Content strategy | Virtually Anything is Possible

Sep
27

Want to build your fan base? Then be valuable.

Category: Content strategy, Digital strategy, Social Engagement, Social Media Tags: engagement, fan base, reach, value Leave a Comment

I get a lot of questions about the best way to grow and engage online audiences and unlike what many “experts” say, there are no magic tricks or easy ways to do this. To grow, nurture and engage a fan base you simply have to consistently and purposefully do the work and put in the time.

If you want to grow your reach, you simply have to provide a meaningful experience through sharing valuable insights, content, and knowledge — and by listening to and engaging with others online in the right context. People won’t be interested in what you have to say or offer if you are not providing value.

It’s not about you

We are bombarded with a constant flurry of information, tools, and resources being thrown at us from every direction. Each company, consultant, or expert wants us to engage with them in some capacity. What types of content stands out to you? Think about the last time a post or article really had you engaged. What was it about the content that made it compelling? Was it the topic? Format? Content that only talks about you or how great your company or product is is probably not at the top of anyone’s list. Most people are thirsty for tools and resources to make them smarter, solve problems, and that makes them more successful in their daily lives. All we have to do is figure out how to rise to the challenge.

Customer pain points = engagement topics

You know your audience best! Start by making a list of their pain points, priorities, and everyday needs. Do this based on the outcome they are looking for. For example, perhaps your customers are small businesses that need to learn how to operate as efficiently as possible. Helping them with best practices around all aspects of running a small business, including tools, resources, and ‘grab-and-go’ templates for business operations would be of great value. If you don’t have these assets you can either create them or simply find and evaluate readily available resources online. Even if you are sharing resources from others, you are adding value by filtering and curating it for them!

Inventory your assets

Whether your offering is a product, service, program or widget – you have something to offer beyond what you are selling. You are a subject matter expert, and are in business to provide value to your customers.The subject matter expertise that your fellow employees have locked away inside their heads and the valuable content assets you have hanging out on random company laptops are your greatest assets! Take your list of customer pain-points and priorities and inventory the content and expertise you have that supports each item. Look for things like whitepapers, powerpoint presenations, recorded webinars, articles, research reports and more. Get creative with your people – your internal SME’s can write blog posts, participate in interviews, share presentations and much more.

Layer your content

Engaging customers with your knowledge and content is not a linear process. For each content asset you have, you can possibly create smaller, more consumable and engaging content products. For example, if your company publishes a research report, you can create several different content assets from it, including: Infographics, a series of individual data stats, blog post, webinar, powerpoint presentation, charts & graphs, downloadable executive summaries in ebook format and more. Layering your content assets is a really powerful way to increase the probability that more people will engage with you, because it can be used in many different contexts. Building layers of content adds depth and value to the overall online experience you offer – and ultimately strengthens your online brand.

My presentation from Digital East 2012

Building your fan base with content and social tools from Susan Cato

There are many organizations who are doing this well, and it’s worth it to do a little benchmarking to help get you started and to inspire some ideas. Hopefully this approach resonates with you – and is helpful in getting started with your online engagement strategy.

If you get overwhelmed, just keep it simple and remember to put yourself in your customers shoes and bring your value.

Aug
29

By Susan

Cut through the noise: You know your audience best

Category: Content strategy, Digital strategy, Internet Strategy, Social Media Tags: consultants, opinion, sme Leave a Comment

On any given day, we are exposed to thousands of messages, and with the proliferation of social media we’re bombarded with more and more “expert” tips, tricks and approaches for engaging our customers for online success.

How do I cut through the noise?

With a plethora of “experts” telling us what to do, it’s no wonder we have lost our own voice, our intuitive guide, or even our confidence around the fact that we actually do know what is best for our customers – and probably have a pretty good feel for how best to engage with them both on and off-line.

You gotta trust that you are the SME (Subject Matter Expert).

The bottom line is that no one else knows your audience and customers better than you do. After all, your job is to understand their pain-points and priorities – and deliver value in meaningful and relevant ways. You know how best to help them to be successful, to walk away smarter and to keep them coming back for more.

Even if you don’t have a lot of experience using online tools to do so, your experience with what works vs. what doesn’t will go a long way with your online activities.

Don’t lose the plot.

What you bring to the table is really important, because these days it’s really easy to lose that point of clarity.

Listen and learn.

When choosing consultants, agencies and/or contractors, be sure they really listen and learn from you before partnering with them, and certainly before they make any ‘expert’ recommendations.

Only after truly listening can they add value by helping to open up new doors with fresh ideas and approaches. After all, a truly successful partnership can only happen when both parties are actively listening and complementing each other with knowledge and ideas. A partnership like this is a fearsome thing to behold!

