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Ten Steps To Build A Basic Content Hub

January 13, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

Using the Web to build your brand is less and less about creating destinations, and more and more about creating content useful to the people you want to reach, then empowering them to access that content wherever and however they like.

The key to this is creating something we call a “content hub.” A content hub is more than just a standalone site or application, it’s both the heart of a distributed network of information, and a destination for those that share the interest it supports.

Rather than explain the theory of a content hub in detail, it’s best to just build a quick-and-dirty one, and use it. Here’s the process I’d recommend to do exactly that:

  1. If you don’t have a GMail account, create one, say acme@gmail.com. You’ll need this e-mail for all the logins, might as well use the same one.
  2. Associate your logo with that e-mail in Gravatar.com; this will also come in handy later.
  3. Create a YouTube account associated with the same Google ID.
  4. Create a Flickr account. You may need a Yahoo e-mail account for this. Just create one.
  5. Create a Twitter account, and customize the profile page to reflect your brand identity. Add an image, and a short bio line, for God’s sake.
  6. Create a Facebook Page. You can do this from your personal Facebook account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one.
  7. Create a Posterous account, and activate the Group Profile feature to make it easier for others to post to the account. Connect your YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook pages to Posterous so that any content you send to Posterous bounces into the other accounts automagically.
  8. Create a simple listening station in Google Reader. You’ll have access to Google Reader automatically having set up the GMail account above. Lots of smart people have described how to do this; just do what they say. Once you get the basics down, you’ll be able to pull any RSS feed into Reader, which I promise will come in handy at some point.
  9. Click the Reader “Settings” at upper right, then the rightmost tab, which is “Send To.” Configure Reader to send content to the destination sites you created above.
  10. Use the damn thing.

The “hub” of the system is your new GMail account. If you log into that each morning, you’ll have access to everything you need.

To distribute original content through the system, just use the Posterous account. This is dirt-simple straightforward… You can post everywhere by sending e-mail to post@posterous.com from your GMail address. Send images and they’ll go to Flickr as well. Send video and they’ll post to YouTube automatically, etc. Links to everything you create will appear on your new Posterous blog, and go out to your Twitter followers and Facebook fans, automatically.

“Curating” content is even easier. Whatever is in Reader can be sent through the system by clicking the “Send To” button. When you do that a drop-down appears with Twitter, Facebook, and Posterous as options (remember, choosing “Posterous” sends it everywhere). Begin to poke around in the local blogs and start raising your visibility. Leave short comments on others’ blogs to draw traffic to your own, and create the personal connection you need to deliver on the brand promise. (Gravatar is already set up if you followed the above, so wherever you log in to comment on someone else’s blog and use your GMail address, your icon will also appear and give you some exposure.)

You can also access your brand “listening station” in Google Reader. Just click “Reader” at the upper left of Gmail, and you’ll pretty much be able monitor any appearance of the brand online. You should add some influential local bloggers to the feeds there as well, and create folders for whatever else you like to read on the web.

So what happens now?

Start posting. Share the content you find interesting in Reader. Build some relationships. Get to know folks. Help people, and watch them help you back.

If you need something more industrial strength, please give us a call. But for 90% of the businesses out there, the truth is this is enough to get started building the relationships that will help build your business.

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Dinner Table Conversation Matters

December 13, 2009 by caroline b. · View Comments 

dinner table
Image by sleepydisco via Flickr

The problems of the world will be solved when we sit down to dinner. Quite frankly, I don’t care if you’re eating a roasted chicken or a KFC family bucket, we can solve the obesity crisis second, the point is not what you’re eating, but that you’re eating in communion with others — that you are taking the time to talk over a meal.

Growing up we always ate dinner together. Years later there would be practices, plays, PTA meetings, and friends that kept all five of us from sitting down to dinner, but even then we made it a point. I grew up believing in the power of a meal, but more than that I grew up believing in the power of dinner table conversation. It was through those conversations that I found confidence in my ideas, learned to take pride in my brothers, and understood the complexities of a world economy listening to my parents talk. At the dinner table, we were all equals.

