7 Keys to Good Content Marketing

Here are my 7 Keys to Good Content Marketing
1) understand your audience
2) figure out what information is valuable to them
3) create an engaging way to share that information (use graphic designer, animators, writers, etc.)
4) make it frictionlessly sharable
5) keep your publishing of that information consistent and frictionless
6) listen to feedback
7) continue to adjust your content and publishing schedule based on audience feedback

Understand your audience

Don’t just publish whatever you want, get to know your audience, whether it’s a network of colleagues, leads or customers. Learn where they spend their time online, what time of day they spend the most time online, how they communicate online. Learn their culture first.
Figure out what information is valuable to them

While you’re getting to know your audience, figure out what is important to them. I used to receive the Mercedes newsletter (when I had one) and somehow they realized I had a baby on the way. All of a sudden I started getting helpful tips on child/car safety including links to Mercedes certified car seats. They weren’t just pimping their new model, they were sharing content that I found valuable because it was relevant and timely.

Create an engaging way to share that information (use graphic designer, animators, writers, etc.)

Just posting a bunch of press releases is boring as shit. Find an interesting way to share the information you have that your customers fund so valuable. Why do you think infographics are so popular? Because they are generally a single theme with a few points of data presented in a pretty, easy to digest graphic. Don’t do this in PowerPoint please, get a graphic designer to do it, or better yet, use video to share info through animation or just getting on camera yourself. If you’re blogging, have a personality, swear, show funny pictures of yourself, have a sense of humor!

p.s. Did you hear the one about the blogger that walked into a bar? Of course you didn’t, bloggers don’t go out!

Make it frictionlessly sharable and engagable

There are only 2 things that friction is good for, one is lighting a match. Don’t make it difficult for users to comment on your blog or your white paper, make sure they can login using Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Make sure it is easy to share as well. I was looking at a technology organization’s website last night and realized there was no way to share their event, never mind automatically put it into my calendars. Your audience doesn’t have time to copy and paste, give them buttons or they will leave!

Btw, I know “engagable” isn’t a word, but neither was gamification last time I checked.
Keep your publishing of that information consistent and frictionless

Stick to a schedule, don’t bombard your audience with 4 blog posts in one week then go dark for a month. There are plenty of tools to schedule publication of a blog post, they’re  built into most CMSs. Get yourself a calendar. It’s okay to spend a week creating a bunch of content, just make sure you spread it out consistently and make it easy to get to. Don’t hide it behind firewalls. Most CMSs allow you to set up an RSS feed for those that want your blog via email, publish a link to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. If you have a cool image, video or infographic, publish it to Pinterest.
Listen to feedback

You may find that your audience wants more detailed information, or that they think your content sucks. Pay attention to how your audience reacts (or doesn’t) to your content.
Continue to adjust your content and publishing schedule based on audience feedback

Always be doing better. The feedback you get from your audience is invaluable in helping you understand what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Always assume you can improve.

The 30 Minute Blog Strategy

My wife wants to write a blog but is struggling with developing the discipline to do it. Everyone will tell you that consistency in publishing is the most important part of a blog strategy, whether it’s once a day or once a week. People crave consistency, ask McDonald’s.

The idea of generating content can be overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be if you follow these simple steps:

1) Write what you know. Mark Twain knew what he was talking about. He only wrote about what he was an expert in; politics, childhood, and riverboats. Let’s face it, if you’re blogging about a topic that you’re not an expert in, whether it’s marketing, flower arranging, extreme couponing, woodworking or struggling to launch a business, then you shouldn’t be blogging, because no one will care. There are 2 caveats to that last statement: you’re funny or a hot chic. Both bring in traffic but both are things that many consider themselves to be regardless of the mendacity of the concept!
If you’re an expert, you will create content of great value, and you won’t have to do too much fact checking!

2) Summarize your thoughts. You’ve been awake for 12-16 hours. You’ve had approximately 230,000 thoughts today. Take 15 minutes to jot down 1-6 things that occurred to you today that would make interesting and relevant topics. You can do this anytime but I recommend doing it right before you go to sleep. Why? The last things on our minds before we sleep are the ones our subconscious chews on all night. This means your inner secretary is working through the night to form thought and opinions, even clear up in-discrepancies. True multi-tasking!

