Robert Rose | Big Blue Moose

My New Book: Managing Content Marketing

August 31, 2011 By Robert Rose

I’ve been blessed to spend the last two years working with amazingly renowned global brands on content marketing strategy and execution. Over that time, both Joe and I have seen some of the same things coming up again and again, including certain challenges, tools, solutions and processes that just simply work.

So, we scrambled, gave up Weekends (and I gave up Video Games) and let our passion for Content Marketing take over. This book emerged over the summer. Managing Content Marketing – The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand, is designed to tell marketers exactly how to put content marketing to work with a structured, repeatable process.

As Jeffrey Hayzlett, the former CMO of Kodak and author of the bestselling book, The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing, said in his very kind forward:

“What gets me fired up about this book is that these guys have it so right. Their book provides the vital steps required to navigate this new path called content marketing.”

You can certainly learn more about the book here. But we’re very proud to announce that, due to the herculean efforts of Newt Barrett and the editing team at CMI Books, we will have a limited supply of preview copies for sale at Content Marketing World, and online sales will follow very shortly in mid-September.

My HUGE THANKS go to my co-author Joe Pulizzi – the godfather of Content Marketing and very dear friend – and the team of people who helped put it together including Newt Barrett, Lisa Murton-Beets, Joe Watson and Neal Lorenzi.

At Content Marketing World, we’ll have four full days of talking content marketing. We’ll learn so much about how the power of story can work for our business. The process is new. We need to be okay with that. The budget allotted for new content creation is going to become a significant part of our “new media” budget. And subject matter experts in our organizations are going to have new responsibilities. It’s a transformative new process, and it won’t happen overnight. But it can, and should, happen.

Filed Under: BBM News, Uncategorized

PTC – Going Micro For A Macro Idea

June 12, 2011 By Robert Rose

“Robert and Joe understood the time constraints. CMI developed an effective strategy so that PTC could execute against a defined editorial calendar and a set of objectives. Having this in place ensures we will continue to develop content for the Creo Site in the coming months.”

Rachel Nislick – PTC’s Director of Interactive Marketing

Description:

PTC is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing software companies, delivering a complete portfolio of integral product lifecycle management solutions.

With more than 25,000 customers in the Industrial, High Tech, Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, Consumer and Medical devices industry, the company has a market cap of more than $1 billion.

Challenge:

The industry called it the “feature wars” of the 1990′s. CAD (computer aided design) software manufacturers scurried to battle. Their mission to bring additional software features to product designers. The problem? All of those bells and whistles made CAD software unwieldy and difficult to use. PTC, a major PLM and CAD software manufacturer saw a flattened uninspired market with no real growth.

This provided an opportunity. PTC decided to introduce Creo, a new family of design software built to solve chronic problems that have long plagued companies that use CAD software. Creo would deliver four breakthrough technologies that address the challenges long associated with usability, interoperability, technology lock-in, and assembly managementin CAD environments. Creo would reinvigorate and redefine the design market and PTC’sposition in the marketplace.

The question was – How to best tell this story?

Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose were brought in to develop and oversee the project. Joe and Robert worked closely with Rachel Nislick, PTC’s Director of Interactive Marketing and Geoff Hedges, Program Director for Creo. A successful launch would require doing more than developing a new product line; it would mean positioning the company as a thought leader, sharing the company’s vision and strategy,and sharing information about the product suite ahead of its release. This would be achievedby creating original content that would educate, engage and excite the core audience

Execution:

The initial content strategy was the first critical deliverable. This identified the pillars of content and mapped the way the content would be laid out strategically. This document guided the production of the editorial calendar, which in turn shaped thecontent development pipeline.“This really helped to align the site strategy and the content roll-out with the marketing messaging that was going out,” observed Robert. This ensured that the roll-out wasn’tjust haphazard but instead had a defined plan and strategy. The result was a smooth site launch with regular, ongoing content deployment.This was supported by a multiple-contributor blog.

The result was:

Very effective launch. PTC’s Creo microsite enjoyed a large launch at the end-of-the-monthdeadline and capitalized on the industry event. The site quickly crossed 100,000 visitors andcontinues to grow, with over 70% of the visitors new to PTC.

Continued collaboration and growth. A core team of PTC and CMI contributors continueto create original content for the microsite on a daily basis. Even guest writers havecontributed content. Managing this content requires ongoing editorial planning, but thereward is increasing web traffic and brand awareness.

Deep development of niche content. The Creo designsoftware works as apps,providing better alignment of product capabilities with users.Providing ongoing content thatexplores these specific app like options ensures thoughtleadership focused on key rolesfound in manufacturers

You can download the entire in-depth case study from the Content Marketing Institute.

Filed Under: Case Studies, Consulting

The “Best Guess” At Effective Marketing

September 7, 2010 By Robert Rose

One of the things we need to remember as we start to imbue our marketing with more measurement right from the beginning is that if we start out with a poor hypothesis – even the best measurement and/or testing process is useless. I just finished reading a wonderful book called Street Fighting Mathematics – and it really puts the idea of “good guessing” into perspective. I think it’s a really important lesson for us as digital marketers.

The book called Street-Fighting Mathematics – The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving by Sanjoy Mahajan. If you like math problems – it’s definitely for you. And, the author opens the book up with this: “too much mathematical rigor teaches rigor mortis: the fear of making an unjustified leap even when it lands on a correct result.”