Marketers are willing to look to their media partners for marketing services.  Is that something that media partners want?

In an effort to do a real-world reality test  of corporate buzzwords, Crain’s Media Business Magazine went out and asked a bunch of marketing heads whether they wanted the marketing services solutions that their media partners are going out aggressively to acquire or build.

The logic from the media company side is sensible.  Advertising spend has been down, the business is changing and their are broader opportunities to partner with their clients.

The challenge is in finding the right way to define this activity.

When a media company says that it provides marketing services, the danger is getting sucked in to low-margin, labor intensive activities.  The unique capability of a media company is to leverage content and marketing know-how to solve marketing problems, not building ads or writing SEO copy or managing e-mail programs.

What’s different today from the past is that digital technologies and changing consumer behavior has changed the core process of content creation, content delivery and distribution.  The lines between marketing and publishing have blurred.

What a media company can do that a traditional marketing agency can’t even begin to dream of is use their traditional skills, transported into the digital environment, to create seamless bridges between the digital footprint of their brand to their clients’.

That’s not providing a marketing service.  That’s extending the media platform to solve the problems of visibility, engagement and conversion for marketing partners.

That’s far from being a commodity solution.

The challenge is finding a simple and direct term to describe this service and to develop fairly standard and efficient ways of delivering the solutions.

Our work in lead generation and social media marketing give us a unique perspective on two different dynamics that are at play in the world of interactive marketing.

The first is the idea of creating a brand online.  This is like going shopping for a new set of fancy clothes.  You start with the intention, I want to look good, and then you keep trying on clothing until you look pretty much the way that you want.  (Or, you think that you look the way that you want, but that’s another story…some of us can’t ever quite get there.)

For web marketing, this means getting the kind of look and feel, feature set and whiz-bang cool things that let you say that your web site is a pretty cool looking set of duds.

Of course, you factor in practical considerations.  After all, just like when you go shopping for clothing, you’ve got to stay reasonably close to your budget, and you’ve got to be able to sit down in it.  But, when push comes to shove, you are going to err in the direction of your heart.

The second is the challenge of converting online visitors into prospects and customers.  This, after all, is the paramount benefit of the internet, that you can provide prospective customers with the kind of information that they need in order to determine whether to work with you or buy your product.

This is nothing like buying a suit of clothes.  This is like trying to find recruit athletes to a Division III college.  You can’t give them a scholarship, you can’t influence admissions, but you need them to believe that you can give them a better experience than anyone else.  It’s about capturing interest, holding on to it and closing the sale at the right time.

That’s an entirely different kind of web experience.  Your web site isn’t designed on the basis of aesthetics; it has to be designed on the basis of data.  What are the images, information points and links that cause your users to take an action that is of an economic  benefit for you?

For most of us in business, that action is a phone call or a visit to our place of business.  And when the prospect already has gotten information that is important to them and decided to reach out and contact you, you have the highest odds of making that  prospect a customer.

As we’ve worked over the past year and a half with local businesses, we’ve discovered that there is a tremendous lack of understanding as to how to use a web site in order to create qualified prospects.  And, as we’ve  built social media footprints for our clients, and developed broader distribution of their content that has elevated their natural search traffic, we’ve found that very few have reliable processes for tracking and capturing those users.

Where do you start as a small business?  With taking the time to understand the simplest attributes of web tracking.  Anyone in business can use the Analytics tool from Google in order to track the activity on their web site.  That is your starting point.  If you are able to answer how many people are visiting your web site, what kind of things they look at most frequently, and how many of them are sending you additional inquiries, either in person, by phone or on e-mail, then you have the beginning of the information that will help you decide how to make your web site more than a pretty set of clothes.

Of all the social media platforms, Twitter is the one that puzzles marketers the most. The typical observation is that they don’t get it and can’t figure out why it’s important.

EMarketer shared some research recently from ExactTarget that provides an easy answer: Twitter gives you a way to reach people who have loud and active voices online. Once you’ve gotten their attention around your message, you’ve got a good chance that they will redistribute that message somewhere on the web.

