The frustration of relying exclusively on the media and expensive advertising to deliver your organization’s story is long gone. Yes, mainstream media are still important, but today smart marketers craft compelling information and tell the world directly via the web. The tremendous expense of relying on advertising to convince buyers to pay attention to your organization, ideas, products, and services is yesterday’s headache.

Chip McDermott founded ZeroTrash¹ as a nonprofit organization to rid the streets and beaches of Laguna Beach, California, of trash. Population and tourism had exploded, and the city had not kept up in providing sufficient infrastructure for public trash collecting and recycling. McDermott used the web to rally the community with a grassroots movement.

“The spark of the idea was that trash was becoming commonplace on the streets and the sidewalks of Laguna Beach,” McDermott says. “We started to tackle the problem with a Facebook² page for ZeroTrash Laguna and quickly built it to hundreds of members.”

People use the ZeroTrash Facebook page to organize events and to connect local store owners with residents. Facebook was instrumental in launching the ZeroTrash First Saturday movement, where store owners and volunteers walk the city and pick up trash on the first Saturday of each month. The store owners love it because people support local stores and keep the shopping areas clean. In turn, McDermott has tapped store owners as sponsors who fund the purchase of supplies and tools like trash pickers, trash bags, T-shirts, and gloves.

Facebook serves to keep people updated about what ZeroTrash is up to. For example, on a recent First Saturday, the Laguna Beach community helped to remove another 590 pounds of trash and 375 pounds of recyclables from the streets; McDermott used the social media sites to report these totals to interested people.

After the initial success in Laguna Beach, ZeroTrash now also serves Newport Beach and Dana Point in Southern California and Chico in Northern California, and is launching in Seattle, Washington, soon. “We want people to take individual ownership of each new local ZeroTrash community,” he says. “How can they get people with a passion to take control and start in their own communities? The obvious answer is to use social media to influence people.”

There’s no doubt that getting the word out about an idea, a product, or a service is much simpler when you can rely on social media sites like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. The web allows any organization (including nonprofits like ZeroTrash, as well as companies large and small, government agencies, and schools) and any individual (including candidates for public office, artists, and even job seekers) to reach buyers directly. This power is clear to nearly everyone these days, but many executives and entrepreneurs still struggle to find the right mix of traditional advertising and direct communication with buyers.

The Right Marketing in a Wired World

Century 21 Real Estate LLC³ is the franchisor of the world’s largest residential real estate sales organization, an industry giant with approximately 8,000 offices in 45 countries. The company had been spending on television advertising for years but, in a significant strategy change, pulled its national television advertising and invested those resources into online marketing.

Wow! I’ve seen Century 21 TV ads for years. We’re talking millions of dollars shifting from TV to the web. This is a big deal.

“We are moving our advertising investments to the mediums that have the greatest relevance to our target buyers and sellers, and to where the return on our investment is most significant,” says Bev Thorne, chief marketing officer at Century 21. “We found that our online investments provided a return that was substantively higher than our more traditional TV media investments.”

Thorne and her team learned that people who are in the market to buy or sell a home rely heavily on the web and that the closer they get to a real estate transaction, the more they use online resources. “We are embracing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ActiveRain, and others,” Thorne says. “YouTube is a central component of our activities, and we seek to utilize it even more.”

Many companies spending large amounts of money on television advertising (and other offline marketing such as direct mail, magazine and newspaper advertising, and Yellow Pages listings) are afraid to make even partial moves away from their comfort zones and into online marketing and social media. But the evidence describing how people actually research products overwhelmingly suggests that companies must tell their stories and spread their ideas online, at the precise moment that potential buyers are searching for answers.

It’s an exciting time to be a marketer, no matter what business you’re in. We have been liberated from relying exclusively on buying access through advertising or convincing mainstream media to talk us up. Now we can publish information on the web that people are eager to pay attention to.

Let the World Know about Your Expertise

All people and organizations possess the power to elevate themselves on the web to a position of importance. In the new e-marketplace of ideas, organizations highlight their expertise in online media that focus on buyers’ needs. The web allows organizations to deliver the right information to buyers, right at the point when they are most receptive to the information. The tools at our disposal as marketers are web-based media to deliver our own thoughtful and informative content via websites, blogs, e-books, white papers, images, photos, audio content, video, and even things like product placement, games, and virtual reality. We also have the ability to interact and participate in conversations that other people begin on social media sites like Twitter, blogs, chat rooms, and forums. What links all of these techniques together is that organizations of all types behave like publishers, creating content that people are eager to consume. Organizations gain credibility and loyalty with buyers through content, and smart marketers now think and act like publishers in order to create and deliver content targeted directly at their audience.

