Author Archive

–

Way beyond CRM

MM: Right. What happens is that the “C” in CRM becomes an “S.” It becomes “stakeholder relationship management.”

Yes.

MM: So now, no longer am I interested in just you as a customer, but who you are as an advocate for me in the marketplace.

Right.

MM: A shareholder of our stock. A trade partner. A family member.

Right.

MM: Ultimately, as I’m thinking — 5 or 10 years out — CRM is going to die.

Yes. That’s right. In fact, that’s another thing that I tout internally. CRM. It’s the old school approach. In fact, I’ve got something scribbled on my whiteboard now. We were talking earlier today about this.

The old school idea of CRM — not just for the reasons you state, but also because — as we pointed out earlier. The relationship. The context of the relationship is no longer just between you and me as a company and consumer. It has to be understood in the broader context of other places that that individual consumer can…

MM: Other engagement contexts.

Exactly.

MM: I’ve got this model that I developed elsewhere. It suggests that initially, the relationship is between buyer and seller.

Yes.

MM: Then it becomes between customer and vendor, or customer and provider.

Yes.

MM: Then it evolves into a larger and more-evolved forms. In terms of advocate-partner.

Yes.

MM: Ultimately, between stakeholder and institutional citizen.

Yes.

MM: Where now I’m not only a customer — I advocate on your behalf — but ultimately I am now part of your overall formation of social capital.

Right. Yes.

MM: Thereby closing the loop on social responsibility and sustainability things. Now I’m actually tracking — as a function of our marketing programs — our contributions to literacy. Our contributions to the health and well-being of the stakeholders — of our markets that create the foundation for consumers to buy stuff.

Yes. That’s right. Absolutely.

MM: Wow.

Yes.

MM: We really covered the topic, today. Huh?

Well, I’m sure if you didn’t, I’m sure you wish you had. Mike warned you that I could talk about this for days.

MM: I thought he warned you I could do the same.

No, he didn’t. But I’m glad he didn’t. It’s been really engaging. I’ve loved it.

That’s what’s so exciting in talking with Mike and all the guys over at Alterian. I think the philosophy that you’re outlining is one that we all — maybe separately or who knows how — have arrived at. It’s just a matter of, “Let’s make it happen.”

MM: Yes. Cool. How about if we leave that as the conclusion for our interview today?

Okay.

MM: We’ll pick that up in terms of “making it happen,” in terms of how we get marketing organizations to start eating this elephant or eating this whale of organizational change.

Yes. Right. Excellent.

MM: Fabulous. Again — Thank you so much.

–

–

Clean customer database as an asset

MM: So it seems to me that the first order of business for an engagement partner is to establish a clean customer database. And more specifically, one that allows me to calculate with a fair degree of probability the predicted, long-term revenue for database records. And the predicted long-term profit of a database record.

Right.

MM: That’s industrial, factory kind of thinking.

Yes.

MM: It’s unitized work or units of work. Right?

Yes.

MM: The first job is, “Look. You’re going to pay us whatever the cost is to create a database record.”

Right.

MM: That then becomes the baseline for measuring the effectiveness of what we do.

Yes.

MM: That seems to me to be the value-capture mechanism. Here’s the other thing that’s kind of interesting that we found in the larger field of digital asset management. In the database marketing area, direct marketers traditionally capitalize the costs of a customer database.

Right.

MM: It’s an asset on the balance sheet. Admittedly, it’s an intangible asset, but it’s an asset that has inferred or derived economic value.

Right.

MM: So it seems to me that in terms of the engagement partners, the purpose of an engagement partner firm is to make tangible and concrete the value of a database record.

Right. Totally agree. Yes.

MM: Do it in such a way that you can satisfy GAAP principles. So as now to make it a formal asset class on the corporate balance sheet.

Yes.

MM: That changes the value proposition. Because that drives share price.

Absolutely.

MM: Ultimately, engagement really entails quantifying customer database record contributions to share price.

Yes. That’s right. Absolutely. That’s exactly why, with engagement at the center of that discussion, you have to be able to capture and store and understand and predict the impact that engagement has on your bottom line.

–

–

Agency mindset and business model

MM: Well, first of all, you’re dealing with both a mindset, a business model and — specifically — a value-capture mechanism. So first of all, let’s deal with the mindset. Really, what we’re talking about here is way beyond the agency mindset.

Yes.

MM: The agency — for the most part — is a service firm. A professional business service firm where it takes on projects or programs, and basically charges for them, based on “How many expensive powers of my people did we consume?”

MM: As a service business, their resource base tends to be fairly flat. It’s basically project-management, communications — the telephone and a database, maybe. Right?

Right.

MM: So there’s a certain amount of risk and effort associated with creating an agency. And markets generally reward risk and effort, in terms of a fair — if not intuitively derived — margin of profit.

Yes.

MM: You’re talking about — first of all — a center of excellence. It’s an autonomous business unit that uses its P&L — and more specifically, working capital — to drive investments in new processes that shorten cycle time and reduce costs. That reduce labor — content from the overall deliverable. Increasing quality and increasing effectiveness.

Right.

MM: That really gets to the business model. It’s a new concept or a new distinction of a business model. First and foremost, you’re a digital service factory or a digital services platform. There are certain inputs and you kind of do your stuff, and there are outputs. Those outputs have a more tangible, measurable economic value.

Right.

MM: It seems to me that you have to say, “First of all, we’re not an agency. We’re a digital services platform. More specifically, we’re an engagement platform. If you didn’t have our sauce on your steak, your revenue line would look like this, and your future free cash flows would be this.

Yes.

MM: With our sauce on your steak, your revenue line is “this,” and you’re future free cash flows are “this.”

Yes.

MM: So we want to get a percentage of the economic contribution that we bring to you. We’ve got the analytic rigor by which to create some fairly effective, predictive models.

Yes.

MM: So ultimately, our value capture — and I’m going to introduce a radical. Been around a while, but nonetheless — radical notion of “revenue and profit per database record.”

Yes.

MM: At the end of the day, that’s all. There’s no other purpose for a firm than to find and keep a customer.

Right.

Instantiation of a customer as a database record

MM: If you accept that premise, then the instantiation of a customer is a customer database record. Now it’s shame that most companies have really crappy customer databases.

Yes.

MM: It’s even a bigger shame that they don’t know the cost of creating a customer, nor do they have any longitudinal data in terms of what they do with us.

Right.

MM: As our friend Mike Fischer at Alterian likes to say, “Well, how long have you been lying to your boss?”

[laughter] Yes.

–

–

Engagement partners

MM: Right. Trae, let’s use that at a segue into a topic that we’d talked about offline. I wanted to bring it back here. That’s the notion of engagement partners. Specifically, the evolution of the traditional ad-agency or digital-agency and/or marketing service provider — into a real partner that really differentiates the value proposition. First and foremost that, “Were a center of excellence.” Secondly, “We have mastery of the technology and the analytics.” And thirdly, “We make our offerings available to our clients for not only a baseline compensation, but there’s performance upside.” Such that when we generate revenue or key performance indicators of revenue — we get compensated for that. Because we’re dealing in such transparent, audited processes, basically, you pay for the value that we help create for you.

Right.

MM: Could you take us through the evolution or the other way of expanding upon the notion of an engagement partner? And what that really means, in terms of systems, processes, accountabilities of that organization?

Like I said before — at least in my experience — I think that is still an emerging thing. I’m not sure that anyone including we at Targetbase have really come through to the other side, in terms of what this is going to look like in the relatively near future.

But I certainly agree — and we’ve been talking internally at Targetbase for many years — that that’s the way we not only should be going, but eventually we will be compelled to go.

The old school ways of approaching it are not going to be as effective. Let’s take it from the client’s perspective. The client’s not going to get the same bang for their buck if the way they’re executing their marketing programs is in a very siloed agency or old-school agency way.

Even when you have agency partners that work well together, it’s still not ideal. Frankly, that’s I think for some of our longer-standing client relationships, why we’ve been so successful. Those that have been around the longest tend to lean on us the most for that strategic, analytic partnership. Not so much the execution side of things.