So I ask – what do your relationships with your consultants, agencies, and/or contractors look or feel like?

Aug
5

By Susan

Checklist for Ongoing Social Engagement

Category: Content strategy, Social Engagement Tags: blogging, social networks, twitter Leave a Comment

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with social engagement activities, causing a loss of focus and time. For this reason, I created a social engagement cheat sheet to help myself and others in my organization stay focused. This pretty much sums up my core activities to staying socially “committed.”

Obviously there is a lot more that can be done, but this is a good start. Not only does this help to create clarity and focus for the team, it provides clear instructions on for those new to using social tools for engagement (at least initially).

Doing this in a distributed fashion by creating a small ‘team’ of individuals so you can divvy up the work is optimal. Remember, a team can be as small as 2 people. Engaging others in your organization is also a covert operation to create a more ‘social’ culture (but that’s a topic for another post).

Checklist for ongoing social engagement

Use a Social Content Calendar:

Use the social content calendar to understand what corporate social content and activities are being posted throughout our networks. Re-purpose posts or simply share and comment on a regular basis.

LinkedIn:

Regularly update my company’s LinkedIn profile with news and information about my organization
Visit LinkedIn.com ‘Answers’ and answer 3-5 questions per week

Facebook:

Update my Facebook business page several times a week (at a minimum) with insightful and relevant information, questions and/other activity that my audience actually cares about.

Twitter

Share helpful, interesting Tweets at least 2x per day
Engage or give a shout-out to others by responding and/or sharing their tweets or mentioning them on #FollowFriday (see Mashable post on this)

Blogging and Link Love

Write 2 to 3 blog posts a week
Comment on 5 blog posts a week
Share links to 3-5 blog posts (from others) on appropriate social networks

Photos & Video

Upload a series of short (90 sec-2 min) YouTube videos that to provide value to our audience
Upload all public photographs on Flickr or Picassa that help demonstrate the value of my product/service or help make my company more approachable. I will share these on my website, blog, and other social networks.

Slideshare

Post content to Slideshare once or twice a month. I will share these on my website, blog and other social networks.

Comments, Responses, Questions

Respond to all valid, respectable comments, responses, questions within 24 hours. These come in many forms and I will scan all of my social networks and communities daily.
Use a tool like Social Mention to scan conversations regarding my organization, product or service to see if there is opportunity to connect/respond to highly engaged individuals

Feb
28

By Susan

YouTube Collab? Content creation and mass collaboration by 12 year-olds

Category: Content strategy, Digital strategy, Social Media Tags: collab, Content strategy, youtube Leave a Comment

In a recent exchange with my 12 year old daughter, I learned about a simple, yet brilliant phenomenon going on via YouTube – the collab.

Summary of our conversation:

Daughter: Mom, I am SO excited because I just got accepted into a collab

Me: A WHAT?

Daughter: A collab on YouTube – you know, where different people submit videos to one channel each week around a specific topic for that week.

Me: OH! You mean collab as in collaboration? So what are the rules? Where can I read them?

Daughter: (Blank stare) What do you mean, read them? They are in a video, duh?

Me: Oh. Silly (old) me. So how did you get accepted?

Daughter: I had to audition with a video response on her YouTube channel.

Me: So you had to make a video in order to audition – that’s pretty neat. What is the topic?

Daughter: All about Guinea Pigs. It works like this. One week it will be how to build different cages, the next week it will be guinea pig nutrition, the following week it will be tips and tricks to make cage cleaning easy, etc. I have Wednesdays, so each Wednesday I have to submit my video on the topic of the week. This way, we can find out new ideas and ways to take care of our guinea pigs by having different people contribute different videos on the same topic. I also learn about different ways to make my own videos by watching these as well.

Me: (to myself) Sigh. I have so much to learn.

…

Is it just me or is this really brilliant?

YouTube collabs are not a new idea – but through her eyes, I see all kinds of possibilities.

This is content creation and mass collaboration by 12 year-olds – they are creating a really valuable content-filled channel through collaborating with like-minded individuals, around common topics. Needless to say, the wheels are now turning in my head. Could this approach support any current strategic objectives in my organization? Could we use this to solve a problem in our community? Can schools/classrooms use it to learn about new ideas and concepts? Could it be an alternative way to report on news topics? Create music?

It seems that all that’s really needed is a clear topic/idea, along with some simple guidelines (deadlines, content, etc) as well as clarity around approach (how do videos get accepted, etc) and a core community of interest to get started – unless I am missing anything?

I did some poking around and found YouTube’s “Life in a Day” project which is probably the most popular and successful example of something like this. Please share other examples if you find them – I am really interested to learn how people are using this concept and let me know what you think.

