The content conundrum: 5 ways to create expert content with limited resources

By Anita O’Malley

In the world of tighter budgets, less staff and more workflow, who has time to write content?  How much do you have to write to be effective? Why write it at all?

A recent business study showed that 75 percent of buyers are likely to use social media in the purchase process and 55 percent of B2B survey respondents search for information using social sites.  Remember all those social platforms you put up for your company? Better have something to say on them, or better yet, have something to pass along. Content is your currency, make it worth sharing within your target community!

Below are five ideas on how you can create expert content, with limited resources:

1.    Curate

This is the cornerstone of a robust content management program. Similar to a museum curator, you don’t create the artwork; you collect and assemble it into a relevant showpiece. This involves organizing just where you are going to get your content from, and that’s not Wikipedia. A well-organized collection of useful information will motivate your audience not only to read, but also share with others.

Just ask Guy Kawasaki. He’s a master curator, employing a staff to help sort through the mountains of information buzzing across the web. In fact he uses Twitter to send folks to his website at Alltop.com by tweeting links to his “online magazine rack,” in other words, the content he has aggregated from original sources.

Trusted, credible sources are key to curating good content. Start by building a go-to list of sites that you rely on regularly. For me, as a social businessperson, a few I subscribe to via email for updates are:

• Daily Infographic
• Ragan Communications
• Business2Community

In addition, I use Facebook to like pages such as Mashable.com/tech to get all the technology news by the master curated site on the web.

2.    Crowdsourcing

Here’s yet another way of collecting knowledge from different sources, where the aggregated collection is the value. You’ll want to ask subject matter experts in your network a specific topic based question or two and aggregate your findings. Here’s an example of expert shared tips, which makes for a perfect published piece: Laptop Life Tips: Experts Share 10 Tricks To Make Your Computer Last Longer.

Or you can take a more public poll. Facebook recently added a Poll app called “Ask a Question.” Survey Monkey also allows free surveys and gives you a link to drive traffic to. LinkedIn Answers offers a chance to ask industry professionals for feedback and opinions.

Here’s a question: “What percentage of your marketing budget are you going to use on creating content this year?”

3.    Comment

I just read a story about Big Data and where it’s headed. Well, if I’m a systems architect, I just may have a lot to say about that. I cite the story, and then add my commentary. It’s also good practice to notify its author and build a warm relationship. Follow him/her on their social sites as well, you’re building press credentials for later.

4.    Use Numbers and Lists

Research shows that the highest rated posts on the web organize their content into numerical lists. 5 ways to create content, 3 top server consolidation methods, 7 of your favorite blogs (this one included). A list that is well sourced and has meaning will inspire your readers to comment and engage.  No room for fluff here. Quality is the key as shown in this article by HubSpot, “The Top 10 Qualities of High Quality List Posts.”

5.    Interview

My colleague, Kathy Tito, from New England Sales & Marketing does this very well. In “The Bootstrap” blog, she finds people of interest in technology marketing and interviews them Q and A style in a candid, no-nonsense way. Not only does it make for some great storytelling, but also she has acquired some great business contacts along the way.

What would you add to this list? How are you creating content with limited resources?

This post is courtesy of guest blogger Anita O’Malley, who is a social and marketing business communications expert. She recently curated her own company, Perspectiv3. She can be reached at anitaom@perspectivmarketing.com. 

Why your organization needs a domain strategy

Creating a domain strategy should be one of the first things you do when developing an overall Internet marketing strategy for your organization.

Organizations should make sure that they purchase multiple top level domains (TLDs) so that they all point to one primary domain name.

What does this mean?  If your company primary domain name has a .com TLD, they should also purchase the domain rights to .org, .net, .mobi, .biz, .jobs and .info.  You should also purchase some misspellings of your original domain name to make sure that your audience gets to your website.  For example, type in yahoo.org, yahoo.biz, yahoo.info into your web browser.  Do they all direct you to yahoo.com?   Yes.  If you type in yahooo.org with the extra ‘o’ do you get directed to yahoo.com?  Yes.  Yahoo is a great example of a company that successfully implements a domain strategy with multiple TLDs.

Why should you care?  One of the best mainstream examples of how a domain issue can affect organizations is the whitehouse.com controversy.  If you are trying to go to the White House website and type in whitehouse.com, you won’t find out about President Obama’s latest press conference.  You’ll need to instead go to whitehouse.gov.  A web page designer purchase whitehouse.com first and made it an adult site.  (It has since been changed to another site.)  CNET’s Whitehouse.com goes porn article summarizes this controversy well.

