Chief Content Officer magazine asked a few of its contributors what their opinions were on the best PR tools available.  Here are their answers.  

HARO (Help a Reporter Out)

Sign up with HARO to receive queries in your inbox from reporters seeking comment on a developing story in your field. With a premium subscription, you can even get advance notice, giving you more time to craft your response to a particular query.

Muckrack.com

Use Muckrack to (a.) identify journalists who are talking about the issues you care about most, (b.) engage them in conversation and (c.) pitch them more effectively. You can also get an early notification of breaking stories about your company or industry among journalists, letting you join the conversation in the critical early days.

PR Newswire

The press release should be considered essential for digital content marketing. Why? Because press releases are structured content that are easily optimized, distributed and consumed across the Web.  And distribution such as that offered by PR Newswire not only reaches thousands of websites, search engines, social networks and the like, offering unparalleled scale and reach, but also includes manual editorial review to help ensure the authenticity of the content and to make sure it is targeted to the relevant media partners only.  What’s more, PR Newswire’s ARC platform integrates text, video, multimedia, infographics and other content assets into a single platform that is distributed across the PR Newswire network, offering even broader storytelling capabilities across many more channels (each asset has a relevant distribution channel).

*PR Newswire is a sponsor of The Content Marketing Institute.

GroupHigh

Want to court the blogosphere more effectively? GroupHigh lets you search more than 1 million blogs in North America and the United Kingdom, identify the niche blogs you want to engage with and capture contact information for influential bloggers (including Twitter feeds and other social media contacts). The site also helps you manage your relationships with bloggers over time to help sustain the relationship and keep your name top-of-mind. 

Constant Contact

Use Constant Contact to distribute press releases and send out announcements on events. The service makes it easy to create email lists, incorporate pictures, and monitor opens. You can also seamlessly distribute through social media.

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free print subscription.

Breathe deeply. We’re about to document the 25+ tools marketers need to know about if they’re serious about real-time marketing.

Real-time marketing—the ability to monitor, manage and guide your marketing efforts as they occur — is one of the most important areas of marketing today. Fortunately, new tools that show breaking trends on Twitter, revealing how an individual customer interacts with your content, identifying your brand’s social influencers and making sense of all that data to make it actionable, are available to CMOs in 2012. The challenge most face: Where to begin?

The landscape of real-time monitoring tools is particularly wide and deep, so let’s focus on digital channels. Further, let’s divide real-time marketing tools into two categories: onsite and offsite. Onsite is any customer interaction that occurs on any digital property you own, such as your website. Offsite is simply everything else, including social sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Most marketers already employ a suite of tools for onsite analytics reporting. Omniture and Google Analytics are two popular tools for viewing your site’s visitor data. These standard site reports won’t be phased out anytime soon, but there is a relatively new breed of tools such as Woopra, Chartbeat and Clicky that offer the ability to view real-time interactions with your site. They answer, “How many visitors are on my site right now and which specific pages are they viewing?” (Google and Omniture also offer real-time tools, but they are not singularly focused, as with the others.)

While these real-time tools are an improvement over the previous generation, they still essentially provide a “web-centric” view of the data, meaning they are designed more for technologists than marketers. Marketers want to know, “How many visitors, at what time, resulted in how many conversions?” Fortunately vendors now realize the importance of this data to marketers and are introducing software that add context to the raw site statistics.

Real-time analytics guides real-time content

Mixpanel offers sophisticated, real-time segmentation, funnel and retention analysis, while GoSquared provides real-time views of top content, top referrers, top searches and social media influence. GoSquared and Lexity also offer customer-centric views of your site. Both of these tools can report on a single individual in real time as the visitor arrives on your site, how he or she got there, what pages were viewed and if an order was placed — or not.

Onsite tools are pivoting from passive monitoring to actively guiding the generation of socially relevant real-time content. InboundWriter monitors your audience’s interests and online conversations, and then instructs you on how to craft content your audience will find compelling. It even coaches you on how to tailor your content for different mediums, such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. This active shaping of content is very reminiscent of search engine optimization. But unlike SEO, it happens in real time and you can see the results immediately.

Offsite tools are evolving even faster than onsite tools, fueled by apps offering new social experiences. Marketers once only worried about Twitter and Facebook. Now add Foursquare, Instagram, Path, Pinterest, Fancy and others.