3) Get up and get on it! Plenty of research points to the fact that our minds are most creative and productive first thing in the morning. When you wake up, look at your list. Pick one or to topics you want to cover and start writing. This can happen over coffee, using voice-to-text apps while driving to work or in the shower, waiting to buy a donut, on the train, etc. there is no standard length for a blog post, make it as long or short as you need to make your point. Whether you’re clear and concise, tend to ramble, like lots of pictures, this doesn’t need to take more than 15 minutes.

4) Build an archive. You don’t need to publish every day. You may have multiple epiphanies in a day or have a month-long dry spell. However, if you write every day, you’ll generate a backlog of good stuff to hold you over when you’re stumped or too busy. You can always store them on your blog unpublished or…

5) Stick to a schedule. Blog platforms allow you to schedule the publishing date of a post. I was out sick on Tuesday but already had a blog post scheduled for publication that day from 2 weeks before. My company has a backlog of blog posts to last until next week, which gives me a week and a half to generate another one.

Now, these rules aren’t hard and fast but give you a framework. Perhaps you come up with your topic list in the shower then right on your lunch break or before bed. Maybe you just keep a running list like I do (which, to be honest, I only go back to in emergencies). Numbers 2, 3, and 4 can be modified to fit your lifestyle but give you a good idea how to manage blog writing easily. Numbers 1 and 5 are absolute must-haves for any blogger looking to generate readers.

For those with more time to write, add a relevant photo, quote another blog or source if relevant. Do some research to dig out official numbers, spend some time on dictionary.com looking up alternate words. I did both in the 30 minutes I took to write this, while stopping to talk to my wife about her business plans, dinner, tonight’s TV viewing and getting her input on the post.

2 last things:

I don’t have to tools to write: I call BS! If you don’t have the tools you wouldn’t be able to read this. I’m typing away on my smart phone. Even feature phones can use email to publish to your blog as can any computer with Internet access. Don’t have a blog? WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger are free!

I don’t know how to write. No problem, read a book, a blog, a magazine or a news story. If you can read and speak you can write. If you have trouble forming your thoughts into words, use the resources I just mentioned or just talk it through out loud.

For any bloggers reading this, please share your tips and tricks.

For non-bloggers, feel free to ask questions!

Google Plus Twitter

Finally! I found a way to post to Google+ and have it sent to Twitter. Which is good, because I’ve been so focused on G+ that it’s hard to remember to not neglect Twitter. Here are screenshots of it working instantly.

 

How’s it work you ask?

The key is a little site called www.manageflitter.com. Give them your G+ URL, sign into Twitter through the Twitter API and your accounts are connected. Their system is set up so that you must post to your Public stream in order for it to work. Alternately you can adjust your settings so that you must at #twt to the post to get it to work. I’ve suggested to the folks at ManageFlitter that they should offer the ability to have just G+ posts to a defined Circle go to Twitter. I could choose my Flitter Circle to post to, or add it to my public post. This might offer a bit more control. I’m not sure if this is technically possible, and they may not want to because, most people don’t adjust their settings, so by default everything will go public, and through ManageFlitter to Twitter.

Keep in mind that content posted to Google+ will be truncated in Twitter, remember that pesky 140 character rule? I’ve also run a test including a video, a photo and a link. I haven’t seen those populate my Twitter stream yet. I’ll update this post once I see results.

 

Update:

Here is a screenshot of the links, and the photo I uploaded to Twitter:

In both Twitter.com and Tweetdeck the links open in a browser window, including the image, which is linked to a file on Google’s server. I have not seen the video link yet.

Speed Dating on Google Plus

I’m talking business here folks, I’ll save the romantic relationship talk for @urwingman.

I was recently asked how I use Google Plus. One way is to limit the conversations I see. I use Circles to group specific users and can focus on just those streams. Very decluttering I must say.