The Lodge at Chaa Creek,⁴ an eco-resort on a 265-acre rain-forest reserve in western Belize in Central America, is a publisher of valuable content about rain-forest wildlife, nearby destinations such as ancient Mayan cities, and the country of Belize itself. This content marketing effort helps the Lodge at Chaa Creek achieve high search engine rankings for many important phrases associated with travel to Belize. This work generates a remarkable 80 percent of new business for the lodge. Its story is among the best I know for learning how content drives business.

As anyone who has built a website knows, there is much more to think about than just the content. Design, color, navigation, and appropriate technology are all important aspects of a good website. Unfortunately, these other concerns often dominate. Why is that? I think it’s easier to focus on a site’s design or technology than on its content.

The global hotel chains fall into this trap: big-budget design and poor content. If you visit the sites of any of the majors (Hilton, Starwood, Marriott, etc.), you’ll notice they all look the same. The content is all created by corporate headquarters, so individual property pages rarely contain original content about the location of each hotel. The result is that most hotel sites are just big brochures that pull product features like room types and food offerings from a global database.

The Lodge at Chaa Creek’s website couldn’t be more different. The team behind it includes co-owner Lucy Fleming, who oversees marketing; Australia-based writer and former newspaper editor Mark Langan, who creates most of the written content; and an on-site marketer who focuses on social media and search engine optimization. The team researches what people are searching on—terms like “Belize honeymoon” and “Belize all-inclusive vacation”—and then works to craft content for the Lodge at Chaa Creek’s site, as well as its Belize Travel Blog.⁵ The goal is to offer content that is valuable for those researching a Belize vacation, content that will be ranked highly in the search engines.

Can you see what’s happening here? Somebody goes to Google and wants to learn about bird-watching in Belize. And because the content on the Chaa Creek site and blog includes stories about the birds of Belize, this searcher ends up on the Chaa Creek site or blog. For people searching for information on planning a wedding trip to Belize, Chaa Creek publishes content such as “Ten Reasons Why Belize Makes for Honeymoon Bliss” on the Belize Travel Blog.

Notice that this kind of information is not about the lodge itself. Instead, the Chaa Creek publishing program focuses on delivering information to people planning a trip to Belize. Then, when they are ready to book a place to stay, they’re likely to consider the Lodge at Chaa Creek, the place where they learned about traveling in the country.

My favorite examples of this technique are the team’s articles about the Mayan sites located in the vicinity of the Lodge at Chaa Creek, such as the Xunantunich Maya Temples. Anyone using a search engine to find information on “Xunantunich Maya Temples” will see the article on the Chaa Creek site at the top of the search results. Clicking through, they learn that the temples are located near the village of San Jose Succotz and that the lower temple is famous for its stucco frieze (a band of sculpture along the facade). Let me remind you that this is a hotel website. The team even created content about the Tikal Mayan site, located about two hours from Chaa Creek in Guatemala, a whole different country!

All this content drives people from the search engines to the hotel site. Many of them will then choose to stay at the Lodge at Chaa Creek. Indeed, some 80 percent of new bookings to the lodge come directly from this content marketing effort. This reduces the lodge’s reliance on the old-fashioned techniques of its competitors, which get a large percentage of their bookings from online travel sites (for which they must pay a commission) or advertising in travel magazines (which is very expensive). And it all starts by providing would-be travelers with the information they’re looking for when they begin researching a trip.

Develop Information Your Buyers Want to Consume

Companies with large budgets can’t wait to spend the big bucks on slick TV advertisements. It’s like commissioning artwork. TV ads make marketing people at larger companies feel good. But broadcast advertisements dating from the time of the TV-industrial complex don’t work so well anymore. When we had three networks and no cable, it was different. In the time-shifted, multichannel, web-centric world of the long tail, YouTube, DVRs, Twitter, and blogs, spending big bucks on TV ads is like commissioning a portrait back in the nineteenth century: It might make you feel good, but does it bring in any money?

Instead of deploying huge budgets for dumbed-down TV commercials that purport to speak to the masses and therefore appeal to nobody, we need to think about the information that our niche audiences want to know. Why not build content specifically for these niche audiences and tell them an online story that is created especially for them? Once marketers and PR people tune their brains to think about niches, they begin to see opportunities for being more effective at delivering their organization’s message.

