Battling Bullies

As a small business, you have no greater leverage than content.

My blog Copy Points, which reached a milestone today—100,000 pageviews—proves the point.

David-size businesses can effectively combat Goliaths in the Bizarro World of social media, and build a proprietary audience of followers, fans and advocates.

But how?

In a study last year, software provider Curata identified 428 bloggers it dubbed members of the “10K Club,” because they attract 10,000 or more pageviews a month. 

Two-thirds of 10K Club members represent small and mid-size businesses, with revenue below $100 million.

Curata concluded that six factors made these David-size bloggers successful:

1. They know all the effort, one day, will pay off.
2. They create content that targets a specific audience.
3. They avoid product-pitches.
4. They post at least once a week.
5. They promote their blogs on other channels.
6. They study their pageviews, to learn what kinds work best.

With 100,000 pageviews under my belt, at last I have something I can boast about to my granddaughter. 

Once she's old enough to know what a blog is.

What's the Most Revealing Interview Question Employers Could Ask?

What's the most revealing interview question employers could ask—the one that would guarantee they hire the best talent available every time? The killer question you should ask every job seeker.

With apologies to the management gurus, it's none of these:

• Why will you thrive in this position?
• What's your greatest weakness?
• Who's your role model?
• What did your parents do for a living?
• What things do you dislike doing?
• Why are manhole covers round?
• Why did you leave your last job?
• What's your spirit animal?
• What's the most significant thing you've done since breakfast?
• What would you like to ask me?

I learned the killer interview question not from an HR manual, but a former boss; and it worked like a charm.

Adman Bill Kircher, founder of Fixation Marketing, posed the killer question at the close of every candidate interview he conducted. 

With it, he built an exceptionally creative, productive and tight-knit team; one that attracted loyal and prestigious clients, enjoyed a reputation for high quality, and earned handsome profits.

His killer interview question: What book are you reading right now?

What makes the question killer?

It's simple. Candidates didn't have to ask Bill for clarification.

It's tricky. The qualifier "right now" essentially disqualified as honest answers To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, and other sophomore-year reading assignments.

It's decisive. Hesitation, blank stares, or answers like "I mostly watch TV" eliminated candidates from consideration.

It's nondiscriminatory. Any title sufficed as a correct answer. Bill didn't care what you read, as long as it was sandwiched between two boards. After all, John F. Kennedy loved From Russia with Love. Ronald Reagan raved at a news conference about The Hunt for Red October. And friends spotted James Joyce in a cafe once reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Reading books proved to Bill's thinking a job candidate was curious, diligent, self-caring and culturally engaged.

And his results proved he was spot on.

Come as You Are

In the 1970s, hirsute posers—there were many—who showed up at sit-ins, rallies and music festivals were labeled "plastic hippies."

They'd take time off from their jobs, let down their hair, don their best tie-dye, pack a bong or a bottle of Boone's Farm, and make the scene.

People today are spared the need to package themselves in order to infiltrate happenings.

Brands are another matter.

To rate with Millennials, brands have to protest against global warming, epidemics, racism, homophobia, fat-shaming and unequal pay—or at least pretend to.

Henk Campher, San Francisco-based publicist and author of Creating a Sustainable Brand, calls the pretenders the "quick and dirty"—campers on the bottom steps of a "sustainable-brand pyramid" populated by:

• Snake oil sellers—hypocrites (Volkswagen, for example);

• Blah brands—big talkers (Apple); and 

• Offset brands—penitents (Starbucks).

Not surprisingly, 99.9% of companies, according to Campher, lack any sustainability gene.

But at least they're honest about it.

My advice to plastic hippies: Come to the party, but come as you are. The rest of us—your customers, employees and investors—prefer the real you.

The Coming Content Arms Race

Marketing strategist Mark Schaefer coined the dystopian term "content shock" to describe audiences' adverse reaction to content marketers' handiwork.

If you've felt a little content shock now and then, seek shelter now.

A "content arms race" is about to commence, Schaefer says.

By 2018, we'll be awash in content, as marketers' annual spend on web ads catches up with their $215 billion spend on TV ads.

Besides flooding the web with content, the spending shift will usher in an arms race, whose victors will be deep-pocket companies.

Small-time players, who until now have considered content their secret weapon against major advertisers, will be buried.

"Those with more money generally are in the best position to create more and better content, as well as pay to have it promoted and distributed," Schaefer says. "Will they always win? No. All things be equal, will they usually kill off the smaller guys? Yes. History bears this out."

Schaefer points to Chipotle's content marketing efforts as proof. "That kind of multi-million-dollar quality is not sustainable for most businesses and will hasten the exit of marginal content producers."

Meet the New Marketer

Most content marketers "live in a delusional bubble of branding hype," claims web designer Gerry McGovern.

He's proven his point with his delete key, boosting clients' sales by expunging 90% of the content on their websites.

"Organizations in general publish far too much of ego, vanity content that’s high on hyperbole and low on information," McGovern writes in his blog New Thinking.

Today's marketer crows about his inestimable edge over old-schoolers like Don Draper.

Today's marketer brings a data-driven, likable, personalized, "un-marketing" approach to the craft.

Yet fewer than 10% of B2B executives say they trust web content, according to a study by the CMO Council.

The revolution brought about by todays 's new marketer, so far, reminds me of lyrics by The Who: "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."