Content: Found, read, shared and measured

The title of this post basically sums up my approach to the growing discipline of Content Marketing.

These four terms are section headings for my simple and effective way to assess and develop your CM strategy. Below they are broken down into the essential areas that I think needs covering if you are putting together your own content marketing approach:

Found:
It's no good creating content if nobody finds it... so ensuring your text, images and other assets can be found on the web is bloody important. This is consequently the area where Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation come together the most; as using the correct SEO techniques and being correctly indexed by search engines can mean the difference between your pages getting lots of traffic and getting practically none.

Read:
Isn't there a wonderful phrase that goes something like "if a tree falls over in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a noise?"... Well, in my opinion the same goes for your words and pictures... if nobody reads them, are they really content?
I should also mention that the quality of your content is something to watch out for. It's no good just getting the office junior to write all your website content if they've no real idea of how to correctly write for the web. Therefore scan-ability, readability and understandability are all key success factors here.

Shared:
To get your content to as many eyeballs as possible, you have to encourage it's sharing across as many platforms and formats as possible. From RSS feeds through to seeding by simple social sharing functionality, your content needs to work as hard as possible when it is is used off of your website as it does when it is on it. Also links and content out on social platforms can now significantly contribute to you SEO efforts too.

Measured:
This is probably the area least understood about Content Marketing (and therefore probably the area most likely to be missed / skipped). However it's not that difficult to get your head around, especially if you have a person in your organisation who understand your website analytics package and can obtain meaningful engagement KPI's.

Let me know if this framework works for you or if you have a better one

The digital PR toolkit

In recent posts I've provided my thoughts on the convergence of digital PR, Marketing and Conversion.
Post 1: Discussing how the roles now blur
Post 2: Covering how SEO is no longer just for marketing
Post 3: Showing the AIDA customer acquisition process
Now I've gone into a fair amount of detail about the process of customer acquisition that they all contribute to and the overlapping roles they play in this process. But now I'm going to cover the respective digital tools and methods that each role can use, based on the model that I created in my previous posts.

The first one up is digital PR and to illustrate this I've provided the diagram below with the simple key:
The things you can do on your target site are within the circle and the tools used off-site are logically outside it.
(Note: I've also tried to group these tools near to similar or relevant ones both on-site & off)

The respective digital PR tools that I believe you can use are:

On-site:

• Keyword targeted content
  Are you producing content that whilst being readable also focused on specific keywords typed into search engines?
• Blog/Editorial
  Have you considered that writing a blog - with whatever name you give it - will also creates great content that user like to read - as well as for search engines - and that could deep link to interesting useful content around your site?
• Analytics
  If you don't know what works (gets more traffic, converts more users, etc.) then how are you going to do more of it?
• Press & News Content
  If you're not using this on your own site to highlight your own successes, then you should. If you don;t want to set up your own content managed press area on your site, then either create one using a blogging platform or even just take a relevant feed from your PR company's site.
• Community
  Providing forums or even just a place for users to comment on articles and blogs gives a sense of community to visitors. Rewarding frequent ones goes a step further. These user generated comments are not just great content to read and spider, they are great PR fodder.

Off-site:

• Link building
  Encouraging sites to link to yours in their news items and articles (although try to avoid reciprocal links)
• Social News & Social Bookmarking
  Posting your Press Releases to Digg, Delicious, etc. is a way of getting your story to a wider audience
• Email
  Both one-to-one and more general email marketing techniques can be used to announce news to those who want this form of communication.
• SEO
  This speaks for itself and I've covered this already in a number of topics. But if your PR company doesn't already understand and use SEO techniques......
• Feeds & syndication
  An RSS feed empowers those who want to pull this information and consume it (or re-publish it) in their own way, rather than via email or traditional means.
• Social Media Press Release
  Consider posting your Press Releases online, with other useful information such as: RSS feeds, links to previous relevant releases, imagery, audio & video, etc.
• Blogger engagement
  Look for them, understand them, communicate in a relevant manner and build up engagement with them.
• Twitter
  Make sure you are promoting your releases via this important medium. Also use it to build up a community of followers who you can ask things of (e.g. feedback).
• Social Media monitoring and tracking
  Listen in to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc and find out who is saying what.
• Photo sharing
  Use sites like Flickr.com to build up an online PR image library
• Video sharing
  Use sites like YouTube.com (although personally Vimeo.com is my choice) to build up an online collection of suitable video clips.
• Facebook
  Its pretty easy these days to build up a Facebook presence and grow a community. Its also quite easy to integrate Press Releases (potentially with comments allowed) and other content from different sources into this popular social media site.
• Online surveys
  This is a quick way to understand if your content is reaching it required audience and finding out what other information or data they would find useful.

