From your comments and messages I know  there are many insightful people here with ideas that deserve to be put in the spotlight.  Also due to the fact that I write at the intersection of several topics this audience is made up of a diverse group.  I know there could be some good knowledge transfer and creative debate by opening the floor up.

The requirements?

• You must be a subscriber here
• You must have at least 3 comments on this blog – or a shortcut, you must have written at least one response to something I’ve written here on your own site.

What you can write about - anything marketing/PR related, creative ideas, inspirational thoughts, something controversial, case studies of marketing success (with metrics, please), a response to one of my posts, thoughts on digital content/infinite goods, or something resourceful and compelling to other members of this community.

What you can’t do – no selling products/services, no affiliate links.

The process – send an email to adam@thefuturebuzz.com with a brief description of your post concept and I’ll approve it or tell you it’s not a fit.  If I say no, please don’t be discouraged, realize I do have an editorial vision for this site.  If you’re a regular reader you already know the type of content that would makes sense.

A note to the community - no worries, I’ll be filtering these and promise to deliver only quality thinking.  If I don’t like it, you won’t see it.

Why? Share ideas/thoughts/inspiration with a smart group of more than 7,000 subscribers and 30,000 – 60,000 visitors per month.

Have Ideas You Want To Share With This Community? is a post from The Future Buzz

After learning more about Shutterstock, using the product and discussing the service with other bloggers I was finally ready to interview their CEO.  I pinged my PR contact at Shutterstock (Felicia Morton) and she quickly connected me with Oringer for a Q&A.  So one year from their original request – I organically reached out to them for an interview.  See how that worked?

Anyway, PR pontification aside, Oringer was kind enough to answer some questions for The Future Buzz community on infinite goods, crowdsourcing and digital marketing.  Let’s get into it:

1. Shutterstock is a remarkable case study in for-profit crowdsourcing: the site has grown from 30,000 images in 2003 to more than 10 million in February 2010. Obviously that kind of growth is organic, but can you provide insight into how you set it in motion?

When I used stock photos for the businesses I started before Shutterstock, I could tell that there were problems in the stock image industry. Reasonably-priced content had grown stale, and it seemed like there was no company out there that adequately met the needs of both image buyers and sellers. So, I built a subscription-based site and put 30,000 of my own photographs up for sale. Literally within hours, photographers were asking me if I could sell their images; I realized that millions of photos were being taken every day and not being monetized. I decided to combine a subscription payment plan with user-generated content, and Shutterstock was born.

2.  Of the 10 million + pieces of content on the site, can you give us a quick percentage breakdown of how many downloads are in the tail, vs. the hits?

While we can’t release the exact data, we can say that the “hits” for our industry are the images that appear again and again, generally photographs of popular concepts or topics.

3.  What qualities do you think make up the hits vs. tail of digital content, i.e., is it about promotion, genres, keywords used, content quality or a mix?

While hits are often driven by broader or popular customer needs, many high quality images fall in the tail because of their specific use or obscurity. Since we also have a very diverse worldwide base of subscribers, who often have very specific or unique needs, and these types of images may be exactly what these buyers are looking for.

4.  There is always a fresh stream of new content added to the Shutterstock site, as is the nature of the product. Is there an SEO process when adding new content?

SEO is important, and all the images we add to our library are optimized and keyworded accordingly.

5.  It appears that Shutterstock has dove head-first into social media and is having great success as I noted in a previous thread. At what point internally did Shutterstock decide to get social, and what made you as CEO fully buy in to a social strategy?

From the beginning, we aimed to instill a strong sense of community among our subscribers and our submitters. We did this by participating in key trade shows and conferences, creating our widely used online forums, and developing our popular newsletters.  As our subscribers and submitters started to use social media platforms to communicate, it was a natural progression for them to join us once we established a presence there, as we had already developed a strong connection with our community via our internal channels.

