Here’s the Catch 22:  Copper Services is marketing to meeting planners as a way to monetize their conference content.  Translation:  a bigger audience to sell your stuff and get all the money.  Question:  should speakers ask for a share of this revenue?  Or just give it away if they are speaking for free anyway?  If the group owns the rights to your presentation to them, can they do whatever they want with it?  Do services like this cannibalize your product offerings?

It’s one thing to sell the content to attendees and members.  It’s another to sell it to the entire free world.  Hmmm…what would you do?

Keep in mind the source of the survey:  HiveFire is an online marketing tech company.  But the findings point to good news for experts:  content curation (finding relevant content and posting it) has grown 17% in just six months alone.  More than half of respondents — 56% — report that content curation is part of the mix.

Translation:  these folks don’t want to create all the content they distribute.  They need our content and are looking for it.  That means that there are more opportunities to get your perspective out there.  Our challenge is to tap into this trend effectively.  One idea:  tap into the top two objectives:  engage customers and drive sales.

So ask yourself:  who can benefit from distributing your content?  Whose customers can you engage?  Those answers will point to your best starting point.  Learn more with this summary.  Registration required (no charge) to get the full report.

Something else to consider:  speaker previews are on the horizon, as more attendees want to choose which session to join.  Watch for more requests for video clips to post on conference websites.  Why do you care?  This means that folks have to fall in love with you before the speech, not during it.

So ask yourself (honestly):  why would attendees want personal access to you?  Platitudes have become obsolete here.  Creators or developers behind big cool projects are getting the inside track now.

See for yourself — here’s the article outlining the findings.

This is a great resource for speeches and other content on these topics.  When you are in research mode, check this site out.

Here are the top three imperatives according to the respondents:

• Delivering value to “empowered customers” — using all that data to figure out buying behavior and demand patterns.
• Creating relationships with those customers — over half say the answer lies in social media, with the focus of going beyond the transaction.  Their key question:  how to help the buyers enjoy their purchase.
• Measuring marketing impact on the business — so they can get their fair share of the budget and kudos.

The best news:  a big majority (over 60%) believe they are unprepared for the above onslaught.  What the most proactive are doing:  focusing on relationships instead of transactions and creating a clear — alert! new buzzword coming up — “corporate character”.

If this isn’t an invitation to help, I don’t know what is.  Don’t think that because you are not a marketing expert, you can’t take advantage of this.  There are a lot of places to play in these initiatives.  Click here for the summary and the full report.

That said, I have come to believe that in the spirit of promotion, many of us have become too clever for our own good.  For those of you doing the below, please know that the rest of us know you are just trying to promote yourself at our expense:

• Asking a provocative question and then pointing to your article:  if you can’t give me insights in your post, I’m not clicking to learn more.
• Answer a question by saying, “hire me and find out.”  Yes, I have seen several of these.  Some even go the extra mile to say, “I’ve checked your website / video / material.  It’s pretty bad, but I can still help.”  I don’t even bother responding to these posts.
• Use the same answer for every question.  One person was passionate about presentation skills.  So guess how he answered every question?  With generic platitudes about the importance of these skills.  Poor man didn’t realize that if he had just given some specific ideas, folks would’ve seen him as a resource.

It’s tempting to justify all the time we spend on these discussions with slick tricks to promote our blogs and offers.  My vote:  don’t do it.  Instead, if we focus on posting specifics with insights, both the participants and the lurkers will reach out.

That’s right, Walgreens plans to sell health insurance products later this year.  Why do you care?  Because they are using sponsorship deals to promote their health and wellness positioning.

This industry leader is looking for both local and national opportunities, as new deals range from national sports teams to community events.  Idea:  any expert in this area with strong ties to their community (or a broad-based national brand) has a shot getting their speaking fee paid to those public health events.

Moral of the case study:  organizations use sponsorships to introduce new products to their customers.  Help them and you can get your share of the ever-growing sponsorship pie.

For those of us with good intentions, check out this cool infographic by KISSmetrics that plays out three options of basic calculations.

Knowing your most profitable customer can drive all sorts of decisions:  where to hang out in social media, where to speak, etc.  It’s a good first step to making sense of all of our marketing options.

Lindstrom drills down on what we already know:  fear sells.  But look closer…we can’t just sell fear.  As experts, selling fear too often comes off as negative.  And high-end buyers see right through the consultant who continually cries wolf.

But we can’t just sell the positive either.  We have to use fear to motivate and move people into desire first.  And that’s where many of us get off track.  We sell the idealized future before we acknowledge the fear of not having it.

So…we have two options:  to sell the positive as the antidote of what is feared or to sell our stuff as a momentary respite from fear (the article uses yoga classes as an example).

We have to be positive as an answer in the battle against the unseen.  Because buyers — like the rest of us — are afraid of being caught unprepared for what can come next.

• Posts with questions generate 70% more comments than the average post.  Other top producers:  clever language (120% increase) and asking for input (also a 120% increase).  My thinking:  these ideas are simple and can be implemented now.  Major bang for our social media buck.
• Passionate debates and touching emotional stories generate two to three times the increase in feedback.  My vote:  the former is easier to implement than the latter for B2B experts.  B2C experts do need more emotional posts.
• Checking in happens around the workday:  morning, noon, after work, and late at night.  My observation:  those in the entrepreneurial space will find traffic on the weekends, too.

Many thanks to Dale Collie, who graciously shared this study via SpeakerNet News.

Analytical study on Facebook page from journalists