Real-time social media

There are many tools for managing your social effort, such as HootSuite, CoTweet and TweetDeck (now owned by Twitter). I like to call these “meta-tools” because they add additional functionality on top of existing applications. These tools can post to multiple networks, schedule tweets and filter your stream so you can hone in on important content. HootSuite also provides niceties like CMS functionality (e.g. team collaboration, messages drafts, analytics) and offers a custom URL shortener, Ow.ly, which enables click-thru link tracking.

SocialMention is a stream aggregation tool. It monitors more than 100 social media properties and creates a single, searchable stream. Want to know what’s being said about your brand (almost) anywhere on the web? SocialMention might help you with that challenge. On the other end of the spectrum is PostPost, which is a surgical Twitter search scalpel. It only searches through content from your Twitter followers.

Other social monitoring tools worth mentioning are Radian6, BuddyMedia, BuzzMetrics and ScoutLabs, all of which provide the ability to monitor, measure and report on social activity.

Once you have identified who is talking about your brand, you would probably like to know how influential they are in the social media landscape. Klout and PeerIndex are attempting to attach some context to users’ online persona by monitoring their social stream, and then ranking their influence on specific topics and with other people. Both indexes are nascent, but it’s interesting to watch them try to establish themselves as the index of record.

Making sense of so much data

OK, so you have tons of onsite and offsite data, and very likely a truckload or two of offline data. While linking the data is critical, making that data actionable in real time, whenever and wherever you see a user, would be the “killer app.” Well, this is possible right now with Data Management Platforms. DMPs are essentially large, fast, real-time data warehouses; they store and link together data based on cookie data or other unique keys, and provide an interface for asking questions against the data. You can import first-party data from your site and your offline campaigns; you can import second-party data from partners with whom you share data and you can import third-party data from providers like BlueKai, TargusInfo, Bizo and Excelate.

Once the data is married in the DMP, you can analyze it, aggregate it, slice it, dice it, report on it and most importantly, make it actionable. For example, you can, in real time, identify the audience a visitor to your site belongs to (e.g. male, 45-50, divorced, kids, into cars and motorcycles) and then, again in real time, tailor the site (content, ads, even layout) directly to that visitor.

You’re a marketer. You’re familiar with audiences, demographics, psychographics and now on/offsite social data; but up until recently, it was a passive undertaking, requiring long cycles of content planning, months of site design and development, weeks of deployments and days of generating reports. With DMPs, you can leverage all of the social data you’re collecting, combine it with your offline data and act on it all in real time. Right now.

Technology alone will not run your marketing strategy. The best tools are only as good as the people using them. CMOs who put together the right combination of talent and technology will have the edge in today’s real-time world. 

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free print subscription.

Two technology start-ups are aiming to make the connection easier.

PostRelease

While ad networks offer brands and bloggers the benefit of instant scale, brands are relegated to small, peripheral ad widgets. PostRelease gives brands the scale and ease of an ad network, with the relevancy and positioning of content. Big brands use PostRelease to publish sponsored posts instantly across thousands of placements — from small but revered mommy blogs to massive media networks and forums. And unlike “dropped-in” ad widgets, sponsored posts match the design of the existing site seamlessly. Currently PostRelease is the only company that places content inside forums as well as blogs and content sites.

Bloggers like PostRelease because they can still use their existing ad units. Brands like PostRelease because sponsored posts are contextually matched and get prime positioning, so campaign performance can be five to 10 times greater than through-ad units. Brands using PostRelease include Ford, Intuit and Clorox Corp.

BlogFrog

BlogFrog has tapped into the surging popularity of “mom blogs” by harmonizing content, community and advertising. Bloggers add a BlogFrog app to their existing publishing platform to create an insta-BlogFrog community. BlogFrog’s technology allows readers to ask questions, share photos and even participate in live chats and broadcasts — a much more versatile community tool for bloggers than Facebook and Twitter. The site has 125,000 active members and reaches 10 million parents per month, making it the largest mom-blogger network in the country.

For bloggers, BlogFrog amplifies conversation and increases revenues. For brands, BlogFrog’s more intuitive connection between content and conversation is already attracting big names like Proctor & Gamble and Kraft.

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free print subscription.

You can’t always get what you want

Don’t assume prospects are willing to provide their information just because you’re delivering a meaty report or white paper. Buyers don’t only base their decision to provide contact information on the value of the content you provide. Rather, they more often are concerned about holding vendors at arm’s length until they’re far along in their buying decision process (which helps explain why 70 percent of tech purchases are at the RFP stage by the time the vendor knows about the opportunity).