Jun
25

By Susan

3 posts to help cure bloggage

Category: Content strategy Tags: blogging, how-to, writing 1 Comment

I have been suffering from some serious ‘bloggage’ - a term commonly used to describe one’s inability to find the inspiration or time to blog regularly.

I dug into my arsenal of links and recovered the following three posts about blogging.

These posts provide practical ideas and techniques to come up with ideas for topics and approaches for writing posts:

Share your resources here!

Dec
16

By Susan

Social media strategy and content strategy: like peas and carrots

Category: Associations, Content strategy, Digital strategy, Internet Strategy, Social Media Tags: content, tips, web strategy 3 Comments

If I have said it once, I have said it a thousand times. Developing a content strategy and plan is extremely critical for a successful social media strategy.

You can’t invite folks to dinner without offering them a meal.

And why does everything come back to food, anyway? or shoes – oh yeah, that’s another post.

Back to the topic at-hand. Developing a focused and valuable content strategy requires us to think through a few high-level things first, then apply that to our social media activities.

Here is what I recommend:

Get your smart, innovative creative thinkers in the room. Ask the following questions (can be about a program, product, or around organizational goals):

What are our goals – in one year, what is the story we want to tell?

This is where you clearly articulate the outcome, based on what you want to be saying when you have successfully accomplished it. Then you work backwards from there.

About your core audience(s), ask yourselves the following questions:

What are their pain points – needs?
What do they find valuable?
Who are they and where are they already gathering online?
How many are current members or participants in any way?
How many know who we are as an organization?
What are the possibilities for future engagement/interactions (membership, content creation, speaking, interviews, etc)?
Beyond the default ‘networking’ answer, what do we have (or what can be created) that would be really valuable to them: Experiences, Content, Knowledge
What is the best way for us to brainstorm activities, events, content to address the answers to these?
How do we use the web and social platforms to engage and/or disseminate where appropriate?

Now that you have gathered an arsenal of knowledge, you can build your strategy. Here is what I suggest:

Develop an content grid/calendar that identifies topics, events/activities & content on a month-by-month basis
Brainstorm content tactics & identify resources for each
- consider existing content that can be re-purposed
- opportunities for new content creation: interviews for podcasts, guest articles and blog posts, white papers, toolkits, etc.

With this information, you can build your social media strategy and easily identify ways to disseminate, communicate, and engage using both traditional and new (social) media.

Make sense? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Sep
2

By Susan

Using tags for collecting, organizing and publishing content

Category: Associations, Content strategy, How to, Internet Strategy Tags: Content strategy, custom content, mashups, rss feeds, social bookmarking, tagging strategy Leave a Comment

Strategic content tagging is one the most overlooked practices online today. Using them strategically not only helps others find your stuff, but it helps you repackage and repurpose content easily and in very targeted ways.

If the basic concept of tagging confuses you – check out this “Tagging 101″ tutorial from ZDnet:

Many people associate tagging with Social Bookmarking – which is a very powerful (and useful) concept worthy of a conversation on its own – Jason Falls provides a great explanation about this on Social Media Explorer.

Most organizations are overwhelmed by the fact that their content and resources live in different places (especially in a web 2.0 world). My organization has content on Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare, Delicious, and have several blogs and podcasts. I also use google news and blog alert feeds from time-to-time as well. We are also having conversations on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Meetup and Ning.

On top of this, we are implementing an enterprise-wide content management system (cms) to manage and publish our core content as well.

The question was, how can I strategically combine and repurpose content from these different online properties efficiently and effectively? How can I repackage them around topics, issues, events, etc., when they come from different places? Even with enough resources – this can be very overwhelming.

This is fairly easy to do if you consistently use tags. Here is what I do:

Create an index of tags to be used throughout my organization – essentially this is a keyword list. It is a living document that we update regularly. This can have many applications but at the very least it helps make content management more efficient.
Tag content on all of our online properties accordingly – keeping it as consistent as possible. Everything from blog posts to video – making it possible for us to create very specific feeds.
Create RSS feeds and used feedburner (when appropriate) to publish content on our sites. Feedburner also allows users to subscribe via email, which comes in handy as well. This way the feeds are controlled through feedburner – and I can adjust them accordingly. I also get stats for performance as well.
Create “packages” of content accordingly – either via dashboard pages on our websites or through repurposed feeds throughout our social networks.

Using tags this way allows me (and users) to easily combine, repackage and repurpose content in many different ways. It also allows us to manage content in a distributed environment, as long as we are all working off of the same list of tags “keywords” – we are able to quickly combine and organize our content and links – and deliver it accordingly.

I am still experimenting with alternative ways of using tags – so let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas.