As our conversation develops, we show how innovative companies are spending more on their own content creation, and becoming targeted publishers as a core competency. They then have the ability to use that focused content strategically, and in many ways -- from the same initial investment. The content becomes the basis of the discussions they have with their users, for internal evangelism, for marketing, and for search engine marketing.

Take a look at the discussion Sam and I have on the merits of a content strategy. Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: We now have the ability to distribute content far more widely, but at the same time in a more granular sense ... that long tail concept, more widely yet more targeted – and more cheaply than ever. So you can create a 30-minute movie, put it on YouTube, and almost anyone on the planet has access to it. Anyone, by the way, that does a search on perhaps the key issues about your value, your products, your company gets to the content.

I think that more and more companies will be making some pretty high-quality, interesting, 30-minute, maybe 15-minute movies. We are already seeing this. There was a great one on SOA that IBM did not too long ago. Are you as a marketer going to want to have someone else define your messaging for you? Or are you going to start thinking about doing this yourselves?

Again, IBM, I think, is a bellwether in this, at least in the IT space. They’re just creating scads of content. And when you go to Google, when you type in "SOA" or "Services Oriented Architecture," which is an important direction and business opportunity for IBM, the left hand side of the search page, that free content stuff, is just littered with IBM content. It's discussions with developers, it's whitepapers, it's mentions in press – these are the things that get vetted by the search engine algorithms as being relevant.

Any company that has a strategic direction that they are taking their business to should say, “What are the keywords that relate to our future? What is the content we can create that will drive recognition from those keywords of our value, specifically as an individual company? And how can we create an ongoing process by which we’re feeding that algorithm machine over and over again to retain that high ranking?"

That to me is marketing 2.0.

Whitmore: Well, I think that model works hand-in-glove beautifully, in sort of uber search environments like a Yahoo! or YouTube or Google. But in the world that I follow, you have got the IT and the tech media really trying to drive their brand because they don’t want you to go to Google and type in “SOA”; that would be a terrible defeat for them.

Gardner: Yeah, but you don’t want to just limit yourself to one media company’s input. What these media companies should be doing is to do the same thing that their customers are doing, and that is to create the very best possible content on the key subjects of interest of the day, and have them appear high up in the general search ranking. So when I go and do a Google search on “SOA,” I’d just as well see an article up there by InfoWorld as one that is from IBM. But either way, if it's good and valuable information – that’s what I’m going to look at.

Whitmore: But as you get closer to, “I have got to make a decision on a reseller or a solution provider or vendor, then I think that I am not going to trust IBM. They are not going to be my goal because they are going to be omitting the stuff about BEA and the competitors.”

Gardner: Well, we hope that BEA and its competitors are creating content about their value and it’s also available. But obviously buyers will be moving from research, into creating a shortlist, into an RFP process and then into actually getting into weighty, detailed discussions, and then ultimately buying negotiations. And this Marketing 2.0 approach is completely complementary to a traditional sales, research, and then execution process.

Whitmore: It absolutely is; they can work in parallel, and I think that these IT trade titles and these people that are being rapidly disintermediated, they need to figure out how to get some of their content to rank well in generic search environments. And that brings us back to SEO and the fact that you can subscribe to RSS search results and these people really are getting hammered.

Gardner: We're now leveling the playing field – the best content that is vetted through the algorithmic search process is what’s going to be most prominent. We know that when people do searches, they don’t go more than maybe one or two pages in. And so, therefore, the IT media, those companies covering IT, need to come up with great content, great columnists, podcasts, RSS, video, whatever it might be, that would show what is voted on as best and vetted.

Whitmore: I have an editorial bias when I hear the word "content." I think about sort of generic, by-the-pound content. And whitepapers have their place and product documentation, too, but I think increasingly, as the 20-somethings and 30-somethings take over the world – and that’s happening – they are not going to accept the same blandness and sort of pseudo-authority that a lot of content has for us.

Gardner: I agree. I think people need to loosen up, and I have written a number of whitepapers. And the way you go about a whitepaper is you do research, you get information and you do interviews – primary research. And what is an interview? It’s a discussion. Why not just create a great discussion with the experts and put that up, instead of putting it into some sort of a turgid-prose, 80-page tome that people only read the executive summary of?

Why not give the long tail its due and put up a series of five key discussions with the experts you would have interviewed anyway for the whitepaper, and let people either read the transcript or glance at the executive summary of each individual interview or discussion, and then pick and choose? To me that’s just a better way to learn. And it also, by the way, is a lot easier for the experts as well as the authors. So it really is a discussion.

Gardner: There are more young people thinking about community and social networking, and so why not combine all of this into a happy discussion that is also substantive and educates at the same time?

Whitmore: It reflects real people with real attitudes, and not created by the lawyers and the PR people and the conservative forces within companies because that’s simply not going to work. I guess my – one of my last points or questions is, when are we going to see an example of a company relying on "content pyramid" philosophy, and could we prove that they were successful doing so? When are we going to see that?

Gardner: Well, we are seeing dribs and drabs of it. But the idea is to look at what’s effective in terms of engagement with your communities. And if you can engage your community with a whitepaper from the people doing lead generation – if they get 300 or 400 leads, I think it’s a success. But when you put something up on YouTube, you kind of get 30,000 to perhaps hundreds of thousands of potential downloads and click-throughs and looks.