Consider these findings from TechTarget’s report, “When Worlds Converge:Similarities in Brand Reception and Media Consumption of IT and Personal Technology Buyers. Of the 3,269 IT buyers surveyed, 43 percent said they were somewhat willing and 42 percent were very willing to share their contact information when they are ready to make a purchase. However, while 53 percent of respondents were somewhat willing to provide those details in exchange for “expert or editorial information,” only 19 percent were very willing to do so in the same scenario.

Add to this the fact that separate research (sponsored by Janrain and conducted by Blue Research in October 2011) uncovered that 88 percent of consumers admitted to having given incorrect profile information on registration forms. It’s no wonder that Sirius Decisions found that 10 to 25 percent of all prospect records contain critical data errors. 

Source: When Worlds Converge: Similarities in Brand Reception and Media Consumption of IT and Personal Technology Buyers

In fact, when IT buyers click to download your content, much like their consumer counterparts, the majority don’t want the vendor to contact them as a result. 

Source: When Worlds Converge: Similarities in Brand Reception and Media Consumption of IT and Personal Technology Buyers

Is it any wonder that 38 percent of these respondents give their personal email address (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), rather than their business address when registering for vendor information? In cases where registration is required but they’re not ready to talk to a vendor, IT buyers do all they can to maintain control over interactions. In fact, 71 percent of the IT buyers surveyed refuse to provide their business account so as not to get inundated with messages. 

Source: When Worlds Converge: Similarities in Brand Reception and Media Consumption of IT and Personal Technology Buyers

Keep it short and sweet

So how can you collect the information you need to start engaging and determining whether or not someone is truly a prospective customer? Ideally you build up the information using progressive profiling, rather than hitting  someone with a 10- or 15-field registration form from the get-go. With this approach, you pre-populate the form with the information you’ve already gathered about the prospect, and collect incremental information during each successive interaction. You can also augment the information you gather with data from third-party providers such as JigSaw or ZoomInfo. By minimizing the burden on the site visitor, you increase the chances of collecting information.

According to a MarketingSherpa case study, HP trimmed its confusing 15-field monster of a registration form to five essential fields. It also collected visitors’ IP addresses and email domain names to cross-reference them with third-party data. The results speak for themselves: The new form yielded a 40 percent conversion rate — an increase of 186 percent — among visitors from HP’s support pages.

Tap into social sign-on

Another option is to reduce the need for forms. Social sign-on allows site visitors to use the information from their profiles on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and Twitter to fill out your registration form. According to the Blue Research study mentioned earlier, 77 percent of those surveyed feel social login should be offered. (And 54 percent may leave a website if asked to register the traditional way).

A few vendors offering solutions enabling social sign-on:

• Gigya (support for 25+ “identity providers”)
• Janrain (support for 20+ social networks and email providers)
• OneAll.com (connect with 20+ social networks)
• Pluck Social Sign On (support for Facebook only)
• React.com (supports 10 social networks)

Test your forms and formulate a strategy

The problem many organizations run into when debating the registration form issue is that they are basing their arguments and decisions on gut instinct. Instead, approach registration from a strategic, analytical perspective, just as you do with your landing pages and emails. Run a test of your forms with a different number of fields and measure the results. Marketo, a company offering marketing automation software, did just that and found that the longer the form, the lower the conversion rate and the higher the cost-per-lead (see the table below). 

Source: http://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/internet-marketing-strategy/lead-generation-testing-form-field-length-reduces-cost-per-lead-by-10-66.html

Ultimately, the registration information you request should logically relate to the content that people are accessing on your site. In other words, map out the buyer’s purchase process and how your content fits at each stage. Then determine which bits of information you can reasonably request at each stage. 

As you can see in the mapping scenario above, there will be times you provide content for free (i.e., no registration required). But that doesn’t mean you’ll have no idea who is visiting your site and checking out your content. Many marketing automation systems support anonymous site visitor tracking, enabling you to tie a visitor to an IP address, which can then be cross-referenced against the WHOIS database for the site owner’s name. netFactor, eTrigue, and VisiStat also provide visitor-tracking solutions.

Remember, by making it easy for prospects and customers to access the information they need, you will deliver an experience that stands out — and could very well factor into the final purchase decision.

What suggestions can you offer to reduce friction in the lead-generation and nurturing processes? 

For this post, here are some insights into how we use online listening tools (and what tools we use) for ongoing monitoring as well as for up-front strategy development and post-campaign analysis of the overall success of our content marketing efforts.