Another way is to meet new people. On Twitter, everyone’s Follows and Followers are publicly available, but clicking through them is a chore and it’s difficult to learn about them due to the limitations of biographies. With G+, many users are keeping their Circles public while some users’ Circles are private (I keep mine private), it’s very easy to see who they interact with. If +Robert Scoble posts a comment you can see the hundred or so folks that will respond. It’s very easy to rollover their names to see who they work for. This alone is a great way to learn a great deal about them.

 

Above you can see a comment by +Brenna Ehrlich. She is in a couple of my Circles, and I’m viewing this comment in the stream of just one of those Circles (there is currently no way to view multiple Circle streams). I can see a comment by +Blake Robinson.

By mousing over +Blake Robinsons I can see that he works for Rackspace. Hmm, might be a good contact to have.

I can add Blake to a circle right here. Or, I can click through to his profile to learn more about him. I can see where he works, who his connections are, if they’re public, where he lives, where he went to work and what other sites I can connect with him on.

I can read a few of his most recent posts (in order to avoid following someone that posts lots of animated GIFs of kitties. I have a special Circle for those people…).

Then I can add him to an existing Circle or make a new one.

Now, I have a contact at Rackspace I never knew before.

I’ve been using this to collect contacts that work for press organizations, creative agencies, potential technology partners, Google employees, and all around cool people. So, it behooves you to make sure your Google profile is filled out the way you want it to be, with more or less content and information to suit your personal online brand strategy. Pictures are nice too. I don’t add anyone to a Circle that doesn’t have a bio and photograph. I want to know who I’m talking to.

What are you going to use Google+ to do?

 

Google+ for iPhone Launches

 

 

Google+ was released for iPhone today. Scrolling through G+ you’ll see many posts like “finally, Google Plus for iPhone”. We’ve become such an MTV-generation on crack that having to wait 3 weeks for a smartphone app for a brand new social network (?) platform is excruciating!

If you are ready to download G+ for iPhone, click here. Word to the wise: you CANNOT currently find Google+ by searching the App Store. You must open this link on your iPhone.

Anyway, here are some screenshots:

The sign-in screen, clicking here requires your Google login and password credentials.

From here you can launch your circles, stream, upload photos or edit your profile.

 

Much like the mobile browser version, you can swipe through the streams from your various circles. A little tough for those of us with more than a few circles (disclaimer, I have 39 and counting).

 

From this screen you can see photos from your circles, view or edit your albums, see all the photos on your iPhone and choose which to upload, and see pictures of you others have posted.

 

You can view your Google+ Circles (I’m calling them Gircles dammit) here, add more, edit them. You can even see here how many people haven’t uploaded a damn avatar. My family is obviously not tech savvy!

 

You can view your contacts by name and add to Circles here. You even get the ubiquitous Suggested People feature, if you’re feeling lonely and adventurous.

 

I’m still trying to figure out what a Huddle is. There’s no explanation so I’m going with thinking of it as group chat. Unfortunately NOT a Hangout. I wouldn’t hold my breath for Hangout on iPhone or iPad, since it will conflict with Apple’s Facetime. I’m looking forward to using Google+ Huddle for the next Boston Social Media Club meeting.

I’m sure stuff will be changing as the Google+ team keeps moving forward. They’ve been doing a great job in taking everyone’s feedback.

I’m looking forward to the iPad app and more updates in functionality.

 

My Twitter Infographic

 

Thanks to Visual.ly

Google+ing your Blog

So, you’ve heard of Google+ right?

• If yes please read on
• If no please click here

Now that we have that out of the way… You’ve FINALLY gotten your Google+ invitation, you’ve logged in, you’ve figured out how to use everything, what else do you do? It’s time to Google-ize your blog. Oh, don’t worry, it’s not that hard. The first thing you should do is add your Google+ link to you blog. After all, you want your readers to find you everywhere right? There are many ways to share your Google+ URL depending on how your blog is set up. It could be a contact page or, as in the case of my blog, a set of icons:

I keep a relatively short list of my social networks in a widget on my blog. The first one, About.Me is nothing more than a personal landing page with most of the same links. However you share your social network profiles with your readers is fine, just make sure to add your Google+ URL.

