Lionel Valdellon's Contentation

1. Create the Best Content Ever

Even if I don't like the topic, even if I don't understand the industry, even if I'm lazy, even if I'm better at whining than writing, I will do the job I was hired to do: I will create the best content I am capable of writing. And I will not settle for the bare minimum. I will do the research needed to get up to speed with the topic. I will do the creative exercises needed to get the writing juices flowing. I will lock out distraction. I will create. I was hired because I convinced someone I was the best talent for the project/job/deliverable. Now I will put my muscle where my mouth was.

2. Forge the Path Now, Apologize Later

In the absence of direction, I will create a path. In the absence of an official strategy, I will compose what I think is the best strategy for my company, my client, my customer. In the absence of attention, I will work quietly. And if my self-appointed direction or strategy ends up being wrong, then I can apologize later. At least there was something done. Inaction in a field that I can contribute to is unforgivable. Mistaken action is forgivable. Therefore if I have control over some content deliverable, I will forge ahead and I will create and I will be busy building up the library of content that must flow from my fingertips.

3. Keep Informed and Keep a Reference Folder

I will stay abreast of trends in design and layout, even in technologies and formats that my content will be displayed in. This way, I can suggest features in the white paper PDF when I assign it to my designer, or mention a plugin that will help display the content better to my webmaster, or simply suggest ways that will enhance how my content is consumed by end-users. I will know these things because I will be consuming the content of other producers, other brands, even other industries -- not just limiting myself to looking at my competitors but looking further afield to see what is happening in content as a whole. And I will keep a folder of inspirational content (whether in the digital or analog realm) so that I have references, inspiration, and fodder for discussion and debate.

4. Widen the Horizon, Consume Information

I will widen my horizon, open my blinkers, and look further than my current industry or my current niche. I will expand my view to macro, not narrow it to micro. I will know something about everything. Which means I will consume information. I will have a finger on the pulse of: the nation, politics, my target audience, the global business situation, entertainment, culture, lifestyle. And whether I do this via RSS feeds or periodicals delivered to my doorstep, I will do it efficiently and without going to the extreme of information overload and eventual insanity.

5. Maintain Sharp Tools

When I am not working on a deliverable due yesterday, I will maintain the tools I need for my trade. This runs the gamut from sharpened pencils and clean pad paper to defragmented hard drives, crumb-free keyboards, and a zero inbox. This also means a sharpened mind. Not one dulled senseless by too much late night TV, overuse of social media or lousy RSS subscriptions. Maintaining my tools means I am ready at a moment's notice to get back in the trench and whip up a smart bomb made of words. Because that's what I was hired to do.

PHOTO CREDITS: Cracked Marble by PareeErica on Flickr.

Whether you like it or not, content that is shared via social media has an effect on the company's brand and image. As content creators and strategists, we should be able to stay on top of what comes out on our social media channels so that the brand is never endangered and the overall impression that consumers have of the brand is positive.

Goal: Positive Brand Perception

People should feel good about your brand for a number of reasons:

• They may have seen your website, logos and collaterals and think your image is professional and really high standard
• They may have read your content and perceive you to be thought leaders
• They may have interacted with your representatives and thought "These guys seem talented and great to work with"

That's the ideal situation.

Reality: You Have No Control

Unfortunately, we do NOT have control over what goes out on the web. Get used to it. Every company has an army of possible social web participants who can post whatever they feel is useful for their specific audiences -- and the army is made up of your employees. Thus your marketing team could be sharing links to recorded webinars, while your C-levels could be tweeting about the economy, while your rank and file could be complaining about their salaries. Ideally your social media policy covers all this in order to protect your company. But what the policy won't cover is actually monitoring the quality of the stuff that's out there.

Just the other day, doing some research over LinkedIn, I found someone who posted a two-year-old PowerPoint deck filled with cut-and-paste graphics as well as outdated messaging. It was customized by a salesperson and was never seen by the marketing department. He decided to put it up on SlideShare, giving the entire world access to something that was potentially harmful to the brand. Anyone who casually came across it might end up thinking: "Wow, this company doesn't even know how to format a webinar deck. I wonder why I should bother doing business with them?"