How’s that work? ExactTarget shows that the 26 million monthly users of Twitter are three to five times more likely to comment on blogs, post to forums, participate in view sites and blog themselves than the average Internet user.

“Consumers active on Twitter are clearly the most influential online,” said Morgan Stewart, principal at ExactTarget’s research and education group, in a statement. “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

The conclusions suggest that the time spent investing in an audience on Twitter is likely to have an exponential impact. This is the crux of social media marketing, and provides a simple justification for using a service that at first seems fragmented and chaotic.

I’ve been intrigued by the dynamic of building lead volume in our Apartment Finder business over the past year.

As I’ve discussed before, the multi-family marketing business is a competitive, lead-generating business that is driven by consumer’s accessing print and online directories and inquiring about apartments for rent.

There are three ways that marketing companies like Apartment Finder hand customer leads over to its clients:  a phone call directly to the apartment community; an e-mail to an apartment community, either directly or through a leasing intermediary; a click-thru to the apartment community web site; and, a prospect who walks directly into the community leasing office without making prior contact.

This week, one of our biggest competitors in the space shared a few public metric related to their lead production.  According to their recent earnings release, the company increased leads 35% year-over-year, and currently produces more than 75% of their leads from their Internet and mobile platforms.

That made me curious.  How did our metrics at Apartment Finder measure up?

The chart to the right shows the increase in lead production at Apartment Finder over the past year.  Overall, leads gained 43%.  Phone leads were up 25%, e-mail leads were up 169% and click-thru’s to property web sites were up 71%.

This data is derived from two third-party sources:  CallSource, which manages our tracking number program, and Omniture, which provides us with web analytics.

Most interesting to me was the distribution between leads from print distribution and from internet and mobile distribution.

At Apartment Finder, 53% of our leads, including click-thru’s, are driven by our Internet distribution and 47% by print.  Subtract click-thru’s, which can’t be tracked back to a specific individual, and the ratio drops closer to 50-50.

But the key issue isn’t what source the lead comes from.  The issue is how useful the lead is.

I had an engaging conversation around the relative quality of leads with a leading apartment marketer at the National Apartment Association Conference this past June.  E-mails that are generated as a by-product of creating an appointment to see an apartment had a high conversion, he said.  Phone calls to the community were the second best kind of lead.  And e-mail inquiries were the lowest-converting type of lead.

That means there are other metrics that can point to how good the lead generation of a marketing partner will be.  A big one is the percentage of phone calls to e-mail leads.

At Apartment Finder, 80% of our leads from print and internet are phone calls.  20% are e-mails.   That’s an exceptionally good ratio, I think.

I do.

The first time I got this question, I was surprised and took a second to answer.

Of course I write it, I thought. My name is on it.

When I asked people why they asked, they said that they loved the blog, but figured that I had other people writing under my direction. I was a CEO, after all.

The question prompted two thoughts.

First, we all have different styles of thinking and communicating. I write, so when I hit on something that I’m interested or puzzled about, my inclination is to try to get it down on paper and see whether it makes sense. I can go through my old files and find documents that I have written at different key moments in my career that laid out what I was seeing and how it sorted out.

This blog simply offers a platform to share some of those things. I write it because that’s what I do…write.

The second thought stems from that last point: a lot of people have things to say, but they aren’t people who write. There’s nothing wrong with that; we all have our different styles.

Those people who have things to say but aren’t people who write shouldn’t be left out of the power of using content and social media to communicate. And, people don’t expect them to be left out. When people asked me whether I wrote this blog or not, the question wasn’t pejorative. They don’t expect CEO’s to write, but they do expect them to have something to say.

Two years ago, when I began seriously exploring how businesses were using social media tools to market, I was struck by this basic inequity: the benefits of social media accrued to the people who could write, not necessarily the people who were the best at doing the work of their business. People who were facile with content and technology could stamp out daunting digital footprints, taking mindshare and traffic away from other, potentially more expert and more deserving businesses.

This was the problem we decided to try to solve when we launched the DigitalSherpa line of services: Can you make content marketing using social media tools accessible to local businesses? The purpose was to help level the playing field, to give people who had something to say but lacked the skills to say it a toolkit.