It’s because they want that — what I mentioned before — agnosticism. They want that objective third-party. Someone they feel they can trust to help guide them through all these decisions.

From the client’s perspective, we see — at least our greatest client relationships and longest-standing client relationships — that’s what they value most. Even when times are tough, they may cut our budget, but they still hang onto us. Because they know when they come through the other side of a tough time, they’re going to need that partnership. They’re going to want that relationship — that engagement partnership as you call it — to still be there.

But from the Targetbase perspective, I think one of the things that we’ve recognized — the first piece, for some time, now — but what I think we’re just now in the last couple of years coming to grips with… . The old school model… the fee-based model of working with our clients… is becoming increasingly challenging.

So much of the revenue under that model is on the production and the execution side. That’s not to say that’s not important. It certainly is, and we certainly need to continue to maintain that and deliver on that in a very best-in-class way. But that’s also the lowest margin. The production and execution side. And the most “commodified” — if that’s a word — part of the business.

Take, for example, “database.”

We’ve recognized now for a few years that the database that used to be — being a database marketer — used to bring along a certain level of margin just by virtue of the fact that you were advancing a relatively new technology. The understanding of that technology and how to make it work for the client. That is increasingly commodified.

So much so that — granted, to a lesser degree — you can go online right now and, for free, start your own database.

Again, we’ve had many of these discussions recently. We and — I think agencies, in general — people who provide these services — have to do a really good job of identifying what a commodity is, and price it accordingly. Then the thing that you’re describing — the engagement partnership — that’s where the real value is.

Then the question becomes, “Okay. That doesn’t require as many man-hours to execute. Or at least not as many people to execute. How do we realize as an agency the payoff for work that resulted in millions of incremental dollars for our clients, when in fact, we would’ve normally charged them $50,000 for that?”

–

–

Content optimization

MM: This gets to the idea of content optimization. And how content optimization really leverages or exploits three sets of metadata. There’s a set of metadata around the customer. You could call that a “customer object.” Right?

Yes.

MM: In that customer object is all this basic demographic and psychographic stuff. Plus, there’s a whole bunch of preference metadata, as well as my media-consumption profile. What you called your “patterns of engagement.”

Right.

MM: That would all be part of my customer object.

Right.

MM: Then I’ve got a content object. Around that content, I’ve got a smaller schema of metadata in terms of the meaning of this — the social context of it. Where it tends to get highly rated or highly used. What search arguments it tends to satisfy. What search arguments it doesn’t tend to satisfy — et cetera, et cetera.

Right.

MM: Then I’ve got a set of metadata around my ad inventory.

Yes.

MM: Also, what I have on my ad inventory is, “What kind of context does this ad have a particularly high lift and/or pull lift?” Are there keywords and phrases that are part of the topic map by which this thing got tagged? Are there particular keywords and phrases that it tends to activate or lift well on, as opposed to not well on?

Yes.

MM: The convergence of these three sets of metadata — the customer metadata, the ad inventory metadata and the content metadata — really allows me to then create highly activated or potentiated contexts for consumption.

Yes. That’s right.

MM: The idea is then that part of my content optimization… Inevitably, going back to what I introduced earlier in terms of our voice-of-customer content analytics… It’s taking that same technology — text-mining, semantic tagging and so on… Starting to tag — hypertag — my content in terms that allow me to create faceted search, dynamic navigation and personal tag clouds. So when I with this customer data model show up, it activates these particular content tags. It says, “Oh — customers like you also are interested in these related subjects or topics — related to that tagcloud that’s adjacent to the page that I’m on.

That’s right. Exactly. Yes.

Technology and analytics

MM: How do companies start doing that?

Well, I think that in my personal opinion, the two major components of that are obviously… There’s a technology component. What you’ve just described is a pretty wicked mashup of tables and fields, from a technology person’s perspective. How do you associate properly all those different data points? Or at least those three big conceptual areas?

Then, there’s the math. The analytics. How do you identify what belongs together? How do you identify the relationship between those different tags and/or data components and customers, et cetera?

