Fresh insights on social media and content curation marketing from a young professional in the field

Getting content shouldn't be like pulling teeth. (Flickr credit: US Army Africa)

Managing is different than creating. But social media is so new, so amorphous, management and creation are usually conflated out of necessity. Companies hire social media managers to manage and create content. They’re the ones doing the listening and the talking, the posting and the writing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these dual responsibility sets. In fact, managing social media from concept to execution across every channel gives the social media manager a tremendous amount of room to do things their way, and in many cases, to be recognized as the public face of a company’s social presence.

But when it comes to blogging, many social media managers find themselves struggling to keep up with demand for content. Their successes fuel this demand, which feels great, until other projects suffer as a result. Shortly after I first started at Bazaarvoice, I wrote Un-silo your social. At that point, keeping up with the “content curve” was already a challenge, and I laid out the things I had learned about getting others within the company to contribute content. Well, more than a year later, I’m still racing against the curve, but I’m catching up. So, in this post I’m going to update the list of content-sourcing tips with two things I’ve learned since then.

1. People must be able to write blog posts instead of some of the other work on their plate, not in addition to it. Unless their boss has bought-in and told them they can devote some of their time to blogging, they won’t do it. It’s not that they don’t want to; they just have priorities that will always trump blogging…unless you work with their superiors to change that. Show the bosses how a well-written blog post from someone in their department benefits them and their work. When it’s them asking for it, not you, you’ll get your content.

2. Merchandize, merchandize, merchandize. Promote the hell out of the internal contributions you do get. Make sure everyone sees that colleagues they know are writing and receiving public credit and praise for their efforts. They’ll want some of that action, too. In fact, if you do this part right they’ll start competing with each other to contribute the best content, the most often. When people realize that blogging is an amazing way to showcase their expertise to an audience beyond their immediate coworkers, they’ll write to get the spotlight to shine on them. It’s your job to make sure it does.

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Photo credit: Flickr user mandiberg

Maybe this will be a series. Maybe it won’t. But I’ve got one metric ton of ideas to unload, and the bandwidth to pursue just a few with passion and tenacity. The last time I  shared an idea, some very smart people ran with it and I was beyond pleased. There’s always the chance I’m the only one that thinks it’s a good idea, but all it takes is one good idea to make incredible things happen. So shall we do it again?

 The need:

“Whatever happened with that [insert once- deafeningly-buzzy news story from a few weeks/months/years ago that has since been bumped out of the news cycle a million times over]? I wonder [how that turned out / what they discovered / if they ever caught him / where they are now / if they succeeded]?”

Recognize that thought? To answer a question like this, you google the few details you remember and what do you find? The original story, over and over. And then you give up, because you’re wasting your time.

The idea:

A site dedicated to following up on once-popular news items. Crowdsourced and fueled by curiosity, it would become the go-to destination for such questions and their answers. Post links to news items you’re trying to update, or take the initiative to post a wrap up. Dedicated editors (more feasible if monetized) create special features, follow-ups to the biggest stories of yesterday. This content will be irresistibly shareable, and the most interesting stories will generate viral loops that bring in fresh visitors continually, and so on.

If you like it:

Tell me how it could be better. Create a wish list of features in the comments. Experiment. Have at it, and keep me in the know!

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The Blogville Ghost Town. Image credit: Flickr user Pascalbovet.com

Every tech company in the world thinks they’re innovative. A fraction of them truly are. The companies that have widespread recognition as innovators had to earn that recognition before anyone would listen when they talked about themselves. But the majority of tech companies talk about themselves as if they’ve earned your attention. And they haven’t. They imagine you’ll come back again to read more. And you won’t.

This is a low barriers to entry story, as is so much else in social. Blogs are free or cheap to own or build. They cost nothing to use. Why bother devoting time and energy to creating great content for something that you and I and everyone else can get for free? “But if my website comes with a blog, I have to put something up there,” says the tech company. “What do I have lying around here? Let’s see…release notes, press releases, customer testimonials…” Those are easy to cross-post on a blog, and they make that vacant real estate look like it’s been lived in. They’ll quickly find that these post types aren’t the golden content they’ve been looking for, so they resolve to create some original content of their own. It’s a step in the right direction.

Then they discover how easy it is to blog about themselves. “I could do this all day,” says the CxO, or marketing guy, or PR intern. And they could! But no one reads it, or cares. Sooner or later, when that ROI never appears from the ether, they give up. And then they’re really blogging like a tech company, because they’re actually blogging so infrequently, it’s a sad little ghost town of quarterly posts.

Because people only care what you do or think once you’ve given them a reason to.

Google could devote 12 blogs to how it cleans its bathrooms at the ‘plex, and thousands of people would read them every day. Marc Benioff could blog about his hand soap collection, and people would care, because they care about Marc Benioff; they want to get inside his mind. But 99% of tech companies aren’t there yet.

Blog like you have something to prove, even if you don’t think you do.

Get rid of the product release content and write about the ideas that led you to that release. Congrats on winning that award, but your blog is a better place to talk about the philosophy that enabled the work that qualified you for entry, or what you learned along the way. What is the space your solutions are filling? Blog about that space, not those solutions.

At a certain point, you’ll know when people are really  listening, and you can flip the switch and start writing about yourself. But take note; even the best, most revered tech companies in the world don’t write about themselves exclusively.

The best tech companies tell great stories in which they’re not always the main character. But by mastering this idea-driven storytelling, they are positively associated with the ideas expressed. If you put 10% of the thought that you put into your products into your blog, you can come out ahead of the 99% of tech companies that see their blog as a content dump.

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This is how collaborative ideation and innovation works in the age of cognitive surplus.

• On Thursday, Seth Godin backed my official hashtags for books idea after my friend Chris Johnson pinged him about it.
• Throughout that evening and over the weekend, authors and publishers stopped by to tell me that they would be implementing the idea in their current and future projects, and about some of the related efforts that had been tried in the past (see the Twitter stream on the official page of #brandexpedition for a great example).
• Amit made a case for page-by-page hashtags, and I met him half way, arguing that chapter-by-chapter would work better.
• Michael L.wrote a tongue-in-cheek open letter to Jeff Bezos asking for the ability to follow and contribute to book-specific hashtag conversations via Kindle (awesome idea), and AJ Fisher echoed this request on Twitter.
• Michael V. imagined how publishers might benefit by curating these conversations on-site, and adding QR codes to the mix.
• Jim Benson shared his thoughts that the uniqueness and brevity of #pkflow were “instrumental in building community and conversation” around his book Personal Kanban, and that he started using this hashtag while the book was still being written.

And then Aidan built an entire website based on the idea, which I think is the ultimate testimony to the speed of ideation, innovation and implementation that we see today. In his words:

I think this is a great idea and have set up the site http://bookhashtags.com to try and curate a set of “official” hashtags for books.

This should help people to find the hashtags people are recommending for use with a specific book.

The site stores tweets so unlike a Twitter search which only returns the last couple of days of tweets for a hashtag the site will provide a more persistent record of the conversations taking place around a book.

It’s hard to imagine a better response to an idea I sketched out in about an hour. At the risk of being reported for humble bragging, I’m extremely grateful to everyone who picked up the ball and started running with it. Let’s keep working on this together.

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