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Why I like a good content production strategy

8 February 2010 in Explanation, Toolkit by Kate | Comments

Can’t figure out where to start a “social media” marketing program? Why don’t you start with a content strategy. Frankly, I don’t think most social media programs should be done without a content production component, for a few reasons:

It’s your starting point. It’s pretty hard to have a social media program without having content to put out. One way to get that is by pushing out other peoples’ content. But the best way – for obvious reasons – is usually to push out your own content. See below.
It gives you credibility in your industry and backs up your product or service. By putting out your own content, people (end-users, customers, partners) see that you know what you’re talking about, and that you have internal knowledge on whatever space you’re in. This content and credibility also justifies your product/service as a solution when it comes to making a decision.
It’s your brand. By branding your content, and developing a sense of expertise in your industry, you increase your brand image and your brand awareness, and you’re ideally able to reach a lot more people if your content is valuable enough to pass along.
It’s easy. This is the part that a lot of companies don’t recognize. You already have all of this content inside your doors. If you think about it, your company exists because it’s got at least some level of knowledge that’s directly applicable to the solution you’re offering. You may have internal marketing documents, business plans, strategy meeting notes, or product write-ups that can easily be repurposed into content. Not to mention the wealth of knowledge you and your coworkers have in their heads. I’ve never actually seen a company that doesn’t have scores of content opportunities inside their walls.

It doesn’t have to be formal. Instead of dedicating the amount of time it might take to write a white paper, why not try a few blog posts, or a one-pager on the subject?

So if you’re considering getting your feet wet in social media, think seriously about how you can add your own content to that.

What success have you seen with content production in your organization? Do you have any examples of identifying creative content opportunities?

If you’re interested, you can get more information on how we can help you with your content production strategies.

If you were to put your blog audience in a presentation hall……

24 September 2009 in Explanation by Kate | Comments

Illustration by Henry Blackburn in the New York GRAPHIC, Nov. 5, 1873 from the Dave Thomson collection.

I was explaining how to think about framing blog content as a thought leader to someone the other day and used the following analogy, which, at least in this particular case, proved effective.

Think of being able to have two different speaking opportunities, each one with a different section of your core audience, and each one with different goals. Allow me to elaborate.

Audience One:

Larger sized audience of people with a broader range of interests. Your role is to offer education at a level that many people will be able to find value in it, and most of them will want to hear more about it.

Audience Two:

Smaller sized audience of well-informed individuals and decision-makers. Your role here is to demonstrate your leadership in an area directly related to their needs, and to your solution. Your subject matter will be much more focused and in-depth.

Example: You offer a tool that greatly enhances the online fundraising capability for non-profits specifically on Twitter.

To Audience One you might talk about the role that social media plays in increasing support for your organization and allowing for more opportunities to donate.
To Audience Two you would talk specifically about the power of Twitter in general, and how that tool can be leveraged to enhance fundraising efforts. [Please note, I'm not discussing whether your language is sales-y or not... it never should be, but that's for another discussion].

Ideally, you have a series of speeches to Audience One, educating large numbers of people enough that you can convert them to a position where they might join Audience Two, and address Audience Two (converts from Audience One along with those who would have already been Audience Two candidates) in a few targeted speeches.

Translation? In general, a blog strategy works pretty well if you have your overall direction be focused on Audience One (most of your posts) and have a few posts strategically placed that target Audience Two.

How do you think of your blog strategy?

Women in Tech: Pledge for Ada Lovelace

8 January 2009 in Outreach by Kate | Comments

We’ve signed a pact to blog about Women in Tech on 24 March of this year.

According to PledgeBank:

“Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.”

Who was Ada do you ask?

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

Ada Lovelace Day needs your support!

5 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Company Blog

29 September 2008 in Uncategorized by Anya | Comments

Anya had some good insight over on her blog about what to ask yourself before starting up a company blog.

Check it out here.

