You hear this in the voice of so many digital marketers today. They’re fired up by big visions. But they often have more passion than conviction—because, let’s face it, this stuff isn’t exactly easy.

This observation inspired a thought: At its heart, great content is really the great equalizer. While doing content marketing well is by no means easy, it’s a challenge that’s somehow more familiar—more tractable—to a lot of marketers. It’s about storytelling. It’s about merchandizing moments of inspiration. It’s about taking some risk, having some fun and allowing a little soul and humanity to seep into our work. It’s about producing artifacts that challenge thinking, enlighten, enliven, entertain, engage.

Red Bull is a great example. For adrenaline junkies—or, more likely, voyeurs of adrenaline-producing experiences—their content is utterly irresistible. But, you may suggest, there’s nothing particularly equalizing about Red Bull’s content marketing efforts. They’ve become a publisher in their own right, producing extraordinary videos of extraordinary quality. They sponsored and staged a supersonic space jump, after all. No shortage of ambition there.

Fair enough. Red Bull is a category-defining example, a class unto itself. But I’d argue that the sort of earned visibility they’ve generated would have been prohibitive using paid media or other digital tactics.

And that’s the point I’m trying to make: Great content is the great equalizer because, compared to so many other digital strategies, it’s more cost effective at any scale. When it’s done right, content marketing amplifies reach, engagement and makes your brand soar.

You might even say it gives you wings.

To generate awareness, drive revenue, stock price or even to disrupt markets isn’t good enough. Why? Because you’re unlikely to do these things well without a clear understanding of what your brand stands for.

In today’s hypercompetitive markets, customers have a superabundance of choice—choice in how they allocate their time, attention, budgets and discretionary dollars. Brands that secure these scarce resources are the ones with empathy. They’re the opposite of egocentric. They’re intimately aware of whose lives they make better and in what specific ways. Their brands stand for ideals that resonate with audiences including but by absolutely no means limited to shareholders.

Ask yourself?

• What specific problems do we solve?
• Why are these problems worth solving?
• By doing so, whose lives do we make better?
• And by making their lives better, what impact are we having on the world?
• What issues do our customers care about and how do we advocate for them?
• How do we do all of this in ways that are appreciably better or more effective than our rivals?

By answering these questions, you’ve begun to unpack the essence of what your brand stands for. And once you do that, you’re better equipped to tell stories that audiences want to hear—and want to share.

What does your brand stand for?

If you ask me, the best strategies are informed by both patterns and anti-patterns.

Patterns are the repeatable abstractions of road-tested success. They’re the examples we celebrate and the case studies we cite. Anti-patterns, as you’ve already concluded, are the exact opposite. They come directly from the mistakes that we should know better than to repeat.

In the business of digital marketing, we’re still in the early days of building our collective compendium of patterns and anti-patterns—but the examples are emerging. In fact, you can probably recite some of them by heart. Social marketing has plenty:

• Oreo’s masterful tweet in the dark? Pattern.
• Auto-posting on Marathon Monday. Anti-pattern.

Mobile marketing has its share, too:

• Sephora’s in-store mobile programs? Total pattern.
• JCPenney’s iPad at every checkout? You get the point.

The point is that we should reflect on (and off of) both documented successes and failures to define digital strategies that yield more of the former and far, far fewer of the latter.

To that end, let’s take a closer look at these specific examples:

• PATTERN: Oreo’s slam dunk. It was the tweet heard around the world. How did they pull it off? Oreo’s agency ran a fully staffed war room, including lawyers at the ready. When the moment struck, they were there. The lesson? Real-time is often anything but.
• ANTI-PATTERN: Social media on autopilot. The scores of brands that failed to suspend auto-posting on the day of the Boston Marathon were deemed unintentionally tone deaf as a tragedy unfolded. The lesson? Timing is everything.
• PATTERN: Sephora’s mobile beauty. By finding the opportunity hidden inside the showrooming risk, Sephora deepened engagement with its customers and then turned the mobile web into its endless aisle. The lesson? Recast a threat as your best opportunity.
• ANTI-PATTERN: JCPenney’s overnight transformation. Ousted CEO Ron Johnson took a page from the Apple and Target playbooks, wildly missing the mark with a tired brand unready for such aggressive change. It turns out that, if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. The lesson? Know your customer. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

This last example has stuck with us, both because of the egregiousness of its miscalculations and the scale and consequence of its failure. In an effort to attract a younger, more affluent demographic, Johnson alienated his core customer. He transformed the in-store experience with iPads at every checkout and an everyday low-price strategy that took the fun out of shopping. Traditional customers fled en masse and the aspirational target never materialized.