Big Birge Plumbing Company Grows Business in a Competitive Market

Plumbers and other tradespeople used to generate business through the print telephone directory (when I was growing up we called it the Yellow Pages). I remember my parents both turned to it when they needed, say, a house painter or an electrician.

We’re in a new world now. People go to search engines and consumer review sites like Yelp to research companies. In this new world, it’s not the expensive half-page Yellow Pages ad that grows business. It’s the best website—especially in a highly competitive market like plumbing.

When I was in Omaha, Nebraska, for a speaking engagement, I had an opportunity to speak with Lallenia Birge, who with her husband Brad Birge operate Big Birge Plumbing Company.⁶ Lallenia goes by a wonderful title: “A Plumber’s Wife to Big Birge Plumbing Co.”

“Don’t let your money go down the drain! Call Big Birge Plumbing Company. For all your plumbing needs!” The clever, if punny, writing personalizes Big Birge Plumbing Company, making it stand out from the rest of the market. When the vast majority of plumbers either don’t have a site or just maintain a basic one with straightforward facts and contact info, being different gets you noticed. The Big Birge Plumbing Company site uses fun original photos, has a great design, and showcases the company’s humorous personality.

Here’s how Lallenia introduces herself on the Meet Big Birge page: “Hi! Unlike my husband, I do NOT have years and years of plumbing experience nor have I dug ditches in 100-degree weather. Honestly I’m pretty sure my husband has had to use our drain cleaner at our house more than most of his ‘regular’ customers (pun intended). I did not realize you aren’t supposed to flush wax down the toilet or not place all the food scrapes [sic] off the plate into the garbage disposal! (Whoops!)”

The fun carries over to the design of their trucks (Lallenia with a “gasp” expression, peering into a toilet filled with money) and to their social media presence, including Facebook.

In a crowded market—there are more than 400 plumbing companies in the Omaha area—Big Birge Plumbing Company has grown very quickly in less than five years in business.

“Our very first year, we received Best of Omaha due to our marketing online via social media and the image we display,” Lallenia says. “This is a major award in our city, and we came out of nowhere. We have won it two years in a row now.”

Big Birge Plumbing Company shows that anyone with a smartphone and a focus on reaching buyers online can grow a business, even in a very competitive market. When I checked recently, Big Birge Plumbing was ranked on the first page of the Google results for “Omaha Plumber.” That’s amazing, considering the company is only a few years old. You can achieve the same result in your market.

Buyer Personas: The Basics

Smart marketers understand buyers, and many build formal buyer personas for their target demographics. (I discuss buyer personas in detail in Chapter 10.) It can be daunting for many of us to consider who, exactly, might be interested in our products and services and is visiting our site and checking out our content. But if we break the buyers into distinct groups and then catalog everything we know about each one, we make it easier to create content targeted to each important demographic.

For example, a college website usually has the goal of keeping alumni happy so that they donate money to their alma mater on a regular basis. A college might have two buyer personas for alumni: younger alumni (those who graduated within the past 10 or 15 years) and older alumni. Universities also have a goal of recruiting students by driving them into the application process. The effective college site might have a buyer persona for the high school student who is considering college. But since the parents of the prospective student have very different information needs, the site designers might build another buyer persona for parents. A college also has to keep its existing customers (current students) happy.

That means a well-executed college site might target five distinct buyer personas, with the goals of getting younger and older alumni to donate money, high school students to complete the application process, and parents to make certain their kids complete it. The goals for the current students aspect of the site might be making certain they come back for another year, plus answering routine questions so that staff time is not wasted.

By truly understanding the needs and the mind-sets of the five buyer personas, the college will be able to create appropriate content. Once you understand these audiences very well, then (and only then) you should set out to satisfy their informational needs by focusing on your buyers’ problems and creating and delivering content accordingly. Website content too often simply describes what an organization or a product does from an egotistical perspective. While information about your organization and products is certainly valuable on the inner pages of your site, what visitors really want is content that first describes the issues and problems they face and then provides details on how to solve those problems.

Once you’ve built an online relationship, you can begin to offer potential solutions that have been defined for each audience. After you’ve identified target audiences and articulated their problems, content is your tool to show off your expertise. Well-organized web content will lead your visitors through the sales cycle all the way to the point when they are ready to buy from or otherwise commit to your organization.