Before you plan

Prior to developing the online marketing, content, and website strategies for any of our clients, we initiate a “listening” (research) effort with an online monitoring tool called Spiral16 that helps us get a better feel for four distinct things:

1. Who is having online conversations surrounding their industry, product, or service categories (influencer identification)
2. What they are saying — the topics that are being discussed and the words/ phrases being used
3. Where they are saying it — types of sites, social networks, blogs, forums, etc., that are housing these conversations and content
4. Benchmarks for brand mentions — how to set an overall baseline volume of current brand mentions

Getting this lay of the land gives us a better understanding of current online/ social conversations and provides a data-backed foundation that helps to guide our strategy development process.

For example, prior to developing an online marketing strategy for a client that manufactures women’s legwear (tights, leggings, novelty socks, etc.), we initiated our listening effort and found that 69 percent of online conversations surrounding those product categories were happening on blogs. Specifically, the majority of those blogs were “fashionista” bloggers who post daily on new fashion trends and the outfits they’re wearing that day. Many of these fashionistas support their blogging habit through sponsorships and the affiliate programs provided by apparel manufacturers. We were amazed to find that many of these fashionistas have significant followings (3000 to 5000 subscribers).

(Spiral16 Site Types Distribution Graph)

With this data it became glaringly obvious that a fashionista blogger outreach program was needed. We proceeded to create that program along with a monthly blog feature, “Fashionista of the Month,” and a new fashionista affiliate program.

Without this initial listening effort, we would have never realized the influence of the fashionista community. Not to say that we wouldn’t have figured it out eventually, but this research allowed us to hone in on the best strategy right from the get-go.

During your campaigns

An ongoing listening effort during your content marketing campaign is definitely a must and can be accomplished easily with both free and paid listening tools.

• For larger clients, we continue to use Spiral16 to monitor brand mentions, campaign performance, and filter the web’s fire hose for relevant content and conversations that may be worthy of engagement (response, comments, retweets, curation, etc.).
• Free tools like Google Alerts, SocialMention.com, and Twitter Search may not do as good of a job delivering the most relevant results, but they can still get the job done if you can spare the time to manually sift through their results.

Setting up your RSS reader is also a vital part of this equation. As you come across influencers, blogs, forums, and social networks that are consistently talking about your product/ service categories, you should:

• Subscribing to those sites via RSS
• Subscribe to any feeds that your competitors are providing
• Pull in feeds from other industry vendors or partners that are providing auxiliary products or services.

Think of this as creating a dashboard that allows you to keep tabs on all the new content that is being created within your industry. (For more on how to set this up, here’s a video that walks you through it.)

If you’re finding too many feeds to monitor individually, you can use Yahoo Pipes to aggregate (group) them and create single, filtered feeds that fit together. For example, there might be several forums and Ning-based social networks that you want to monitor. Most forum or discussion board platforms allow you to grab (copy) RSS feeds, which can then be plugged (pasted) into Yahoo Pipes and filtered for the specific keywords or phrases that are relevant to your business. Yahoo Pipes will then provide you with one filtered feed URL that you can plug into your RSS reader. (For more on how to set this up, check out the video on the Yahoo Pipes homepage.)

After you’ve launched your efforts

I don’t know about you, but my goal for almost any marketing campaign is that we’ve done enough work to help the product or service grow organic legs of its own. How are you going to know if that happened if you’re not monitoring after the fact? Depending on the goals of your campaigns, listening after the fact can help you uncover some of the most juicy nuggets:

• Viral, organic spread of your campaign’s messaging
• User/ customer reviews and testimonials
• User-generated ideas for new features (send these to R&D)
• Any drop in mentions/ activity when the campaign stops, which normally indicates the need for a more sustained marketing effort.

No matter which tools you’re using to get this done, it needs to be done regularly. Larger organizations will probably have the ability to hire that Chief Listening Officer or analyst who has a nose for digging into data; but even small organizations can benefit from dedicating a little time each week. At the end of the day, we need to be using all of this data to help us make better, smarter decisions.

What other tools are you using to find relevant content and conversations surrounding your industry, product or service categories? How are you using them to make smart decisions?

• What your visitors have and have not been doing (analytics)
• Why your visitors are taking certain action (visitor behavior indicators).

For information on how to do this, take a look at the series of articles I wrote for CMI on tactics for visitor behavior optimization. Also, Brody Dorland just wrote an excellent article on understanding buyer personas and the paths they take on websites.

