It’s one of five websites developed as part of an extensive content marketing strategy for the Board, who is tasked with promoting and protecting the Wisconsin cheese industry’s 160-year-old brand and reputation.

“Our feeling here is we have this huge responsibility when we’re talking about Wisconsin Cheese,” said Patrick Geoghegan, senior vice president of corporate communications at the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board. “We have to take care of this brand and honor it.”

Part of honoring the brand was upgrading its image in the eyes of consumers, who five years ago thought of Wisconsin as a ‘reliable’ source of cheese – particularly cheddar — but not much more, Geoghegan said. With more than 600 varieties and styles of cheese to promote, a limited budget and a national scope, Geoghegan and his team embarked on a campaign to engage consumers, build a following of supporters – and have fun doing it.

“In late 2007, content marketing and social marketing really hadn’t taken off like it has over the last two years,” he said. “For us, it was an opportunity to zig where others were zagging.”

Five-Site Strategy

At the core of the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board’s strategy is its main website, EatWisconsinCheese.org, which offers information for consumers as well as retail and foodservice professionals looking for answers to their FAQs on cheese and cheese-making in the state. In addition to recipes from celebrity Chef Ben Ford and a variety of food bloggers, the site offers a Learning Center for those invested in the cheese industry. Visitors can also watch a series of videos on topics ranging from ways to celebrate Oktoberfest with cheese to creating party platters for the holidays.

The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board then launches off to four other microsites that drill down into more specific topics. The electronic recipe index of cheeseburgers on cheeseandburger.com features the voice of Patrick Warburton, the actor best known for his portrayal of “Puddy” on the television comedy “Seinfeld,” offering humorous commentary on each recipe and the type of cheese it uses.

The site has developed a global following, from Australia to Denmark, where some groups hold monthly get-togethers to cook different burgers and wear Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board gear.

“It’s really about engagement,” Geoghegan said. “When they go onto our cheese and burger site, they’re with us for five or six minutes. It’s an amazing thing we’re seeing.”

Inspiring Restaurateurs

The “Grilled Cheese Academy” offers its own set of 30 recipes, this time for a variety of grilled cheese sandwiches, and also hosts an annual contest for new recipe ideas.  The concept of sophisticated grilled cheese sandwiches caught the attention of restaurateurs such as the Melthouse Bistro outside of Milwaukee, which makes all of the Board’s recommended sandwiches, Geoghegan said.

DairyDoingMore.org, provides education and information about Wisconsin’s dairy industry, while the last site, The Wisconsin Cheese Cupid at www.cheesecupid.com, helps users pair up cheeses with their favorite alcoholic drinks. 

Geoghegan estimates the campaign has reached 100 million households in the U.S., and noted that in a recent U.S. survey that asked individuals, “When you think of cheese, what geography do you think of?” about 60 percent responded “Wisconsin,” followed by 12 percent, who said “France.”

“Certainly the perceptions (about Wisconsin cheese) are changing. We’re making progress here,” he said. 

Why does a one-on-one email ‘share’ matter for content marketers? Because it demonstrates that ultimately if you want content to “go viral,” the content itself must resonate enough to get people talking among their smaller, more intimate groups of colleagues, friends and family. Trying to gain traction by having thousands of followers click on one link simply isn’t a realistic expectation, or the norm.

“If you think about the course of a day, you spend the most amount of time communicating through email,” Jack Krawczyk, senior marketing manager at StumbleUpon, said in an interview. “People still want to have that intimate conversation.”

This is true even among young adults, who are generally seen as relying on social media tools to communicate. StumbleUpon, who said half of its user base is aged 18-24, found that those 34 and younger are “the ones sharing emails,” Krawczyk said. “They want that direct line of communications.”

StumbleUpon teamed up with BuzzFeed to examine how content is shared. They looked at the 50 stories that had received the most Facebook traffic since mid-2007, and found that the median ratio of Facebook views to shares was only 9-to-1.  That means that for every Facebook share, only nine people visited the story. So even the biggest stories on Facebook are propogated by smaller, intimate conversations within a single network—not the result of one individual engaging 100 of their friends.  Twitter’s median was lower at 5-to-1 and Reddit’s was 36-to-1.

