I fall into a dinner conversation with a gentleman from a traditional B2B magazine publisher who is a speaker and sponsor at the event.

“We just launched our content marketing division last year,” he says confidently.

“Oh?” I say. “You never did custom content before? I would have thought you would have.”

I spent a few years at B2B giant Reed Elsevier and, like many publishers (especially in the B2B space), Reed had a custom content business that was typically run as a one-off – using most of the same resources and processes as the content business.

“Oh, no, we have done custom content for years,” the magazine man says.

There is an obvious follow-up question here, but I don’t want to put him on the spot. I can’t help myself, so casually as possible, I ask…

“So, then what do you see as the difference between content marketing and custom content?”

He pauses. A few folks stop their conversations and start listening –  yup, I have put him on the spot. I actually had never considered the issue myself until just now.

“Well, nothing really I guess,” he replies. “I think they just keep changing the name. It used to be Custom Publishing, then it was Custom Content, and now it is Content Marketing.”

He smiles weakly — and a little bit later he leaves to take a call.

Quite a few of the companies here at Content Marketing World are from the traditional publishing world: PR Newswire, Wolters Kluwer, Penton, Cygnus, etc.  For many of them, “Content Marketing” may indeed be just another word for “Custom Content,” a business that is run on the side for brands. But I don’t think that is the whole story; if it were, this conference wouldn’t be nearly so well attended.

In my view, there is a simple and fundamental difference between Content Marketing and Custom Content: one is internal, one is external.

Custom Content — pioneered by folks like Pohly & Pohly over 50 years ago with the airline magazine — was typically the creation of content meant to build an affinity with your existing audience. This content would reinforce the brand, communicate the value of the product and create new opportunities. Custom Content is the creation of  ”branded content” for a customer. And, for the most part, custom content is created for the client to communicate with their own existing customers.

There is some overlap, but Content Marketing for the most part is a different beast. Content Marketing is predominantly outward facing — it is about creating content that will attract *new* customers for brands. It can be branded content, but it can also be simply “brand-relevant” content that attracts an audience.

The Content Marketing trend started with white papers, but has crossed over into blogs and social media. In fact, for some brands P&G (soap operas were actually an early anomalous example of content marketing), content marketing is starting to look like a much more successful method of creating online engagement than advertising. Hence the popularity of the new Content Marketing World conference I am attending.

What does all of this mean? Brands or firms who are looking to be content marketers will have to overcome all of the same challenges as publishers. They not only have to create great content, but also have to figure out how to attract and reach an audience. And guess what? They will likely be in direct competition with publishers over who is going to build a direct relationship with the audience.

I draw two conclusions: first, Content Marketing is going to be a lot harder than Custom Content to do well. Brands who want to be content marketers will have to understand and use a much wider array of expertise and disciplines including: social media, search optimization, paid and earned media, distribution and community building.

Second, there will be blood. Inevitably, content marketing creates a conflict with publishers over who owns the audience, the writers and the content. Brands may not find that traditional publishers are going to be so keen on helping put themselves out of business.

One thing is for sure: this is a very different business than custom content.

Which is where search engine optimization and social media optimization, when fused together, yield something that the folks over at Edelman Digital are calling social content optimization. Their belief is that search and social are not mutually exclusive. And we think they might be onto something.

Basically, SEO + SMO = SCO. This is especially where all those “Content is king!” declarations ring true. After all, both SEO and SMO are flourishes being used to make the core content more visible, shareable, and engaging to users. The flowchart provided over at Edelman can seem a little overwhelming, but the great thing about SCO is the customization; not every entity managing its web presence will approach its SCO plan the same way.

They identify give core areas: Video, Documents, Images, Conversation, and Niche. The trick here is that many companies operating web or social presences will likely find a need to focus on only a few of these core areas for strong impact. For example, internet marketers may find blogging (which in Edelman’s model is under the Conversation umbrella) to be their top priority.

Without anything (editorials, ideas, reportage, even press releases) to offer, a blog entry is basically a collection of words – and thanks to Google’s Panda update, even skillfully optimized collections of words won’t rank high in a search engine. And thanks to people who only want to read news items of substance, collections of words won’t warrant any real shares across social channels.

For this same segment, images and videos are nothing more than accents for a blog post. Documents, meanwhile, are only when something – coverage of a particular trend, for example–demand them. And as far as Geolocal placements (Yelp, Google Maps, and so on)–found under the Niche umbrella–the nature of internet marketing is that it’s not based on any bricks-and-mortar operations.