I think that’s again — what’s so exciting about this conversation. I think philosophically, we’re in total alignment. Again, what I love about Alterian — they’re there, as well.

I think we’re taking steps to that ideal. I think we’re moving in that direction. I think the biggest problem we have at Targetbase in terms of our clients is, so many times clients have more fundamental issues than what we’re describing. So what we’re describing sounds like a pipedream.

I think that the underlying components are really technology and analytics. Again, that’s why I truly believe that whether by just pure dumb luck or some grander scheme I’m not aware of, Alterian and Targetbase are uniquely-positioned to take advantage of these trends that I think we’re all seeing.

–

–

Operational leadership

MM: Let’s quickly explore the notion of marketing operations. Let’s start with a few presuppositions. One, I think many marketing professionals can agree that marketing no longer entails just developing insights, messages, and program-putting lipstick on pigs.

Yes.

MM: By that, I mean it’s no longer about, “Who can we sell this stuff to, and how have we got to tickle their consumption button, such that they want to buy it?”

Yes.

MM: Increasingly, marketing now entails the development of interactive, on-demand, re-mixable customer self-services as well as the provisioning of these services to my customers and potential customers.

Right.

MM: So in many respects, the career path for tomorrow’s CMO rides the rail of digital service platforms and IT service provisioning.

Yes.

MM: It’s going to require a completely different mindset. Now, in this interview we spent a lot of time already talking about the “analytic mindset.” Great stuff!

Yes.

MM: It starts by working backwards from the customer’s preferences and cohort and into the product portfolio mix, as you said, “What do I have the right to sell them or the right to win?” Using that, then, to do media-mix optimization in terms of, “Where do I spend my scarce marketing dollars, to activate those consumers and those cohorts that I want to have the right to win?”

Right.

MM: Then I begin to see that it’s not just winning, but keeping them. How do I keep them? How do I keep them engaged? Then increasingly, that means that I’ve got to be remixable. To use another funny time, I have to be able to customerize content and services.

That’s right.

User-generated content

I would say another piece to that is something you mentioned before. “How do I or how can I intelligently leverage user-generated content?”

Yes.

The age-old example of Amazon. Their recommendations and their ratings. That was a brilliant insight on their part, to realize that, “You know what? I can allow customers to generate content on my site that’s not only going to make that customer happy who got to rate it, but it’s going to inform the purchase decision of future customers. They’re more likely to come here as a result!”

MM: Well, back to this notion of a preference center or information preferenda. I’d like to have another social indexing of “who said what?” It’s one thing for a 22-year old college kid living in a dorm to say, “This is cool.” It’s quite another thing for a 55-year old business owner to say, “This stuff works!”

Yes.

MM: So I’d like to be able to slice through a lot of the rating and say, “For people like me, what do they say?”

Exactly.

In fact, it brings to mind an idea that — unfortunately — we weren’t ever able to execute for one particular client. I think it was Move.com. They own Realtor.com, et cetera.

The idea that they had wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. It was, “Can I create neighborhood-level sites?” I would argue that the idea is a bit dated, now. This was a while ago.

But, “Can I create neighborhood-level sites, where we as a neighborhood — as neighbors — can exchange information and recommend restaurants in the area,” et cetera? To share information about the neighborhood.

The business model idea they had was that the thing would be funded by local advertisers. Local restaurants, local service providers, et cetera, would be interested in being there, from an ad perspective, et cetera. Because those are their local customers.

One of the things that we recommended and pushed back to them was the idea of… In terms of both profile and preference center — if an individual comes on and you understand who they are, then you can do a better job of matching them up with other individuals in the neighborhood or in the general area that look like them.

For example — to your point… If I’m looking at the average rating of a local Thai restaurant, then I can filter — if I want to — down to people who look more like me. So, people who like stuff that I like. Or people who…whatever the parameter is you want to choose. Those who are like me. What do they say about this restaurant?

–

–

NetVibes

If you look at — for example — at IGoogle, MyYahoo — in fact, my personal preference is a site called NetVibes. If you’re familiar with it.