In contrast, a StumbleUpon user shared at least twice directly, either through StumbleUpon or via email. This means that intimate sharing outnumbered so-called broadcasting by 2-to-1 on StumbleUpon, the companies said.

“There is little data to support so-called influencer behavior in social marketing,” BuzzFeed’s Jon Steinberg and StumbleUpon’s Krawczyk wrote in a column in AdAge Digital. “Rather, the data suggest that content and ideas online spread through large numbers of people sharing with small groups.”

Highly ‘Synergistic’

Similarly, a B-to-B marketing study found that email marketing is still considered the “workhorse” of the marketing industry because it’s inexpensive and effective. It’s also highly synergistic with new digital entrants – both social and mobile. In fact, e-mail is increasingly being integrated with social media platforms, according to the study, which is titled Email Marketing: A Legacy Channel Continues to Deliver. 

The study had more than half of its respondents saying that a key initiative on their agenda this year was finding ways to deliver highly relevant content in their email campaigns. Increasing the number of opt-in subscribers to their lists ranked second, with 42 percent of respondents citing that goal. The third priority was measuring success by tracking their e-mail programs.

Surprisingly, almost a third of survey respondents said the most important purpose of their email-marketing program was customer acquisition. That contrasts with the only 17 percent who said customer retention was the top priority.

#1: It’s the Future of the Web

“HTML5 is the future of the web and developers who take advantage of the newest web technologies will be able to create a better user experience, better development tools and allow for rich applications,” says Google Developer Advocate Seth Ladd.  Indeed, HTML5 is already being used by eight of the top ten websites.  A report by Strategy Analytics says sales of HTML5 compatible phones will reach a billion next year.

So, you know it’s here.  But why should you care?

#2: It Makes Design Easier

The goal of HTML5 is to standardize all of the changes in technology and design of the last 15 years. A lot of the content that requires special add-on applications can be delivered with HTML5 alone. “HTML5 technologies ensure that various functionalities, such as video or 3-D graphics,” Ladd says, “will just work within any browser, regardless of the device they are being accessed on.”  

#3: It Makes Development Faster

Adding content is a lot easier with HTML5. “The family of HTML5 features simplify web development because in many cases they put common functionality into the browser,” Ladd explains.  You don’t need to use FLASH or other tools to embed video.  HTML5 provides built in video support with the <video> tag.  Most modern browsers already support HTML5 video, and sites like Youtube have begun supporting the <video> tag.  Audio content is supported with the <audio> tag.  The <canvas> element and SVG graphic support make significant improvements to graphical elements.   “When you put common behavior into the browser, that means the developer needs to ship and write less code- which is always a good thing. ”, says Ladd.

#4: It’s Already Working For Others

HTML5 isn’t scheduled to be officially ready until 2014.  But, that hasn’t stopped saavy web developers from putting the language’s new features to use.  In September of last year, 34 of the top 100 websites were using HTML5, according to a report by Binvisions.  HTML5 covers features that have wide adoption as well as features that are very new and experimental,” Ladd says.

#5: It Creates Amazing Web Experiences

The tools HTML5 provides can create websites as beautiful as any you’ve ever seen. You may not need all the bells and whistles, but HTML5 can help you stand out in comparison to your competition.  “Luckily, there are great online resources like caniuse.com,” says Ladd,” that help developers and businesses choose the subset of features that help them deliver fantastic experiences to the browsers that matter most to them. “And without the need for elaborate coding. Check out this fantastic gallery of HTML5 sites on Wix.com for examples of the power of HTML5.  You can also get a great overview of HTML5 specifics at html5rocks.com.

In a fiercely competitive environment, you know you need any edge you can get.  And HTML5 may be the best edge to come along in years.

Mint.com aimed to provide content that demonstrated the usefulness of its site to StumbleUpon subscribers who had indicated they were interested in financial planning as well as self improvement, internet tools and university/college topics. The company split their demographic targeting into male and female, and even promoted their “Wedding Budget Checklist” page in StumbleUpon’s weddings category.