But this tale is more than nostalgia; it’s the realization of a theory. Just this evening, a roasted chicken prompted an intimate dinner party that brought together a teacher (who is also a bird watcher, fluent French speaker, and organic food enthusiast), a musician (holding a Master’s who also happens to take an intense interest in genealogy), a budding architect (who spends his days working retail after deciding to stop making a life as a jazz musician), and myself (a girl with a scattered understanding of various non-urgent or remarkable matters). There over a chicken (which yielded less than a desirable amount of food for four people) we began to talk. We were expressing interests, asking questions of our companions, sharing theories about sustainable farming, comparing our theories to those of books we were reading.  (Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food was mentioned.) Amongst us was a wealth of understanding, insight, and personal experience. A native of Texas, my views on farming and meat are vastly different than my East Coast comrades. But that was not the point. The point was something else entirely.

In the absence of CNN.com, HuffPo, RSS feeds, and the pile of unread New Yorkers next to my bed that gives me nightmares, there is still a wealth of knowledge to be cultivated. When there is nothing else to be read, there will always be a chicken to be roasted and hungry friends with whom to share.

Posted via email from holland-mark posterous

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Social Marketing Is Powered By Content

September 25, 2009 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

The Helping Hand in a Hamburger Helper commercial
Image via Wikipedia

We talk about our approach to social marketing being “rooted in brand, and powered by content.” We’ll cover the front half in an upcoming post. The back half is our take on The Great Truism of social marketing… that today, you are what you publish.

Content Strategy

We believe success in social marketing starts with a content strategy, which boils down to a clear-eyed definition of exactly what kind of content is at the intersection of:

  • what your target audience is looking for online, and
  • what you are uniquely willing and/or able to provide.

What does that mean? It means if you’re a magic marker brand, don’t blog about the 10 Reasons Your Marker Is Better than Brand X. Create a showcase for people who use your product to make cool things. If you make plastic stuff in every conceivable configuration, don’t tweet your press releases. Create a blog about how people can take control of household chaos and get organized. If you’re a late-night taco truck, don’t do a YouTube series on Korean cooking. Tell hungry, drunk people where you’re at through a medium they can access easily.

It ain’t rocket surgery, people.

Feeding The Beast

The real challenge with this approach is that when you commit to a content strategy like the above, you actually need to produce content aligned with that strategy. Knowing that once you start, you have to “feed the beast” — day-in-and-day-out — actually keeps some smart marketing folks out of social media altogether.

That’s a shame, because once you get into the rhythm of it, contributing something worthwhile to the conversation about a problem your product solves (which in the vast majority of cases is ground zero of the intersection defined above) rarely turns out to be anywhere near as hard as you think it’s going to be.

Three simple strategies can ease the burden dramatically…

1. Balance Your Content Portfolio

“Content” means more than white papers and blog posts. Long-form content like that is important and great, but no sane person with a day job would sign up to produce enough of it to sustain a consistent social marketing effort over time. Content can also be links to on-topic information you come across in your travels online. It can be cameraphone shots of your white board doodles, posted into a Flickr account. If you’re a restaurant, it can be a cheap-and-dirty video of your best waiter explaining today’s specials. It can even be “rapport” content, the stuff that gets produced automatically in the ongoing give-and-take among people who share a common interest on the web. All those things are like Hamburger Helper for the long-form stuff. And if you haven’t had it in a while, Hamburger Helper is pretty good. People like it.

2. Integrate Your Content Capture

The fact is most businesses throw off 80% of the content they need just by being. The problem is they don’t know how to easily capture it — in meatspace or on the web — and make sure it finds its way into the proper social media pipe. Getting people across the organization to spot, capture, and deliver on-strategy content into a centrally managed social program is hard, simply because it’s a change in behavior. But you can make it easier by being smart about what you ask of people. Have a contest to get the ball rolling. Use the inbound e-mail interfaces most posting sites make available now, or even a one-stop-shop posting system like Posterous. Teach people about RSS, and get them onto a reader that makes it easy for them to build a feed of relevant links (in Google Reader, for example, just clicking the “share” button creates this.) And stay on them… it’s going to take time, but with a steady stream of reminders and some recognition for the folks who deliver the goods, it will happen.

3. Maximize Your Content Distribution

Finally, get the most out of every piece of content you publish. The key to this is setting up a system that links your social networks together in the right way, what I think of as getting the “Plumbing” right.

That’s a biggie, and the subject of my next post. Why not subscribe now, so you don’t miss it?

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