The idea is that it’s simply a platform for widgets and feeds. I can control what I see and what I don’t see. I get to control the content on that page.

Back to the whole Top 12 idea — that’s my Top 1. I don’t go many other places. At least if I do, it’s from a jumping-off point of NetVibes. So I’m controlling it. Again, I’m sure you’re familiar with Firefox. The browser.

One of the things I love about it is the plug-ins. The add-ins. One of them is called GreaseMonkey. Granted, it’s a little geekier than most users are comfortable with — but GreaseMonkey allows you to edit JavaScript. There are others, of course, who’ve made their own edits. You can easily download and install them yourself.

I can choose to see your ads or to not see your ads. I can choose to take two totally different pages. I can take a competitor’s page and your page and smash them together on a single page. I can do whatever I want to do with content.

The point is — and I kind of hinted at this earlier… As marketers, we’d better wake up to that fact. Or we’re going to be left out in the cold. The consumer is in control.

Again, I think some of that is an emerging trend. There are definitely aspects of it that’ve been around for quite a while.

Futureproofing

MM: As William Gibson — the great Cyberpunk author said brilliantly — “The future arrives unevenly distributed.”

Exactly.

I think that for some marketers — unless they’re alerted sooner — it’s going to come as a big shock that, “Oh, crap! My online media isn’t doing anything for me.” Why isn’t it? Well, because it’s easy to ignore. It’s easy to block. It’s easy to mash up.

That’s the point.

Again, back to the site dying. If you expect your site to be one of their top-12 destinations, good luck! For some lucky few, that’s going to be the case. But you’ve got to realize that there are going to be an increasing number of consumers mashing up content and deciding what and how much and when, et cetera, they consume it. So much so that if you don’t start to approach it from that “preference center” mindset, they’re going to ignore you. Or they’ll choose to consume it however they want to, anyway.

–

–

Consensual database marketing

MM: The other aspect… I want to bring up this notion of a preference center. About 15 years ago in a Direct Magazine or Catalog Age…. I read a fascinating article that came out of IBM around this notion of “consensual database marketing.” This was back when Lou Gerstner just came in. I guess this was early 1990s or late 1980s when IBM got into big trouble. Of the many things their customers complained about, the article covered the inundation of IBM customers with direct mail. EDP and IS managers would get four and five direct-mail pieces a day from IBM. Worse still, 80 percent of these mailers related systems long retired and thus no longer relevant.

Right.

MM: So these IS managers went to their IBM account and said, “Stop sending me this crap.”

Right.

MM: The poor account executive found that there were some 70 or 80 databases within IBM that were mailing this stuff into this poor IS manager’s office.

Yes.

MM: So Gerstner said, “Okay. Cut the crap. As of March 1st, we will cease all mailing to all of our customers.” Secondly, on March 2nd, all of our account executives are going to go to each one of our accounts with a clipboard. You’re going to tell me what categories you want to hear about from IBM. Do you want to hear about storage? “Yes.” “What category or subcategories about storage do you want to hear about?” Oh. DASD? Great. “Do you want to hear about terminals?” “Yes.” Do you want to hear about 3270 terminals? “Yes.” Do you want to hear about PCs? “Yes.”

Yes.

MM: So they created a consensual database record in terms of what they wanted to hear about.

Exactly.

Information preferenda

MM: In my book, “Firebrands,” I kind of expanded that into what I call “information preferenda.” Now, “preferenda,” is a term from biology. It relates to all the stuff that attracts the attention of a motile organism. Thus, sunlight and water constitute preferenda of a plant. Information preferenda describes all the classes of information by media type and manner of fulfillment that a knowledge worker would want to consume.

Yes.

MM: Back to IBM and their consensual marketing database. They requalified their entire customer base, defining what each customers wants to hear from IBM and explicitly what areas each customer does not to receive communications or mailers.

Yes.

MM: The net result, IBM realized an $87 million cost-savings in the first year.

Wow.

MM: They got a 4 times great lift-they sold four times as much stuff on a drastically reduced mailing schedule.

Yes? Wow.

MM: Your idea of a preference center really syncs up nicely with IBM’s consensual marketing data and my notice knowledge worker preferenda.