By distributing content through StumbleUpon, Mint.com saw traffic on their site jump 20 percent, helped by a strong increase in new users who were women ages 18-25. The company also found that they received an average of 180,000 monthly visits to their site from StumbleUpon.

How did they achieve these results? StumbleUpon calls itself a “discovery” engine – a form of web search engine that finds and recommends web content to its subscribers. When new users register, they tell StumbleUpon about their interests and the company crafts a stream of content related to those topics that is largely recommended by other members. All a user needs to do after registration is press the “Stumble” button and serendipity kicks in. They don’t know what will come up – it could be an article, photo or video – but they can look through a stream of links related to their profile.

“It’s very similar to Pandora,” said Jack Krawczyk, senior marketing manager at StumbleUpon. “You press the big yellow button and it takes you directly to the content that’s been recommended by other StumbleUpon users. As you stumble along, you can curate the content with thumbs up or down. “

Planting Content Seeds

In addition to the content collected off of the web, StumbleUpon allows businesses to be paid sponsors of content. Companies including Activision and Sony Pictures are among 75,000 paid sponsors that use the platform, which mixes their information in with the unpaid content, but clearly marks it so that users can differentiate.

“What content marketers want to do is plant seeds with initial content, but they want it to live on past one day,” Krawczyk said. “We’re a distribution channel. We continue the content lifecycle.“

An average StumbleUpon user spends about seven hours a month engaging through the service, and during that time “discovers” about 300 pieces of content. Then, users typically go out and share the content when they find something they really like, Krawczyk said.

StumbleUpon reserves about 5 percent of the stream sent to consumers for paid placement that’s targeted to a particular demographic and list of interests, Krawczyk said.

Mobile Content Consumption

“We go out and find them,” Krawczyk said. “As they are in the mode of discovery, they are taken to content that really speaks to exactly what they’re interested in. It’s doing incredibly well.”

StumbleUpon had 20 million users last year, the majority of whom stumbled through their desktops. But mobile use is the fastest-growing segment, and now 25 percent of StumbleUpon’s business takes place through mobile apps, Krawczyk said.

“This is just more reflective of how content consumption patterns are evolving,” he said. “When you have an iPad or other tablet, what you want is an immersive content experience. It’s not as fun to read through a couple of lines.”

The study analyzed an actual video campaign that included a professionally made “how to” video and a user-generated product video that was created and submitted by an actual product user.

“What we found was strong evidence of incremental benefit with exposure to both forms of media,” Frank Findley, Vice President, Research and Development at comScore, said in a statement. “Professionally produced content and product videos drove strikingly higher lifts when used together than when either was used individually. While marketers may already be familiar with the effectiveness of professional video content alone, these results suggest that even greater returns can be had by combining their use with authentic, user-generated content.”

Professional videos are important tools in helping viewers understand the importance of the key messages presented by a company or brand. Consumers were more apt to understand the described benefits and features of the products in professionally produced content, the comScore/EXPO study found.

User-generated videos, on the other hand, are easier to relate to, perceived as being unbiased, and were considered more believable about verifying specific product claims, such as superiority and convenience. They generate an emotional intensity about a product, and in doing so help drive communication about a company’s key messages.

Filling in the Gaps

“When used together, all of the perceived gaps get filled in and consumers become more confident in their purchase decision, resulting in better sales effectiveness,” said Jessica Thorpe, Vice President of Marketing at EXPO.

The first group of consumers participated in a veiled exercise in order to determine the sales effectiveness of the professionally produced content, the user-generated content, and both together.

The study found that the professional videos generated a 24.7 point lift in Share of Choice for the featured product and a 16 point lift for the brand’s total line. User-generated videos drove an 18.7 point lift in Share of Choice for the featured product compared to a 10 point lift for the brand’s total line. When exposed to both professional content and user-generated product videos, lift in Share of Choice for the featured product jumped to 35.3 points for the featured product and 28 points for the brand’s total line. This demonstrates the powerful combination when used together, the study said.