Once you are armed with this information, you can take advantage of the following WordPress plugins to help you optimize your content:

Display popular categories on navigation menus

It’s a good idea to discover what categories pique your visitors’ interests at your site. Yoast has an excellent analytics plugin for WordPress which, among other things, allows you to see page views per category. Once you have this information, you can better market that content by adding it to your dropdown menus like this:

Above (click to enlarge), popular categories were first called into position using the WP 3.x drag and drop menu admin, and then they appear in your top navigation.

Include smart internal links

You also want to review your analytics to figure out which search terms people use to arrive at your site and what they search for when on your site. (Note: This requires some setup to track. Some advice from And Break can help get you started). Once you know what these terms are, include relevant links in your posts. For instance, you can link to a related term that has appeared on your site such as Analytics, Visitor Behavior. Note that I have “sculpted” this search return (pulling groups of content into the WordPress search returns by adding a set of keywords separated by a comma) to dynamically pull a set of articles directly related to our topics (both on-site analytics and on-site visitor behavior), then I just copied the resulting link URL.

Reveal buried content

It’s a good idea to surface content that is  timely and relevant as this could be different from what is on your “latest posts” widget. To find which posts to feature, review your analytics to understand what visitors want.

A great plugin for this (developed by my agency, WebFadds.com), is MaxRef Widget(s), which stands for maximum reference to content. You can place this in as many locations as your need, but I suggest including one in the footer area to re-engage visitors who have scrolled to the bottom of a page and are thinking about leaving.

Below, see just one way you can configure the widget to show feature-relevant content:

Above (click to enlarge), we have configured this MaxRef widget to display only certain child pages to market specific content.

Ask for action

In the Brody Dorland post I referenced earlier, he asks us to think about ways to better convert a visitor to a prospect, lead or customer.  One way to move them along the conversion path is to ask them to subscribe to your RSS feed. An excellent plugin, called WP Greet Box, offers editable call-to-action messages you can send to new visitors. I use this on my sites, including  CMI.

Below is the stock message for RSS feed subscriptions, but you can ask for any desired action that matches your business outcome goals (TIP: Always test wording to see what will work best):

Above (click to enlarge) the versatile WP Greetbox plugin allows you to customize calls to action after recognizing visitors who are entering your site from any one of a number of social venues.

Attend to social signals

Currently, search engines are paying particular attention to “social signals”, meaning how many people like, tweet, and otherwise link to your content in social venues. There is a great plugin that fosters the “big five,”  Twitter tweets, Facebook “likes”, Google+, LinkedIn comments, and StumbleUpon postings. Note that I included StumbleUpon because the plugin automatically adds it, and Mashable recently noted that StumbleUpon drives more than 50 percent of social media traffic over time (think link building).

Called TF Social Share, the plugin provides extra placement and styling options, including a floating box that stays in place at the side of posts when you scroll:

Above (click to enlarge) you can see the excellent options featured in this plugin to help you market your content in social venues

I made a recent video on Content Marketing plugins that explains more about some that are mentioned in this article:

I’m sure some of you will have other favorites, so I look forward to reading about WordPress plugins that help you with your content marketing tactics. Let me know in the comments.

Kapost

Kapost helps content producers manage the content production process so they can focus on content, audience, and marketing promotion.

Haiku:
Make content, storms rage
Content marketing, dark skies
Kapost, sun shines bright

Inbound Writer

This allows writers to focus on what they do best: understanding and creating engaging content.

Divvy HQ

This new program (the beta was launched yesterday) helps marketers plan create and manage content plans with something other than the dreaded spreadsheet. It’s an especially useful tool for agencies who hand off content plans to clients.

Haiku:

Your accountant called.
He would like his spreadsheet back.
Try Divvy today!

Dlvr.it

Dlvr.it helps content marketers distribute content to both paid and earned media through Facebook, Twitter and more.

Haiku:

Serenity Now!

Engagement lacking
Dlvr.it optimize
Relevant Now, breathe

Thoora

Tired of looking for answers only to be bombarded with info? Thoora provides the freshest and most relevant content so you don’t need to dig through thousands (or millions) of search results.

Haiku:

The best content lies
Buried in the web’s rubble
Find it with Thoora

Serv.io Media

If you need content that scales, is optimized for SEO, verified for credibility and ready for publication, check out Serv.io Media.

Haiku:

Google Panda Bear
I laugh at your fierce growling
I use Servio

Outbrain

Outbrain helps you distribute your content by providing personalized recommendations for your content.