Action: Get a System in Place

These are issues which every content strategist should have an answer to. You need a system in place to track and monitor all mentions of your company's brand. It's part and parcel of our job to be a content patroller who has the proper search terms keyed into your apps and alert software of choice, which are checked on a daily basis. And if there is some negative mention of the brand, there should be a system in place to escalate the issue to the right people.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Check out these free social media monitoring tools:

Google Alerts delivers real-time mentions of your brand to your email. 
Tutorial: How To Use Google Alerts to Monitor Your Business 

You can also feed your Google Alerts into AlertRank, which is able to parse the search data and make it more useful to you by giving you context and ratings for each term. Tutorial: Google Alerts and AlertRank Tutorial. 

SocialMention is another web-based app that lists any mentions of your brand on the social web. Plus it has sentiment ratings -- whether the mention is positive, negative or neutral. Watch the video tutorial: How to use Social Mention to monitor your brand or business – Simple Social Media with Jay Rodriguez

You can also use good old Twitter search via web apps:
Search.twitter.com
Convomonitor.com
Monitter.com

Or use Twitter search from a desktop or mobile app:
Hootsuite
Pluggio
Yoono
Tweetdeck

Photo credits: "Yellow Gaze" by Fazen on Flickr.

Content and Copy Differ in Form

Copy writing -- a function that originated in the advertising industry -- refers to the short, often witty text pieces which effectively capture a brand and persuade a consumer to act. Copy writing is snappy, concise, explosive -- able to distill an experience down to a few words, powerful enough to get a casual visitor to click/buy/recall. Thus,copy writing typically produces names, taglines, ads, brochures, flyers, button text, direct mail, sales emails, and the like. 

Content writing on the other hand refers to lengthier explorations, informational products that inform more than they entice. These text products tend to be explanations or articles, catalogs or brochures, press releases or legal disclaimers, ebooks,  white papers, PowerPoint decks and of course blog posts! Initially, content may be the articles that make people's eyes glaze over or the 12-page service brochure that a prospect skims through because they have no time. However, if they need to seriously study an option before buying, they won't be reading your copy for information. Content is the only thing that will satisfy them then.

Content and Copy Differ in Intent

Copy pushes the consumer to act. The clearest example I can give you is from my GMail inbox. One of the subject lines declared that Amazon would shave an extra $100 dollars off the already discounted price on a Kodak camcorder. That got me to click right away. 

Content informs. Continuing my previous example: I would later look up the product page for the Kodak camcorder and read through the reviews of owners who gave the product 5 stars-- as well as those reviewers who hated it and gave it only 1 star. The product page was eye-opening, not just for specifications and accessories, but mostly because of the reviews. Now I'm convinced I don't want a Kodak camcorder because of the information I gleaned from that product page. That's content.

For Complex Sales, Content Must Be There to Support Copy

You might consume content on its own and come to a buying decision. In fact, you've probably done it already: say for example, you read a blog post reviewing a DVD and went out to buy it the next day. But for more complex sales (i.e. more expensive sales that require more involved research prior to buying) you very rarely convert based on copy. I mean, have you ever bought a car simply based on an email a dealer sent you? Not without consulting online reviews, or reading the product literature, or researching whether there have been any malfunctions or recalls in the recent news.

So, content must be available as back up and as support to whatever copy writing piece got a prospect to your door in the first place. Imagine sending out sales emails to prospects touting a promotion on your web design services. But your website doesn't have any info at all on the promo, no customer testimonials to convince them further, or no portfolio of past projects. Your email will fail miserably. 

Are there any more differences you can suggest? Feel free to hit the comments! 

Photo credits: Original photo "white lake, north carolina at sunset" by Y-Its-Mom on Flickr. 

Content which draws in prospects and turns them into leads is content which is user-centric. As all the social media experts and web 2.0 gurus remind us, it's no longer about our company or our brand -- it's all about the end-user, our consumers, our target market. Which raises the question: how do you know what your end-users want? The simplest answer is: ask them.