A second group of consumers participated in a cued exposure exercise and were surveyed after being directly exposed to the content. On its own, the professional video content resulted in a higher percentage of respondents understanding the importance of the key message presented than user-generated content. The user-generated product videos were more successful at producing emotional intensity

When exposed to both types of videos, the combined increases were greater than for either of the individual media exposures.

comScore and EXPO will be conducting a webinar on Tuesday, April 3rd at 2 p.m. EDT to further explain the methodology and results of the study. 

Video image via Shutterstock.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle and the Daily Dot, one spammer claims to make thousands of dollars per day on Pinterest by setting up dummy accounts, using the accounts to pin fashions, unleashing bots to ‘like’ those images and improve rankings, and using the momentum to drive traffic to an Amazon affiliate site. The anonymous spammer reports Pinterest is “by FAR the easiest social network to spam right now. Quite possibly the easiest ever to spam. It requires almost no work to get started and no money to invest.” [An excerpted interview with the anonymous spammer is available here and worth a read.]

The tipster also claims to have “stockpiles” of fake accounts, but to date only one has been deleted by Pinterest.

Another canny Pinterest blogger noticed suspect pin-boards are ‘liked’ by members who mysteriously lack profile pictures—something uncommon in a normal sample of Pinterest users. The blogger also noted that suspicious profiles link to Twitter profiles with no activity.

Popularity too much of a good thing?

With the site’s soaring popularity, it’s not suprising that Pinterest is experiencing growing pains. In response to mounting confusion about acceptable behavior, Pinterest released new terms of service for all ‘pinners,’ as members like to refer to themselves. Among the changes: 

• The site is making it easier to report copyright or trademark violations. This after TechCrunch reported “frequent” copyright violations when users pin content that does not belong to them.
• Pinterest removed the word “sell” from the prior Terms of Service because, says co-founder Ben Silverman, “our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for us to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.”
• Most interesting for content marketers, Pinterest got rid of one of their “Pin Etiquette” statements that previously guided users “not to use Pinterest as a tool for self-promotion.”

The terms of service are intended to help the company navigate the tricky issue of legally sharing content, but also to help Pinterest expand beyond the site’s core group of pinners, which to date have been primarily women interested in fashion, interior design, arts & crafts, and cooking. But how will this core group respond to the hordes of marketers that have been pinning decidedly different content?

Brands must use Pinterest with care.

More than a few brands have found themselves haplessly in the middle of dueling pinners, like when Hubspot was the subject of a small kerfuffle because pinners objected to Hubspot’s ‘pin’ of a new ebook, Pinterest for Business. (To Hubspot’s great credit, they jumped in to ask questions and find out what exactly was off-putting, winning followers in the process.)

Marketers outside of the site’s core group of pinners—design and fashion-oriented women—should take care before wandering in just because Pinterest is the ‘next big thing.’ Reggie Bradford, CEO and founder of Vitrue, describes the site’s limitations for marketers in an interview with The Content Marketing Institute: 

• “The “pin-it” button works well for consumers, but was not designed for marketers.  It is missing features that allows for analytics tracking (platforms can help here along with the API).”
• “Still images are great, but do have their limitations.  Unless users click through to the source site, a brand’s ability to communicate everything they want to is limited.”
• You also have to watch for ‘link rot’ where the source image is moved or removed, thus generating a broken link that stands out like a sore thumb in such a visually driven environment.”

For more ideas, check out the full interview with Bradford.

Unlike SAP.com and the SAP Community Network, other existing content vehicles, the new blog will focus on business topics rather than deep technical information, with an emphasis on content that allows business executives to better understand the role several specific technologies are playing in driving business results.

For SAP, those technologies are mobility, big data and analytics, as well cloud computing.

The site intentionally is aimed at business executives who are in an exploration stage, and therefore features educational and thought leadership content about problems that SAP believes it can address for a stakeholder.

The site will feature blogs on innovation from industry thought leaders, customers, partners and SAP employees, as well as articles from sources such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and IDC. The site will probably also include some SAP advertising and other lead-generating links designed to gently “pull” users along.

Business Innovation from SAP illustrates the use of content marketing to stimulate interest in a firm’s solutions by helping “companies understand how to better compete in today’s business environment.”

SAP also has tried to design content to take advantage of what it believes business professionals, when investigating solutions for some business problem, prefer.