AMA : Another Meaningless Acronym

The technical world is filled with Acronyms (I nearly wrote Anacronyms, but that's probably the basis of another posting). Features, processes and innovations are usually given TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) to make it quicker and easier to communicate.

However, one assumes when you use them, that the other person knows what you're talking about and understands the acronym the same way you do. Here's a few terms you may well hear being used more recently, their official meaning and an alternative suggestion:

UGC
Official: User Generated Content
Suggestion: Uncomplimentary Griping Comments


RSS
Official: Real Simple Syndication
Suggestion: Reading Senseless Subjects


CRM
Official: Customer Releationship Management
Suggestion: Costly Repetitive Marketing


Has anyone got any other suggestions for TLA's alternative meanings?

Portable content - more considerations

Although I've previously covered making your company content and assets portable, based on recent feedback, I thought I'd provide some additional information about how to do this.

1. Put your corporate videos up on YouTube
This allows you to still embed the video clips you want into your own site, saves you expensive bandwidth and instantly makes your company video available to a new selection of people. Caveat: All YouTube users will be able to comment on your video, so be prepared to engage in any accompanying dialogue your video creates

2. Put your company photos up on Flickr (Note: Other photo sharing sites are available)
Aside from the potential bandwidth-saving achieved from delivering high quality images to your users from an alternative host, there are other benefits to placing any company photos on one the popular image sharing websites:

• These sites provide easy integration with other Web2.0 sites (e.g. Blogging tools, etc.)
• By using proper descriptions and tagging your photos, you make your official photos easier to be searched for and used
• Links from your photos and profile back to your company website could improve your Search Engine Optimisation efforts

Caveat: Users to these sites, like video sites, will be able to comment on your content. Expect the level of conversation you need to participate in to increase.

3. Extend your audio coverage
Assuming you already provide downloadable audio files such as interviews on your site (hopefully in the ubiquitous MP3 format) then you can easily raise your content's profile further.

• Add an RSS feed and allow subscription via podcasting software
• Syndicate your podcasts via a large/popular podcasting syndication network

Caveat: This whole subject can by quite complex, so it is probably best that I cover this topic in more detail subsequently.

Ways to make content more portable

Distributing your media across the web can be a beneficial way of providing your users and extended target audience with the assets that you want to provide them with (more examples of use and mis-use here)

The immediate and instant delivery of your content and media to numerous people across the web is not the stuff of the future or something so cutting edge that it requries a bespoke multi-million pound Media Distribution System.... it can be achieved easily over time, as part of your corporate site's evolution and just used combinations of several known & standard technologies & practices already out there.

So... what are they?

Content/Media Management System:
Including:categorisation (tagging & meta info), reformatting, versioning, workflow, etc. to manage the content you want to 'push'

Admin function:
This manages the permissions / rights / subscription / personalisation process

Syndication:
RSS is by far the most preferred method of distribution and updating content. Other methods of syndication can be used but RSS is now becoming a common standard for pulling content thanks to podcasts and widget technology gaining widespread usage.

Widgets :
These can be used and are just self-contained HTML components that deliver text and media. There are several standards for these and also some bespoke work may be required to fit it into some frameworks / templates. However, sometimes just the media is sent or referring URL is called.

Hosting:
It is also important that this service has an adaptive hosting facility that that can react to large fluctuations in demand across a potential global footprint, especially if streaming of audio or video is required.