So do you want your organization’s clients and prospects go to a site that is not affiliated with your organization?  Worse yet, do you want to your audience (who may be young children) to encounter adult content instead of your content?  A cybersquatter took advantage of the popularity of the White House to promote his content.  Do you want your organization to fall victim to this too?

To learn more about the benefits of why your organization should purchase multiple TLDs and point them to one domain, I recommend you visit these two posts: advantages of multiple TLD registrations and why use multiple domain names?

Does your organization have a domain strategy?

These are a few of my favorite social media things

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the musical film The Sound of Music. The song that everyone knows from this movie is “My Favorite Things.” In tribute to this movie and song, I would like to share with you a few of my favorite social media things.

Video

A refresh of the original Social Media Revolution video with new and updated statistics. The facts in the video come from the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.

PowerPoint

This is a great presentation, courtesy of the Social Media Club of Greenville.

Database

A list of 126 social media policies, all in one location. Also, another must-read for developing and implementing your social media policy: 10 Must Haves for Your Social Media Policy.

Quote

Chris Brogan from his new book Social Media 101: “Social media lets you go wide, but YOU have to make it go deep.”

Want more social media quotes? Then, you should read 99 favorite social media quotes and tips.

E-Newsletter

PR Daily — a daily e-newsletter and website from Ragan Communications — that highlights the top stories from the web about social media, marketing and public relations.

What are some of your favorite social media things?

Show your constituents some love

By Matt Lindsay

We’ve been featuring Alumni Valentines in our GW Colonial Cable alumni e-newsletter for three years running. I typically have some trouble finding couples to profile, but this year was different.

We leveraged social networks and asked couples whose relationship began at GW to share their stories. I posted a message to our GW Alumni LinkedIn Group and on Twitter (@GWAlumni) and watched the messages rolled in.

We received 25+ stories, more than enough for our e-newsletter, and enough to spill over into a “More Alumni Valentines” story next month. The story received two to three times as many click-throughs as our traditional feature story in our e-newsletter.

On this Valentine’s Day I encourage you to show your constituents some love by engaging them across your social networks to help you tell more interesting stories.

Know Your Audience

We try to segment our social media outlets and target our messages accordingly. Here is how we focus our communications on each of the GW Alumni social networks (recognizing there is some audience overlap):

LinkedIn– Build awareness of career services, opportunities, and news, encourage peer connections, find story ideas, and open conversation through “discussions”

Twitter – Quick hits to build prestige around the university and its alumni (top news and prominent alumni), support relationships, and find story ideas

Facebook – Promote events, share regional-specific information, encourage peer connections

YouTube – Share highlights from alumni and university events, build awareness of leadership in the university and alumni association

Flickr – Repository for event photos, maintain engagement

Social media is by its nature not about simply pushing information out, but learning about your constituents needs and engaging them in dialogue. GW graduate and social media consultant Steve Goldner recommends bringing an “LCR mentality” to your social media outreach – Listen, Conversation, Relationships.

One powerful way to encourage conversations and build relationships is by soliciting advice and feedback from your audience on story ideas. In this case, the quality of our engagement through social media is just as important as the quantity.

Recognize Your Reach…and Limitations

For most organizations, social media provides another platform to reach a certain segment of your audience. Our largest GW Alumni social network – LinkedIn, with 10,430 members – only represents about 5% of our alumni population.

According to research by Forrester (see Josh Bernoff’s post on Social Technographics) 17 percent of U.S. online adults are “inactive” on social networks and the largest percentage group are simply “spectators” who read, listen and watch, but do not take an active role in a conversation.

It is important to use a variety of communication platforms in your outreach. For our Alumni Valentines feature I solicited names of couples during in-person conversations, through e-mails, and on social networks. The story was e-mailed out through our e-newsletter, featured on our website, and posted on our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook pages. The piece included a call to action for others to share their Alumni Valentine stories, which allows us to build off the original story.

Create Winning Content Through Collaboration

Some people are more interesting in 140 characters than others. Some videos on YouTube become viral hits and others flounder. Some individuals on LinkedIn spark thought-provoking discussions, while others come off as completely self-promotional. And some stories in your e-newsletter receive more click-throughs than others.

Creating content that resonates remains crucial. Develop content with input from your constituents on a variety of social networks and share that content across several different platforms. You will engage more individuals, hear more ideas, and produce a better end product.

How have you seen success by engaging your social networks in developing content?

This post is courtesy of guest blogger Matt Lindsay (@lindsam8). Matt is the director of alumni communications at The George Washington University (GW) in Washington, D.C.

10 ways to grow your Twitter influence

How do you grow your influence and measure it on Twitter?

That is the question that many companies, organizations and individuals are trying to answer, now more than ever.

Edelman has created a popular tool that measures an individual’s importance on Twitter called TweetLevel. This tool can help you understand and quantify the importance levels of Tweeters and their usage of Twitter. However, judging a person’s true level of ‘influence’ is tough to define, even though many people have provided a great start.

While doing research for this blog post, I came across several great articles, blog posts and resources to share. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, wrote a great piece about 10 ways to increase your Twitter followers. Social media expert Brian Solis has a post about Make tweet love – Top tips for building Twitter relationships and prevential.com has an excellent resource titles How to attract and influence people on Twitter.

With all this information on this topic, I brainstormed my own list of tips for my readers to share ways to boost your ranking on this social media platform. Below you’ll find my top 10 ways to grow your Twitter influence.

1. Think like a reporter or a copy editor. With only 140 characters, every word, space and punctuation counts. Make sure each tweet is so compelling that your followers will stop to read what you have to say in the crowded and noisy Twitter universe. Today, it is all about telling a story and telling it well.

2. Content is King. Make sure you have content that is worth posting and that engages your followers and prospective followers. The Internet Activity Index released by the Online Publishers Association provides a unique way of looking at consumer engagement online.

3. Be generous. Engage with other tweeters by re-tweeting content that you find interesting. Think of your tweets as your online journal that you can reference on your public timeline. It is easy to RT tweets that you like of others — and the added bonus is that you’ll have those tweets in your stream for future reference. Not only are you helping yourself, you are spreading the word for others. People you RT will be more likely to follow you back and spread the word about you.

4. Be a resource for others. Add value with each tweet or retweet. Make sure that when you are tweeting, you treat each one like an email. Sending too many emails decreases your credibility. Make sure that when you have something to say, your followers think it’s worthwhile.

5. Take Twitter offline. Arrange for a phone call or coffee meeting with interesting tweeps that you follow. Or attend or create a Tweet-up in your area. Check out Twtvite, an event manager tool that helps you create and learn about TweetUps.

6. Listen. Try to read of your followers Tweets and follow the most popular hashtags like #SocialMedia and #FollowFriday and industry hashtags that affect your job or interests like #PR or #Marketing. I would also suggest checking out the #hashtags Web site that tracks the most popular hashtags on Twitter and provides details about those hashtags.

7. Be relevant. Try as much as possible to link to articles or post something that is new and newsworthy. For example, I recently tweeted an article from TMZ that claimed the Tiger Woods injuries in the car accident were caused by his wife, not his collision. It was one of my most popular tweets.

8. Quality over Quantity. There is a big temptation to get as many followers as possible. The key is to have a quality following over a large quantity of followers. As Twitter becomes more popular, more and more spammers (and the porn industry) will want to become your friend. Check out How to get more followers: Some methods that work for some more information.

9. Patience is a virtue. A large following doesn’t occur overnight. It takes a while to build a loyal following. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your following. Be persistent and continue to invest time in growing your network on Twitter.

10. Treat others as THEY want to be treated. It is a twist on the golden rule. Find out how your followers like to interact with others and engage with them in a similar fashion.

What do you think? What are some others ways you can grow your influence on Twitter?

Living in the social media age

More than 56% of marketers plan to incorporate social media into their businesses next year, according to a recent survey by the Center for Media Research.

With so many social media channel options to choose from, which one do you use for your marketing communications strategy?

In July 2009, Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law study of national business leaders highlighted that the most popular social media channels were the following:

1. Facebook (80%)
2. Twitter (66%)
3. YouTube (55%)
4. LinkedIn (49%)
5. Blogs (43%)

In my first blog post, my audience confirmed that Facebook and Twitter were the most popular social media platforms. So, as a marketer, should I use the most popular social media channel or a combination of both? Well, the short answer is that it depends. Since each tool works in a different way and with the social media landscape changing everyday, the key is to find out what your targeted audience likes to use.

The bottom line is that you need to be a part of the conversation because these conversations are happening, whether you are in the social media game or not.