Understanding buyers and building an effective content strategy to reach them are critical for success. And providing clear links from the content to the place where action occurs is critical.

“Slacker.” “Hippie.” “Freak.” “Get a job.” “You look like a girl.” “Unprofessional!”

After hearing these and all sorts of other snide comments about their atypical personal grooming choices, Chris Healy and Lindsay Barto founded The Longhairs. This global community advocates for, educates, and celebrates men with long hair.

Why? “Because longhairs are badass,” their site says. “From Samson to Jesus to George Washington, real men let it ride. Don’t let ’em convince you otherwise.” Healy and Barto realized early on that women are taught from birth on how to care for, style, and manage long hair. But men haven’t had that luxury. So the duo created a blog to serve this unmet need. And now that they’ve gathered a vibrant community on their popular blog, they are starting to sell products, initially Hair Ties for Guys.

“Content is absolutely the cornerstone of our community,” Healy says. “In fact, we began with no product—or really almost anything at all. We just started with three or four blog posts, and we had a pretty good idea that there would be lots of content that we could come up with. I think the first four blog posts were ‘Long Hair at High Speed,’ ‘Six Tips for Guys with Long Hair,’ and a couple of other really basic ones. But we decided from the very beginning that content was going to be the backbone of our community and our business.”

The site is beautifully designed. That’s not surprising when you learn that Healy and Barto also run Round Two Creative Group, a creative studio in San Diego, California. But consistency is their key to success. As I write this, they’ve blogged every week for more than 100 weeks.

“The blog content is written within the three categories of our mission,” Healy says. “We advocate for men with long hair. For millennia men who are leaders, warriors, scientists, and politicians have all had long hair. Only in the past century has it become ‘unprofessional’ to have long hair. There are employers who won’t hire men with long hair, and the stereotypes are well documented. One of our content categories is the Longhairs Professional Series. We interview CEOs, business owners, and other successful professionals with long hair to illustrate that you can in fact be a successful professional.”

For example, there is a conversation with Dave Littlechild, a successful business professional from the United Kingdom. Littlechild has lived around the world building businesses, most recently as executive vice president for dotmailer, the largest email marketing software firm in the UK.

The educational content of the blog is focused on addressing that male knowledge gap about long hair. “We’ve got no idea what to do or how to brush it,” Healy says. “Is it okay to do a ponytail? How do I braid it? None of these things we know about. Before The Longhairs, the only place to learn was women’s blogs, websites, magazines, or asking our moms and our sisters about it. And frankly, some of the videos can be a little uncomfortable for men to watch. We help guys by teaching them, ‘Hey, you don’t need to be a hair expert, but there are a few things every guy with long hair needs to know. We got it. You need it. Here it is. Let us help you out and show you how to do these things.’

“And you know, since probably very few people are encouraging you to grow your hair out, you’re probably not celebrating it with your mom or with your buddies or your sister. So we have some fun by celebrating on the blog with ‘Hair Whip Wednesdays’ and ‘Famous Long Hair Fridays.’ You know, it’s a club and it’s a community. We should celebrate it. So we do that with our Celebrate Style content.”

Many of the new visitors to the community come through search. As Healy and Barto pored through their stats, they realized that people were coming for some of their more unusual posts. “We wrote a blog post about a year and a half ago called ‘The Uncomfortable Truth about Awkward-Stage Hair’ that documented that phase when guys start to grow out their hair between about four, five, six months until about a year and a half,” Healy says. “Man, it just looks bad. There’s nothing you can do about it. But that’s part of why long hair is a minority among men, because you have to get through that awkward phase. It turns out a lot of guys are searching for information on awkward-stage hair: how to deal with it, how to accelerate it, how to make it go faster. Now, if you Google ‘awkward-stage hair,’ we show up in the number one position.”

While the blog posts are the primary content on the site, Healy and Barto also publish videos, record podcasts, and use photography. The content drives people to where they can get updates via email and become part of the community of Longhairs.

The flagship product of the Longhairs community is Hair Ties for Guys. “That was the original idea before The Longhairs even existed or was an idea,” Healy says. “We were thinking ‘Hair Ties for Guys’—man, we need that. It tells you what it is. It’s sticky. You’re not going to forget that!”

Once the community launched, they started work on Hair Ties for Guys. The process involved a great deal of product testing and searching for manufacturing sources, but after more than a year they released the first offerings. Today they have six collections of Hair Ties for Guys.