Ultimately, SCO is about a new issue that content providers face as more SMBs enter the content creation fray: It’s about making articles pop and sparkle, no matter how dry or technical the industry. It’s about taking the problem of “too many” and overcoming it. The funniest, catchiest piece of content wins. The best way to guarantee that victory? Visibility through optimization.

Cross-published at the Blue Phoenix Network blog.

The social media monitor turned blog advertising platform plans to use the funds to improve its technology platform and introduce new social advertising products. In addition, BuzzLogic plans to double its sales and account management staff.

“BuzzLogic is a very different company than it was two years ago and growing revenues greater than 50% a quarter proves that,” said CEO Dave Hills, a LookSmart and 24/7 Real Media veteran that joined the BuzzLogic in March. “Before we were helping brands understand what consumers were saying, now we’re helping brands engage with the consumers by activating media for them. Before we were listening. Now we’re listening and engaging at huge scale.”

The latest round brings BuzzLogic’s fundraising total to $28 million. Last July, the company secured $8.8 million in a Series B Round led by Adams Capital Management.

Higgins — who previously held senior management roles at Infoseek/GO/Disney, Ziff Davis, Benedek Investment Group and Tacit Software — joined Technorati in 2007, heading up strategy and day-to-day operations for advertising sales, business development and the advertising network.

And what a tenure she’s had — the company has doubled its revenue year over year and became profitable in 2010. In addition, Higgins headed up the development and April launch of Technorati’s private exchange, powered by AppNexus.

Higgins has “been running our day-to-day business for the past three years, and much of our success is due to her leadership,” said previous CEO Rich Jalichandra — who we’ve had the pleasure of talking to numerous times and who contributed a great story about the Federal Trade Commission hopping into the social media fray back in 2009.

Jalichandra is shifting to the role of executive chairman of Technorati and its board of directors, and promises to continue focusing on strategy and corporate development.

Technorati also has a new CTO in the form of Abderrezak Kamel, who was last seen in the same position at DSP LucidMedia. Kamel boasts nearly 20 years of experience with online advertising, information retrieval and natural language processing.

According to comScore, Technorati’s social media network is the third-largest social media property following Facebook and Twitter.

Believe it or not, 36% of that group do not believe they are seen as thought leaders in their industry — shocker!

In its first annual B2B marketing research study, HiveFire discovered that 60% of B2B companies that show up a great deal in search results have a blog plan and 75% of that group say visitors expressly come for content. Forty-four percent of companies that show up sometimes or rarely in search results merely have a company blog.

A little more than a quarter of respondents cited their biggest challenge as delivering new content on a regular basis, with 30% saying they publish new blog content less than once a month. Only 10% cited publishing new content daily.

In addition, there was no clear management structure for procuring blog content — 33% said it fell under the VP of marketing’s realm while 32% claimed it was the online marketing manager’s problem. The remaining 35% split the responsibility among PR people, contractors or other internal resources.

However, Solariat CEO and cofounder Jack Smith notes that more than half a century of academic studies around offline conversations have produced anthems of work expounding on the stated and unstated rules of conduct. To respect the conversation, one must possess refined etiquette: show you understand the gist of the conversation, acknowledge the level of formality (which encapsulates everything from tone to volume) and respond with relevance. Only then will you be welcomed into the conversation.

Perhaps the greatest goal of advertising is to be seen as an enhancement to content rather than a distraction or interruption. Solariat may have achieved that with AdLibs, an advertising product that serves as a scaled, automated assistant for conversational media.

While an executive at WPP and 24/7 Real Media, Smith became obsessed with the idea that as social media grows, users will increasingly seek out information beyond the search box. They’ll employ various forms of social media to get answers from their peers.

It was obvious the old ways weren’t working when it came to transcribing what happens in information exchanges. Pulling information out of a Facebook profile to target was ineffective — especially if it was irrelevant to current discussion. Social media is a far different piece from the typical web page.

On the other side of that equation was his cofounding partner and CTO, Jeffrey Davitz. With a Ph.D. in statistics focused on large-scale data mining, Davitz was working at the Stanford Research Institute’s Artificial Intelligence Center on the largest AI project in history, CALO. Within SRI, he started the Social Computing Group in the early days of social media — “People were just learning how to shake hands,” he comments — which examined machine learning over tech streams and social networks and a built set of applications to preform smart routing.

Conversational analysis became Davitz’ forte — honing in on how to intercept where information is being demanded in the context of social media and addressing those needs where they occur. The latter half intersected with Smith’s commercial goals, so they set up shop in November 2009.

