As my previous post<\/a> described, we failed miserably in our first goal of branding the site. Embarrassingly so. Enough said.<\/p>\n For the latter two goals, the results have been mixed, though securely on the success side of the equation. I\u2019m excited for this new iteration of our blog. Our epic marketing failures have given us plenty to learn from, and the few but significant successes have given us a great foundation to build upon as we enter into the next chapter of our company\u2019s evolution.<\/p>\n For the first eighteen months of the B2B blog formerly known as Content Ping, we operated beneath Amazon.com\u2019s Master Service Agreement (MSA), a binding agreement that grew increasingly oppressive as our business evolved.<\/p>\n We were effectively a white label for Amazon\u2019s content needs, and as our clients\u2019 needs evolved, the Amazon MSA actively held us back from any significant growth.<\/p>\n Our biggest challenge was the no-publicity clause prohibited us from publishing our primary expertise on our blog or our basic value proposition on our business website. We could communicate our Amazon knowledge and services verbally to our clients, but our keyboards transferred nary a pixel of that knowledge to the blog or any other public setting.<\/p>\n However, we continued to report on content trends and news beyond Amazon. As our other services began to grow, the blog became an important inside sales tool, helping our account managers and sales team to advise clients and close several significant deals.<\/p>\n There is no question that while we may have failed in conveying our thought leadership outside of our immediate clientele base, the two years and 600 posts we invested into the blog provided us with a vital sales resource and a strong foundation on which to grow.<\/p>\n One benefit of content marketing in general, and blogging in particular, that I don\u2019t see written about much is the knowledge gain that occurs when you ask your subject-matter experts\u2014the staff members who are producing your product or providing your service\u2014to be your content producers. Having your staff produce the content instills a foundation of knowledge no amount of passive reading can create. Admittedly, by many measurements writing may not be the quickest or most efficient way to learn about a subject, but in my book it\u2019s the surest way to instill that subject-knowledge for the long term.<\/p>\n In the blog\u2019s first year, we scheduled our project leads\u2014the people who manage our accounts\u2014to provide daily news roundups and regularly contribute feature posts. They were the ones selling our value proposition to our clients, so we felt that if they produced content for the blog they would deepen their knowledge of the industry and thus sell our value better.<\/p>\n There is no question that we succeeded at this goal. Our entire staff became more competent with the complex issues of syndication, search algorithms, Google updates, the particulars of retail channels, the value of original content, SEO, and so on.<\/p>\n The downside of this strategy is that because most of our project leads, despite their above-average writing abilities, had never been professional journalists, the time commitment on content production began to cut into their account management duties, especially as our business grew.<\/p>\n So if we were to continue to maintain a regular publication schedule (while also continuing to maintain and grow our client relationships), we had to come up with Plan B.<\/p>\n As visual designer and content specialist Chris Raymond<\/a>\u00a0put it in the same thread, \u201cit is far easier for a journalist to learn domain knowledge than a scientist [account manager] to learn to tell stories\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n This model sped up the content creation process, reduced our overall resource commitment to content creation, and kept our account managers and other staff on task to service their clients. By maintaining informant status, our subject-matter experts could continue to actively grow their knowledge base and contribute to the content process.<\/p>\n While the ultimate measure of the blog\u2019s success will be our conversion rate\u2014how much the increased traffic to the blog will translate to increased business\u2014our goals with the new iteration of the blog are much broader than that.<\/p>\n In the spirit of the classic thought experiment<\/a>, if a tree falls in the forest, we are now ever more focused on recording the noise and sharing it widely, as well as getting people into the forest to hear it. In addition to our established journalist-informant model of content creation, we have three routes to that goal:<\/p>\n But as I said, the best measure of our success at this point in our company\u2019s growth will be conversion. The formula for our blog conversion is pretty straightforward:<\/p>\n As far as I can tell, this is as simple (and as challenging) as it gets. If I am missing something, or if you hear one of our trees fall and want to better understand what it means, connect with me here or on Twitter (@mwhitec26<\/a>). I\u2019m all ears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When we launched Content Ping, we had three basic goals: To drive brand recognition for the blog as a leader…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22396,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[789],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\nQuestion: If Nobody Reads Your Thought-Leadership Writing, Do Your Thoughts Mean Anything?<\/h2>\n
Answer: Yes<\/h3>\n
\n![\"Valuable](\"http:\/\/content26.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/books2.jpg\")
\nIt\u2019s a myth that the act of writing is about conveying one\u2019s knowledge of a particular subject. We don\u2019t write in order to teach; we write in order to learn<\/a>. Writing is an objectified form of thinking; it helps clarify and solidify our thoughts on subject.<\/p>\nThe Journalist-Informant Collaboration Model<\/h2>\n
![\"Open](\"http:\/\/content26.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/open-book-300x243_2.jpg\")
In a recent conversation in the content strategy group on LinkedIn<\/a>, content strategist Sim D’Hertefelt<\/a> best put to words what our Plan B was. We created a journalist-informant collaboration model: we identified within our staff dedicated digital storytellers (staff writers and editors with journalism experience). These people would play the roles of journalists and would reach out to experts\u2014our account managers, executives, and outside industry thought-leaders (the subject-matter experts)\u2014who would in turn play the roles of the informants.<\/p>\nThe Future of content26’s B2B Blog<\/h2>\n
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