“We have some fun names, including the Outdoorsmen, the Kokomos, and the Up All Nighters,” Healy says. “Instead of what you would find in the women’s hair care aisle (pastel colors and maybe some more feminine designs with flowers), we do rocket launchers and shotgun shells, camouflage, surfboards, fishing rods, and stuff that guys are into. And guys love them. The reach has been extraordinary. We have now shipped Hair Ties for Guys to 47 states in the U.S. and 36 countries around the world.”

Now that the Hair Ties for Guys product is doing well, Healy says he is looking at new products to offer the community.

The potential market for his products is huge. Healy estimates that men with long hair make up somewhere between 3 and 5 percent of the population of the United States. If you also include men who live in other countries and have disposable income, the target market is in the tens of millions. Guys with long hair is a distinct buyer persona that had been ignored by nearly all other companies.

As Healy and Barto say in their introductory video, “In the end, long hair is about more than just hair itself. It’s commitment. It’s identity. It’s a lifestyle. It’s all of those things and more. So even if you’re not a guy with long hair, if you’re a mother of a boy with long hair, if you’re a wife or a girlfriend of a man with long hair, if you’re a few months removed from your last haircut and you’re ready to press on, if you have an ailment and you’re not capable of growing hair, The Longhairs are here for you. Because long hair lives in the heart.”

Content sells products to guys with long hair. A well-written blog targeting a specific audience with a well-defined buyer persona has the power to sell your product or service too. It’s about tapping into a shared challenge and rallying the community around it.

Think Like a Publisher

The new publishing model on the web is not about hype and spin and messages. It is about delivering content when and where it is needed and, in the process, branding you or your organization as a leader. When you understand your audience—those people who will become your buyers (or those who will join, donate, subscribe, apply, volunteer, or vote)—you can craft an editorial and content strategy just for them. What works is a focus on your buyers and their problems. What fails is an egocentric display of your products and services.

To implement a successful strategy, think like a publisher. Marketers at the organizations successfully using the new rules recognize that they are now purveyors of information, and they manage content as a valuable asset with the same care that a publishing company does. One of the most important things that publishers do is start with a content strategy and then focus on the mechanics and design of delivering that content. Publishers carefully identify and define target audiences and consider what content is required to meet their needs. Publishers consider all of the following questions: Who are my readers? How do I reach them? What are their motivations? What are the problems I can help them solve? How can I entertain them and inform them at the same time? What content will compel them to purchase what I have to offer? To be successful, you need to consider these same questions.

Staying Connected with Members and the Community

As the demographics of the United States have changed over the past several decades, many mainline church organizations have struggled to attract and maintain members. Like any business or nonprofit, the churches that succeed are those whose leaders understand the problems buyers (here: churchgoers) face and use the power of publishing valuable information to reach them directly. Trinity Cathedral⁷ in Cleveland is a place where ancient church practice has blended with new patterns of social interaction to build a vibrant community both online and offline. Trinity Cathedral is a historic landmark and home to a vibrant, inclusive congregation in the heart of a city struggling to revitalize after decades of decline in manufacturing jobs. The Very Rev. Tracey Lind, dean of Trinity Cathedral, leads the effort.

“The official way you count attendance or membership in the Episcopal Church is to count average Sunday attendance,” Lind says. “For a long time, I and a group of my colleagues have been saying that’s not an accurate measure of the work we’re doing. In fact, our vitality would be better measured by average weekly touch.” To touch people regularly outside of Sunday services, Lind publishes an email newsletter, her own blog,⁸ audio podcasts, a Facebook page, and a Twitter feed. “Reality is that most people don’t go to church every week anymore,” she says. “That’s just a reality of life. My attitude is that you can fight it, or you can be a part of it.”

Lind’s publishing efforts help create a virtual community within the congregation. Trinity Cathedral employs a full-time communications person and also relies on Rebecca Wilson and Jim Naughton of Canticle Communications (a firm that serves mainly church organizations) to help with web design and content publishing efforts. “We do everything as if we are running a web business to try to attract people to us,” Lind says. “The reality is I’m not going to get everybody to church every week. If you can’t get to church on Sunday, you can listen to the service on a podcast or you can read it on my blog. If you’re teaching our kids or you’re singing in the choir or doing something else at that hour, you can listen to it on a podcast. What we find is we’re reaching huge communities of people [with] our podcasting. People are listening to us all over the globe. I get emails from folks in Australia or Germany, thanking me for a sermon that I preached and wanting to engage.”

