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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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At a party like that you get to talk to people you work with about stuff that has nothing to do with work. One of our clients has an 18-year-old son, and is struggling with his impending departure from home. We had a great conversation about what that’s like, something I’ve been thinking about now that our oldest is 11. I met the spouses of several folks I’ve known for a while, which somehow always sheds new light on people (my Mom, Dad, and wife came to the event; I’m sure others felt the same). With others I talked politics, song lyrics, the terrorist fiasco in my hometown of Sudbury, cooking, travel, old times, women (with men), men (with women), and football.

The Two Yous

Most of us are more than the roles we play at work, on a team, or in a single project. Moving past the cardboard cutout and getting to know the complete person makes work and life in general more interesting, with the added side bonus of making teams stronger and more effective.

Adding Social Media

Embracing this is the key to engaging effectively in social media. You should approach Twitter in the same state-of-mind you do a cocktail party like last night — sharing yourself authentically, getting to know each person you meet for the interest of it, building a network of relationships, and letting the mutual benefits emerge naturally.

Last night I met someone new who went out of her way to tell me so-and-so from her office said hello. “So-and-so” was a guy I met in person once, but who I felt I’d really gotten to know on facebook over the last two years. He and I have shared thoughts on digital media, but I’ve also seen him react honestly to job changes, watched his kids grow, witnessed his trials and triumphs from afar. He’d apparently done the same for me, and felt he knew me in the way I knew him. That’s powerful ju-ju, I think. If there’s magic in social media, that’s it.

This morning I got a YouTube video from another client, featuring her CEO horsing around in an on-camera skit. He’s the kind of person you instantly know is more than his title when you meet him; a warm and open wit, and a personality that fills the room. Seeing that video validates and enriches my understanding of him as a person, and makes me want to see him succeed.

“Younification”

The blurring of the “professional” you and the “personal” you that happens on the web – younification – is decried in some circles, and I respect that. My wife would say my work life creeps into my home life a little too much, and, if I were wired differently, one or another of my digitally immortalized indiscretions might be embarrassing. But I’ve always thought good business is personal. And social media at its best really just boils down to that.

It gets us all a little closer to the truth. And in the long run, that can only be a good thing.

That’s how I see it, anyway. But this is a tricky one, and I welcome your thoughts.

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When I hit “publish” on this blog post, busy elves will make good things happen all across the interwebs. The post will hit this WordPress blog first, then, via RSS, reach our followers on FriendFeed. Other content – from our agency and personal Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter accounts – will do the same, and a comprehensive feed of all things Holland-Mark will be created there. A subset of that content will be posted to Twitter, including this post, drawing more people to the site. Some of these folks will hit the Tweetmeme button embedded in the lower right of this site, drawing still more people in. Related posts on other sites will be linked to at the bottom of this post, with just a click or two using the Zemanta plug-in, and links back to this post will appear on those blogs.

A subset of all this content – just the “official” agency stuff – will hit our Tumblr account, creating a more focused, agency RSS feed. That will drive Notes in our facebook fan page, which will appear in the news feeds of the 120 or so people who already follow us on facebook, and be seen by everyone who follows them. And the cycle will continue.

Wassat? No elves on your payroll? Well… good news… you can achieve the same result by getting the plumbing right across your social site profiles. Doing so is one of the more critical aspects of building a social media presence on the back of content worthy of attention, though it’s all too rarely talked about among the digerati*.

As unsexy as the plumbing stuff is… If you get the Gospel of Good Content at the core of your social media effort, you’re working hard to put good stuff out there. Why would you not do everything you can to see that it gets the maximum possible distribution? If the answer is “because this is all too freaking complicated, wiseguy,” read on.

The Key Concepts

Let’s start with a few key concepts:

1. Content is the core of your social marketing strategy. Not Twitter. Not facebook. Not blogging. CONTENT, in whatever form, but always at the intersection of what your target users are looking for online, and what you are uniquely able to provide.
2. Social marketing success is a marathon, not a sprint. A sustained effort is necessary to get the business result, which means your strategy to create and leverage content must live within the constraints of the resources you’re able to commit to it over the long haul.
3. The absolute key to getting the maximum impact from the minimum necessary content development investment is to connect your disparate social networking presences in such a way that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Still too complicated? How about this: Whatever you publish in one place should appear, automatically, everywhere else. While it’s obvious how this serves your interests, remember it serves your audience’s as well. This approach makes your content available to people in the places they want to consume it, and it creates feeds that let them subscribe to just the content types they’re interested in.

