist Image, who has dedicated a chapter in his upcoming book to the subject of utility marketing.’ Wow. Marketing that doesn’t irritate but informs instead? I think he’s on to something.

If you’re good at what you do, you know a tremendous amount about it. But most people don’t share what they know, except anecdotally.

Why not showcase your knowledge and expertise?

Creating thought leadership
White papers are designed to create preference for a company’s brand, product or service through thought leadership. By publishing an authoritative white paper, you are showing the world your mastery of the subject and your opinion on what constitutes best practices in that area.

The result? Thought leadership. If you hope to stand out in your industry, if you would like journalists and trade show organizers to solicit your opinion, a series of white papers is a good place to start. (Articles are good, too.)

White papers can add depth of information to a website. They can be used as sales aids or ‘hooks’. Here are some examples of what can be done with white papers:

• Capture contact information when prospects register to download a white paper on your website
• Email a white paper to prospects along with a sales message
• Link to white papers from a regular e-newsletter
• Improve Internet search results with depth of content

Click here to download our guide to writing white papers:
White Paper Best Practices

What you’ll get is a clear, straightforward, five-page guide on writing white papers that hit the mark. ¡Outwrite! has written numerous white papers for Canada’s top companies, including Bell Enterprise. We understand what works, and we are happy to share our knowledge with you.

But still. We stopped them not with an injunction. Not through direct action. Not after a million dollar legal battle. We stopped them by creating awareness. Strong messaging around a few central issues, hammered home on radio, in print, on television, via Twitter and Facebook, and in person at events and on the street. We created a groundswell of opposition to the idea that grew so strong that they threw up their hands in defeat…and kept farming potatoes.

It’s a sweet victory for many who spent weeks and months working on the dozens of events, large and small, that contributed to this dénouement inattendu. FOODSTOCK: 28,000 in attendance. SOUPSTOCK: 40,000. I guess when you’re facing these kinds of numbers, $25 billion only gets you so far. After all, we reached Baupost’s investors in Boston. They listened. And didn’t like what they heard.

The moral?

Pick your messages. Take the high road. Don’t deviate. And hammer, hammer, hammer your point home at every opportunity.

A bit of an aeronautical train of thought, but do we really need to feature a Canadian invention that is so heavily associated with a larger U.S. achievement? At the end of the day, isn’t the Canadarm merely a useful appendage on another nation’s space shuttle?

The Canadian Space Agency website describes the Canadarm as ‘Canada’s most famous robotic and technological achievement’. Back in 1981 it was pretty hot stuff, to be sure. Personally, I’d love to see a ‘heritage’ stamp of the Aero, the telephone, the lightbulb, the snowmobile or the pacemaker featured. These are Canadian inventions that stand on their own. One obvious parallel to marketing is the difference between taking part in someone else’s event and creating your own.

Just think: companies pay billions to sponsor sports teams and venues, charity events, industry conferences, and the like. And it’s a good thing, because charity events in particular often wouldn’t succeed without corporate or government support. It’s also a good thing for you: while your competitors are busy trying to create brand awareness, preference and mindshare through sponsorship (which is really just choosing a direction in which to throw money), you can find a way to own the moment.

Whether it’s a conference, an open house, a customer appreciation party, a charity drive organized by you, a webinar, a seminar or a series of thought leadership articles printed in trade magazines, creating your own event, no matter how big or small you are, is almost always worth more than participating in someone else’s.

Our greatest success this past year was for a non-client. It was a place. If you’re from the Toronto area you might have heard about a mega-quarry being proposed north of Orangeville, just north of Shelburne. Publicizing what a bad idea that is kept me pretty busy, especially in October.

Resultswise, Outwrite worked to create awareness of the issue and preference for our point of view: that the proposed mega-quarry shouldn’t happen. It wasn’t just us driving the media engine: We worked with a bunch of other publicity enablers, including two social media experts, a PR veteran with incredible lists, a filmmaker, a former CBC personality and reporter and a government relations guy.