For me, what is most significant about this particular failure is that it represents a failure of customer empathy. Simply taking a close look at their brand loyalists should have been an indication that these aggressive changes were an anti-pattern in the making.

The lesson? It’s more fun to talk about victories, but sometimes the more important truths are found in failure.

Perhaps calling it a raging debate is an overstatement. But if you follow this blog, you’ve heard me argue that data alone isn’t sufficient—that we’re lulling ourselves into the false sense of comfort that all truths are held in the giant, all-knowing corpus in the sky.

You’ve heard me say that our data obsession is drawing us into a world of small ideas. Like the day trader who can’t see beyond the closing bell, we can lose sight of the bigger picture when we’re excessively dialed into data. If you ask me, data can both illuminate and blind us.

Here’s why. If you accept the premise that intelligence is roughly derived from the combination of analysis, synthesis and emotional intelligence, you’ll see that data alone is no silver bullet.

Sure, data-driven technologies can help mine insights from each, but they all require smart people asking smart questions, drawing smart conclusions, and taking smart action. Let’s test the theory:

• Analytic—while machines can crunch massive volumes of data to detect patterns and make predictions, the questions we ask are every bit as important—perhaps more important.
• Synthetic—to make data actionable, smart people must draw inferences and connect the dots between disparate structured and unstructured threads that help shape the storylines that lead to decisions and action. (Just try bringing the raw threads into the boardroom.)
• Emotional—while machines can assist us here, there’s no substitute for human interaction. Increasingly, ethnographic techniques are a key part of how marketers understand customers, not only by the answers and insights customers provide, but by the behaviors they betray through first-hand observation.

Because this argument continues to rattle around in my brain, I’m always keen to find new way of thinking about it—frameworks for making sense of this head versus heart, man versus machine dialectic. So I was pleased to come across the work of Tim Kastelle, an innovation expert and senior lecturer at University of Queensland in Australia.

I spoke with Tim last week and here’s what he described:

The most durable business advantages, Tim suggests, are enabled by a combination of smart tech and smart people—Stage 4 found, not surprisingly, in the northeast corner of the matrix above. Tim provides a detailed analysis of this framework here. I’d highly suggest reading his full post on the subject.

My inference? Big data is a big deal. But it, alone, isn’t enough. What do you think?

You’re the judge because cool is a state of mind—and a very subjective thing. What’s cool to me (don’t ask), may be completely passé to the next person. Truth is, analyzing cool is probably the exact opposite of cool. It’s something you recognize reflexively. It challenges your thinking by standing out in some unique way. It hits you viscerally. It broadens your perspective and may inspire you to think differently.

Once a year, Gartner analysts become cool hunters. We set out to identify a crop of vendors who are doing something different and interesting. Sometimes they’re turning a business problem on its ear, thinking about it differently. Sometimes they’re exploiting emerging technologies in an innovative way. Sometimes they’re simply putting together a set of ordinary pieces in ways that others have not.

What makes Cool Vendors cool? Any and all of these things. Perhaps most importantly, what makes Cool Vendors cool is that they challenge conventional thinking. They cause us to stop and take a step back. What makes the selection process cool is that it suspends some of the traditional rules dictating our research agenda. Cool Vendors aren’t necessarily tomorrow’s tech titans, but they are some of today’s forerunners. And, for that reason, they’re worth paying attention to. Because, after all, who doesn’t like cool?

Here are Gartner for Marketing Leader’s Cool Vendors for 2013:

Digital Marketing

• Catchoom
• PublishThis
• RevTrax
• ThisMoment

Social Marketing

• 140Proof
• Influitive
• Janrain
• Woobox
• Zuberance

Data-Driven Marketing

• Anametrix
• Media6degrees
• Wayin

Mobile Marketing

• Appboy
• Applause
• Banjo
• TalkTo
• Vibes

“Disruptions can be swift and unrelenting, and it is much better to be a disruptor than one of those being disrupted.”

This got me thinking about the collateral damage of change—those left behind by the swift and unrelenting forces of disruption.