In early 2009, we developed some unique initiatives to further promote a strong sense of community on our existing social media channels. For example, on Twitter, we created a service called “Shuttertweet,” which enables our subscribers to automatically send out tweets alerting their followers when their images are approved or downloaded. We also just launched a similar service last week called Facebook Connect. In addition, we just celebrated our 10 millionth image with a successful promotion on Twitter. We are always thinking up new creative ways to engage our community via social media.

Last year, we really began encouraging our subscribers and submitters to join us on Facebook. We truly interact with our fans throughout the day by commenting on their posts, answering their questions, sharing our latest news, highlighting new celebrity photos from our Shutterstock on the Red Carpet program, or just updating the page with fun, relevant trivia. In fact, you’ll see me check in a lot and comment on things that our fans have posted.

What we’re doing is resonating with our global submitter and subscriber base, and our fans and followers continue to grow. We look forward to more interactions with them.

6.  As a subscriber, I’ve been enjoying the Shutterstock Newsletter and love that it includes content by members of the web industry external of your brand.  As Shutterstock gets social, are there future plans to evolve the Newsletter into a blog and/or community to serve as the hub of your networks?

Yes, we are launching two Shutterstock blogs, one for submitters and one for subscribers. The blogs will provide a complement to our photography forums and social networking platforms, and they will also feature posts from guest writers.

7.  Tell us a bit about the culture at Shutterstock – what’s it like to work there, how large is the team and who is it comprised of?

Shutterstock is headquartered in the Financial District of downtown Manhattan. We have employees from all over the world; people with a passion for photography and digital content and a desire to see our company continue to expand. We take pride in fostering a free and open environment; we invite all our employees to come to us with ideas on how to improve our service, and they do. Plus, we’ve cultivated a very friendly atmosphere with our company social events.

Quick end note: Shutterstock was recently voted best royalty free stock photography site for bloggers at Online Marketing Blog.

Interview With Shutterstock CEO Jon Oringer is a post from The Future Buzz

Sometimes I think he just creates posts he knows people will link to, but I’m going to take his bait today as again I think he’s way off. Essentially, Mitch sees a future with no investment in your own open web presence, instead yielding this to other entities like social networks. Let’s go through his thoughts:

Are the days of big websites and long website builds numbered? It could well be. If you think about how people find and connect to most brands, it’s not just through a search engine anymore.

Agreed Mitch but your downplaying of SEO is missing the point. Search is still and will remain a core function of the web and plays a central role in all digital marketing activity, including social. Even as a marketing blogger who loves social media and has been an advocate since day one, I still do not drink the kool aid A-listers like Mitch Joel and Steve Rubel are drinking. Throughout every wave of social web innovation search still mattered and there are not any current trends that convince me otherwise. If anything, as web users become more literate in search, it becomes more valuable.

In fact, more and more people are having their first brand interaction on their mobile device. There are many people who are also connecting to brands for the first time in spaces like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Perhaps if your website isn’t findable and you’re that bad at marketing it. This advice steers marketers wrong by immediately pushing them into outposts (something ultimately tactical). Further, the comment of “in fact, more and more” without any data behind it is merely pontification (actually there is data behind it, but that data still only tells one side of the story).

While social media is growing, that does not denigrate the value of intent-based traffic such as search. For a majority of the consulting I do, proper SEO efforts send the highest quality traffic. Additionally, while I agree with inspiring conversations across channels, I do not agree with resting your whole web strategy in channels you do not control. You play right into the strategies of social sites by doing it. Those sites do not necessarily exist to help you as marketers, they are businesses and the popular ones have a design on your activity (and it’s not necessarily for the same outcome you want).

As an aside, I’m honestly a bit tired of those who are spreading the messaging of putting all your resources and content development into the products of other businesses. Other networks can and do fall out of favor, and time spent in them comes at the opportunity cost of your own home on the web. I’m not saying that someone couldn’t have their first interaction with your brand in something like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, but these channels are simply not robust enough to offer a unique experience you can create in the open web. Don’t mistake a first interaction with long term story telling and lead nurturing.

Does this mean that the website is going the way of the dodo bird? Not exactly, but it does mean that the overall Digital Marketing strategy is going to change dramatically in the next little while.