If you wrote a blog
And no one came to read it
Did you write blog?

Skyword

Skyword provides brands, agencies and media companies with a turnkey solution for content workflow automation. This includes writer management, content creation/promotion and program management.

Want to hear more from these companies? Here’s a great video from Eric Leslie from OnScene Produtions that shares what exhibitors are getting out of the event.

What is a video infographic?

Why do users like video infographics?

How do I use video infographics in content marketing?

• We were looking for an attention-getting way to promote it via as many channels as possible (email, blogs, social media channels, etc.)
• We wanted a highly visual way of promoting the white paper on our website
• Video was a key topic of the white paper, which was also rich with data

• People like sharing infographics, which extends the potential social reach
• A video infographic is the perfect medium to repurpose some of the content we worked so hard to collect: Some of the eye-opening stats could serve as a great teaser for the document and/or could be consumed by those not interested in reading the whole white paper.

1. Keep your script as concise as possible
2. Consider the size, angles, and animation of your text
3. Have a simple slide background with enough contrast to your text

A quick tip

While it’s obviously a benefit to be smart, skilled, and open to experimenting with available tools, techniques, and formulas, content marketing today is as much an art as it is a science. And so who better to provide some great marketing tips than some artists and entertainers who could be considered brilliant — if unexpected — content innovators.

An indie spirit, with a mind for community

Do-it-yourself content marketers searching for inspiration should look no further than the work of one of the kings of independent film, Kevin Smith.

Smith embraced the power of online fandom early on, creating a View Askewniverse, where his fans could gather and commune with each other — long before MySpace, Facebook, or even Friendster gave like-minded people a digital lounge to hang out in. For the release of Clerks II (2006), he spurred fans to support the film by putting the names of the film’s first 10,000 MySpace friends in the film’s credits. And last year, he demonstrated the power of the tweet when he turned an embarrassing personal incident on a Southwest Airlines flight into a national, branded conversation.

But for his latest film, Red State, Smith bet on the persuasive power of content marketing, and he hatched a plan to go all in: Smith set out to self-distribute his film, and to side-step Hollywood’s marketing monster by promoting it through an unconventional viral/social media campaign. (He has since announced a revised plan to release the film via video-on-demand, followed by a video release by Lionsgate.)

He began by teasing both the film and his distributor’s journey on multiple social and online platforms, and then he took his story on the road, appearing live at each screening of the film and conducting lengthy Q&A sessions afterwards to interact directly with his audience. Smith comments on his official RedStatement website:

“My only super power as a filmmaker is that I refuse to let the film end when the credits roll; that’s when I come out and continue the story.”

Content marketing lesson: Don’t be afraid to defy expectations and break new ground. If you have a strong, dedicated fan base, like Smith has cultivated over the years, reach out to them, and give them a reason to spread your message with their friends — an underdog cause to rally behind, an experimental venture they can be a part of, a unique experience that they won’t find elsewhere, or what have you. And let the ensuing experience feed your ongoing brand story, told on as many platforms as you can manage.

By the way, screenings of Red State are scheduled in Los Angeles, Calif., for the week of August 15. But if you’re headed to Content Marketing World, you’ll have an extra opportunity to experience Smith’s vision: He will be performing a special show in conjunction with the conference’s Day 1 festivities and will be giving the final keynote.

An uncompromising desire to deliver content creatively

Back in the early 1990s, who would have thought that a hard rock musician who created loud, brash, and controversial songs with nary a guitar in sight would be making waves in the circles of advertising business publications like AdAge? Then again, who would imagine said musician would someday stand among film legends, accepting an Oscar for his work?

Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has accomplished both, and he’s done it in the same uncompromising, do-it-yourself way that he attacked the music scene nearly two decades ago.

After extricating his band from its contract with Universal Music Group’s Interscope label, Reznor embarked on a series of innovative content-based promotions that provided fans with the means to support and follow his work on a deeper level. Some of Reznor’s experiments have inspired other artists to undertake similar self-marketing efforts, such as these examples:

• An alternative reality game with elaborately staged fan scavenger hunts
• Strategically placed (i.e., dropped in rock club bathrooms) flash drives of new music
• A crowdsourced website that offers unprecedented access to the band’s catalogs and archives for free are just some of Reznor’s content marketing experiments that have inspired other artists to undertake similar self-marketing efforts.

