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© Benjamin Haas

As writers of content for marketing, we at Write Angle work for companies of all stripe from nascent start-ups to large publicly-held brands. How to best measure the effectiveness of this or that content invariably comes up along the way and there’s never a shortage of opinions on how to do it. Which is the most important metric — click-through, volume of readers, new site visitors, orders, revenue?  We put this question to the Linked In community recently, asking  1) what measurement methodologies do you find to be the most effective and 2) how do you rank order your content assets from most to least effective and why?

We were prompted by Contently who passed along the work by Ascend2 and Research Partners: http://contently.com/strategist/2015/04/27/the-most-effective-and-difficult-types-content-marketing-in-one-chart/ Their research examines the relative effectiveness of articles/case studies, videos, infographics, research/white papers, webinars/online events, eNewsletters, photos/illustration and news releases.

We would now like to know what you think of these findings. Yes, it’s using an awfully broad approach to determining meaningful findings. Still it raises some fundamental questions about content categories and their respective “effectiveness”, presumably in triggering new site visitors, generating new sales leads, increasing conversion rates and driving revenue.

How do do you measure the value of the content your team creates?

© Arkadi Bojaršinov

From the beginning (2011), we’ve made a priority of handpicking a circle of preferred partners outside of writing services — in design, public relations, market development and branding.

Hate to say it, but we couldn’t put it much better.

© Tetyana Kochneva

As Write Angle ramps up for what looks like a very busy 2014, it’s always good to look back at the variety of content development projects we tackled in 2013.

It’s no surprise that Big Data, Cloud and Mobility clients dominated our time.  But we also found opportunities to collaborate with one of the world’s most famous science museums and an emerging talent recruiting organization.

Here’s a short list of key clients and the projects we worked in 2013:

AppSense:   Write Angle was tasked with crafting copy for the company’s MobileNow web site as well as use cases, a comprehensive MobileNow datasheet, a BYOX white paper, a case study and a strategic iOS7 Readiness blog.

Cloudscaling:  Delivering elastic cloud infrastructure to enterprises, service providers and web application providers, Cloudscaling turned to Write Angle to help with a comprehensive web refresh.

Exploratorium:  In our second year of collaboration with one of the world’s most famous science museums, Write Angle was called upon to develop compelling content for the organization’s Annual Fund brochure and Annual Report.  Look for writing samples soon once these pieces are published.

Glassbeam:  Providing business intelligence from machine log data, Glassbeam once again utilized Write Angle to develop a key Service Revenue Generation solution brief as well as a case study featuring Hitachi Data Systems.

Paxata:  Emerging from stealth this year as a highly innovative provider of Adaptive Data Preparation technology for agile business intelligence, Paxata is working with Write Angle in the development of two major contributed thought leadership pieces that will publish in the Q1/Q2 timeframe.  Check back for a look at these compelling articles.  We also created a “Declaration of Data Independence” marketing collateral that supported the company’s coming out party at the recent Strata Conference.

Pertino:  As one of the most innovative providers of cloud networking solutions, Pertino turned to Write Angle to help craft its “Under the Hood” web copy.

SenSage/HEXIS Cyber Solutions:  Write Angle was called upon to deliver a wide variety of content for venerable SIEM vendor Sensage that was acquired by KEYW Corporation/Hexis Cyber Solutions.  We crafted a thought-provoking piece entitled “Defending Against APTs:  Looking For the Big Picture” that ran in the December 20, 2013 edition of SC Magazine.  In addition, Write Angle developed a comprehensive white paper addressing the The Event Analysis and Retention Dilemma.

TalentSky:  Formerly known as Devine Capital, the executive recruiting firm that helped Apple land CEO Tim Cook, TalentSky engaged Write Angle to develop an entirely new web site reflecting the company’s new brand and approach to talent acquisition services.

So what are your content marketing objectives this year?

Big Data is becoming an even bigger deal. And when things get big, it gets more important to stand out from the crowd.

Just this week, a group of Silicon Valley investment superstars, including Ron Conway and Andreessen Horowitz, announced another fund, Big Data Elite, targeted at Big Data start-ups.

 At Write Angle, we’ve done a number of projects for companies in the Big Data realm, including Sumo Logic, Glassbeam and Sensage (now Hexis Cyber Solutions). What’s clear to us is that the term “big data” means different things to different people – which is another way of saying it may mean nothing at all without the proper context. Big Data applications and analysis services run the gamut from information security to customer support to consumer marketing to social media.

As the volume of hype becomes deafening in the Big Data arena, it’s easy for a young company to be grouped together with other perceived players despite having little, if anything, in common with them. Market analysts, journalists and potential customers may not have clue about who does what in which space – or even if the space exists.

Would-be Big Data players must ensure that they differentiate themselves in terms of what market they’re targeting and how they serve that market better than anyone else. If you’re not continuously informing your market about who you are and what makes you worth paying attention to – with constantly refreshed content across your media platforms – competitors who articulate a more compelling story will surely pass you by.

© Iqoncept

How would you like to boost the perception of your B2B brand as one of your industry’s thought leaders, grow your blog readership over 2000% and develop relationships with the who’s-who of your business — all in less than a year?