What? Smart marketers have been playing to the social landscape as it changed. Good digital marketers are fluid in their approach and shift with the times. This statement is made as if the digital marketing community sleeps under a rock – it does not. Social media is not new nor novel.

Instead of one, big and centralized website with many digital marketing outposts in the appropriate platforms, it is more than likely that we’re going to see more and more brands create multiple spaces and platforms to ensure that they’re connecting with the right people in the right communities.

Go for it and make the rest of our lives easier. Spreading yourself thin is a great way to minimize your impact and ultimately ruin your strong source of signal in the world. This is not a realistic approach for most brands and ignores the power of concentrating your forces along with network effects that kick in when you reach critical mass within one area. It could work with the right strategy behind it but ignores the SEO benefits of having one centralized, ultra-authoritative home.

Imagine a world where a Digital Marketing strategy focuses less on one big website and more on creating engaging “things” like iPhone apps, a mobile website, a Facebook page along with a Blog (or whatever), and it’s all supported with a simple website that acts more like a hub for all of the other spokes.

This advice seems tactical, doesn’t it? You could base your strategy on “things” like iPhone apps, a Facebook page along with a blog as Mitch advises, or you could base your strategy on something decisive and platform agnostic, like owning a certain vertical in the market or positioning differently/ahead of competitors.  Also, where does Mitch plan on converting anyone?  As much as I love blogs, they don’t convert visitors like a well crafted site designed for such a thing.

Yes, there are some (only a few) brands already playing with creating Facebook pages in lieu of micro-sites for promotions and experiential marketing initiatives, but it has not become a commonplace activity where you find a brand doing multiple things in multiple channels and focusing less on driving consumers to their marketing-riddled jargony websites.

Micro-sites? Ughh. The fact that is even mentioned here as an “in lieu of” as if they ever were ever a good idea bothers me: micro-sites are a mistake. As to Mitch’s other point, again I disagree with yielding your digital marketing returns to social sites external of your own site. If I know my “marketing-riddled jargony” website converts, I am damn well going to drive people there. If I build permission in external channels through thought-leadership or delivering value, especially in the B2B world, the authoritative, compelling website I’m funneling prospects to will be trusted and will already have the social proofing behind it to succeed. I find this ironic since Mitch runs a digital marketing firm which has one of those “marketing-riddled jargony websites.”

The “game” used to be about always driving people back to your own, controlled, website, and the truth is that the more vibrant community for a brand may be happening more through a mobile app or online social network platform… or something else or something in addition to it.

If you want to ignore search engines (which I do not advise) listen to Mitch. But ultimately search traffic is demand based, consistent, and profitable. Social traffic, while nice, has a high bounce rate and attracts users in a different kind of mindset. Ultimately I want both. This post just has undertones of selling out your strategy to networks controlled by others.

Does this mean we need to trim websites back to WordPress Blog-shaped platforms or micro-site sizes? Not really, but it does mean that if a brand’s vibrant community is happening in a place like Facebook, they won’t have much control or ownership over the content, but they might be able to do things (in terms of connecting and growing that community) that they could not scale to with a big, towering website of their own.

This is a blanket statement and without context makes little sense. If a brand’s vibrant community is happening in a place like Facebook that’s great – but figure out what it is about Facebook that makes it so attractive and apply it to your own strategy to grow visitors back to your site. Why should Facebook benefit from all the links, addition of content feeding the tail and attention? You spend time in sites like Facebook and Twitter at the opportunity cost of your own site. When did we as marketers decide we would allow others to tell us what we can and can’t do with our marketing (yes, there are rules, controls and severe limitations in those networks).

Sorry Mitch, I don’t mean to complain today (and I do like you) but ultimately you serve a disservice to marketers when you push them in the direction of giving up the value of the open web. Brand experience websites suck and should die, I agree, but content/resource based sites are valuable and will live on – social or not.