Blog Day, 31 August 2008

26 August 2008 in Outreach by Kate | Comments

Aside from our participation in Blog Action Day, we’ll also be trying to promote five fellow bloggers in Blog Day, which was “created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest.”

We may include one blog from our industry, but will try and diversify (which will be easy for me to do).

A few nuggets from the AMA Web 2.0 talk last night

15 May 2008 in Uncategorized by Kate | Comments

Last night, the AMA Boston Chapter had a talk on how Web 2.0 and social media are effecting brands. It was given by Steve Mulder of Molecular. The talk was quite good, for energetic, and he makes some darn good PowerPoint slides….

I wanted to share some of the key takeaways that at least I got out of the talk.

1) First and foremost, throughout the entirety of the speech, very little focus was given to the negative examples of how social media has effected various companies, which I found refreshing.

2) His very loose description of what “Web 2.0” included the following four characteristics: User content, Openness, Rich interface and New digital interactions.

3) He highlighted the difference between using Web 2.0 as a Site Augmentor (for instance, corporate blog) vs a Site Co-creation (for instance, Facebook, a collaboration of those infamous “masses” out there).

4) Regardless of the medium, it needs to be integrated into the overall experience for the user, it can’t just “be” there.

5) Blogs, if you’re going to use them effectively, must be set up with a conversation in mind. They are most effective if they’re two-way

6) He brought up a site quickly called Rate My Teacher (I don’t think I need to explain). It brought up a question in my head that I don’t have an answer to: What do you do when you have a group such as teachers, usually much less connected to all things internet than we are, who just plain don’t know that sites like these exist? And the administration doesn’t know? Is that fair? Should there be an initiative within institutions like this to educate people on what’s out there?

7) Steve made an off-hand remark about his desire to see “more websites like that,” meaning more websites that were a collaboration of “the masses.” It led me to my question in the Q&A: How do you address the fact that there is still a desire by some to have an “expert opinion” amidst all the blogging? Is this being incorporated effectively? [using the example of the academic backlash against sites like Wikipedia]. His answer was that this wasn’t going away, this desire for credibility, but that certain people are beginning to incorporate it (and some better than others), into their sites.
My own thought: You want to create an open space for conversation, you don’t want to create the conversation it self. Think of it as a starting point for a larger discussion.

9) A few problems that corporations have found in trying to use Web 2.0 techniques: getting full commitment from everyone, realizing the actual resources it will take (including devoted time!), lack of an accurate measurement system (how is it effecting sales exactly?), and making it too much about promotion as opposed to customer education. His suggestions: start small, experiment, and get full commitment from your team or subteam. Most especially, don’t do it “just because.” There has to be passion and genuine motivation there. If not, your readers can tell.

10) Lastly, it got me thinking yet again about a past post I had on Craigslist. I still ask: What do we do when your purpose is to have a social community run by the masses, but it’s the masses who begin to make the site less and less effective either over time or with the influx of users? Do you just let the forces which will be, be? Do you cap membership, or put restrictions on usage, and if so, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Does this begin to create definitive life spans for Web 2.0 tools? Or is it still just a matter of “how well you do it?”

Time will tell I suppose.

Charles Gibson and ABC

23 February 2008 in Uncategorized by Kate | Comments

Charles Gibson came to speak at a small luncheon I attended at school on Thursday. Firstly, he’s a funny guy. More importantly though, he pointed to some key issues facing ABC that I wanted to touch upon.

Aside from asking us how much time he should devout to the McCain/NYT issue in his Thursday night World News clip, he started out the conversation by simply highlighting the fact that TV, and especially TV news programs were losing viewership. People were flocking to new sources of media, and that his show’s average viewer age has been increasing for the last several years, resting now at a solid 58 years old.

The few minutes we talked about this, and an instance as he was walking out the door, tells me that ABC (and all the others!) have a long way to go. He told us about a student at UPenn who had said to him “We’ll get to it when we get to it.” I think Charlie (was that presumptuous of me?) understood that comment was way off. He had interpreted it as that she was saying that some day when she and her cohorts get older that they’ll get back to the TV.

