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:

• How to write a blog post - from Outspoken Media
• 20 Ways to up your blogging fun quota - from Problogger.com
• 100+ SMB Blogging Ideas to Kick Start 20 - from Small Business Trends
  

Share your resources here!

Well, not really…

Think of yourself at a reception at one of your events.  When you are asked to mingle and network with event attendees, we nurture relationships through conversation, make connections and share ideas, which ultimately strengthens customer loyalty and engagement.

This is what social networking is all about.  Social media simply refers to the tools we use to communicate and talk about it.

Successful organizations adopt this social approach as part of their culture – and that is where you want to be.  It is customer service, marketing, sales, member outreach and networking all rolled in to one.  For many of us, it is (or should be) part of what we do every day.

We have a challenge and an opportunity

Our challenge is to step outside of our comfort zone and learn how to use these new tools.  Our opportunity is to take our organizations to the next level using social media and social networks in innovative and creative ways – engaging our members, customers and partners beyond what we currently do.

Whether it’s customer service, communications, marketing, or general outreach – we should all be using these social tools to share information, participate in conversations, answer questions, and communicate information about everything you do.

Here are a few things you can do:

• Participate in conversations and share links in your social networks on LinkedIn and/or Facebook.
• Start reading industry blogs and start leaving comments and engaging in conversations.
• Start using Twitter – search Twitter every day for your organizations name and see what people are saying.
• Share ideas for blog posts and/or podcasts with the appropriate folks in your organization.

Let me know what you are doing to get involved!

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.

Mehta cites that sound business strategies are “rooted in developing, maintaining and strengthening relationships with customers.” Social media enables us to do just that - if managed in the right way. Mehta goes on to say that “Social media isn’t a means to further a corporation’s strategy, it’s a means to help determine it.”

Amen to that. Yes, we can use Social media just for the sake of  it - but the real power is in conversation. It’s in nurturing relationships with  customers in new and innovative ways - connecting them with real people, content, and knowledge of interest to them - that makes customers ever-so-loyal to our brand. Then they want to hang out with us no matter what. It’s personal, and it’s business. And that is powerful.

Zappos got this right. In all of their social media outlets, they actually talk to me, not at me. They are funny and personal, and help me with what I need (if they can). That’s why I heart Zappos. Don’t you think that what they did online and with social media helped to determine their future as a company? I think so.

Why did this post about social media end up talking about shoes anyway?

Go check it out: http://www.prezi.com

Use Poll Everywhere to engage your audience. Poll Everywhere enables people to answer via text (sms) message, twitter, or the web and can display results real-time on your powerpoint slides.

How cool is that?

It is by far the best Twitter explanation I have found. Check it out.

Kevin Dugan’s recent post on his Strategic Public Relations blog on Text vs. E-mail or Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants describes a recent experience he had where he encouraged to provide his cell phone number rather than email address to receive coupons and updates from a local coffee shop. I can see why it is attractive - marketers would no longer have to deal with email deliverability issues and recipients can begin reducing the amount of SPAM in their inboxes. Not only that, I can have my coupons on my cell phone, so when I go to that coffee shop or bookstore I can get my discount (I am forever forgetting to print out my borders rewards coupons).

Texting is becoming so commonplace that we are now seeing it used in schools. In fact, educators are beginning to understand that ‘digital natives‘ actually process information differently - and the use of text messaging in education is quickly becoming a hot topic.

Some educators are going as far to say using SMS in the classroom to summarize complex topics helps to increase understanding - (as discussed in “Messaging Shakespeare” from the Northwest Educational Technology Consortium - NETC).

Cell phones offer new potential for learning, if well-managed.  They can send short text messages (SMS), images, and browse the Web. Users can also send files from their phone to be published on a Web page. Imagine students gathering survey data outside class - now instead of purchasing new tools students’ cell phones may enable efficient data transfer and analysis.  –NETC

This all sounds really crazy - and foreign to me. Thoughts?

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.