Monthly Archives: June 2011
In our webinar, “A Marketer’s Guide to Thinking and Acting Like a Publisher” earlier this week, we talked a lot about the importance of developing and managing content that meets customer needs as well as your brand and specific business objectives. One tool publishers use to maintain timely, relevant and useful content is an editorial calendar. To continue the conversation started in the webinar, here are four inputs businesses should consider in developing their editorial calendars: Customer, Marketing, Merchandising, and Seasonality.
Customer inputs:
What are your customers talking about? What are they interested in? You can find out by simply reviewing your internal search logs for keywords your customers are using, or you can dig deeper (and wider) by employing digital listening tools like Radian6 and SM2 that scour social media channels and compile data on the conversations going on. These tools allow you to not only get a better sense of what people are talking about, but the sentiment around those topics. All of which can help you develop content that will resonate with your target audience.
Derek Phillips and I presented a webinar today entitled “A Marketer’s Guide to Thinking and Acting like a Publisher.” In it, we outline the six key elements of great content plus the three phases your company needs to include in their publishing plan.
You might notice that we won’t talk a lot about social. It isn’t because we don’t value social media; we have three experts working with clients in our Chicago office alone. So in this web 2.0 world, why didn’t we focus as much on social?
It reminds me of a recent Joe Pulizzi interview with Jay Baer. During the interview, Jay reminds us that strategy must come first.
“You have to focus on how to ‘be’ social first, and worry about how to ‘do’ social second…If you and your company are worrying specifically about your ‘Facebook strategy’ then you really don’t have a strategy at all…”
I don’t think Jay is saying that you shouldn’t have a Facebook strategy, period, but that you should come up with your overall strategy and then determine how you want to use to distribute your message.
Our webinar focused on a publishing strategy; social can and should be baked into that strategy. But social is more complex than you’d think. As we discussed editorial calendars and governance processes, many organizations have these things in place solely for their social strategies. While I love the commitment around these channels, I think it’s always best integrated.
Measurement:
The Divergent Demographics of Groupon and LivingSocial
Everybody loves a daily deal. Who wouldn’t want to get a massage regularly priced at $100 for only $65? And it has become pretty clear that the lead dogs in the daily deal race are Groupon and LivingSocial. But when it comes to choosing which of these to deal with, how are the demographics breaking down? comScore did some research and found out that these two sites have some interesting similarities and differences in the crowds they draw. In my opinion the most interesting part of their findings are education and affluence level of users.
“LivingSocial’s visitors trend younger, slightly more affluent and more highly educated than Groupon’s. In addition, Nielsen found visitors to LivingSocial 49% more likely than the average American online to earn $150,000 or more, while Groupon’s visitors were 30% more likely.”
But this is not to say that if you use Groupon you’re uneducated and broke. Quite honestly, these differences are only slight. Generally, both are quite similar in demographics… and quite interesting. Read More
Me too. And I didn’t realize just how much I’d fallen off the Twitter wagon until this subject line appeared in my inbox this week: “We’ve missed you on Twitter!” Gasp! Had it really been three months since I tweeted. Indeed it had. The reality is, I’d run out of steam, and had been for a while.
Before my Twitter derailment
I started out on Twitter much like many other people, tweeting about ordinary things like which patio I was having lunch on or venting about some unfortunate incident I’d experienced in the day 
– likely some guy spitting on the sidewalk in close proximity to my feet. As more people joined with more interesting content to offer I got a mild case of Twitter stage fright. Could I really be brilliant all the time? In all honesty, sometimes. Still, I plodded along, upping my game when I could with wittier tweets and better content as more and more people began to follow me.
Signs of boredom appear
Over time I noticed a few patterns emerging. If life was a bit status quo, so were my tweets. If life was awesome and random and exciting, so were my tweets. I found there was a direct correlation to the activity in my life and the activity on my Twitter feed. When I traveled, I couldn’t tweet fast enough about where I was and what I saw. When I was super excited about something, I shared it immediately. But on a day when I wasn’t particularly inspired and had little to say, my Twitter posts would stall and my anxiety would start to grow. And I couldn’t always bring myself to scour the blogosphere and then fake spontaneous brilliance.
My first break from Twitter
Soon enough, Twitter lethargy set in. I didn’t post or sign in for a while. Didn’t even stalk my friends to keep up with their lives. Of course that backfired a bit when I started to feel out of the loop and friends started to say “Didn’t you see it? I posted it on Twitter.” Read More
Communities:
Will government’s embrace of social media boost transparency?
The relationship between government and social media has been a hot topic recently, especially with “Weinergate” still in progress. But this issue, and this article, brings up some very interesting ideas about how social media and politics should interact. 
While the government has loads of documents regulating the usage of social media by officials, it still seems as though some people are having a hard time abiding by the rules. This article poses the question of whether or not this Twitter scandal (and previous scandals) will slow down social media transparency from the government. The author of this article argues that there will be no long-term affect, but I beg to differ. There has already been a slow-down of Congress members tweeting and actively participating on social mediums.
The author of this article argues that Congress tweets will eventually become more mainstream and transparent, but since we hold our officials to such a different standard, I believe we should hold their social media usage to one too. I believe that scandals like “Weinergate” will totally and completely change the level of transparency that government officials are expected to uphold. This article makes some fantastic points to the contrary, but I personally find it hard to believe that we will continue to respect government officials who behave like this. As of right now, most Congress tweeting is a one-way street and mainly comes from staffers. I believe that, in light of recent events, this is going to be the norm for quite some time. Do you agree?
Read More
Content strategy isn’t just about audits or aligning with information architecture. Directly supporting copywriters is a primary goal of content strategy as well. It falls to content analysts to distill insights and create an appropriate plan (based on business objectives, user needs, etc) – a plan that gives your copywriter enough to succeed.
Without content strategy, you create an unjustified delay; your copywriter is forced to research, analyze and strategize before they even start crafting the language that will entice your customers to convert. It’s unfair to your copywriter and is poor stewardship of your client’s resources.
After all, content strategy at the start of a project makes the creative process run faster and more efficiently, thus saving money for your client. Like information architecture and planning, content strategy work done up front will ensure that the best possible creative is produced…and that the entire project aligns with the given business objectives.