In an exclusive interview on Wired’s Underwire blog a few years ago, Reznor explained why, as an artist, he took marketing matters into his own hands:

“Anyone who’s an executive at a record label does not understand what the internet is, how it works, how people use it, how fans and consumers interact — no idea.”

And though he has stated many times that he doesn’t believe music should be free, he admits that the music industry’s missteps in the digital age have created a sense of public mistrust.

“So everything we’ve tried to do has been from the point of view of, ‘What would I want if I were a fan? How would I want to be treated?’ Now let’s work back from that. Let’s find a way for that to make sense and monetize it.”

Content marketing lesson: If your fans are willing to take their time to express their love and support, reward them with special recognition, such as shout-outs on Twitter or open vaults of exclusive content. The success of Reznor’s innovative marketing efforts has proved that if you respect your consumers, and let them participate in your brand on their terms, you will benefit as well.

Feeding the public’s appetite for invention

In my final content marketing lesson, the “genius” of note is a composite of sorts. There are many artists who embrace techie lust in a way that extends what consumers know about their brands, and allows them to explore that brand in creative, playful, or personalized ways. Here are just a few examples:

• The Beastie Boys launched their latest album by releasing a 30-minute video that revisited its “Fight for Your Right to Party” roots by pitting their young, rebellious selves against their older, and maybe not much wiser, future selves in a mock battle for supreme coolness.

• The rock band Arcade Fire used Google Maps and Google StreetView to create an innovative, Cannes-winning video project called The Wilderness Downtown. When viewers plugged in the address of their childhood homes, the video would unfold in multiple windows, personalized with scenes from their own neighborhoods. As an added personal touch, viewers could also leave a message for their “younger selves” in a tree branch-inspired font that was incorporated into the video.
  
• The band OK Go has made a name for itself through its willingness to push the envelope of creative video concepts and give fans a unique experience. Their latest video, “All is Not Lost“, tops all their previous efforts with a split-screen “video dance messenger” experience that spells out viewers’ typed phrases through the body manipulations of dance troupe Pilobolus.
  

Content marketing lesson: If you are afraid to use the latest technology to enhance your marketing efforts, you’re not telling your consumers your full story. By holding out on them, you risk the possibility that your content will seem stale and behind the times — a potentially fatal error in the world of ever more fickle and fragmented audiences.

These are some of my favorite content marketing geniuses from the entertainment industry. Do you have others to add to the list?

This week, they answer the question, “What technology excites you most as a content marketer?”

Easy: Email is the most underappreciated tool in the Content Marketer’s Arsenal.  Here are five amazing uses of email that almost no one is using: Email as content. Every day in every organization on earth, people send one off emails that explain the business, solve a problem, introduce a new concept etc.  With some minor tweaking, many of these ‘throw away’ emails can be imported to the kind of content that wins search, gets shared and is discoverable pretty much forever. Email marketing. This is close to the above, but more about newsletters.  Most email marketing is never indexed.  It sits in a silo, gets sent, then dies.  Pushing your email marketing content into your blogs gives you a terrific foundation for SEO. Email to solicit content. A lot of User Generated Content (UGC) strategies are based on hope. Email is the tool that makes things happen. Triggered emails to your customers asking specific questions, promoting contests, and encouraging the right kind of content are outstanding ways to get a constant flow of relevant content. Email to promote sharing. Sending triggered emails to the people who contribute content are sure fire ways to encourage sharing. Making it special (‘Dude, we just featured your story on our site!’)  and putting big Facebook buttons in the email are great ways to help drive traffic back to your content. Pulling email content from your blogs and other content marketing sources.  We have talked about ‘relevance’ in terms of email marketing for years.   Why has this been so elusive?  It’s not the technology,  it’s not the  lack of customer data … it’s the lack of content. Blogs are full of great content and are a terrific place to pull relevant content from. I’m sure there are others, but these are five almost painless, almost free ways to use email to boost your content marketing efforts. - Chris Baggott

Right now, I’m excited about any technology that makes it easy for marketers to extend their messages into various channels. We’re experimenting with dlvr.it at the moment, and we’re happy with the results so far.- Alison Bolen (@alisonbolen)

Video and the continued ease to film and post in near real timehas me excited. This allows for content to be created and shared from almost anywhere, and that has endless possibilities.- C.C. Chapman (@cc_chapman)