This is exactly what Drillinginfo (DI) did. Today, DI, a SaaS vendor serving a sector not exactly synonymous with trendy social media, is positioned as a premier source of information in the oil and gas industry. And its forays into social media began only last September.

It’s been a given that a B2B brand’s social efforts are a long-term slog, so DI’s results merit a closer look. In fact, this report suggests that the company’s approach amounts to a study in best-practices that might be replicated in any industry, especially when it comes to blogging. To our way of thinking, these practical steps are actionable for any B2B blog:

1. Get your employees to contribute ideas and content.
2. Set an editorial calendar — don’t assign topics, assign people and let them write about industry-relevant subjects that they’re interested in.
3. Involve them in brainstorming topics and angles relevant to your products and customers.
4. Involve your contributors so they feel ownership. Teach them “blog-consciousess” by explaining what blog-friendly writing and content are all about.
5. Push content out to your email lists and social accounts (Linked In, FB, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.).
6. In your email to blog subscribers, include the full blog post, but include a custom call-to-action for readers to go to your website and make comments.
7. Compile interest-groups on Linked In (and elsewhere) of relevance to your industry and post your content there. Caveat: be absolutely certain that what you’re sharing is of genuinely useful value. If it isn’t, it’s spam.
8. Find out who the influencers are in your industry and publish your own Top 20, 50 or 100 list(s).
9. Set a big goal for your blog: Aspire to thought leadership.

What are you doing to promote your blog?

© Mhristov

If you market and sell to IT buyers or do marketing and PR for an IT brand, you should know about Spiceworks.

Why? It’s an online community of two-million information-technology professionals who share views on their industry, technology and vendors just like you. Think of it as the Yammer, Yelp or TripAdvisor for the IT crowd. In other words, what HR.com and GlassDoor have become for the human-resources profession, Spiceworks is for IT.

Think “product reviews” in this context and you realize the implications for IT marketing and public relations.  According to Paul Gillin, who visited the site’s reviews section recently, it’s not a pretty picture. Few vendors draw raves. And few brands bother to weigh-in or even know about it. How ironic that such a resource, whose existence owes to technology, exists in a blind-spot for so many technology marketers.

The same crowdsource forces at work in today’s consumer markets like Amazon Reviews are coming into their own in the B2B world, too. Industrial brands late to this party are paying the price in missed opportunities. Our rule of thumb is simple: whenever there is a discussion underway online about your company or product, you need to be in the middle of it. Not to dominate the conversation but to share your point of view — and understand the issues being raised. It’s just good business.

Truth be told, as ubiquitous and commonplace as social media is today it remains a question mark in B2B C-suites and boardrooms. Even in the face of the U.S. government’s approbation of crowd-sourced reviews (see saferproducts.gov). In Gillin’s view, there‘s validity in what many senior managers believe about manipulation of online reviews and polls.  But this is irrelevant. The genie is out of the bottle. Ongoing engagement with customers and commentators online, is now currency of the B2B realm.

How does your brand engage with online opinion-sharing? Do you have a “crisis” plan or have one in the works?  What’s been your experience?

“Content” is a perishable.  Blame those pesky algorithms.

We live in content-marketing world. And at Write Angle we counsel clients to be wary. Why? Because marketers live in a part of this world characterized by the cat-and-mouse of search practitioners vs.search algorithms — and the creative tension it causes between SEO gurus and content writers. Just throwing “content” out there isn’t enough. It has to be be right stuff at the right time.  And it must stay fresh.

The surefire way to prosper in this world is to create and publish material that earns you a consistent place in search rankings. Today, this means the top three-to-five.  Easy to say, tough to do.  And this is where we come in because organic search is the baseline tactic for the written content of marketing campaigns.

New research from Chitika , according to Danny Flamberg of Booster Rocket, based on 300 million search impressions last May, “indicates that winning and losing at natural search is clear; you either win big or die quickly. If you don’t place among the top 3–5 positions on the search engine results page you get none of the benefits of your investment. It’s win big or go home”. (Download the complete report here.)

Boiling down the findings: you get 33% of the traffic if Google ranks you number one. Come in second and you get about half of that. Third place earns you about half again (11%). This, BTW, is the response rate of old-time direct mail!

In other words, if you don’t make page one (92% of all traffic) the maximum access you can hope to achieve is about 8% of  total search-driven traffic.

“For most marketers, rankings drive traffic; that’s the payoff,” Flamberg says. “There’s not much value in bragging rights to a position that doesn’t pay off in site traffic…it doesn’t pay to be number two.”

As content-driven rankings are key to brand awareness and lead generation, you need to put your brand’s best foot forward with refreshed content — the kind that’s regularly adjusted to changing algorithms.

Is your content driving the traffic you want? Do you keep it fresh?  Is it the right stuff at the right time?

Those incendiary words are courtesy of a recent Pike Research (now called Navigant Research) study.  Bottom line: It suggests that a dirt cheap smartphone app could wirelessly communicate with a targeted command-and-control computer system — one that utilities rely upon — to cause unimaginable havoc.