We’ve had some success and are learning along the way. I’m constantly struck, though, by people who look at businesses and say, If you don’t do social media yourself, then you’re not doing it the right way. That statement has an elitist and exclusive air. The real question that all of us should be trying to contribute solutions to is how to make the power of social media marketing available to any business, regardless of how good they are at writing and interacting and sharing.

I was struck the other day by the observation that the start of our current recession was sharper than the Great Depression and that the steps taken by governments around the world to provide financial stimulus helped to moderate the decline.

That observation got me thinking about how different the images of this recession are from the images of the Great Depression.

The New York Times had a long article in the Week in Review section this week that captured some of the underlying difference.

A great many people have lost faith in powerful institutions, from Congress to Goldman Sachs. Yet beneath the bitterness coloring national affairs — down at the level of neighborhood, family, coffee shop, tavern — a tenuous belief in the collective good remains, perhaps moderating national dismay.

I don’t think that the Times article intended to demean the level of suffering and pain that individual people a experiencing during this downturn. But they captured something of the zeitgeist that I experience as a I travel around the country. People are carrying on, often with a tremendous amount of energy and a degree of mobility and connectedness that is unmatched by any time in our history.

That perspective made the chart above particularly powerful.

One dramatic difference is the relatively low cost of food in the U.S. compared to other places in the world. The affordability of food is driven by diverse factors, including vast natural resources of our country, federal subsidy programs, efficiencies in distribution and innovations in preservation.

And compared to other countries, there’s no other place on the planet that has cheaper food than the U.S. (2008 data here). The 5.5% of disposable income that Americans spend on food at home is less than half the amount of income spent by Germans (11.4%), the French (13.6%), the Italians (14.4%), and less than one-third the amount of income spent by consumers in South Africa (20.1%), Mexico (24.1%), and Turkey (24.5%), which is about what Americans spent DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, and far below what consumers spend in Kenya (45.9%) and Pakistan (45.6%).

When you don’t worry about where your next meal comes from, you can afford to feel optimistic and energetic. The relatively low cost of food in our country is an important element in keeping that positive viewpoint up

Any small business looking at social media ultimately has to ask, What business benefit am I going to get from being active in this media? No matter how compelling the user statistics are, any commitment of time for a small business needs to be rewarded with results.

I thought it would be useful to share a detailed case study on how one small business has leveraged a content marketing and social networking strategy to drive measurable business results.

Situation:

TMG Brand Communications is a boutique public relations and marketing communications agency in New York City. Established in 1994, the agency has developed a particular expertise serving accounts in the financial services, lifestyle and media sectors. TMG is focused on creating broad-based communications programs that convey the distinctive attributes of brands and help drive business results. [Disclosure: The principal of TMG Brand Communications, Tami McCarthy, is my wife.]

The company’s purpose is summed up on its website.

The thrill of developing a brand’s personality, giving it a voice of authority in the market and having it resonate and drive a target audience to act or think differently inspires everything that we do at TMG Brand Communications.

Over the past several years, TMG has developed a suite of skills in internet and social media marketing. One of its most notable initiatives was the integration of social media with a live webcast to launch the Citi Forward card from client Citi Cards. (A description of the project from social media maven Mack Collier can be found here.)

Not surprisingly, TMG had not developed a plan to leverage its social media marketing expertise to elevate its own profile. Tami was an early adopter of social media platforms, with an active presence on Twitter and profiles on services like Facebook and LinkedIn, but had not developed an integrated strategy for using these tools to benefit the agency.

Like many of its peers, TMG did have an excellent web site which presented its capabilities and a sample of its work. However, the site was lightly trafficked. Most of the visitors came directly to the site, driven by TMG’s distribution of its URL on its business cards and stationary.

Tactics:

In the last quarter of 2009, TMG decided to develop an integrated strategy to use social media marketing to elevate its brand presence.

The strategy was designed to add a content marketing component to an already active social networking presence. In addition, the strategy linked personally-branded social networking activity on platforms like Twitter and Facebook with the digital identities of the overall agency.

