It seems counter-intuitive to give away your your knowledge in order to get more market share. In fact, some would say it’s downright irresponsible.  How can you protect the expertise that ensures your livelihood when you willingly give it away for free?

The truth is that the more you give away, the more the market understands that YOU are the expert they’ve been looking for.  Solve people’s knowledge problem, and they’re more apt to give you the opportunity to solve the real underlying problem – and pay you a premium to do so.

One of the goals of a content strategy is to prove expertise and share valuable knowledge with those in your market (potential and current customers). To some extent, consumers on a knowledge quest have a low expectation of the quality of the content out there that might address their immediate need. Finding the good stuff can take a while, too.

Think about it: how much time would you expect to spend trying to find out the difference between sea salt and kosher salt? Like most, you would start that query at the Google search box. A quick look at the results for the phrase “difference between sea salt and kosher salt” tells me that not many fine salt purveyors have tried very hard to answer this most basic of food questions.  Way at the bottom of page one, I found a salt brand (Morton’s) and a salt seller (Salt Works). The first results were forums, recipe sites, and a TV network site.

The return on an investment spent answering this question better than the others would pay off handsomely, I would think. The principle at work here is that by giving more and better content than your market expects, you can become a resource in their minds. And the distance between the act of coming to you for knowledge about salt types and the act of coming to you to buy salt is not a big one. Any marketer worth his salt could easily bridge that gap. Sorry. I had to do it.

You read a lot about being “authentic” and “transparent” when communicating online and how people will see right through you if you aren’t. Though we know what being authentic and transparent means it’s easier said than done. Let’s face it, it’s hard letting people see the real you and even harder sometimes to find your real voice. So what can you do to make sure you are communicating in a way that brings value to both you and those with whom you wish to engage online?

1. Be a giver. Give of yourself by providing good solid information about what you do or the products you represent. If you think it’s the same old information that everyone else is giving away then put your own spin to it with a good true story or analogy. Don’t be afraid of putting yourself and your company out there; sometimes it’s the only way to get the conversation going.

2. Be yourself. Everyone is unique and it’s that uniqueness that enables us to see something from our own point of view. Giving your take on something should always be conversational even if it is different or even confrontational. As long as you always remember that this is a conversation with one or more people who are all a part of the exchange, then civil discourse can take place.

3. Listen and refine. Listening to others is the key to mastering your own voice. Being able to handle challenges quickly and with grace as well as taking what others have to say and incorporating their thoughts and views when appropriate show others respect and acceptance.

There will always be the types online that feel if you don’t agree with them or buy their product or like what they like then they have nothing to say to you. It is unfortunate how many people get pushed away or turned off from being able to have a great exchange where everyone can participate and grow. Being able to reach as many people as possible with your voice in an open and positive way is the new (and certainly the best) way of marketing yourself, your company or your views.

Web guy. Print guy. Tech guy. These positions, while essential to your business and the productivity of your office, have become borderline buzzwords. If you can’t do it yourself, you need someone to develop your website, design your logo and/or print materials, and someone to provide administrative support when things go wrong (they will probably go wrong).

It’s vital to realize that among these helpful support systems, there must be a storyteller. Why a storyteller? Because someone needs to paint the picture of your business, your goals and your personality.

It’s difficult to objectively display your company. You know your company and your model better than anyone. Yet, consider the value of having an outside party recognize and extract the interesting nuggets that truly allow you to stand out from the crowd.

The right marketing storyteller can strategize for you. You may think you have a great selling point or product that makes you irresistible, and you may be right. Consult a marketing professional who can make a story out of your business and properly sell it to the masses time and time again.

It’s all in the details. Talented and qualified storytellers ache over every syllable, and torment over word usage, just as skilled marketing professionals understand the diamonds are in the details. Make sure you’re shedding light on every sparkling facet of your business.

It’s great to have a web developer who can tear through code without breaking into a sweat, or a graphic designer with the fastest turnaround time this side of the Mason Dixon line. These assets aren’t valuable if someone in your support team doesn’t take the time to understand your story is worth telling. More importantly, you need someone that knows how to tell your story, and who to tell it to.

All the great stories have lasted throughout the ages. Will yours?

(This post was contributed by Nicole Branigan, a freelance writer who regularly gets involved in helping to tell our clients’ brand stories. We’re thrilled to have her voice here, and to link to her very deserving freelance site.

Recently I was with a group of business owners who were talking about different “marketing tools” they were using for their businesses.  There seemed to be a rabid desire among them to learn about some “Holy Grail” new tactic or technique they could use. But as I started asking them how they would use one particular tool or another, their answers started sounding more like the feature lists these tools use to market themselves.

• “It lets me add all my contacts and manage discussions in one place.”
• “I can see results from my email campaign in real time!”
• “I can post to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, all from the same program.”

Not to belabor the point, but these stated reasons for using a tool aren’t reasons at all. They don’t identify the one crucial element every marketing activity must possess: The Goal.

So what is the goal of any marketing effort, digital or otherwise? It’s simple: To increase revenue and profit.

Any tool, tactic or strategy must be able to demonstrate how it will help you hit this goal, or it’s nothing but a waste of time, money and resources.

Lately, it seems like many respected tools and tactics cannot seem to quantify any bottom line objective.  I guess that’s what makes us different from other creative digital agencies. We genuinely think that if a service can’t justify it’s price, then neither can we.