Music is a particularly important aspect of Trinity Cathedral’s podcasting efforts. “If you go to England, one of the things that people do is go to the great cathedrals to attend choral Evensong to listen to the men’s and boys’ choirs sing,” Lind says. “Well, we do that at Trinity every week, and we think there’s nobody in the country podcasting choral Evensong. So we started podcasting that, which is a way of making us unique. People listen to really extraordinary choral music every week, and they count on the podcast.”

Marketers at companies whose buyers include a segment of older people frequently assume that the elders are not online and that they won’t engage with a web publishing effort. I’ve always pushed back on this notion. So does Lind, who has demographic data to show how misguided those conventional ideas can be. “We find that in our 1,000-member congregation, all but about 10 adults are on the Internet,” she says. “Only 10 adults are not using the web, and that includes our elders. Most of our elders are actively social networking and on the Internet. When we suspended our print newspaper, I got just one complaint.”

Trinity Cathedral attracts a very diverse group of people in the Cleveland area, and the web publishing efforts aid in building the community of people who become members. “Our market is clear,” Lind says. “We’re trying to attract progressive people of faith who are concerned about the city and who want to be a part of an intentionally inclusive, diverse, engaged congregation. We’re trying to attract change agents. We’re intentional about trying to attract the 20s and 30s, but there’s also great value in the world of the empty-nesters, and also in the ‘third half of life’: boomers, those reinventing aging. I think of one of our audiences as those who listen to NPR—thoughtful, but not necessarily highly educated. We attract a lot of really thoughtful working-class folks that you wouldn’t otherwise think would be coming. We’re racially diverse. We are always interested in families that are wanting something other than the bland suburbs for their kids—so a lot of alternative families, blended families, adopted families, LGBT families, single moms, single dads.” Lind considers each of these markets as she creates information to publish on the web.

Developing and maintaining the publishing program at Trinity Cathedral is a major effort for an organization tight on resources. But reaching buyers through the blog, podcasting, social networking, and the email newsletter is essential, given the changing ways people relate to their churches. Just like so many leaders of for-profit businesses, Lind has had to convince stakeholders of the importance of online marketing. “When I got to Trinity, there was one computer in the place, and it was barely used. That was in 2000. Part of the dilemma is the amount of money that has to go into communications, which is an enormous paradigm shift for churches. Frankly, my communications director is as valuable as a priest. That is a shift that is sometimes hard to explain to people.” But it’s one that will be essential for traditional churches to understand if they are to survive and thrive in the age of the social networks.

Know the Goals and Let Content Drive Action

On the speaking circuit and via my blog, I am often asked to critique marketing programs, websites, and blogs. My typical responses—“What’s the goal?” and “What problems do you solve for your buyers?”—often throw people off. It is amazing that so many marketers don’t have established goals for their marketing programs and for websites and blogs in particular. And they often cannot articulate who their buyers are and what problems they solve for them.

An effective web marketing and PR strategy that delivers compelling content to buyers gets them to take action. (You will learn more about developing your own marketing and PR strategy in Chapter 10.)

Organizations that understand the new rules of marketing and PR have a clearly defined business goal—to sell products, to generate contributions, or to get people to vote or join. These successful organizations aren’t focused on the wrong goals, things like press clips and advertising awards. At successful organizations, news releases, blogs, websites, video, and other content draw visitors into the sales-consideration cycle and then funnel them toward the place where action occurs. The goal is not hidden, and it is easy for buyers to find the way to take the next step. When content effectively drives action, the next step of the sales process—an e-commerce company’s Products button, the B2B corporation’s White Paper Download form, or a nonprofit’s Donate link—is easy to find.

Working from the perspective of the company’s desire for revenue growth and customer retention (the goals), rather than focusing on made-up metrics for things like leads and website traffic, yields surprising changes in the typical marketing plan and in the organization of web content. Website traffic doesn’t matter if your goal is revenue (however, the traffic may lead to the goal). Similarly, being ranked number one on Google for a phrase isn’t important (although, if your buyers care about that phrase, it can lead to the goal).

Ultimately, when marketers focus on the same goals as the rest of the organization, we develop marketing programs that really deliver action and begin to contribute to the bottom line and command respect. Rather than meeting rolled eyes and snide comments about marketing as simply the T-shirt department, we’re seen as part of a strategic unit that contributes to reaching the organization’s goals.