Right.

You now, it’s not just, “What products do you want to hear about?” But, “What categories do you want to hear about?” That leaves open the door to engage the customer in the future when we have a real offering in that category.

Yes. That’s right.

Again, from a marketing standpoint, “What channels do you want to be communicating on? Do you want e-mail? Do you want it just on your mobile? Do you want to come to us? Do you want us to come to you?”

Allow them. This is a hypothetical/theoretical ideal, maybe. But the consumer — again — because as you said before… The consumer is now predisposed to that level of control.

If you look at any channel these days pretty much … Take TV and TiVo, for example…

I can shift time. I can skip your commercials. I choose what I want to do.

The consumer is becoming accustomed to that. So much so now, I would argue, that like you said before… “If you don’t offer that, then I don’t need you.”

Frankly, if you don’t offer that, before long… back to my earlier comment about the “programmable web,” there will probably be someone that will hack your system such that I can actually control what I get and don’t get, anyway.

–

–

Proofpoint: “I’m already there!”

MM: I’m already going to one of these 12 on a regular basis.

Exactly. So, make it portable. Put it where I am. Don’t make me come to you.

MM: This really gets to a great enhancement to this working definition I have of a “brand engagement theater.” I use that metaphor, in particular, to really bring forward and highlight 4 or 5 ideas or themes of engagement. First and foremost, engagement happens at the tribal mind. You have to connect in with it. Tribes, by definition, create a social context. Second, the notion of a theater basically brings forward that, “every brand tells a story.” A story about what it means to be in a relationship with the brand. But it’s a story that evolves through various phases-acts of a play. Thereby, allowing us to use all of the cultural narratives of how we tell stories vis-à-vis a theatre. It takes back to Aristotelian poetics and classic form of a 3-act play with each act having a setup, build and payoff-all of the traditional classic models of how you tell a story.

Right.

MM: Third, a brand-engagement theater also highlights the notion that we need to tell a story to someone and, with success, we can pierce that fourth wall — between the audience and the theatre. Engagement means to pull each member of the audience into the narrative-the storyspace. Not only to pull them into the narrative as an observer, but actually as a collaborator. Then in order to do that, you needs actors that hit their marks and say their lines. You need the set-and-settings for each scene, changing as the narrative progresses through the plot. Then ultimately, we’re trying to get consumers to engage in the brand as a theatrical experience that kind of sweeps me up into a narrative and takes me someplace.

That’s right. That’s again back to the Alterian technology side of things. Ideally, that story should develop in reaction to the consumer’s engagement.

When I was a kid, we used to buy these books where you choose the story. You’d get to a certain point in the story and say, “Do you want to go left or do you want to go right?” Then if you go left, you go to Page 103. If you go right, go to Page 120.

You’re changing the story by engaging with it. In terms of dynamic content and in terms of customized content — beyond personalization. Don’t just know my name. Serve me the content that I want to interact with, in the way I want to interact with it. Then when I do interact with it, recognize that and change how you treat me in the future.

Personalization and individualization

MM: Trae, that really brings forward another controversy that I’d like to mash up and spit out a bit in a newly-digested form: personalization. I think that many people find some level of non-collaborative personalization off-putting but scary; you know, we I encounter a company that know more about me that I shared with them, it’s just weird. Like what else do you know?

Yes. Creepy. Yes.

MM: So there’s the notion of personalization, which inevitably becomes kind of creepy. There’s this other notion of individualization where now I’m kind of configuring things to serve my needs.

Right.

MM: So I’m really kind of programming the basic services of my Schwab account online, or my bank account. I’m really configuring content and services to my sensibilities and my kind of design sense and my lifestyle.

Wow. That’s incredible that you’re going in that direction. We were just having a conversation again — something that we talked about here internally.

Everybody’s familiar, at least in a limited sense, with the idea of a “preference center.”

MM: Right.

I can go in, and — like the examples you give — I can tell you to some limited degree from an operational standpoint — how I want to interact with the company. But we do a really poor job of porting that approach over into the area of marketing. “Let me tell you.” I’m a consumer. “Let me tell you, company, how I want you to engage with me.”