Are you asking the tough question about your marketing efforts? Or are you wasting precious resources without a strategy that moves you closer to your revenue or profit goal? Either way, you should know and be able to quantify how each new tool or tactic moves you closer or farther away from revenue and profit. To riff on an old axiom, “Experiment, but verify.”

As a storyteller, I love language. I know I offend my more precise and articulate content-creator peers with my pedestrian and oftentimes overly-colloquial story style, but to me, language is a rich and glorious palette, and I want to use every color to tell my stories. If I couldn’t mine the more colorful, historic, rustic and regional parts of speech to get something said, I’m not sure I would enjoy language that much at all.

As it is, everything that has come to me in this life has come as a direct result of my ability to communicate. Not born of wealth and privilege, I’ve had to convince the world that I knew something, and that based on merit alone I deserved a place at the table. I quickly found that if I sounded like I was “one of the group”, it didn’t take much to get the invitation.

I’m a bit of a chameleon when speaking to various types of people. Getting a read on the person or group of people I am talking with quickly shapes and informs the way I speak to them. With an older farmer or rancher, I might slow down a bit and say less, like I am chewing my cud. When I do speak, I try to adopt a very organic and natural cadence, full of rich metaphors drawn from the natural world. On the other hand, talking with a senior C-level executive of a Fortune 500 company, I am likely to be quick to my point, direct and authoritative. The purpose in either case is quite simple: I want to get my point across. I want to be persuasive, to have influence. I want to be seen and trusted as someone of a like mind, who then has the ability to mold and shape their ideas about things, and in so doing, gain their cooperation in my own plans.

Isn’t that the ultimate goal of marketing? Think about your company’s storytelling, or “content strategy”. Is it perceived as authentic? Have you failed to use the language of your customers to reach them and connect more efficiently? How could you change your approach to better “speak to the room”?

As a social web participant, technologist and consultant, I am being asked on a daily basis my thoughts on Twitter and Facebook for business. I definitely have opinions about the uses of both platforms, and the suitability of each to various types of marketing and relational/conversational business networking activities. I was asked by a merchant’s association of which I am a member to share some insight on the social web strategies I see working, but of course before any such discussion can be meaningful, there has to be a short summary of the features and benefits of each platform. And the shorter this preface is the better, in my opinion.

So in an attempt to cram it into a nutshell for my upcoming audience, I was comparing and contrasting the ways in which the two networks build connections. The starting point for a connection can often be quite revealing about what sorts of conversations will be able to emerge as mutual participation and engagement ensues. If I meet someone in the context of  being “a friend of the family”, I am likely to explore radically different topics of discussion than if I met the same person in the context of “having the same interests”.

Facebook’s primary connection mode seems designed to bring together people who already know each other, or are very likely to know one another in an existing relational context, whether past or present. A slightly secondary mode is the locale-centric one, in which Facebook seeks to center activity and connections based on the reported location of its members. Both modes suppose an existing geographic or sociographic connection in order for the system to perform well in suggesting friends. And indeed, many if not most of the prompts and activities around which Facebook revolves suppose that the connections occurring within networks have some real-world mirror or context.  Nowhere is this more clear than in the memes and recurring quizzes, etc. that get passed around. Without already knowing something of the individuals participating in these activites, the answers and the exercises themselves would be of little interest, consequence or value to the group.

Twitter, on the other hand, with fewer guided activity options (and subsequently a LOT of general confusion about what Twitter really is) can be much like Facebook, in terms of mirroring confined and pre-existing real-world social connection graphs, but it isn’t designed to limit or promote only those social spheres. In fact, Twitter seems to be harder to use in that way than Facebook, because of the lack of recommendations and six-degrees-of-separation sort of ready-made connections. To find people to follow on Twitter, or to find followers, one would typically start with an interest or subject matter that mattered in their world. With little in the way of formal introduction or pre-existing awareness of an individual, connections can be made, based on little else than a mutual appreciation of a topic, interest or body of knowledge. In this way, Twitter tolerates more anonymity during interactions in the network, and thus can be an appealing place to be a genuine and transparent brand with a valuable voice in the conversations already occurring there. One does not have to know much about someone before choosing to follow them, because the value of the connection is not based on felt associations, but rather based upon a knowledge transaction.

In other words, Facebook networks are based upon WHO you know, and Twitter networks are based upon WHAT you know.

I am thrilled to have finally come up with a “10 words or less” comparison/explanation of the two services. But probably no more thrilled than my audience will be.

Dave Winer claims he has earned over $2M from his blog, and not an ad in sight. Ever. Wow.

Dave clearly gets what the value of his blog is to his business: It proves his expertise to his market with every post.

I have talked before about how online content models are notoriously poor performers if the goal is to make money directly from the content via advertising or selling premium content. There are exceptions, sure, but on the whole, unless your blog is grabbing 2,000 sets of eyeballs a day or better (fraction of % of all blog sites on the web, by the way), advertising really isn’t going to make you rich.

But if you blog to prove your expertise, to provide value to your intended audience, to extend your brand and increase your visibility, then even a modest few hundred monthly visitors can turn into a valuable increase in your business.

Content proves expertise. Use your blog to engage your market and demonstrate what you know, and you’ll stay flush with paid work.

(NOTE: I was asked by a friend how I could afford to give away so much knowledge on my blog for free, if I hoped that people would pay me for my expertise? My answer is simple: General expertise is free. Applied expertise isn’t.)