In order to accomplish the strategy, TMG established a blog on a sub-domain of the tmg-media URL. This blog, buzzcloud.tmgpr.com, was set up using WordPress and the Cordobo Green Park theme. The agency also created a TMG Brand Communications fan page on Facebook, pointing the page to the primary TMG domain. The Networked Blogs application was used to distribute blog posts to the Facebook page, and a plug-in was used to distribute posts to Twitter.

A general content outline was developed in order to give focus to the blog posts. Tami is the sole author of the posts. The purpose of the posts is to share observations and suggestions about topical communications challenges. The content only peripherally touches on TMG clients. In addition, the content plan assumed that new posts would be created every two weeks or so, so that the burden of creating content didn’t weigh down an already highly-productive team.

Results:

Tami McCarthy’s BuzzCloud was launched in November 2009. Results for the subdomain buzzcloud.tmgpr.com were tracked separately from the results for the www.tmg-media.com domain so that the impact of the new content strategy could be accurately measured.

That impact was immediate.

In the six months following the launch of the blog, TMG increased web traffic to its TMGpr.com agency site and to its new blog, Buzzcloud, by 198%.

Hidden within this gain are a couple of data points that demonstrate the impact of a well-executed content marketing and social networking program.

• Visits to TMGpr.com, the agency site, increased 32% in the six-month period following the blog launch;
• Search engines drove 61% more traffic to the agency site in the six-month period;
• The number of keywords that drove traffic to TMG’s agency site gained from 425 to 1,178 in the six-month period.

After launching Buzzcloud, TMG became much more visible on search engines, particularly Google. TMG became visible because it began to publish original content with more frequency. Each of those blog posts were distributed into TMG’s digital footprint, and as people clicked through to the site, or redistributed the content their own digital footprint, TMG began to develop a broader network of digital breadcrumbs, all of which led Google and other search engines back to the TMGpr.com web site.

Increased web traffic to the agency site was not the only indirect benefit of the social media marketing program. The digital footprint of both TMGpr and Tami McCarthy expanded dramatically, generating increased brand heft and awareness.

The easiest way to assess the heft of a brand’s digital footprint is to type the name into Google. The phrases “TMGpr” and “Tami McCarthy” both return relevant results that dominate the first page of Google.

Most people who are interested in you or your company are likely to search for you on the web. A Google search that returns a page filled with relevant links creates an aura of credibility and authority for your brand. It isn’t enough for those links to exist, however; behind them there needs to be useful and relevant information, the kind of search outcome that is Google’s brand promise.

This program has not required an incredible amount of time to execute. The most time-consuming aspect is creating the original posts. Maintaining the social networking presence is a matter of intermittent focus; TMG uses Facebook and Twitter to share interesting content, give personal updates and re-distribute content that other people have created.

What’s fascinating about this case study is how important the creation of content has been to driving overall web traffic.

During the six-months ending November 2009. TMG executed its social networking program actively. It did not, however, have an active blog. As a result, the social networking had virtually no effect on the company’s web traffic.

Launching the blog and publishing content drove a tremendous amount of traffic.

One lesson is that social networking without content marketing will not drive clearly measurable results for your business.

Of course, the big question is whether this activity has any impact on your business results.

For TMG, social media marketing has helped to drive increased visibility, more business inquiries and ultimately more account. Go take a look at the agency’s blog to see just how much.

While the buzz about social networking has shifted to the hot new thing, mainstream consumer adoption and usage of social networks is exploding.

eMarketer this week shared some of its conclusions from a recent research report defining the scale and opportunity of the social networking category.

“There is no doubt anymore that social networks, reaching more than 50% of the total US Internet audience, are an essential part of the Internet experience,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “Social Network Demographics and Usage.”

The research points to broad usage of social network among all demographic categories and continued expansion in the market.   eMarkerter forecasts that two-thirds of Internet users will participate on social networks every month by 2014.  Williamson comments that “the connections and interactions that social networking makes possible didn’t even exist a few short years ago.”