Poll Numbers. Photo by Alex_Ford on Flickr.

Here are four ways to gather feedback about what your readers want to see more of.

(1) POLLS
At the end of your newsletter or blog post, ask a simple question which will help you solidify your content's direction. Questions can range from delivery format (how would you want this given to you in the future? PDF, RSS, HTML email, TEXT email ) to rating the quality of your current content (did you find this article useful?)

Polls provide a simple, easy, and quick way for an end-user to tell you if something's working or not. After all, who doesn't like clicking a radio button?

(2)  RATINGS
Ever notice thos thumbs up/down icons at the end of a blog post or forum message, or web article? Websites like Digg and Reddit utilize the same mechanism which allows users to say if something is useful or not. The trick is reminding readers that the rating scheme exists. (If you want more articles like this, give ita thumbs up!)

(3) SURVEYS
You always have the tried and tested free survey websites like Survey Monkey or Zoomerang to fall back on when you need a more comprehensive review from readers about your content. Just make sure you don't bother them too often with 15-minute monster questionnaires that exhaust them -- or you might see a drop in subscribers.

Take this opportunity to ask more detailed questions about your content's length, quality and frequency with questions such as:

• Do you feel the articles are: too long, too short, just right.
• Would you rate this issue's content as: excellent, good, average, poor.
• Would you prefer these blog posts come out: once every two weeks, once a week, thrice a week, every day.

(4) COMMENTS
Comments are the lifeblood of blogs because they allow readers to react to the content and continue the conversation. Which is why it's important to drive people to the comment box with open-ended questions at the end of your posts. Ask them doozies such as:

• How would you ...?
• What do you think?

In conclusion, remember that if you want to drive user participation or simply create awareness for any of these feedback mechanisms,  then provide an incentive. Freebies usually work wonders. Offer free prizes such as gift cards, branded merchandise, review copies, or simply a free demo in exchange for some comments, ratings, or survey answers.

Do you have other suggestions on how to discover what your readers want? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Unless you hired fresh grads with no experience and no opinions, your content team has something more to contribute to the table than merely executing your overall plan. So if you want them to play a more strategic role in your communications scheme, and if you want to avoid the negative backlash that happens when you view content as a commodity, then I suggest the following steps:

1. Allow them to massage your message 
2. Allow them to set the communication strategy 

"I had a strategy" graphic by Hordel on Deviantart

Allow Them to Massage Your Message

First off, they're professional communicators who know best how to massage your content so it penetrates the dulled, overloaded senses of the target audience. You probably know the product and the company vision and the quarterly goals, but they know how to make pretty sentences that prospects will want to download, read, link back to or retweet. So let them do the work! Get the actual writing job off your own plate and assign it to your content writers. 

Your Action: Provide key messages and key points to guide them, but allow them to craft the final draft. With your approval and revisions of course. 

Allow Them to Set the Communication Strategy

They know the best strategies for reaching the audience because they interact with their readers and end-users on a daily basis (and if they're not, then shame on them). Thus your PR Manager knows best when to schedule a press release and which periodicals to target. Your Social Media Guru knows best when to tweet that announcement for maximum reach and response. Your Blogger knows what kind of posts resonate best with his RSS subscribers. 

Your Action: Provide suggestions on strategy, target market, release schedules, and frequency of messaging but defer to your content team's expertise and hands-on experience with your intended audience. 

Then, provide helpful feedback as a project moves along: what do you feel needs improvement, how could we do better?  Merely saying "This white paper is horrid" does not give your writers a chance to improve the text product. 

If you've hired the right content writers and producers, then you probably have a dynamic group of individuals just raring to fuel your marketing plan with their out-of-the-box ideas and writing. Why not allow them to play a more strategic role? After all, it's what you hired them for. In more common street parlance: use it or lose it.   

Let your ideas fly! "Flying birds for SNIPS." Photo by Walraven on Flickr.

