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Soc. Media Best Practices: Great Content
Social Media Marketing Best Practice: Creating Great Content
Ironically, the topic of my post (which is almost officially two weeks overdue) is on creating great content as a "social media marketing best practice." The reason it's ironic is that I love to create great content and I prefer to do it in multiple channels as Monsieur Partee suggests. However, a number of business trips, webinars, podcasts and other blogs have conspired to prevent me from actually writing my post on why creating great content is a social media practice.
In addition to thinking that writing a post on a particular social media best practice is a great idea, I'm also responding to being "tagged" by friend, and Twitter enthusiast, Morriss Partee. This is part of a writing project that Mitch Joel initiated several weeks ago and has been responded to by a number of high profile bloggers including:
My addition to this great body of work is important but pretty simple when you get down to it. Create great content to keep your audience engaged. This is right about the time where you say, "no duh, Aaron, what other type of content would we create?" Surprisingly, this is far less obvious as one might think as evidenced by the amount of crap out there. You'll also notice that many companies continually struggle with this concept (it's usually the second or third question we get right after the "what if someone says something bad about us?" comment when we are talking about building an online community).
To that end, there are a few simple rules that I've learned that should help you think about creating great content:
- Keep it in a Box - it's easy to meander all over the place if you're writing a blog, recording a podcast or moderating a webinar. While you might demonstrate your breadth of knowledge by doing this, you'll also lose your audience quicker than you can say "I can't believe the mayor of a town of 9,000 people in Alaska could be one heartbeat away from President of the United States some day." Lee LeFever does a great job of "keeping it in a box" with his Commoncraft videos.
- Always be Prescriptive - this works in lockstep with item number one. Bottom line, it's a lot easier, not to mention more valuable, if you make your content actionable. You also have a much better chance of your content becoming viral because people will want to share your helpful information with others. For more thoughts on this, check out my recent Keeping it in a Box post.
- Be Memorable - it's easy to regurgitate the same old junk that everyone else is talking about. Why not interview someone REALLY exciting for that next podcast interview. Or better yet, write a blog post that takes an unconventional approach to an everyday activity. I did this with my Hiring in a 2.0 World blog post and got blogged/written about by Shel Israel, US News and World Report and the Boston Globe.
What tips do you have for creating great content? If you've got 'em, please share them in the comments section of this blog.
Last but not least, I'm "paying it forward" by tagging friends, Bryan Person, Jim Storer, Doug Haslam, Lisa Dilg and Jennifer Leggio.
Tue, Sep 23 2008
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