The outcome was incredible. Granted, we had a media darling of an issue. I couldn’t have dreamed up a better David-and-Goliath story. But still, I think we did rather well. August through November we had fairly constant coverage of the issue on Goldhawk Live, CBC radio and TV, CTV, City TV, the Star, the Globe and other majors, ultimately culminating in the incredible press coverage surrounding an event called FOODSTOCK. We had a hand in getting 28,000+ people out to that event (the somewhat outlandish goal was 20,000 people) and had something to do with write-ups by Canadian Geographic, Atlantic Monthly, Reader’s Digest (Canada) and all major media in central Canada. In all, close to a million dollars’ worth of publicity, had it been paid work.

A David and Goliath fight

You’re wondering. What’s it about? It’s a shocking thing, really: in 2006 Highland Companies, a Nova Scotia corporation created by Boston-based hedge fund Baupost Group, started buying farmland in the Melancthon Highlands, mostly from older farmers, with the stated intention of becoming Ontario’s largest potato farmer—a goal that it has now accomplished. In March 2011, Highland submitted an application for a limestone mega-quarry of 2,316 acres on the 7,000+ acres that it owns.

So why would this bother me enough to get me involved? Why am I more ticked about this than about Japanese whaling in the Antarctic, the hollowing out of America by powerful corporations, or Harper shredding Kyoto? Well, first of all there’s the bait and switch with the old farmers. Pretty unethical if you ask…anybody. There’s more than one old potato grower out there thinking he’s betrayed his heritage. Then there’s the fact that it’s an American company trying to grab 8 billion tons ($1 billion) of our stone for a pittance. Then there’s the soil. This is Class 1 farmland, the best in Ontario. The earth here is so damn special it’s even got its own name: Honeywood silt loam. Half of Toronto’s spuds come from here.

And there’s the water. The area is a high point, which in Ontario means water. Under this fertile farmland lie 20 stories of Amabel dolostone, a coveted variety of limestone. It’s fissured like crazy and permeated throughout with water. Unlike with sand and other substructures, water doesn’t seep here; it gushes. It goes from A to B very quickly, and B happens to include feeding the Saugeen, Pine, Grand, Nottawasaga and Mad rivers, among others. Highland’s plans call for the extraction of 600,000,000 litres of water per day from this giant hole—once it’s been contaminated with blasting debris (likely ammonium nitrate-fuel oil), alkaline limestone dust, bird droppings and whatever else finds its way to the bottom of a 200+ foot deep pit—just to keep it from becoming a lake. The effect on the local water table? Not likely a positive one, as the pit is planned to descend 180 feet below the water table.

Then there are ancillary things, like 7,200+ trucks per day on local roads, blasting 24/7, dust pollution, destruction of nearby farmland due to a nose-diving water table, eradication of 1800s homesteads and a way of life that might have continued for thousands of years. But the biggest reason for me to get involved is that I think I can stop it. I think that a concerted effort by a few hundred people, over years, will stop this giant financial corporation from disemboweling our land. Corporate America may be running ragged in the U.S. but this is not America and we are not a banana republic.

Whew! A bit of a rant, but it feels good to get it out there. Hope you enjoyed it. If you want to learn more, visit nomegaquarry.ca.

50 Cent may not have anything over other stars with 4 million-plus Twitter followers, but just like them he wields tremendous power. With a few keystrokes he can boost or ruin a fledgling career, influence millions of young minds or make himself tens of thousands of dollars, all of which he does on a regular basis. His tweets are right on—why bother with mainstream?

@50cent has an obvious edge over the rest of us. Being a famous rapper, he’s already built a brand and lots of preference among the keenest demographic of social media users. But you’ve got to admit, he works it: 4.894 tweets at last count, an average of 8-10 per day. The man speaks to over four million people as if he’s sharing a private joke with friends. And I get the sneaking suspicion that’s exactly how he sees it.

It’s an irony that while it’s getting tougher to make money selling music, musicians potentially wield more power over fans. But the flipside is that direct contact with the fan base can result in many kinds of revenue-generating opportunities well outside of the tradition artist-label relationship.