For content creators, execution is where we fly. A plan is in place and acting on each necessary step is a thrill unto itself. But here's the thing: if you don't bring anything more to the table than great writing/editing or brilliant audio-visual "outputtery," then you'll forever be relegated to the last step of the content process.

I'm assuming here that you don't like being the last in line to get a new product ready or to unleash a brand new website/collateral/landing page/fill-in-the-blank. If this indeed is the case and you WANT to provide more input on how best to implement and execute on a content plan then here are three ways to become a more strategic content creator in your workplace.

1. Demand to be in the Kickoff Meeting
   Yes. I said "demand." You have a right to know what's being planned before you're given the 2-day deadline. You also have a right to be part of the brainstorming process because you know the strategies that work. My point is: if you want to be involved in the planning, then you need to be in at the start of the project not at the tail end.
2. Offer Suggestions on Strategy
   Speak up! Tell them the best channels to get the message out. Tell them the best time for the updated website to go live. Or the best day to send that email blast. You already know this stuff from facing it day in and day out. You have the most knowledge about what types of content work best with the target market. You know the best subject lines to use. You have links to the funniest YouTube videos in the blogosphere. Oh wait. Scratch that last one.

   As part of offering suggestions on strategy, learn to question the tactics that other people want. Especially if there's no solid reasoning behind it. Ask: "Why a white paper? And why not a webinar?" Or "Why a forum? Why not a Facebook Fan Page?" If they have no explanation for the tactic other than "it's the cool thing right now," then you can jump in and share your in-depth knowledge about the content consumption habits of your target market. (Which you SHOULD know by now if you've been working at it for more than a few months.) Questioning the tactic will save you from having to sign up for every new shiny social media platform or online application.

3. Read up on your role as content creator
   An ignorant content person does not deserve to be more strategic. Therefore, get the knowledge that's out there. Most of it is free anyway. Subscribe to blogs of content marketing experts. Not sure where to start? Check out my Netvibes page (entitled Content-ed) for a list of content strategy and copywriting feeds which I follow: http://ow.ly/1udOm
   
   There are many more resources out there: ebooks, webinars, teleseminars, podcasts and even actual printed books. If you're not sure which printed books to buy, Shelly Bowen has a good list.  

How about you? What tips do you have for content people to step up their game, and contribute more to strategy than execution? Hit the comments below.

Photo credits:http://www.flickr.com/photos/13521837@N00/ / CC BY 2.0

The Kinko-fication of the Content Function, a.k.a. The Red Worker, with additional text caption.

When content (which is defined broadly as text, videos, images, status updates) is viewed as a commodity, then guess what happens to the people providing the content? In the eyes of the parent organization, these producers become nothing more than copy shop employees cranking out 175 photocopies a minute.

The focus is on speed of production (I need this tomorrow) and volume of output (I need 8 Tweets a day) rather than strategy and effectiveness (Will this help us sell our services to prospects? Will this increase our click-through rate?)

Commoditization of content makes it easier to walk up to your content team and demand a deliverable in two days' time with no prior planning, warning or process. Doesn't sound right? Hush now, Mr.Cog-in-the-Machine. After all, "Shock and Aww" is as much a battle tactic as it is evidence that a utilitarian mindset is in place.

"I'm SHOCKED that you're demanding an email campaign, landing page and intranet banner in less than a week!"

"AWW, you'll get over it."

My point is simple: if you invite content producers to planning meetings and kickoff calls to get our input, great! We can plan for, and create content that gets the job done, in a reasonable amount of time, no sweat. But if you persevere in The Kinko-fication of the Content Function, then expect crappy, copy/pasted output, a "who cares" attitude, and an overall lack of motivation leading to the exodus of your top performers. (Not to mention a whole lot of whispered jokes about hairy body parts.)

Also, expect your content team to decline your next few meeting requests. You won't want to hear their strategy anyway, so why waste their time at a meeting? They could be more productive finishing the 10 new website pages you ordered only yesterday. Or filling up a job application at a place that better values their input.

"Magazine Stand." Flickr photo by Mannobhai via Creative Commons.

