ChasNote

I hope the folks at Cococu are saying nice things!

Marketing Shift weighs in, too:

“…companies are looking for ways to aggregate communities even if it’s not directly tied to their core business. Chris Brogan points out that American Express is doing just that with its OPEN Forum, which aggregates blog and business information in one place and encourages conversation in a sponsored area with the hopes of subtly marketing to people who have an interest in business information (e.g. potential American Express users). When you think about it, the concept is a no-brainer. We trust people more when we don’t feel like they are selling us on something. It’s why we hate ads — and marketing.”

Steven Lewis at Inside the Box, while not exactly speaking a different language, adds his support from Australia.

And if financial jargon qualifies as a foreign language, we can count NetBanker:

“American Express’s OpenForum: As the name suggests, it’s a business forum and resource directory, not unlike Bank of America’s…. American Express has added posts from several prominent bloggers such as John Battelle’s Searchblog and Anita Campbell’s Small Biz Trends, to keep the site fresh. The site has 5,400 members and monthly traffic of about 11,000 unique visitors, up three-fold from a year ago.”

Goes to show you: If your marketing projects are great media with quality content and authentic conversation, not only will you engage your customers more deeply, you’ll benefit from social-media amplification as those customers spread the word across the web.

Here’s more positive coverage of American Express’s OPEN Forum blog, a partnership between American Express and several FM business authors. My favorite line:

“To everyone behind the creation of the OPEN Forum, good job! To anyone who has not checked it out yet, please do!”

Chris Brogan writes American Express is OPEN.

He’s referring not only to Amex’s small business brand (OPEN Forum is an American Express trademark); he’s congratulating the company on its open approach to content at the OPEN Forum blog, a site where American Express teams up with several FM-affiliate small-business authors to create credible, third-party business content (not advertising or advertorial) and to give American Express customers reason to come back to the site for something other than account status. As my colleague James Gross (the guy who put this program together) describes it:

“Our goal was to bring together leading experts in an engaging experience at the OPEN platform itself. Thus, any of the authors work that was picked up on other blogs, social media engines like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc., would all give credit back to OPEN as being the keeper/facilitator of the conversation. In the new world of media, these trackbacks and links provide a new form of Brand Equity for OPEN. This again drives home the point behind the OPEN brand that they are here for Small Businesses to make their life better and grow their business.”

Brogan, a business blogger himself, likes the idea:

“I think it’s definitely a way to build a content network [for a marketer] that would be more useful to end readers. It’s not that we don’t want more traffic to our blog, but that there are ways this content can be made more useful to end readers, by being curated by others in interesting ways. That’s why we use Creative Commons. That’s why we use RSS. It’s the plan.”

American Express’s partnership with top business and tech website authors to create the OPEN Forum Blog creates an opportunity for American Express to deliver banner ads that do more than promote credit-card offers; AMEX ad banners running on other business sites are promoting content instead — which, of course, stand a better chance of being noticed. One ad, running on tech business site Mashable, caught the attention of a Mashable editor, who posted this comment at the OPEN Forum Blog:

The more high-quality, credible content that’s published at American Express’s OPEN Forum blog site, the more instances that other sites will tell their readers about it, link to it and improve the OPEN Forum’s “relevance” in search engines. Here’s another from the official WOMMA site.

In a recent post on American Express’s Open Forum site, Battelle tells business owners who interact with their customers online: You no longer just selling widgets, you’re in the media business. The point is this, don’t define yourself by what you sell (”we sell trains!”) but rather the service you provide your customers (transportation services). American Express — the company that’s paying Battelle and other business authors to license their content — gets it. The Open Forum site isn’t about selling plastic debit cards, it’s about empowering their customers with tools to grow their businesses, plastic debit cards and insightful business content included.

Last fall (if not earlier), American Express recognized the importance of search equity, the status of its brand among the organic results from search engines. These results — the free ones, not the paid listings — are a proxy for the relevance and trust your brand has earned among its business ecosystem: customers, partners, the press and the peanut gallery. In other words, your brand’s position in search results reflects how active and successful you are in the conversation.

I say last fall because that’s when I first noticed American Express paying careful attention to the small-business authors and bloggers that rank highly on search results for SMB terms and phrases (including American Express trademarks), and making sure its ad messages surfaced on those high-influence sites.

Now American Express is making an even greater investment in its search equity, a greater commitment to having a voice within the small business conversation. It has partnered with top independent content creators covering small business — especially those authors who don’t merely create content but also use content to inspire a conversation — to produce the OPEN Forum Insight from Business Experts site.

Authors such as Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, Scott Belsky of Behance.net and John Battelle of Searchblog are contributing exclusive content to the site. No plugs for Amex OPEN Forum Events or Travel Services from these contributors, mind you, just insightful editorial features on the topics Anita, Scott and John cover at their own sites. Content that appeals, quite obviously, to their existing audiences, which opens the door to efficient marketing in two ways. One, American Express is running ads on each site that invite readers to read more from the authors they came to read in the first place. Ads for original content by top business authors, targeted to those authors’ loyal readers? Needless to say, click-through performance on these ads is vastly better than average.

Two, authors don’t want to publish content and then hide it from their core audiences, so American Express is benefiting from some unpaid (and un-asked-for) promotions, like this call-out by Anita Campbell to her own content at the OPEN Forum site.

When audiences follow their favorite authors to the OPEN Forum site, they arrive ready for a conversation. A week in and visitors have clicked on the “I find this post useful” button more than 100 times, and the commenters are out-pacing the contributors based on word counts. Engaged visitors tend to carry the conversation with them, too, even as they leave the site that started it. According to Technorati, 17 blogs are linking to this section of the OPEN Forum site, and there have been news pick-ups by aggregators such as I Want Media (on 2/22/08). As more sites “endorse” the conversation by linking to it, Digging it and Twittering it, Google will take notice, and American Express’s search equity will feel the juice. And the 1% rule of social media suggests that for every comment post and every trackback link published, there are 99 others who quietly found the content useful. Search equity is the tip of the social-media iceberg — a partial indicator of a much larger phenomenon.

Congratulations to the team that put this together: Steve Clark, Jason Ewell, Naama Ashkenazi Bloom, Amy Fitzgibbons and Lou Paskalis at American Express; Rachel Bogan, Lee Baler and Scott Cappuzzo at Digitas; and James Gross, Marcia Simmons, Matt Jessell and Teresa Nielsen Hayden at FM.

Disclosure: When Battelle isn’t writing Searchblog, he is FM’s CEO and my boss.

American Express announced their new “plum card” earlier this month at the Inc 500 event in Chicago. Two FM authors, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing and Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, attended the event and covered the launch. (Amex runs ads on both sites.)

Googling “plum card” gives you a glimpse into the new dynamics of influence. Business Week and Inc. have more reach (unique users and pageviews) than sites like Duct Tape Marketing and Small Business Trends, and American Express owns the “plum card” trademark, but Google ranks results in order of relevance. Which sites, Google’s algorithm asks, are most trusted by others, based on their in-bound links? It turns out Duct Tape Marketing (the #2 organic result) and Small Business Trends (#3) are the marketshare leaders when it comes to trust influence in the world small business. American Express’s own site ranks #4.