SlideShare excites me most as a content marketer. The network attracts a professional audience and can be a hub for dialogue. Pro accounts are affordable, “brandable,” and supply deep analytics.  But most importantly: SlideShare can be used for lead capture. The company’s LeadShare tool allows publishers to insert a form into their SlideShare-hosted content. The fields and form placement can be customized, and Eloqua plug-in allows leads captured in SlideShare to auto-populate the demand generation database. For me, SlideShare is where social media and demand converge. It may just be the most important social outpost for content marketers.- Joe Chernov (@jchernov)

I’m closely watching new developments in the interactive e-book market. For example, the iPad version of Al Gore’s “Our Choice” produced by Push Pop Press is amazing. As the ability to create multimedia apps powered by touch-screen interfaces becomes as easy as desktop publishing, can you imagine what the boring old whitepaper will evolve into? Or fully interactive articles and blog posts that allow people to dig in as far as they choose, all the way to a product demo or a multimedia sales page. Really fascinating stuff coming right around the corner thanks to mobile technology.- Brian Clark (@copyblogger)

Content curation technologies are changing the way marketers generate content to help their brands.  Creating great content helps marketers build their brand, establish thought leadership and develop a sustainable flow of qualified inbound leads. Content curation is helping the way marketers produce, organize and share a continuous volume of high quality content using very few resources. Today’s curation tools help marketers focus more of their time on industry insights and analysis and less time on the block-and-tackle of content creation, organization and distribution.- Pawan Deshpande (@TweetsFromPawan)

Right now I’m really excited about technologies like Chartbeat and Newsbeat.  Watching users interact with the site in real time is addictive and highly useful.  Content marketers should be thinking about ways to harness that kind of data into real time decisions about different types of content to highlight based on popularity throughout the day.- Ahava Leibtag (@ahaval)

Content curation is one of the keys to building online communities of customers with shared interests.  When you combine content curation and community platforms with recommendation engines, the end users’ experience improves significantly. Customers keep coming back. My vote for one of the most exciting technologies goes to recommendation engines. Can’t wait to see more of them in B2B marketing.- Susan McKittrick (@ssmck)

There is no doubt that the tablet revolution is the most exciting technology development for the content marketer.  Gartner is projecting that there will be close to 500 million tablets out there by 2015.  We are all after higher levels of engagement, and we are seeing this platform deliver a greater depth of time spent with content (especially multi-dimensional content) and interactions across all channels.- Clyde Miles (@clydemiles)

Engage121 is incredibly exciting as a social media distribution dashboard. Distribution of content using social media and other tools is a critical piece in making the content marketing puzzle work optimally for your business, and the folks at Chicago-based Engage121 are way ahead of the curve in terms of providing content marketers with a way to easily distribute their content, respond to and talk with the audience that receives it, and then drill down to real ROI based metrics related to retail foot traffic and spikes in sales. They also have really unique tools in place that help brands who might sit in heavily regulated industries.- Nate Riggs (@nateriggs)

I recommend HubSpot to integrate and track marketing activities in inbound marketing campaigns.The HubSpot system enables content marketers to improve content effectiveness by providing the tools to: Publish blog posts and identify the most popular and engaging content through analytics. Monitor keyword popularity, search engine rankings and website traffic to identify popular topics and content opportunities. Capture and nurture leads with content through dedicated landing pages, emails and lead-nurturing campaigns. Create tracking URLs, which can be used in enewsletters and other content pieces, to determine what type of content drives traffic to your website. Auto-publish content to social media profiles. - Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer)

It’s still pretty underground, but I think this thing called the Internet has a lot of potential. I definitely recommend people check it out.The problem is, as a content marketer, ALL technology excites me. I think technology’s in very dangerous hands with marketers. We love shiny new things, and in just a few short years we’ve managed to find so many of them that we no longer have time left to brush our teeth. That’s good for dentists, but terrible for marketing. And with each new technology, we can create new ways of measuring it to keep one step ahead of those nasty ROI hawks. Click-thrus not holding up? Impressions are so much more relevant. Newsletter subscribers plateaued? It’s all social these days anyway. A big part of why we love technology is it gives us new places to hide.- Todd Wheatland (@ToddWheatland)

Good old fashioned video. I think the popularity of video marketing is going to continue to grow. Zappos is doing it right with video of each product that brings the product to life. You see the product in action, gives it 3 dimensions and someone is telling you about the product. I think it brings shopping online to a whole new level. Another example is a much smaller company using video to sell TV replacement parts.- Arnie Kuenn (@ArnieK)

What other technologies excite you as a content marketer? Let us know in the comments below!