So I think you’re absolutely right. At least that’s what we believe. You want to avoid the personalization “creepy” factor, and actually be forthright. To say, “No, no. We’re letting you dictate our engagement.”

That gets to an underlying sense of what Lawrence Lessig of Stanford calls, “The remix culture.”

Yes.

MM: “If you don’t allow me to remix — if you don’t allow me to customize and pimp my service — then “f” you. I don’t need you.”

That’s right.

–

–

Organic seeding

MM: They talked about both organic seeding — which is you put it up onto these various video-sharing sites. You tag it in a manner that a member of that cohort would tag it. Then you kind of a do a friend-to-friend, “Hey — did you see this?” But it tends to be organic and passive. Oftentimes it takes weeks or months for it to catch.

Yes. Actually, a good example is a case that we’re right in the middle of, now. One of our clients is Michaels. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them. They’re an arts-and-crafts retailer.

One of the things that we’re doing for them now… they have a particular personality — a woman named Jo Pearson — who’s their expert crafter. For the holidays, one of the things that we developed for them was a communications strategy. It had a very heavy social element to it.

Basically, we built a microsite WhereCreativeHappens.com, where Jo is the feature. She’s basically doing crafts with basic materials you can buy at Michaels that turn out looking fantastic and are really easy to do, et cetera.

From a marketing standpoint, one of the ways that we enriched that program as opposed to the more old-school way of just going out and building a microsite and then e-mailing all your customers that it’s there… In this case, we created — as well — a FaceBook page for not only the site, but also for the personality Jo Pearson.

This drove consumers — existing Michaels customers — not only to the site, but to the FaceBook page that the video was posted on. All the videos actually are posted on YouTube, with the appropriate tagging, et cetera — to get people to find it.

It turns out that from a social standpoint, all those efforts resulted in the month of November… One particular video for a wreath, I think it was, that was posted on YouTube… They were recognized as the highest-viewed video in their category on YouTube. Over 900,000 views for that particular craft video.

To me, that was shocking. I didn’t think that many people on the planet were interested in crafts or wreaths. But apparently they are. It was only by wrapping that content in the social context — promoting it maybe initially with your current customers… But also, reaching out to friends of your customers via FaceBook, and seeding the content in a place like YouTube, with the appropriate searchable metadata, et cetera, in order to really see it take off.

Content strategies: Only 12 sites

MM: I think what you’re now beginning to surface or bring forward to our conversation emphasizes a content strategy.

Yes.

MM: To summarize what you said — first of all, microsites are now not just a standalone kind of “go to it, have your experience and go away,” but it’s part of a larger social-media web.

Absolutely.

In fact, people laugh at me because I say it so often here internally at Targetbase. The “site” is dying. By that, I mean the site…

MM: The isolated site.

Right. What I mean when I say that is the “site as destination” is fading. Consumers can — increasingly — and will continue to engage with your content where and how they want to. Or they won’t. So if you don’t have your content accessible and reachable via mobile, via social, et cetera — depending on the target of course, and being smart about it — then you’re not going to be able to optimize your marketing effort.

I believe it was Marketing Sherpa a while back that did some research and identified that the average person has — at least from a destination or site standpoint — a top 12. They engage with those almost all the time, online.

The old school approach is, “How do we break into the top 12?” What we’re suggesting at Targetbase is, “No, no. You don’t necessarily want to break your site into the top 12. You want to perhaps, using FaceBook as an example, put your content into the context of a top-12 site.”

It’s just like social ladder-climbing, in terms of interpersonal relationships. If I want to get to know the mayor, just walking up to him or trying to storm into his office isn’t going to work. But if I have a friend that’s friends with his daughter, and I work that angle, then eventually, I may get to know the mayor.

It’s the same idea of how you put your content into the appropriate context — for your target — so that they’re going to consume it the way they want to consume it. It may need to be a FaceBook application.

Back to the old General Mills example… I want a recipe of the day, but I don’t want to come to your website every day to see it. I want you to build me a…

–