Additionally, different brands have very different objectives from their digital participation. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to digital. If you treat your digital marketing as this type of solution, you can’t ever create something unique or remarkable. It’s not remarkable to have a Facebook or Twitter page (who would remark about that? At this point, other marketers – but not real people). It’s not remarkable to have a blog by itself. It is content that is worth remarking on, and that content should live in a place unique to you. At least if your brand is unique.

There is another fatal flaw with this advice: not all consumers want to be social. To only have a social presence and no well-crafted pages speaking to your business may confuse or scare off some prospects. It’s just not for everyone, and it’s the wrong approach to think everyone is like you. I grew up using social networks and was in them long before most, yet realized from the days of being on my 9600 baud modem some users just want information without necessarily getting social. That has not yet changed to this day.

The social web would be a depressing and ultimate boring place it was ruled by horizontal networks. The most influential, profitable and ultimately valuable networks for brands and media live on the open web. Despite the attempts of sites like Facebook to commoditize the web, passionate users demand something “for” them. I see examples in the industries I’m passionate about like music and I see it in areas I market to for clients. The best players in each industry have a website worth going to and content/communities worth engaging with that don’t live within walled gardens.

The Open Web Is Not Going Away is a post from The Future Buzz

The MarTech opening session title is Architecting a Social Web Marketing & P.R. Strategy. For this presentation, I’ve decided to dial down most of my content from the deck so that event-goers focus on my words instead of reading slides.  However, to supplement my session and provide the same content to The Future Buzz community, here’s a brief written summary of what I’m presenting.

The social areas of the web are growing fast. Consider just a few stats:

• 400 million active Facebook users (source)
• 50 million Tweets per day (source)
• 133 million blogs (creating 900,000 blog posts every 24 hours) and around 77% of internet users read blogs (source)

While the above numbers show the scale of the consumer driven web – B2B influence also lives here.  According to a Forrester Research report of business buyers:

• 91% read blogs, watch user generated video, participate in other social media
• 55% of decision-makers are in social networks
• 43% are creating media (blogs, uploading videos or articles, etc.)

Consumers and prospects are already here.  Marketing dollars care catching up, fast:

• $55 billion - number of dollars marketers will spend on interactive (display, mobile, email, social, search) channels by 2014 -representing a compound annual growth rate of 34% (source).

Media influence, too:

• 89% of reporters use blogs, 65% use social networking sites, and 52% use microblogging sites according to a national study by GW University.

These stats are just the tip of the iceberg, and highlight a clear trend of the last decade.  Despite the doom-and-gloom in the early 2000’s, the web kept moving forward and integrating tighter with business and our personal lives.

But, more subjectively – why is social media so compelling for marketing and PR pros?  A few of main reasons include:

• Authenticity/personality – the world and web crave it
• It scales – popular brands that catch on just get more popular
• Long-term storytelling – build a permission asset
• Leverage – digital PR/marketing is your social proofing
• Intersection with SEO – links are by-product
• PR/Marketing have changed – pull is now more effective

Your opportunity is to approach the web in a strategic manner through the development of a digital marketing/social media roadmap.  This is the approach we take at TopRank Online Marketing to help clients navigate to success.

As with any marketing plan, you need to start by identifying/researching audiences, then defining objectives and developing a strategy.  Only after these first steps should you get into tools and tactics and ultimately move on to metrics/KPI measurement (and at that point, you’ll know what your objective metric is and what other numbers feed it).

So, let’s go through an outline of the basic steps:

1.  Identify audience

Identify who it is you are trying to influence.  Once you’ve defined them, start to gather data about them.  Your potential data sources include, but are certainly not limited to:

• Current website analytics
• Google search trends
• Data aggregation (apps like BlogPulse and Trackur)
• Data analysis (apps like Radian 6 and Techrigy)
• Google blog search/Twitter/Technorati search
• Existing market data/competitive research/industry reports
• Analysis and data uncovered by your R&D department

After you’ve uncovered the data, what exactly do you do with it?

Develop personality archetypes

Start to create personality archetypes of your audience.  Who are they, what are their motivations, what makes up the influencers/connectors?  What makes up the average user? Begin to document this in a way that’s scanable and useful.  Include both objective and subjective insights.  As you move forward into your plan and dig deeper, you can come back and make this section even more robust.

Identify popular content/ideas

What types of content, ideas or imagery resonates with this audience?  Start to track and document what they’re sharing like crazy or always linking to.  This data will help you learn to tap into existing demand and model the already popular archetypes.  It will also help you predict what’s coming next and be the one to capitalize on it.  Also try and make correlations between popular content/ideas and personality types of influencers identified during this process.

Matrix trending data (including competitive intelligence)

Take your audience data and begin to trend it over time in a way that is useful and accessible at a glance, such as popularity of content within Google search trends or Twitter trends.  The past can help you map the future.  You’ll be able to make connections today even if you’re not tracking this data since others are already doing so for you.  By studying it, you’ll gain insight into the ebbs and flows of the niches that matter to your business.

2.  Define objectives

What are your end goals from this audience?  What is it you want from them?  Just a few example objectives I’ve worked with include:

• Increase organic leads
• Build thought leadership
• Inspire publicity
• Increase organic search engine traffic
• Improve recruiting
• Improve customer relationships/retention
• Build a community

Of course, your objectives will vary depending on your business.  Social media marketing application is only limited by your creativity.

3.  Develop strategy

After audience is identified and your objective(s) are fleshed out, you are now ready to define a strategic approach.  This is driven by audience data + objective + industry insight + creativity.  All tactics implemented in the next steps should be driven by the strategy.  Consider common digital strategy development mistakes prior to finalizing this.

4.  Implement tools/tactics

Only at this point should you define tools/tactics.  As Matt Dickman stated previously – if you want better digital strategy, ban these 7 dirty words.  Most marketing and PR pros skip immediately to this step.  And while it makes sense to experiment with different tools/tactics, they should still roll to the strategic approach (which needs to be locked down first).

Potential tools include anything from blogs and microblogging, to social news sites/networks, to content formats such as videos, podcasts and images.

Points to keep in mind when fleshing out tools/tactics

• Social media is more than just Twitter
• Own a niche across web platforms
• Have a destination and draw users back
• Connect with power users/influencers
• Build an organic community of “sneezers”

Ultimately, you want to siphon users out of the horizontal social sites – which have a signal to noise ratio you do not control – to your own social channel (perhaps a blog, as just one example).  Networks can and do fall out of favor and to vest too much time and effort into sites like Twitter or Facebook comes at the opportunity cost of building your own leverage on the web you earn by having your own site.

Activate SEO intersection

All social media activity should be mindful of search engine optimization.  5 basic tips to keep in mind include:

1. Create a social media keyword glossary of popular social terms, cross reference with your search keyword glossary.
2. Title/tag social content appropriately.
3. Conduct digital asset optimization on images, PDFs, and videos.
4. Leverage/repurpose content across channels.
5. Create linkbait/social media friendly content.

Of course feed your content into your social channels, but ultimately realize your community has greater power to do this than you.  Inspire a group to organically raise your brand’s search equity naturally.

5.  Metrics/measurement

Measurement is key with a social web strategy, and defining the KPIs that matter to your brand is vital.

Some potential metrics to measure include:

• Number of subscribers
• Overall unique visitors
• Conversions/conversion sources
• Branded searches/non-branded searches
• Search engine traffic
• Visitor to subscriber conversion ratios
• Followings in “outposts”
• Referral traffic
• Quality and quantity of engagement across platforms

For much more details on measurements/KPIs, check out my post at Online Marketing Blog on web analytics reporting.