IT knows this all too well. Each subsequent generation of technology brought new complexity that forced IT organizations to automate anything that wasn’t nailed to the ground. In many cases, the complexity of these environments exceeded the unaided capacity of human beings, making automation of manual steps and abstraction of low-level operations the only option.

It all sounds a bit wonky, I admit, but the analogy has important implications for today’s marketing leaders. Digital marketing requires standardization and automation of many procedures that were once performed by human beings. The speed, complexity and precision of the discipline depend on it. In the same sense that automation made some IT folks uneasy, digital marketing will surely do the same for some marketers.

But, as we’ve learned through the industrialization of IT, as each layer of technology is automated and commoditized, it allows talent to move up the stack to focus on higher-level, higher-value work.

Here are some IT lessons that may lend perspective to those weathering the digital marketing storm:

• Automate yourself out of a job—drive the process of designing and implementing the next-generation. Instead of carving off and protecting the spaces you’ve traditionally occupied and owned, look for ways to automate yourself out of a job. Then look for new ways to add value.
• Develop higher-level skills—automation is liberating. It allows you to cultivate higher-order skills and thinking by elevating your orientation from a game of Whac-A-Mole to a game of Stratego. Use automation as your lever to move up the stack.
• Bravely lead the change—trust that leading the change globally, despite the provincial risks, will strengthen your position in your organization and in your profession.  
• Start a revolution—IT has done a great job building communities of change. Open source, ITIL, DevOps—these movements were created and sustained by likeminded professionals with passion and a strong point of view. Organize or join a movement with a vision and agenda for change.

Digital marketing is nothing short of a disruption. Chances are it will substantially change your role. On which side of history will you fall? Be like the best in IT. Be one the disruptors, not the disrupted.

So, naturally, I was intrigued by Dan Roam’s case against words in Blah Blah Blah, his treatise on the power of visual communication. Roam’s point is that, the more we talk, the less audiences understand. Words, according to Roam, often get in the way of clear thinking and messages that resonate. He suggests that words trick us into thinking we understand better than we do.

Roam suggests that while the use of language is refined through the course of a lifetime, development of the skills for rendering thought visually typically ends with crayons and paste.

Most of us are poorly equipped to communicate visually, which is why Roam has created a system of visual grammar to bring us back to the basics—much like you would learn a foreign language. He offers simple and clever illustrations to communicate the full breadth of thought based on sound grammatical structure. For example, a vocabulary of simple, iconic portraits represent nouns and pronouns. Maps are prepositions and conjunctions that illustrate the relationships between ideas. Flow charts are complex verbs. It all sounds a bit wonky, but it’s actually fairly simple and intuitive once you dig into it.

As Guy Kawasaki puts it, “the more words you need, the less enchanting you are.”

Personally, I believe in the enchantment of words. But I also believe that words alone yield diminishing returns, particularly when audiences are distracted and distractible and you’re fighting to rise above the noise. As my colleague Julie Hopkins says, social marketing depends on visual communication.

I agree entirely, but I also believe we should have a greater respect for language. In B2B marketing, for example, the conventional response to the geek-speak backlash is often a better-faster-cheaper “business” platitude that communicates no greater meaning, fooling brands into believing they’re communicating “business value” when all they’re doing is chanting the same old refrain.

Blah, blah, blah, indeed.

Examples? A recent Atlantic article offers a list of the all-time stickiest pop songs:

- “Single Ladies” – Beyoncé
- “Alejandro” – Lady Gaga
- “Bad Romance” – Lady Gaga
- “Call Me Maybe” – Carly Rae Jepsen
- “I Want to Hold Your Hand” – The Beatles
- “She Loves You” – The Beatles
- “SOS” – Rihanna
- “You Belong With Me” – Taylor Swift

You’ll notice something interesting about these artists: Huge moneymakers all.

Why does this matter to the digital marketer? Earworms are perhaps the ultimate form of brand engagement. They don’t only stick; they rattle around in your brain ad infinitum. That’s why, for decades, Madison Avenue has practically printed money on the basis of the prized jingle.

Who can ever forget the Oscar Mayer wiener, Doublemint gum, I’d like to buy the world a Coke, or the Meow Mix kitty chorus? (Oh, you had forgotten? Consider this an innocuous dose of nostalgia in the service of a broader point.)

What is that point? The concept of the earworm is an instructive (if perhaps slightly creepy) perspective that marketers may want to consider in crafting storylines and considering storytelling devices that make their message stick.