Yeah but, they won’t. That’s why viewership is getting older and declining. People are moving to and staying in new media, and they’re not coming back. So what does that mean? You either need to figure out a way to get them back, or need to embrace the change and get into new media (a decent article on the topic in Brandweek). That doesn’t mean hiring a few bloggers (I have a LOAD of comments on this move by pretty much all of the TV stations, but maybe I’ll save them for another post) or posting some videos.

So he wanted ideas, and since it’s a school of International Relations, when it came time for Q&A at the end, no one wanted to talk about new media, which is fine, it was a great Q&A session. On his way out, I walked up to Charlie and said “Sir, thank you for speaking, we really enjoyed it… hey, if I have a few ideas about ABC and the use of new media, how can I get them to you?”

His response? He gave me “his” snail mail address in NYC. Does anyone find that ridiculously ironic? And to boot, I’m fairly certain he would never ever see my letter. It would be opened by an intern and thrown in a pile, or else my ideas would be implemented and I would never hear about it.

But mainly this shows how out-of-touch the network is. There isn’t an understanding of how the “younger” viewers or potential viewers work. We don’t want to go online and log into ABC to read blogs (although I did just go on to check them out, they’re informative…). You need to make it better than that. I don’t want to send your station a letter with my ideas, I want you to come get them from me (or I’m just going to tell someone else). You need to tell me why I should be listening to World News with Charles Gibson each night at 6:30 when I’m usually doing work in the other room.

I could go on, but I think you all get it.

And so, Charles Gibson, if you’re out there, I have some ideas, come and get them.

Blogging vs Journalism

4 December 2007 in Uncategorized by Kate | Comments

In a recent interview with blogger Tony Pierce as he moves positions from LAist to LA Times, I noticed that he gave a good amount of props to traditional newspapers/journalists, commenting that “they have the best writers, they are the ones actually gathering news, and they have the best photographers, and the tightest infrastructure. They’re doomed for success as long as they stop fighting the inevitable.” I couldn’t agree more. Reputable journalists are, for the most part, trained to dig up info, research stories and give us the best of their findings, biased or not. It’s the facts.

Which leads to the question of which is better? I used to disregard bloggers (this was some time ago, as I now have two of them!), chocking them up to people who just wanted to vent and throw out unsubstantiated claims. That was pretty naïve on my part. But we’ll go ahead and chock that up to inexperience and elitism… a common occurrence for someone in their early twenties who had degrees in History and Political Science.

Moving ahead, it started to become common that, while searching for info in graduate school, blogs were among Google’s first finds. So I started reading them…. with a grain of salt of course. And back to the issue of biases, yeah, blogs are full of them. They’re mostly opinion of facts.

So we end up with facts versus opinions. And again, which is better? Well, I’m proud to say my views have changed and I consider both better. I’ll always read a newspaper or magazine for a set purpose, harvesting for facts and information on what’s happening today, being aware of biases, and trying to par it down to data. That’s fine. And because of my training, I look at as many sides of the issue that I can (yes, I’m Middle-of-the-Road on politics).

But this is where blogs come in with an attribute that forces this process on people who wouldn’t otherwise go through it. Because of the vast amount of information online, it’s close to impossible to do a search on a particular topic without finding a blog or a blogesque quality to it. Even the big newspapers online have comments offered by bloggers (or just plain commenters).

The opinions are out there, and in your face. And it’s great. You almost can’t avoid reading an opinion contrasting your own views, and that’s what needs to be happening. One of the biggest downfalls I see in people is being unflinchingly dogmatic.

So slowly, the blogging world is chipping away at this. And I say keep it up.

blogging

Women in Tech: Pledge for Ada Lovelace

5 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Company Blog

Blog Day, 31 August 2008

A few nuggets from the AMA Web 2.0 talk last night

Charles Gibson and ABC

Blogging vs Journalism

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