Real-Time Business at American Airlines Reaches Buyers Directly

While on an American Airlines flight I was introduced to a well-behaved German shepherd named Kobuk. His handler is Elizabeth Fossett of the nonprofit Maine Search & Rescue Dogs team. She told me how Kobuk had searched for hours to find a 77-year-old woman with diabetes and dementia who had been lost in the woods for several nights: no water, no food, and none of her medications. Kobuk had just traveled across the United States with Fossett to attend a ceremony at American Humane. For saving the woman’s life, he was being honored with the 2016 Hero Dog Award: Search & Rescue Dog.

Of course, I had to get a photo with Kobuk!

And then, naturally, I had to share it with my followers. So I tweeted the photo with the text “Psyched to meet Kobuk – 2016 @AmericanHumane National search & rescue hero dog – on @AmericanAir.” Within a few minutes, American Airlines thoughtfully tweeted back to me: “@dmscott Oh wow! We’re sure that was a great moment. #smile.” Seeing that response—and many others like it over the years—there was no question in my mind that the airline’s people pay attention to every message they receive and, when appropriate, craft a personal response. There are no generic “thanks for sharing” type responses on the @AmericanAir feed.

American Airlines is also fast to respond to Direct Messages on Twitter, and to similar communications in other social networks. As a frequent traveler on the airline, I sometimes tweet questions. A response typically comes within 15 minutes.

I was impressed and wanted to learn more about how the world’s largest airline uses real-time communications. I flew to the company’s Dallas/Fort Worth headquarters to spend the day with Jonathan Pierce, director of social media and content services, and more than a dozen of his American Airlines colleagues.

I went there expecting to learn how the airline uses real-time social networking to engage with customers and solve their problems. But I hadn’t expected to learn how important these interactions are to the entire company and its brand. I was fascinated to learn how real-time customer data is used all the way to the CEO level as a major source of data informing how to run the company. For this, American Airlines is at the forefront of a new way to manage business.

“We try to create customer value, and we try to create business value,” Pierce says of his company’s approach to real-time social media. “We’re building relationships with customers through social and building relationships internally through the value provided by our work.”

While Pierce was showing me around, I took interest in the team’s social media wall, a dashboard of real-time metrics displayed on a series of large video screens. On the day I was there, 5,130 people had mentioned American Airlines on social networks in the past 24 hours, and 2,666 of them geotagged their mentions with their location. The monitors showed a scrolling set of tweets as well as recent images that people posted. The social media wall, as well as reports that are sent to management daily, weekly, and monthly, aren’t interesting just to a geeky visitor.

“The CEO walks by and says, ‘What’s going on today?’” Pierce explains. He’ll sit with us and chat. He knows what we do, and he cares about what’s going on. Everyone on the executive team also get a daily Social Pulse message, which includes the hot topics of the last 24 hours. And they all get a weekly scorecard with key data, number of mentions, our response time, the top stories of the week, the top proactive posts, and what were the things that bubbled up. We also share stories about our team members, because it’s very important to the leadership that we tell them.”

The reporting and social data wall have become so important to management that they use it to gauge real-time reaction to new initiatives. “You know you have a good thing when we’ve launched a product or done an announcement and the VP of marketing will come up here and stand and watch the screens for the first hour to get a sense of what the customer reactions are,” Pierce says. “It has gotten to the stage now where leaders know customers will give immediate feedback through these social platforms, and this is where we can gain insight immediately. We can course correct and get a sense of reaction quickly based on the immediate insights that come out.” As I was learning about this use of real-time data, I was thinking how the vast majority of large companies would have convened a focus group or hired a team of researchers and then taken months to gather data. At American Airlines, big data in real time provides immediate intelligence that is used up and down the company to run the business.

The real-time social networking at American Airlines is all done in-house. There is no external social agency involved. “That’s a very deliberate move, because the process and the time line to brief an agency and getting them up to speed with the business just takes too long,” Pierce says. “We’ve got the luxury of being able to get to market much quicker.”

The team operates around the clock with 25 team members, several of whom are fluent in Spanish and another in Portuguese. “Our permanent team come from all different backgrounds at American,” Pierce says. “The last time we checked, the average seniority for the team was about 16 years with the company. We like to refer to them as super representatives, because in this job you’re going to get every kind of question and comment that you could imagine. They have to know so much about everything. And if they don’t know the answer, they have all the resources they need to find the answer.”