Instead of waiting for a consumer to insert queries into a search engine, Solariat sought to serve him or her — and potentially advertisers — by being an assistant to the conversation. And rather than detect the person, their technology would detect the information being requested, without even a thought about from which search box it came.

The Internet ad technology first developed in the late 90s — ad servers and search engine management tools — are not geared for social exchanges and conversations and the team found they could not repurpose it. The piece of data that Google possessed that obliterated early data modeling efforts and made it the king of search advertising was expression of intent, far more powerful than browser history or location.

“It’s different to understand what someone means when they say ‘I have a headache’ — asking for headache relief — than when they simply type in ‘headache,’” Smith says.

So Solariat sought to find the expression of intent in social media, starting with the earliest form: forums, which even predate the Internet.

AdLib, the resulting product, crawls for content — editorial or user-generated — that contains certain attributes and then match the content with users seeking those attributes. But just as important, if not more so, is an appropriate response that’s viewed as an extension of the conversation.

The solution packages a series of links into a dynamic creative that fits within a specific conversation, being sure not to imitate a person but be recognized as part of the system — a scaled, automated assistant. The text within the creative is to anchor the link in the context of the conversation, Davitz says.

Although they may visually resemble a recommendation engine, which are generally based on some kind of profiling, AdLib links are based on similar queries like in a search engine. AdLib doesn’t look for the meaning of content, which also kicks them out of the semantic ballpark, but patterns within words — though Smith adds advertisers can insert a relevancy score. Linked content is chosen based on possessing similar user intent.

As queries within an online discussion get more refined, so do the AdLib links thanks to the machine learning core. In addition, it’s able to recognize the central queries post by post.

“For there to be value creation for publishers and advertisers within social media, there first must be value for consumers,” Smith says. “It’s logical, but I don’t think we’ve done that well as an industry.”

Ninety-three million people watch the Super Bowl. How many Facebook friends, Twitter followers and members of the blogosphere does this audience represent? Don’t miss out. Seek to engage this massive audience by empowering them to act. Don’t just entertain them with an expensive or celebrity-focused TV spot.

Leveraging the social media universe is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a key strategy for some of the world’s largest consumer brands. As new advertisers consider the hefty price of entry into Super Bowl TV advertising, it’s critical that they focus less on the 1:1 communication of a “sit back and watch TV” experience, and spend more time considering the many opportunities a socially-networked audience of nearly 100 million Super Bowl viewers represents.

These viewers want to get involved. They want to voice an opinion, be a part of a conversation and get involved. Give them ways to interact with your product and your brand; they have the tools at their fingertips.

Advertisers need to think beyond a one-screen strategy. While football fans might be watching the game on a TV screen, many will have a computer screen nearby. The vast majority, regardless of where they’re watching, will have a phone in their pocket. They’ll have several options to interact before, during and long after the game is played.

How will you utilize these eager brand champions? Give them a task. Today’s consumer loves to participate, collect, share, recommend, post, identify, tag or “like” something, especially when it involves a brand they love or some strategic creative with buzz-building appeal.

Today’s savvy marketers don’t need to get out of the traditional TV game, but they do need to use it correctly. As part of a larger multiscreen social strategy, having access to 100 million captive viewers is a powerful opportunity. When properly utilized, this can be an influential and effective tool.

Engaging these viewers can be as easy as a 30-second spot during the game. Empowering them starts when you give them a task with marching orders.

Consider a scavenger hunt where the items collected are calls in the game, announcer catchphrases, certain fan antics or objects that could be photographed on the TV screen. Items could be “hidden” in advertising or in the actual game.

In many cases, these activities can be managed from viewers’ phones via a Facebook application, iPhone app or on Twitter. Sitting at home, at a bar or at a Super Bowl party, they can be sending data to their social network about your brand while enjoying the game.

Who’s having the best Super Bowl party? Send pictures, video, guest lists, and menus to a Facebook Super Bowl site where judges can vote. The voters are the community and contest participants will be lobbying for their “party.” It’ll bring traffic to your brand and transform your brand champions into evangelists.

Things are changing. We, as consumers, continue to evolve. We are spoiled by access to information and opportunities to engage. Our expectations are higher. We expect a two-way or multi-way conversation and meaningful opportunities to interact with a brand. Just sitting and watching a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl is much more about buying “wow” factor and far less about meaningful brand interaction.

Brands are engaging the consumer now with more frequency, inviting them to interact with, participate in and even own a portion of the experience. The typical Super Bowl ad formula is becoming less and less effective and it makes less sense for large advertisers to spend the money on a “throw it over the fence, and see what happens” strategy. Not when we have social networks to leverage and analytical tools that allow us to see immediate results.

