New Website Launched, Conferences & the Content Marketing Playbook

BrevilleUSA.com, running Magento

Last week was a great one here at Tippingpoint Labs. We released a new e-commerce platform for Breville. The whole thing took Eric and his team five weeks to deploy (which is in record time). As you know, we’re big believers in open-source tools, and Magento has proven to be extremely powerful for Breville’s time-to-market needs.

Andrew also had a busy week, speaking at two different events in one day. Gauging from the reactions on Twitter, he seems to have made an impact at both. In the meantime, we’ve been churning out more content.

Comments of the week

We understand that our readers add as much value, if not more, as we do in the generation of high-quality content at Tippingpoint Labs. That’s why, once a week we take some of our best interactions and highlight them — it’s all great online content and we appreciate your insight. Here’s last week’s best stuff.

What about the press?

Online Value Chain

Brad wrote a post about the Online Value Chain that we’ve developed, and it garnered a lot of discussion this week. Greg Wood astutely pointed out something that’s missing in the model:

I think you forgot media professionals. In the Chocolate example, their could be a journalist for Vogue magazine that keeps up on the latest trends in chocolate and publishes a story about it every so often. These people should not be ignored and brands can provide value to them as well. That said, a brand must understand all the influentials in their passion area and engage them all, media professionals as well as amateur influencers.
– Greg Wood

To be honest, this is something we’ve seen Andrew grappling with in many discussions. Most recently we heard that he’s planning to revise the value chain to include professional media (professional influencers) in the new model. Stay tuned for “The Online Value Chain Revised.”

Meetup.com shows us some love

The Banshee - Packer Country!

Last week’s podcast has been downloaded thousands of times. We think it’s one of the best ones we’ve ever produced. We’re proud to see that the team at Meetup.com tuned in as well:

Congrats to Oran and the rest of the Boston Greenbay Packers Meetup Group! And thanks to Andrew and the folks at Tipping Point Labs for the great podcast.
– Tegan, Meetup.com Community Manager

We hope that Tegan and her team will keep listening!

Analytics insight

Andrew’s post that addressed the need for a better understanding of your valuable traffic garnered some great insight:

I think there are 2 key challenges for companies to be able to understand and calculate ROI:

Business Challenges:

1. What questions does a company ask itself?
2. Do they have the data to measure and benchmark i.e. avg cost per transaction?
3. Do they an infrastructure set up internally to allow for ROI measurement and tracking?
4. Is the challenge larger in scale, i.e. a marketing accountability problem?

Technology Challenges:

1. How do you interpret many analytics platforms?
2. How do you track users across various platforms?
3. How do you measure the value of a conversation over time?

– Jacob Morgan

Jacob’s right. Marketers are going to find themselves on the hook, and analyzing the business and the technologies employed to measure the answers to those questions are central to success in the future. Thanks, Jacob!

What we’re reading

We use Posterous to keep track of what the entire Tippingpoint Labs team is consuming on the web. If you’d like to see everything, feel free to subscribe. Here are some of our picks from last week:

The Content Marketing Playbook

Joe Pulizzi

We met with Joe Pulizzi last week. He’s a smart and talented content marketer, and he invited Andrew to speak last week at an event for OpenView Venture Partners. Last week, Joe released a free eBook called The Content Marketing Playbook. We’ve all read it, and I think it’s a great way to start a content creation and distribution brainstorm session. Check it out!

Prezi with 10% more Flash

Anyone who has met Andrew in person or watched his weekly @the SmartBoard episodes knows that he loves Prezi. This week, he watched a TED speech in which Parag Khanna uses Prezi to show how the world map evolves. It’s a great presentation and an amazing use of Prezi!

About the author

Josh Cole - Josh Cole was born to create content -- from his pioneering works in anarchoustic and hobophonic sounds & web content to writing across a wide variety of media. Joining the team in Spring 2009, he has been instrumental in crafting and producing oodles of content for Breville, Putnam Investments, and Tippingpoint Labs. He rides a near mint 1964 Raleigh Colt to work. He still remembers which accessories go with each G.I. Joe action figure. He writes with the kung-fu action grip. Josh is in charge of content for a variety of clients. His favorite Tippingpoint Labs value is: "There is a content solution to every business challenge."