“They want a mix of news, blogs and featured content like analyst white papers, with the ability to engage with the content, leave a comment, or share it with their colleagues,” said Michael Brenner, SAP marketing senior director, and editor for the site.

SAP hopes to become the favored destination for information and insight in these areas, thereby creating pull for an audience that includes SAP’s key prospects in these areas.

A key objective when envisioning the site was to create “a dynamic platform offering prominent social sharing and comments to drive conversation and engagement,” instead of the more static “white paper approach” that traditionally has been a staple of business-to-business content marketing.

In fact, Business Innovation from SAP is viewed as the first concrete result of SAP’s “dynamic approach” to educational content. “Readers want smaller chunks of content that also allow them to comment,” says Brenner.

The site uses what SAP calls “a subtle branded experience” with an appropriate call-to-action for visitors to explore SAP Solutions on their terms, with an intentional emphasis on engaging the audience enough to “pull” them back.

Aside from those direct business benefits, the site will be innovative in its own right as an example of best practice “content marketing,” says Brenner. 

Image via Shutterstock.

The video is an important example of how Dove’s content marketing team has succeeded in helping to make this brand one of the most desired in 2012 among both men and women. The spot incorporates a key element of content marketing that is often missed: It taps into the “non-conscious” – the area that manages humans’ memories, desires, instincts and intuitions – with a story that is so simple, any average Joe can easily remember and repeat it.

Content marketers are often taught content should be either “educational” or “entertaining.” Should “evocative” be added to the list?

The non-conscious, a term often defined and researched by behavioral economists, is often overlooked by content marketers and general marketers alike because they rely too much on traditional market research that is premised on the idea that consumers think rationally. “Humans simply don’t operate this way,” said Donna Sturgess, president of Buyology Inc. “Brands must get in touch with the deeper emotional response consumers have” to products.

The stakes for businesses are high: Only one out of 10 new product launches are successful, Sturgess said. So the investment in a new product idea, packaging, website, logo, advertising, etc. should incorporate specific actions that enhance emotional connections.

Emotional Brand Relationships

When interviewed by Buyology and its survey partner uSamp, men responded that the Dove brand reminded them of home. In some instances, it brought back childhood memories, as many of them grew up with Dove products. Others said their wives do the shopping and purchase the products now. Dove has reinforced this emotional relationship it has with men through a site dedicated to “Dove Men + Care,” which currently features a section on March Madness and product tie-ins for the NCAA Men’s Final Four.

Dove is building on its longevity as a brand, and the trust it has with its female audience, with content on its website on topics ranging from tips on skincare to a toolkit on helping young girls build their self-esteem.

Other companies that ranked high among men and women in Buyology’s recent survey of 4,000 individuals included Southwest Airlines and Google.

In the case of Southwest Airlines, the company established itself as the one that gives people an opportunity to create memories through affordable travel. That resonated in today’s tough economy, when many people have canceled or scaled back vacations, Sturgess said. The company’s site features a Travel Guide section that gives people an opportunity to share trip advice as well as explore conversations with other Southwest fliers.

Google’s ability to help people connect through products ranging from YouTube to Gmail helped that company win consumers, Sturgess said.

Men’s other ‘desired’ brands included Cadillac, BMW, Bed Bath & Beyond, Apple, Sharp, General Electric and Macy’s. For women, the list included Hallmark, JetBlue, Kohl’s, Lexus, Target, Neutrogena and Crest, Buyology said. 

Image via Shutterstock.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, enterprise software was applied to back-office functions such as finance, human relations and manufacturing. In the 1980s enterprise resource planning got more attention.

But marketing automation generally has lagged behind (with some salient exceptions, such as Omniture, Siebel and Trilogy).

Age of ‘big data’ marks change.

But some investors seem to believe that is about to change. Ajay Agarwal, Bain Capital Ventures managing director, thinks marketing automation now will get serious attention, and the “big data” trend is the reason.

McKinsey & Company points out that in 2009, most firms with more than 1,000 employees had at least an average of 200 terabytes of stored data (twice the size of US retailer Wal-Mart’s data warehouse in 1999).