93; 350; 65; Add “million” to each number and you have the Super Bowl audience, amount of total Facebook users, and the amount of Facebook users accessing Facebook on their mobile device right now. These are exciting times for the savvy digital marketer. The consumers are ready and expect us to include them in our brand conversation. They want to be engaged and empowered. They want the opportunity to become active players for our brand.

Are we ready for them?

What’s the best way to do this? Give away your best tips and proactively address customer problems before they happen. Sounds crazy? From your perspective, it may seem as though you are giving away your most valuable secrets. However, in the eyes of your customer, you are establishing trust. Even more importantly, you’re establishing a deep sense of respect. If done correctly, blogging can help a potential customer’s line of thinking to evolve from “who are these guys?” to “wow, I wonder what else these guys can help me with?”

There are three components to successful blogging from a customer relationship standpoint – drafting great content, ensuring the content gets appropriately distributed and locking in reader loyalty. These days, setting up a blog is easy thanks to the plethora of tools out there. Blogs fully automate the more mundane aspects of online publishing such as user interface design and connectivity with third party web applications. This means you can focus your efforts on content and distribution. There are many popular platforms to choose from like WordPress, Typepad, Blogsmith, Movable Type and Blogger. The help pages for these blogging platforms contain detailed instructions on technical aspects of setting up a blog.

Once you’re up and running, the key to successful blog writing from a corporate perspective is to always frame your articles by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. More importantly, focus on content that is engaging. Topics that are universally popular include increasing sales, building a corporate brand, new product development ideas and industry research.

For example, let’s say that you publish software for accounting professionals. Don’t only write articles about how you solve problems for accountants. Readers get easily turned off if you sound insincere or self promotional. Instead, focus on the key problems faced by your customers. Topics could include industry regulation, courting new customers and automating accounting processes. As you write on broader problems faced by your customers and interact with them through comments, you will earn their respect. You will also gain valuable product development ideas for your own product for future growth.

Also try to approach drafting content in a creative way. While you can write article after article, the beauty of the internet is in dynamic and interactive content. So think outside the box! Some of my favorite bloggers regularly conduct audio and video podcasts, surveys of key industry professionals, “top 10” lists and proprietary research. For example, try stirring the pot by publishing a list of the top 10 accounting firms in your target market. Create detailed criteria for the top 10 list, interview major players in your target industry and include your own commentary. You will be amazed by how many potential leads will start banging on your door demanding to be placed on your list.

Alternatively, you can run a survey on executive sentiment covering topics such as projected revenue growth this year, upcoming hurdles and most-respected competitor. The key to surveys is getting company executives to divulge juicy information such as revenue, profitability and employee salaries. Better yet, try throwing in a few graphs that visually demonstrate the results of your survey. For example, run an analysis comparing profitability to average employee salary. Revealing how well (or how poorly!) your target industry is performing is the ultimate conversation starter.

Once you have great content, you need to distribute it as widely as possible in order to find and retain loyal readers. There are several avenues for distributing content. One avenue includes aggregation services like Ezinearticles. You can also submit your article to the latest social media sharing tools like Digg, FeedBurner and Reddit.

Another way of distributing content is by submitting it to related blog carnivals. A blog carnival is a central repository of blog articles on a certain topic like fashion or finance. A great example is blogcarnival.com where an individual typically reviews each article submitted manually and then posts the most interesting ones. Yet another way to distribute your content is to bundle ten or twenty articles and publish a small eBook or white paper. You can then distribute your eBook through document-sharing services like Scribd and DocStoc.

Your last step is to maintain a loyal reader following. Beyond supplying a steady flow of engaging content, you should look into Web 2.0 tools that help readers stay in touch. Tools such as RSS feeds, email newsletters, MashLogic and Twitter allow your readers to access content via third-party websites, email and the mobile Web. Some blogs have even taken the step of building social networks around their content using white-label social networking software such as Ning or KickApps.

Beyond corporate brand building, you will be pleasantly surprised by how many customers will find and read your articles. In short, blogs are public relations tools that have a real-world sales impact. I regularly run into potential leads that tell me they have heard of UpClick through articles like the one you are reading right now! While there is a lot of content out there, there will always be a shortage of quality writing, videos and surveys on topics that people want to discuss. So get out there and make yourself heard!

The FTC Guides Concerning Use of Endorsement and Testimonials in Advertising is not new. Much of the document dates to the first publication of it in 1975 with a revision in the 1980′s to create the standards by which marketers, particularly television commercials could use endorsements and testimonials. And, while television still plays a large role in marketing, the Internet’s influence has reached a critical mass, i.e. the FTC has received a large enough pool of complaints regarding certain practices that they feel it necessary to dictate allowable behavior.