Why Content Creators are Publishers

You brainstorm topics that answer a customer's need. You draft a schedule of deadlines months in advance of the "go live" date -- which amounts to an editorial calendar. You marshall an army of content providers, whether they are internal subject matter experts or freelancers, and then you give them deadlines two weeks ahead of when you really need them because they will ALWAYS ask for an extension. You're on the phone and on email following up with your writers, going back and forth on edits and revisions that make everything sparkly and smooth.

Sounds just like a managing editor's responsibilities to me. Sounds just like the job I had at a glossy monthly lifestyle magazine except instead of a hundred plus pages due at the printer every month, we're talking about blog posts, email campaigns, white papers, tweets and web content that all need to be submitted a week before yesterday.

Hire Content Creators with Publishing Experience

Content creators and content marketers ARE publishers, as Kristina Halvorson constantly reminds us. They're not just writers and bloggers. Out of necessity, they have to be all-in-one managerial manaiacs who can mine their networks for the best writer/photographer for a feature article, and then craft effective email subject lines five minutes later. They have to be able to manage the full content life cycle from creation and delivery to nurturing of the product. And they have to do it well. Then when something is up on the web, or sent out to a list of leads, they have to go back to the drawing board and do it all over again for a new set of deliverables that contribute to the company's business goals.

It makes perfect sense then to hire people with a publishing background -- the journalists, editors, writers, freelance reporters  -- who can easily make sense of the continuous demands that content providers are faced with and turn out excellent copy by strict deadlines.

"Here Come The Robots." Photo by Max Kiesler on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Automation and social media rarely make good bedfellows. Try automating a "thank you for following me" message on Twitter. And then try automating another response but which contains a link to a free download. For a third experiment, try setting up an RSS feed to inject itself directly into a Twitter feed and then leaving it alone forever. In the first case no one will really care to respond one way or another. They know when it's canned, my friend. In the second, you'll get a quick number of unfollows. They don't want to be sold to, my friend. In the third, you'll never get any followers. They want to interact with humans, my friend.

I've seen from personal trial and error that the people on social media who resort to automation are the ones who have no time or inclination to do the hard work of building up a community and actually conversing with people. They're either spammers or robots. And they're not even the cool robots that go around wrecking Japan while battling giant alien bug monsters. No surprise then that in general, automation is shunned in the social media arena.

Why is it then, that we engage in social media without doing enough to differentiate ourselves from spammers and bots? Why aren't we uploading profile photos of ourselves as avatars? Why aren't we completing our profiles with pertinent info and a link back to the corporate website? Why aren't we doing all we can to establish that we are interesting humans who have something worthwhile to say? 

Probably because we're lazy. Or we don't have much to share with the world.

"Boo" to both.

Valuable Original Content. Photo by 10ch on Flickr.

The curious thing about content marketing is: apparently I've been doing it for years and didn't even know it. Whenever I've had to fill out an application form for a new job and the blank field "Strengths" presents itself, I've always filled it up with:

• Idea generation and
• Clear, concise communication skills

Because ideas are fuel. They explode if they aren't handled well. Or they can propel a project down the highway when properly injected into a content product that answers a customer's needs. And coming up with ideas for content that persuades a consumer towards action? My bread and butter. 

So, what I do for a living now has its own buzzword. And I kinda/sorta like it, the more I read up on it. In fact, it was quite satisfying to go through Barrett and Pulizzi's Get Content, Get Customers and realize I've tried a great deal of those content strategies before. (That book would've been perfect for me if it were written back in 1998!)  And a copy of Kristina Halvorson's Content Strategy for the Web lies on my desk, ready to be mined for inspiration. 

While it's not very comforting to realize that thousands of keyword-crazy SEO freelancers and anonymous spammers from Ethiopia are utilizing the "content marketing" tag for their own efforts, it's good to know you aren't operating in a vacuum. It's nice to know that ideas are cool. It's nice to have a twitter hashtag.

It's also nice that I don't have to come up with names for department store raffle promos anymore, like I did when I first started in 1994. Anyone remember "Pick-A-Prize Surprise?" No? I'm glad.