So the scale is much greater and the cost can be comparable or even lower. I think that you are going to start to see what works in the field. When people recognize that search – that is, if they are number one or assumed to be in the top several media outlets, they are going to have to be there. Vendors will cultivate through PR and AR and Investor relations the search option too – operate among different channels or distributions of content to reach their end-users and communities.

I can see "search relations" as another possible definition of people’s approach to this.

Whitmore: Yeah, that’s a very interesting concept I think – very interesting concept. But from a VP of sales perspective, Dana, I don’t want 30,000 leads; I want the 25 that are in an advanced state of consideration for the product that I sell.

Gardner: Then you just vet them. You take that 30,000 potential community and then you bring them down into another level of content that will be able to slough off those who are not interested very much. That’s to say, if they’ll click through and look at a five-minute video, that means there’s mild interest; if they’ll click further down and read a transcript of hear a podcast on a similar topic, but more refined, that shows even more self-selecting and self-interest.

Then if they listen to the podcast and then you get down to the where it’s a lead generation benefit, and that’s where you cut out the wheat from the chaff, and you get real leads. It's also where the content pyramid works; you need the content to walk them down that path of self-selection. But I would rather start with a large universe and work it down, creating brand affinity and relationships with those people, and then find the content and the mechanisms that then bring them right down to the point where they are ready to sign up for the product or service.

So the pyramid is in that case inverse – you start wide and you go narrow. But the content creation process should start specific and narrow and then go wide. I mean, it has to be two-way discussion. But once you engage the people on a discussion, that’s where you have the opportunity to then bring them into a myriad of different opportunities for bringing them into your business.

Whitmore: Are there examples of people that are prospering with this philosophy?

Gardner: The notion of getting people to a sales and marketing activity requires community and affinity and interest, and you have to lure them in there and then get them to click – whether the click is a download or it’s a lead generation form.

I’d look at some companies that are good at that. I would again bring up IBM, but I have also noticed that BMC has a very good page, where you can go for information. And this page has got a listing of all sorts of content that has to do with specific values about what they bring their customers.

And they are saying, "Here’s the content that we have created. Here’s content that we found out there that others have created. Here are links to blogs and podcasts that we think are relevant to this. Here’s a download of whitepapers in the traditional marketing literature." But it really is just a site or a destination around a topic that’s a subset of their business that people can go to, and then they could get an RSS feed from.

In a sense, BMC is doing their community a service through a knowledge triage around a specific topic that then hopefully will engage them. And so I would say BMC is a good example. They still have to populate this; people who come back, the people who have a subscription to RSS are going to need something new and fresh coming down their pipe every week or two.

But again, I think that they're creating this – a sense of a funnel – and then qualifying people and then hopefully getting them into an engagement.

It therefore requires these companies to become publishers themselves.

Whitmore: Yeah, but most companies don’t have the headcount for that.

Gardner: Why not?

Whitmore: Because usually the executives are going to say, “If I had any spare headcount, I'm going to put it in sales and field marketing and they're not going to get into the publishing business.” Now they might subcontract it out to somebody, but I don’t think they're going to bring it in-house, I’d be very surprised.

Gardner: Well, I was thinking the same thing when I started my business, Sam. I thought that I would be one of those subcontractors – and I am. I basically help people figure out how to make content distributed and keep it credible and valuable. But increasingly I'm seeing more and more companies are actually saying, “We're going to create a studio – a video studio inside of our company.”

Whitmore: What kinds of companies?

Gardner: Well, Red Hat, for example, recently had a job posting that they are looking for someone who has experience as a video producer. And they are going to start doing this in-house, I suspect. And I expect to be able to see the same thing from other companies.

Whitmore: That’s interesting; because they live in a viral world. And Apple’s the same way.

Gardner: Their goal is to get people to download the code that then leads to a support and maintenance that interests business.

So I think that will be a mixture. For some companies, they're not going to be interested in being in the content business, they’ll outsource the whole thing. Other companies will say, “Listen, just makes more sense for us to make this a core competency. We will still use traditional media, but we're going to create our own media too.”

Let’s think about the numbers here. Let’s say you're a $5 billion-a-year company, revenue-wise in the IT space. You and I have worked for large IT publications. What was the total editorial budget?

Whitmore: Well, back in my day? It was at least $1 million.

Gardner: Let’s say you could create an entire weekly news publication that’s the best in its field for a couple of million a year, and you're a $5 billion company. Wouldn’t you throw $750,000 or $1 million at a core competency of content creation, and perhaps soon dominate your space for content, and dominate all of the keyword searches because you're putting up the best, precious, more interesting content?

Whitmore: If I had strong enough leadership I would.

Gardner: If I were spending five times that much on just advertising, and half of that advertising was wasted but I didn’t know which half it was – wouldn’t I take some of that money and devote it into my own content creation competencies? I think this is no-brainer. I think that any company, after a certain critical mass of size, should look at their content creation spend, among their marketing spend and advertising spends.

It's time to take from Paul, who may not be delivering the goods, and pay Peter, who can create great content that gets used many powerful ways. That's the content pyramid, that's the strategic method to content.