In this case, the format in question revolves around blogs and bloggers. That the FTC might look to regulate bloggers in a revision to their guidelines is also not new, with mentions beginning in November 2008 with proposed changes being published and picking up again at the very end of April 2009 and throughout May. The topic has gained momentum in the past few days because of a recent AP article that was revisited on Cnet.

The AP article begins, “Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services…” “to help them find a gem or shun a lemon. What some fail to realize, though, is that such reviews can be tainted: Many bloggers have accepted perks…” and “Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all.” It’s important because it would be the first time that FTC has proposed any sort of rules for bloggers specifically.

For the individual blogger this can sound scary. A classic example comes from an ex-coworker who started a beauty blog, and as it started to gain a little bit of a following, she started receiving not just requests to cover a product but incentives for a review, the implication being that she would write positively. Such one offs aren’t unusual. Entire companies even exist to help advertisers receive coverage from bloggers. PayPerPost for example has created an entire marketplace whereby companies can find bloggers who will write about their products or services with the advertiser having final approval of whether they will pay for a particular post.

Intellectually, this is an interesting and important topic. As mentioned in one of the articles, “If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk,” said Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC’s division of advertising practices. “Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and … they have an economic motive for what they’re saying, that’s information a consumer should know.” And unlike more traditional media where those reporting are held accountable for what they say (the exception being Fox News), in the solo journalism world of blogging, no such code of ethics and enforcement exists. Yet, as we see day in and day out, people believe bloggers.

The ones most worried about the changes are not surprisingly the people who rely on the incremental the most, the stereotyped single mother who earns $1000 per month through blogging, now concerned that she might make an accidental mistake to get her in trouble. It makes for an emotionally charged example in theory suggesting caution in adding the oversight but doesn’t represent reality. The FTC is not the music industry, willing to sue an individual for $20,000 per song for downloading and sharing 20 songs. Things start to get screwy, though, if bloggers can’t link to books, movies, etc. using affiliate programs. As to the specific changes, they haven’t been finalized but should be later this year.

It’s hard to say what changes will be made to existing language but clearly much effort focuses less on the medium, i.e., that it now would include enforcement over blogs, and more on the nature of testimonials and endorsements – what can be said, what can’t, and what disclosures are necessary. Two recurring themes emerge, one summarized by this statement on the November 2008 document, “Businesses are entitled to compete based on truthful, nonmisleading advertising claims, but they are not entitled to use techniques that mislead consumers.”

The second theme will sound more than familiar to those who went through the changes in ringtone marketing – the use of “clearly and conspicuosly,” e.g., “the advertisement should clearly and conspicuously disclose either what the generally expected performance would be in the depicted circumstances or the limited applicability of the endorser’s experience to what consumers may generally expect to achieve.” The challenge has been and will be what is “clearly and conspicuously,” but a litmus test could be – if you’re trying to deceive, Then that’s a problem.

Not everyone will agree, but more than not do seem to think that FTC generally strikes an appropriate balance between “protecting consumers and allowing advertisers to communicate creatively and effectively to potential customers.” (When they raid your office without warning, seizing property, that’s another story.) When the new guidelines come out, it seems that the biggest change is that those using testimonials and endorsements, in the case of weight loss, will need to know not only what you can lose (the testimonial/endorsement) but what the average person would expect to lose.

Reading between the lines, what we think we see is an emphasis on areas that have truly quantifiable results, such as weight loss. You can measure pounds, but you can’t measure wrinkles. So, we’re likely to see a crackdown on weight loss and a shift in marketing towards those where no such scale exists. Who really wins, though? Your lawyer. You’ll need one now more than ever to comply.

For an indepth look at the new Guides with commentary, see:
http://blog.seorevolution.com/2009/05/30/ftc-change-in-endorsements-and-testimonials-policy/

 Courtesy of DM Confidential editor

According to AllThingsD, Azure Capital, joined by existing investors Venrock and Peacock Equity, an NBC Universal fund, were part of the round. CEO Lisa Stone said the money will go toward improving tools offered to its 2,500 bloggers as well as investing in research and ad technology.

BlogHerAds is intensively geared towards female bloggers and advertiser who want to reach the female demographic. According to a survey conducted by BlogHer during their BlogHerAds test release, more than 90% of the readers reached by the network are female. BlogHerAds participants have the option to refuse ads by certain advertisers.

BlogHer has so far raised $15.5 million and the BlogHer Network reaches more than 14 million unique visitors a month.