A retailer using big data could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent, McKinsey estimates, by making information transparent and usable and increasing the ability to see patterns in real time and adjust operations accordingly. In other cases, data itself can lead to development of the next generation of products and services such as after-sales service offerings.  [Download the McKinsey study here.]

Historically, marketing automation is that it has always been about “process,” not about the “data” itself. And that is about to change, many would argue.

Until recently, it has been difficult or impossible to collect structured data on marketing prospects who were not customers. But social media and the web represent new potential, allowing automated systems to make inferences when a user checks a price, looks at an image, reads a review or conducts a detailed search query, for example.

The implications for understanding of return on investment are huge. The argument is that, for the first time, marketers can link spending on customer acquisition directly to a set of downstream customer actions.

Budgets grow to match interest in analytics and automation.

For such reasons, Gartner analyst Laura McLellan has predicted that by 2017, chief marketing officers will spend more on information technology than the chief information officers.

In 2011 B2B and B2C marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue were almost three times as high (10 percent) as IT budgets (3.6 percent), according to Gartner.

Gartner also said 2012 IT budgets are expected to grow 4.7 percent, while all marketing budgets, in general, are predicted to grow nine percent, and high tech marketing budgets, more specifically, are expected to increase 11 percent.

Image via Shutterstock.

Rick Vosper

It’s all about the Conversation, Rick Vosper will tell you.  And he’s in a position to know: He cultivated a conversation about biking into a highly creative and successful way to conquer a very specific market.  My own conversation with Rick, an eloquent and passionate spokesman for content marketing, ranged from propaganda to cocktail parties.  But it started with bicycles.

Creating the Conversation

“As a startup company,” Vosper says of Airborne Bikes, a subsidiary of Huffy, “we didn’t have a zillion dollar budget.”  Vosper describes Airborne’s products as “real solid, entry-level performance bikes at the best value anywhere.”  Huffy’s agency, Brunner, came up with the concept of a team of brand ambassadors called The Flight Crew.  The ten-member team spreads the word about Airborne in exchange for a bike and gear.

“I wanted to take it another step,” he says.  “I wanted them to be our content marketers.”  The Flight Team specifically includes photographers and videographers, who already have their own blogs and produce high-quality, visually rich content.  They all got basic lessons in content marketing, but Vosper told them it wasn’t just about Airborne.  “You’re here to talk about riding bikes,” he told them.

Consumers loved the campaign.  Airborne’s sponsored riders aren’t necessarily racers, and “the notion that just some regular guy could be sponsored the same way a pro athlete was” Vospers says, “is incredibly intoxicating.”

Vosper says the success of the campaign was talking with customers, instead of talking at them.  “In the broadest sense it’s about having a conversation with our customers,” Vosper says.  He refers to the old notion of a marketplace where sellers talked to buyers, and that discussion “wasn’t just about the products.”  Talking to customers is “how we did it until this massive industrial era communications technologies took hold.”

Propaganda Isn’t Conversation

“Corporate America is stuck in this old-fashioned propaganda model of how to talk to customers,” Vosper told me.  “Driving the sound truck through the streets saying who they are and what they do.”  Vosper says it doesn’t work anymore.  “Customers aren’t dumb, and they’re tired of it.”

Big companies aren’t dumb either, but when they start to do a content marketing plan “the old entrenched ways take over,” he says.  And, “at that point, people turn if off.”

The propaganda model doesn’t work anymore.  “It’s a dinosaur and old-style corporations will either adapt or die.”  Their blogs and twitter accounts have nothing more to say than “we did this, or we did that.”  Stuck in that paradigm, they’re like “the guy at the cocktail party who can only talk about himself.”  At the end of the night, “those guys are all standing around in a small group, talking about themselves and not listening to each other.”

The Conversation Never Stops

In February, Vosper left Airborne and Huffy to focus on his own company, Rick Vosper-Marketing Services (http://www.rvms.com).  He and his wife are going to hit the road for a while, but he’s not going to stop working.  Thanks to technology, he’ll never stop talking to his clients.  It’s about “the art of having a conversation,” Vosper tells me.  And so it is.