I’m no cognitive psychologist, but here’s what I think it takes to make an earworm burrow itself:

• It’s simple—something your audience can remember by accident.
• It’s rhythmic—using poetic techniques to make language soar.
• It’s clever—unique, unexpected, funny, quirky or jarring.
• It’s repetitive—looping back on itself with hooks, hammering home the refrain.

In a sense, the whole idea of the earworm is the opposite of content marketing, which I advocate for frequently on this blog and in my formal research. You’ll recall that content marketing is about authentic storytelling, stripped down, from the heart, and free of manipulative tricks—perhaps like the cultivation of earworms. But I think there’s a place for both approaches—it’s not and/or so much as it’s and/and.

After all, we’re all in business to sell something. And, there is no doubt: the earworm rings the cash register.

But how do you keep the fire burning day after day? You need to use your muse—find the tricks that help you trigger inspiration. Here are some of mine: 

• Learn to observe—for me, it took an undergraduate class in photography to open my eyes. Suddenly, I was observing the world around me. Train yourself to observe and ask questions with deliberate intent—like a journalist or a detective. You’ll find that small glimpses, closely observed inspire new ways to tell your story.
• Cross train—seek inspiration outside of your domain. Creativity is often nothing more than applying known concepts to a new context. Borrow shamelessly from other disciplines. This requires a curiosity and appetite for content that doesn’t directly fit into your job description.
• Carry a notebook—write down your fleeting thoughts as they occur to you. It takes the pressure off by documenting the precious ideas you’ll otherwise lose like loose change in the sofa. A small soft cover Moleskin should serve you well.
• Listen to your biorhythms—I’m sharpest at the crack of dawn. So I reserve this time for writing or simply organizing my thoughts. I’m usually able to produce twice as much, twice as well, in half the time. Catch me at 3pm and you’ll see the exact opposite. What are your natural rhythms? Pay attention to what works best for you and make it your daily routine.
• Set and honor goals—develop a cadence and stick to it. Document your goals and hold yourself accountable. Maybe it’s two original articles a week, three annotations and six tweets a day. Whatever specific goals you set, be sure to live by them. Exceptions are a slippery slope.
• Keep it simple—the best content makes its point clearly and quickly. Don’t over-engineer your thinking. Less is often more.
• Study the pros—not only great content marketers, but songwriters, comedians and other artists. You’ll learn about compression, timing, rhythm, hooks—all the things that create emotional resonance.
• Create leverage—you don’t have to create your own content, all the time. Curate other content and add value to someone else’s point of view. This isn’t a co-out—it’s contributing to a dialogue.

What are your creative habits? How do you find your muse?

So it’s perhaps no surprise that Gartner’s 2013 social marketing survey pointed to content creation and curation as the key areas of focus for social marketing organizations—and the most outsourced function.

Part of this research is available here to the general public, free of charge.

The rhythm and tempo of social marketing puts extraordinary pressure on marketing organizations that are more accustomed to publishing horizons measured in weeks and months than those measured in minutes and hours. Also, as my colleague Allen Weiner tells us, the expectation for content quality and authenticity has changed dramatically. As Allen says, “speak from the heart or not at all.” Amen.

What’s different about content in the age of the social web?

• It’s human—it speaks with a conversational voice, from one human being to another. Thought isn’t hidden behind stilted corporate speak, chest-thumping claims and pompous language.
• It’s neutral—perhaps not wholly objective, but it holds fire on the hard sell in favor of issues-centric storytelling that supports a brand’s point of view without always making the brand the hero.
• It’s simple—attention spans aren’t what they used to be and competition for that limited attention has reached a fever pitch. The best content is stripped down and gets to the point, fast!
• It’s visual—my colleague Julie Hopkins tells us why visual content is inspiring content. It’s also easier to consume when you’re already up to your eyeballs in dense text.
• It’s curated—you don’t have to create all of your own content. Leverage happens when you organize and annotate third-party content that helps tell your story or sell your point of view.
• It’s conversational—communities talk back to sustain the dialogue in the form of comments, reviews, ratings and new content of their own that defends or argues against your point of view.
• It’s organic—it’s published fast, often in response to unpredictable moments. The now-ubiquitous Oreo cookie tweet is still one of the best examples of organic engagement in action.

It’s all easier said than done, which is why content has become more than an asset—it’s a strategy.