About that Google+ URL: most of us using the service agree that it’s ridiculous:

the number, in this case, 116375847890292587823, is your actual Google+ ID. Most of us our hoping that unique nicknames will be added soon, remember, G+ is in beta. Google is moving very quickly with this new service so I don’t think we’ll need to wait as long as we did for personalized URLs for LinkedIn! If you don’t want to wait, you can try a free service a bunch of clever guys thought up called Gplus.to. Just copy your G+ ID number, pick a nickname and you’re all set:

You’ve already got a Facebook Like button, a Tweet button on every blog post right? Now it’s time to add a +1 button. It works kind of like a Like button, nothing more. I’ve looked around to find a WordPress plugin that combines the Like, Tweet and +1 button to no avail. For now we’ll have to deal with:

If anyone comes across an elegant plugin that combines all 3, let me know!

Your blog should be all done! Currently there is no way to have a blog stream your G+ posts, you can see mine streams my Twitter stream, but I expect it fairly soon. At the moment you can’t share G+ posts with Facebook or Twitter either.

Make sure that when you publish a new blog post you share the link on Google+ the same way you share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter:

Google+ Gets a Check+ Part 1

The Fourth of July holiday weekend was ruined for most of us by the launch of Google+. In just 4 days the new social platform by Google has exploded. Of course many have still not seen it as it is in real beta (as opposed to Gmail’s multi-year beta status) and the company was so overwhelmed with invitation requests that they’ve had to bottleneck entrance to the system.

WTF?!

Google+ was launched on June 28 following a little over a week in which slight changes to Google were spotted. It is essentially a status/content wall similar to Facebook’s that aggregates Google+ content from people you’re connected to in Google apps, Gmail, etc. You can visit the home page to request an invite and I think they’re giving priority to those who request an invite that have already been added by multiple people already using Google+. That would seem to be the case considering how many of my social media colleagues are signed up but few non-industry friends are. It would make sense from a marketing standpoint as we’re all early adopters and influencers to some degree.

Functionality

Keep in mind that this is beta and some nice folks from Google have already told us they’re taking feedback and making changes rapidly as we go.

The Navigation Bar
The first thing you’ll notice is that the new Google bar that you’ve been seeing now begins with +Michael. You can still reach your Gmail, docs, etc, but the +Username will take you to Google+. The right side of the bar gives you an account dropdown with an alert box that turns red when you have a notice. The Share field allows you to post a quick note (like a Tweet or status update), followed by more in-depth settings. It’s an efficient and compact design. It reminds me of something.

Stream
The Stream is similar to Facebook with far more control and is your main Google+ UI much like your FB Wall. You can view your stream with all of your contacts or, with a simple click, see only content from the Circle, or group, you want. More on Circles in a moment. You essentially get the same functionality with your stream as with Facebook Groups or Twitter Lists but with a far superior user experience.

Email
A quick word about Google+ and it’s effect on your email: Once you sign up for Google+ go into the settings quickly and change what you wish to receive alerts on. Every comment in your stream will send an alert to your email. So, unless you want your Gmail account to blow up, make this change soon.

Circles
Google+ allows you control over your contacts like never before. With Facebook you get a few settings that give you the ability to lump contacts into one of a very few categories with no overlap. The problem with this is that human relationships and communications are much more complicated. I’ve written and spoken in depth about this, theorizing that the next big social network would take more realistic human relationship dynamics into account, even going so far as to begin building out the concept behind a possible startup. The fact is that Facebook’s founder and many of it’s young programmers don’t have the depth of experience with human relationships that us old folks have, especially those with some background in psychology, sociology, or mental health.

Circles allow you to create custom groups and organize your contacts into them. Not only can you put a contact into a group, you can out them into multiple groups, say, co-workers AND colleagues, or client AND friends. Once a contact is in this group you can control what content they see and don’t see. I’ve attempted to load 100+ into a circle at once and the platform froze. I haven’t figured out the exact limit but more than 20-30 at once is fine.

 

Simply drag a user into a Circle to add them, the number in the Circle will change. You can drag a user to the gray Circle to create a new one, or just click on it.

You can click on a Circle to open it to add members this way, remove members or rename the group or description.

You can sort users of a single Circle by first name, last name or relevance.

Make sure you’ve updated your Google profile with an avatar or you look like one of these faceless gray icons.