The real-time social networking team handles all sorts of issues for customers, such as rebooking flights, handling lost bag inquiries, and answering questions. But they also serve as the outward face of the brand, commenting on tweets like mine with Kobuk the hero dog.

Perhaps you noticed that, unlike the large majority of organizations that hire people who are already so-called social media experts or hire young people because they grew up using social media, American Airlines takes people who are experienced in the business and teaches them the social media aspect.

“Training in the first week is tone of voice,” Pierce says. “How a reservations rep or an airport rep communicates with you is different than how we talk on social media. We start new hires in the private feed, responding to Direct Messages on Twitter, for example, so they can get their social media legs and build their confidence before they manage the public feed. We can put folks in there who are real pros at helping the customer, while we are developing and training them on being the face of the brand online.”

Once a new person on the social team has gotten experience responding via Direct Messages to individual customers, they might begin working on the public feed.

If a customer provides his or her American Airlines AAdvantage frequent flier number when communicating through Direct Messages, as I have done, the team adds the number to the person’s internal social profile maintained at the airline. That way, a person’s social profile and customer profile are merged. In my case, the team knows me as more than just @dmscott on Twitter, who has more than 125,000 followers. They know I’ve also been a frequent flier for 20 years and have flown over two million miles on American Airlines, making me among their best customers. All of this information pops up on the social media representatives’ screens as they interact with somebody on a network. They can go back and look at the history of all social engagements between the airline and that customer. This is another example of how real-time social networking has become a fully integrated aspect of American Airlines’ business, much more than for a typical company that uses social networking just to promote products. I’ve interacted on Twitter with hundreds of companies I do business with, and I don’t know of any besides American Airlines that have merged public social networking feeds with private customer data to understand the total picture of the people they are interacting with.

Besides the global social media team, there are many individual employees who are active on social networks and who serve as unofficial brand ambassadors for American Airlines as a result. For example, @taylortippett is an American Airlines flight attendant with well over 100,000 Instagram followers, and Brad Tate is a Dallas/Fort Worth–based first officer who tweets to his 18,000 followers at @AAfo4ever. “We’ve got lots of pilots who take great, amazing pictures,” Pierce says. “In fact, we use a lot of that content for our own proactive engagement.”

Toward the end of the day I visited the American Airlines Integrated Operations Center (IOC), where 1,600 employees operate in one arena-like room. The 150,000-square-foot facility is where real-time flight operations for the entire airline and its one million yearly flights are conducted, including dispatch, crew scheduling, air traffic control, maintenance operation control, customer service, and other functions. It was here, in the nerve center of the largest airline in the world, where it became crystal clear to me how important real-time social networking is to running the airline, or managing any large business. In fact, in the center of the room is what they call “the bridge,” which is where the operations manager for the entire American Airlines system sits together with a handful of key staff. And right next to the operations manager is a representative of the social team.

“Every passenger on a plane is a reporter now,” says Pierce. “They’ve got phones, and they are sometimes tweeting about things faster than our team members can tell us what’s going on. That’s really useful. Maybe there are people arguing on the plane, or it’s delayed, or they pulled somebody off, or somebody’s not comfortable on board. We find out immediately. We’ll let others on the bridge know what we’re hearing about the situation on this particular flight.”

Having a social media representative sit on the bridge was originally done on a short-term trial basis, but the benefits to the entire airline became obvious very quickly. The arrangement was made permanent after just a week. “It still amazes me to see something going on at the IOC and the operations manager will turn around and say, ‘What have we seen on social? Is there anything going on?’” Pierce says. “They’re communicating with our team just as much as we’re communicating with them. It’s a really great partnership.”

I went to American Airlines to learn how the airline uses real-time social networking to communicate with customers who tweet cute photos like mine. I wasn’t expecting to learn how important real-time customer communications are for running the entire airline. American Airlines is an amazing example of the new rules of marketing and public relations at work throughout an organization. But it’s not just large organizations that can operate this way. I’ll share many more examples in these pages of companies small and large that are making the new rules work for them, too.

In the following chapters that make up Part II of the book, I introduce social media, blogs, online video, podcasting, content-rich websites, real-time marketing and PR, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. Then Part III presents a guide to creating your marketing and PR plan (Chapter 10), followed by detailed chapters with how-to information on each technique. Content turns browsers into buyers. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling premium wine cabinets or a new music CD, or advocating to stop sonar harm to whales, web content sells any product or service and advocates for any philosophy or image.