What kind of catastrophe are we talking about?  Some U.S. officials foresee cyber-attacks that could take down a utility servicing millions of people and render them powerless. For months.

The way PG&E’s Chief Information Security Officer James Sample, sees it, “We will see catastrophic outages.  We are dealing with a very intelligent adversary.”

But despite the doomsday warnings, have utility companies stepped up their security measures?  Not according to many security specialists.

Why not? Looking at the issue from a purely monetary standpoint, some estimates for upgrading utility security could cost upwards of $14 billion. But from a preparedness standpoint, are utilities in a serious state of denial about the realities and potential impact of cyber-terrorism?

Some vocal critics say yes. Consider what Dale Peterson, CEO of Digital Bond, a firm that evaluates the security posture of utilities and other companies, told the San Jose Mercury News: “[Utilities] just want to kind of pretend the problem doesn’t exist.  So it might take some really tragic thing with some huge disruption of peoples’ lives before something gets done.”

So how many wake-up calls are needed to compel utilities to step up their security act?  The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has already reported infiltrations of oil and natural gas pipelines and electric power organizations.  Out of 198 cyber-incidents reported, 41% targeted energy companies, 15% were aimed at water-related firms and six included the “nuclear sector”.  Yes, it is that scary.

The California Public Utilities Commission warns that utilities are increasingly vulnerable by way of smart meters and the smart grid.  The same CPUC study reports: “(Eighty) to 90 percent or more of the electric infrastructure currently does not fall under any required standards and that cyber-security practices of the utilities are not monitored.”

If this doesn’t scare the hell out of you, consider the sobering findings from a survey conducted by risk management specialists nCircle who asked 104 energy security professionals if their smart meter installations were adequately protected from hackers, 61% said, “No.”

As content specialists in security, Write Angle would like to hear why security companies aren’t making more noise about the vulnerability of utilities.  We’d love to hear from you.

© Photoexplo…

No matter how you define “big data”, the market category is scorching hot.  How hot?  Accel Partners has just launched a new $100 million fund dedicated to funding so-called big data companies.

With its “Big Data Fund 2”, Accel is betting a hefty sum on organizations developing big data solutions.  Their rationale for another infusion of capital in this space?   Quoting Shlomo Kramer, CEO of Imperva and a new advisor to Accel’s big data group, “The enterprise world has already embraced the concept of Big Data and is starting to leverage insights derived from data to solve security and other business problems in ways previously unthinkable.”

Having written extensively about Big Data on behalf of clients including Sumo Logic and Glassbeam,  it’s clear to us at Write Angle that companies vying for market leadership will have a harder and harder time differentiating themselves.  Consider the findings of CB Insights who is tracking this space closely.  According to their big data report, funding for these companies rocketed from 55 deals in 2008 to 164 in 2012.  Over a five-year span, the total sits at 523 deals.

Does this signal market saturation?  Too early to tell, probably. But the takeaway is unmistakable. The dogfight in the big data space will create a deafening amount of noise. And the companies with the best chance of survival will be those that can articulate a compelling, well-differentiated and highly defensible value proposition that will stand the test of time.  And that means content creation efforts needed to tell a compelling story, one with rock-solid business use cases, are nothing less than essential.

Now in our third decade of technology marketing in Silicon Valley, we’ve been exposed to our unfair share of linguistically challenging content and mind-numbing jargon.

You’d think we would have been de-sensitized at this point.  But a recent email containing a slew of cringe-worthy zingers inspired this blog posting.  It was as if we were previewing a script for a sitcom on “Valley Technobabble”.  Like us, even the laugh track was groaning.

No matter how many times we call it out, tortured business language continues to pollute even the simplest communications.  Like cockroaches, taxes and acronyms, it just won’t go away.

The peculiar dialect now permeating every avenue of communications is something that might be best described as “Silicon Valley Speak”, a bewildering vocabulary that redefines (or it is “defies”) grammar, tramples well-established definitions and creates an entirely new glossary of befuddling terminology that would leave even Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, slack-jawed.

What punched our buttons in the aforementioned email was the word “onboarding”.  No, this is not a variation on the CIA’s torture tactics, but it might as well be linguistically.  The term may not exactly be new, but with all due respect to HR folks, do we really need yet another ham-handed concept to convey “a systematic and comprehensive approach to orienting a new employee to help them ‘get on board’”?  What happened to “hiring” or “orientation”?

Alas, we’re not alone in our incredulity at the insidious invasion of the “jargon-slingers”.  Credit goes to Christopher Steiner for creating that gem.  He penned one of the funniest and most astute articles titled The Most Annoying Business Jargon that takes the business world to task for “cutting its anchors to the English language.”

Let’s face it.  We’ve all heard the usual suspect lingo clanging around web sites, press releases, conference presentations and the like.  But do we have to stand for it?  At Write Angle, we certainly hope not.

To quote Mr. Steiner, “Let the jargon slinger know that you know who they are:  a vapid, message-clouding, English-avoiding, communications nightmare.”

Amen to that.

What SV-speak do you hear around the cubes or watering holes these days that cause you to cringe? What do you do to stamp it out?