
Illustration of Jay Baer's Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype |
Joe started off the first
morning with a video that showed him running through downtown Cleveland to the
Convention Center leading him to the stage (in his traditional orange
suit...complete with orange shoes!) to welcome us and give us the state of
content marketing today. He then welcomed Jay Baer to the stage. Jay’s
presentation was based off of his current book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype. I won’t go
into too much detail as I’ve written a review of the book (http://www.jeremybednarski.com/2013/08/book-review-youtility-by-jay-baer.html).
Youtility is marketing that is so useful that customers would gladly pay for
it. What he gave us were plenty of real company examples of companies using
content marketing to be useful and helpful instead of using it to promote their
products. What I love about the concept is that it makes so much sense. There
are so many applications of this concept that can easily be implemented by
companies of any size. It just requires a slight shift in strategic thinking.
Instead of thinking me first, think about what your customer needs and how you
can meet those needs.
Jonathan Mildenhall from
Coca-Cola completely blew us away with his presentation of Coca-Cola’s
transition and growth through liquid storytelling. In fact, I tweeted the
following: “Not tweeting as much during the Coca-Cola .@mildenhall
keynote because it's just fascinating!” Explaining
that amazing things can happen when you listen to consumers, Coca-Cola made a
case for change and grew from one way storytelling to dynamic storytelling,
including building in social purpose. He showed examples of how they modernized
the old “Share a Coke” song/commercial in Australia by allowing consumers to
customize cans with recipients names...taking the sharing concept to a new
level. He also worked on a campaign between Africa and India with a Coke machine that had a camera so
consumers in Africa could see those in India and vice versa. The machine
would tell them to do things like dance and even had a place where they could
simultaneously place their hands.
Illustration of Jonathan Mendenhalls' From Happiness Factory to Content Factory: How Coca-Cola is Growing Through Liquid Storytelling |
Wednesday’s keynotes began with
Don E. Schultz from Northwestern
University . This may have
been the most thought provoking session of the conference. He showed evidence
that brand preference has been declining each year for the past decade.
Additionally, that decline is directly
correlated to the increased use of social media, coinciding with the
decreased use of traditional mass media. As Schultz put it, social media
creates communities, not markets. Social media and other digital marketing
tactics are great tools, but they have to be incorporated into the overall
marketing plan. In looking at what influences people’s buying, the top
influencer is word of mouth, followed by the traditional media: TV, radio, newspaper,
etc. Internet finally shows up a bit further down the list. Content marketing
will get us back on track as we go back to true storytelling and taking the
time to understand what solutions and information customers need.
Finally, the closing
keynote...none other than William Shatner! So what does he have to do with
content marketing? Quite a lot actually. He talked about many of his current
and soon-to-be released projects. He’s got an upcoming music CD, a new show
about wine, a partnership with watchmakers, a new show about motorcycles...he’s
a busy guy at age 82! But what ties all of these projects together are the
stories about each of them told from his perspective. With each of them, you
can see his genuine enthusiasm. When asked about self-promotion, he said he
sees it as simply working on projects that he’s truly interested in. This to
him wasn’t self promotion, but simply enjoyment. In a subsequent interview with
WKYC, he said he understood a while ago the impact of marketing to people in
ways where they don’t realize they’re being marketed to.
So, there you have it...two
jam packed days in a nutshell. I’m sure everyone in attendance took away many
of these messages, as well as many others. The inspiration that comes from
being at a conference like this can’t be replicated in a blog, webinar, podcast
or live stream. Cleveland
should be very proud of Joe Pulizzi for making this happen in our city. For
those that haven’t attended yet, I can’t recommend it more. I can’t wait until
next year’s conference and I hope to see many more people – both local and new
to Cleveland !
For those of you that were
there (or have attended in the past), I’d love to hear your thoughts and what
you took away from the conference. Please share it below! As always, thanks for
reading and please share with your friends if you like my blog and sign up for
the emails!
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