It’s not difficult to extend this model to the business world. Once you’ve gained mindshare and preference—and leveraging ubiquitous connectivity is part of building that preference—you can keep, strengthen and make use of it through direct interaction channels, including social media. Build buzz that would otherwise be costly to build, and keep your fans enthralled via regular updates. Then, when you’ve got something to promote, you’re already plugged into your audience. You can push it and spread the word without much spend. The trick, of course, is keeping that low-level direct marketing going all the time.

Individuals and companies now hold greater sway over mindshare through technology, once they’ve built a brand and gained preference. Naturally, building preference is the tough part, and there’s no magic bullet. There is, however, a clear path to follow, starting with a great brand story supported and nurtured by some carefully chosen, ongoing marketing and/or sales support activities.

That was then. Now you have five-minute algorithm-based branding and 200 Old Spice videos whipped up in 48 hours. Digital has sent the traditional agency model spinning out the window, and the show belongs to specialists of all kinds.

A company with the time and smarts can increase sales through marketing at absolutely no cost, with homemade YouTube spots and diligence in working social media channels. That is provided, of course, that they can come up with compelling content. You have to have something to film, talk or tweet about, and it’s got to be kept fresh and new. Is creating content, not execution, the new purview of communications firms? Hardly. Any company can generate their own content, and many may have the talent to make it novel or noteworthy enough to attract attention.

Marketers used to deal themselves a fat slice of media pie. But the 10-15% commission is long gone, and the traditional media buying model is in an advanced state of decrepitation. The opportunity for marketers now is that instead of having to pay for their message to run somewhere, they can “earn” media for free, via consumers spreading YouTube clips, Groupons, and tweets. It’s viral magic, but it’s almost always sparked by solid creative and great content.

If you’re not paying for dissemination—radio and TV spots, print, digital print, Adwords, etc.—then content becomes more important. If it’s no good, you’ll get nowhere at all.

The phrase is an inanity. More than that – at some level it’s offensive, as it shows an inward focus that has no place in customer service. ‘No problem.’ God forbid that someone providing you with service goes out of their way. ‘My pleasure’ is much better – the idea that someone is pleased to serve you, rather than implying that you might cause them inconvenience, however unwittingly.

Take a look at your company. Do you have a culture of inward or outward focus? If it’s ever a problem to get the job done, to satisfy your clients, you’ll know that you’ve got a problem.

The interesting thing is that you would often learn enough about a subject to speak intelligently about it.

Maybe it was the process: getting up, going to the bookshelf, finding the right book, leafing to the right page and then spending time reading it. Or maybe it was because you had to spend time finding a 200-page book on the subject, so you thought you’d better make it worth your while and read some of it. Either way the result was the same. You could whip out your knowledge and parade it at the dinner table. It might even stay in your head long enough to make it to school.

It could be that my brain is getting more wooden by the day. Or perhaps it’s full. But now that I can count on one hand the seconds it takes me to find the information I’m looking for, I don’t remember it for longer than it takes me to use it. What’s more, I often read just enough about anything to get the general gist. The result? I don’t feel that it’s precious. I haven’t earned it. And so I treat it very casually – the way Canadians treat water. It’s an unlimited resource and it’s always going to be there.

But sometimes you happen across something that’s really well-written, truly interesting and presented in such a way that it sucks you in. It gets you thinking. It doesn’t happen every day, but when it does that information sits in the back of your head for a few minutes, a few hours, and leaves its imprint. It might even make it to the dinner table. I for one find that I’m likely to remember where I found it – the media source, the company website, the blog stream – and be more inclined to go back there for more.

The lesson is obvious: great content captivates. But the point is that it’s more important than it used to be. In the old days you had to read that boring book from the library. Now you can choose from the top 100 results. People have almost unlimited choice in the information they consume. (I just Googled ‘bunsen burner’ and got “About 654,000 results (0.05 seconds”.) So make sure that if they happen upon yours, they stay awhile: make it good.