An analysis of the growth in Facebook‘s US users since this past January underscores the robust growth in the social networking category.

iStrategyLabs has been using Facebook’s ad targeting system to track the growth of key demographic cohorts on the service for the past couple of years.  In 2009, for instance, US users of Facebook gained 145% — an incredible explosion.

I was curious just how strong growth was in 2010 and went to the ad targeting system to update the iStrategy figures.

In the first five months of 2010, Facebook’s US users gained 22% to more than 125 million.  The rate of growth is remarkably strong, following the explosion of the past year.

Usage continues to grow more rapidly among adults, with the 25 – 34 cohort increasing 23% over the past five months, and the 35 – 54 cohort increasing 25%.  Interestingly, the number of adults 55+ appeared to decline over the past five months. The net effect of these trends is that the average age of a Facebook user continues to increase.

The service is remarkably mainstream.  And, as the usage data that Facebook shares indicates, remarkably utilized.

Facebook reports as of the end of May that is has more than 400 million worldwide users.

Half of Facebook’s users log in every day.  They interact with 130 friends on average and are connected with 60 pages, groups and events.  Each user is creating more than 2 pieces of content a month:  a photo upload, a status update, a link share, a comment.

This is a truly social phenomenon.

Let’s consider, for a moment, the potential impact for marketers and media brands.

If each user has 130 friends, that means that their first degree of influence is 16,900 friends…the friends of their friends.  Their second degree of influence is 2.2 million friends …the friends of the friends of their friends.

Each time a user interacts with a page, or a group or an event, that interaction is broadcast to her 130 friends.  The interaction can be clicking the “Like” button, or becoming a member, or commenting on an update, or sharing a photo or a post.  If one of the 130 friends then interacts with that page or group, that interaction is broadcast to his 130 friends.  The multiplying effect of interactions with content expand with every Facebook user.  Each of these instances of sharing are a moment where a brand inserts itself, within the context of each users identity, into the awareness of other users.

This is part of the power of marketing on social networks.  The skill is in creating instances of content that people interact with.  Remember, the interaction isn’t just about “engagement.”  Clicking a Like button or sharing a piece of content is just as powerful as leaving a comment.

The Facebook universe is one powerful indicator of the mainstream character of social networking, and the dynamics of user activity underscore how potent this new marketing platform can be for large businesses, small business and media brands.

When you are using content to influence consumer behavior, the context that the content is delivered in has a big influence on how consumers respond to the messaging. This maxim is an important factor in designing content marketing and social media programs. Experience suggests that consumers impute authority to two types of content: content that is considered and structured; and content that is personal and authentic.

Take recent research from SheSpeaks and iVillage that was reported on in eMarketer this week.

The survey examined how women interact with brands on digital platforms. The big headline was that while women follow brands on different social platforms, brand content delivered on those platforms has relatively lower impact on purchasing decisions.

I was struck by the relative weighting of different kinds of online content in influencing shopping behavior, and the degree to which context appears to have an impact on influence.

For instance, three categories of content had consistent impact on female consumers: reviews on message boards; articles on general interest websites; and content about products on brand websites.

Each of these three venues has assumptions built into the context that the content is delivered in. Messages boards and review sites have a self-policing nature, where reviewers gain credibility by their relative weight in the social group. General-interest websites present the same kind of editorial independence that traditional magazines have long benefited from. And brand sites have an underlying regulatory framework, since consumers understand that brands are required by law to make supportable claims about their products and services.

Each of the three categories has an foundation of trust that creates a positive context for the content.

The survey suggests that social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are less credible sources of information to women shoppers.

This assertion assumes, however, that the primary purpose of the social platforms is to communicate information about the brand.

Within a well-structured social media marketing program, social platforms serve two important purposes: content distribution and consumer engagement. In each case, the purpose of the program is to create awareness and to give the consumer easy access to points of contact and information.

The brand web site — and by extension, a brand blog — are the appropriate distribution points for brand content. Consumers are more inclined to trust content that lives within a trusted context.

Social media marketing is the integrated execution of two different marketing activities that are supported by content and engagement. Consumers will respond to authentic content, but not when they encounter it out of context.