Profile
Your Google+ profile simply pulls content from your existing Google profile. If you’ve been too busy with Twitter and LinkedIn, you might want to go back and clean up your Google profile. You don’t want to be one of the graphic heads as seen above! Your G+ (I”m getting sick of typing Google+) profile has several sections:

Posts – what you’ve posted.

About – this is your Google profile content as Introduction with fields for Bragging Rights, Occupation, Employment.

Photos – you can create albums here just like in Facebook. It automatically creates an album for all photos from your posts. I haven’t tested the file limit yet but will soon.

#1′s – this are posts that you’ve #1′d or Liked, or whatever we’re calling it.

Buzz – this is essentially everyone that you follow or that follows you.

You will see a smattering of people you’ve put in Circles, and those that have added you. On the right you can add as many links as you want, the major ones like Facebook and Twitter come with icons.

 

As delve deeper I’ll show you more of the UI and functionality behind Google+. Stay tuned!

Managing Your Brand+

Most of you have heard of Google+ by now. It exploded like a firework over the 4th of July weekend for early adopters lucky enough to get an invitation. I was one of those lucky few (million). While organizing my Circles I noticed something interesting: a serious lack of avatars. Now, most of the professional social media types I know like @girlgamy, @cmajor, @danschawbel, @vanhoosear had their lovely faces in place, but a vast majority did not.

Now, I know that you’ve all been busy focusing on Facebook and trying to build your Follow numbers on Twitter and have forgotten about that Google profile you filled out last year and never use. However, Google+ is upon us, time to get your Gshit together, your Gducks in a row. Even if you don’t have a G+ account yet, or aren’t planning on using it, if you have Gmail, would you rather be this guy:

Or this guy:

 

That is all.

Is “Too Big To Fail” Just Too Big?

Thursday April 21st was well past April Fools Day and no one was laughing when they tried to checkin on Foursquare, catch up on Reddit, or collect on SCVNGR.

All three of these popular sites/services and a handful of others, including Twitter dashboard darlings Hootsuite, hosting provider Heruko, and Wildfire among others, were all down. How could this happen? They all host their products through Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing system. Early in the morning a failure that shouldn’t have brought down the system did. There has been plenty written about the iceberg that sunk Amazon’s elastic database already and plenty more written about what should have happened. My opinion: Amazon has gotten too damned big. Now, I’m all for capitalism, profit, growth and I have nothing against Amazon’s growth in the retail ecommerce space. My issues resolve around it’s hosting service. They offer a fantastic end-to-end service that many fledgling social media and tech startups rely on for hosting. Too many.

The issue lies with the fact that so many companies rely on just Amazon’s service that a failure at one company brought down a half dozen high traffic companies. It would seem to make sense to go with the guys that do such a great job for everyone else, but as yesterday proved, just because everyone else uses something doesn’t mean you should. The United States has seen many examples of companies that have gotten so big that their failure can bring down entire business sectors, put people out of jobs, devalue national currency. Is it time for us to use some common sense and hedge our bets rather than put our eggs in the same basket as everyone else? Should we fight against companies that only offer services that lock you into their ideal partnership?

The promise of the cloud seems pretty simple: spread your data to machines optimized to serve single functions to make it more efficient and cost effective, mirror your data across the network to avoid failure bottlenecks. But what happens when a system that shouldn’t fail does? By all accounts a failure in a single data center happened and built in redundancies failed. How could this happen when Amazon is a lead in cloud technology? Many years ago I worked for a small regional web hosting and access company called Shore.net. A year or so into my employment there we were acquired by a telecommunications giant called Primus Telecommunications. For all the negatives of Primus (just ask if you’d like to hear some of my horror stories, needless to say I’m not a Paul Singh fan), we did a version of cloud computing well. We had data centers in Boston, Virginia, London, and, If I remember correctly, India, Australia, and South America. We pushed every hosting client toward our collocation service. You could drop a bomb on Boston and your site would stay up. London could sink and your site would stay up. Our Australian staff could spill Fosters all ogre the servers and your site would stay up. There would have to be a global catastrophe to take your website down. This was 1999. WTF Amazon?

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