Case Studies

After the plan outline, I’ll be taking the audience through several case studies that would each require their own blog post to do justice.  With that said, for readers here, following are a few fleshed out case studies to help you start formulating your own ideas, lock down your plan, and execute next steps:

• Shutterstock Gets Social – Digital PR Case Study
• Dosh Dosh Case Study: Develop A Unique Brand For Your Blog
• Case Study in Building a Blogging Network: The “Daily” Network
• Case Study in Building Buzz in the Blogosphere: Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company
• Case Study – Escapist Magazine: Building Popularity By Teaming Up With An Exceptional Content Creator
• Using an Internet Meme for Fun and Profit: Lolcats and I Can Has Cheezburger (Case Study)
• 20,000 Ducks: Visuals Are A Key Ingredient For Event PR

image credit: Taylor Jackson via Shutterstock

Architecting A Social Web Marketing And PR Strategy is a post from The Future Buzz

1.  Writing skills are critical

Never before has writing mattered more.  While we were trending to a society dominated by video, the web changed all that and gave rebirth to the written word.  Text reigns king once again.  Also consider:

• Video blogging simply has not taken off.
• Search engines reward sites with text-rich content.
• Companies in the marketing and media industry that matter, blog.  And you need to be able to contribute to your employer’s blog at a high level.

2.  Meaningful insight into analytics/interpretation of data

Good marketers know not just how to record metrics and what KPIs matter, but how to use that data to influence decisions at the strategy table and get buy in for new projects.  This involves both left and right brain thinking, as you can get pretty creative with how you use numbers to tell a story.

3.  Nexus of marketing specializations

Only by understanding PR, Social Media and SEO can you successfully make their natural overlap work for you.  While many today specialize, the marketers of tomorrow will understand them all innately and devise campaigns that encourage multipliers in results.  None of these items happen in a silo.

4. Digital strategy development

Forming effective digital strategies is more than just taking current situation data and applying it to a process or formula.  That may have worked in the past, but in the future there will be too many people that know the obvious paths to digital marketing results for them to be effective.  When everyone is applying the same tactics to acquire limited resources, only those who were first win.  Instead, current situation data fused with creative, unique thinking from an experienced practitioner will be the valuable skill.

5.  Leadership

In a connected society, marketing’s seat at the strategy table only grows in value.  Tomorrow’s marketing professionals must be leaders and be confident in their ability to drive a brand forward.

6.  Not afraid to fail

I recently watched a speech by Adam Savage from Mythbuster’s.  In the speech, he says it succinctly:  failure is always an option.  In fact, go a step further – don’t just be prepared for failure, get organized around it.

7.  Always experimenting

The marketers of tomorrow grew up with digital tools – experimenting with ideas, content and code.  You should experiment if you hope to have a cache of creative ideas on tap.  Only then will you have an array of experience – outside of your normal realms – to draw from.

8.  Understanding of tools/technologies/applications/programming languages

Only by innately understanding your tools will you be able to quickly translate ideas into reality, or even know what ideas are possible to bring to life within a given time frame.  I’m not saying you have to know how to build a rails app – not at all.  But you should know what programming languages are capable of and the right designers/developers to tap for the right project (plus how to manage them).

9.  Fresh thinking with content

Can you slice and dice content ideas in 10 different ways, making each one compelling?  Do you know how to mind map?  Digital marketers of tomorrow will come prepared knowing these things.

10.  An understanding of how to orchestrate buzz

Buzz is a vital element of digital PR, and tomorrow’s marketers will understand the importance of it, how to orchestrate it and measure it accurately.

11.  They’ll be members of the media

Because they will be blogging and creating digital media, tomorrow’s marketers will be active, connected members of the media.  In a world where content is advertising and advertising is content, there is no line between the two.

12.  Content marketing will be second nature

Where we segment the idea of content marketing into it’s own category of marketing today – in the future it will just be known as marketing.

13.  They will champion niche media over mass

Mass media will become less and less relevant as we create a world where reaching everyone is reaching no one.

14.  Understanding of the rules that govern groups

Current marketing classes will need to be fused with sociology to remain relevant in a digital society.

15.  Ability to tap power users and influencers

Marketers of tomorrow (at least the good ones) will be well connected and have their finger on the pulse of the world’s connectors.

Of course, this is just a shortlist.  What other skills do you see composing the marketer of tomorrow?

Tomorrow’s Marketing Skill Set is a post from The Future Buzz