Feeders, Endpoints & Aggregators

The key to making this work is to distinguish among three social network account types:

• Feeders – Which are places you post content. You’ll need one of these for every content type you post… examples include a Blog for long-form text, Twitter for snippets, Google Shared Items for links, Flickr for images, YouTube for video, etc. etc. You can have as many of these as you like, though I’d recommend limiting yourself to one per content type just to keep things simple.
• Endpoints – Which are places you want your content to end up. Wherever your target user hangs out, you should maintain an endpoint. If it’s facebook, make a fan page. If it’s Tumblr, be there. If it’s some Ning site, same deal. With endpoints it’s pretty much the more the merrier, so long as the content you’re sending out is of some value to the community built around that endpoint.
• Aggregators – Which are hubs that make it easy to get content in from your Feeders and out to your Endpoints. I like FriendFeed for this, but I’ve seen people use Posterous, Ping.fm, and even Google Reader to handle this function.

After you get your accounts set up, you just connect the respective inputs and outputs like you did on your home entertainment system:

1. Connect the outbound RSS from every Feeder to your primary Aggregator.
2. Consider setting up a secondary or even tertiary Aggregator to provide partial feeds to those only interested in a specific subset of content.
3. Connect the outbound RSS from one or another of your Aggregators to all of your Endpoints.

There may be some RSS trickery necessary to make this happen, and to start you’ll almost definitely make a mistake that creates duplicate entries one place or another. Don’t sweat it, just be systematic in rooting out problems, and getting the system up and running. Keep at it, and sooner than you might think, you’ll have the whole thing spinning like a top, getting the good stuff out to the people interested in it.

• An excellent post by Louis Gray on how to get the most out of your Google Reader shared items.
• Here’s another one from Louis a while back, on the value of pulling your blog into FriendFeed. (Louis Gray is on the list of must-subscribe folks, IMHO, and there’s a lot of other great stuff on his blog.)
• Chris Brogan’s classic “50 Steps” post lays out a linking strategy one breadcrumb at a time.
• Michael Calienes calls this ‘Presence Engineering,’ and has posted a lot on the subject (hat tip to Edward Boches for uncovering this one).
• Sure there’s more; please add anything good you’ve come across in the comments.

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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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Anyway… If you’re trying to get rolling in Social Media, consider the 5 P’s:

1. Planning – The strategy stuff.
2. Plumbing – The technical stuff.
3. Posture – The mental stuff.
4. Participation – The active stuff.
5. Programs – The business stuff.

Here’s what I mean.

Planning

Always good to start off thinking about what you want to accomplish, not in social media terms, but in business terms. Are you trying to generate leads here? Build some goodwill? Get closer to customers and prospects, to better understand what they want? What?

Beyond that, you need to determine what your content strategy is going to be… in other words, what kind of content is at the intersection of what you can uniquely provide, and what your target audience is interested in? If you can figure that out, and deliver the goods, you’re halfway home.

Plumbing

There’s a lot of stuff to get set up to make the social media thing work. I think it’s best to start with a blog, but that’s really a channel for long-form content. If pictures serve the story you’re trying to tell, get a Flickr account set up. If you need video, then YouTube. If you’re partial to talking rather than writing, create a podcast. It really doesn’t matter, just add whatever serves your content strategy, and ignore whatever doesn’t.

You might also want to set up some aggregators… places like FriendFeed, facebook, and Tumblr, where all your feeds come together as one. These are a great way to make it easy for people to get all of your content in one place, and to multiply the impact of every investment you make in content production.

After that, put the mouse down, and get into right headspace…

Posture

The posture you maintain in your social media interactions is arguably the most important dimension of it. As important as content is, in the end people will tolerate mediocre content if it’s delivered with sincerity, and maybe a little humor.

Remember social media is a cocktail party. Walk around, talk to people, get to know them, be nice, add value to the conversation wherever you can. Listen more than you talk. The time will come to hand out your business card (that’s “Programs” below).

Participation

This is the stuff people think about when they talk social media… the tweeting, the blogging, the flickr-ing (??), whatever.

Again… cocktail party. A cocktail party with the valuable and interesting folks on the planet is useless if you don’t show up. So show up.

Program

Here’s where you get to pay the bills. While you’re investing in the creation of “social equity” – the goodwill you can generate in these networks by trying to help other people out – you need to harvest some of that equity once in a while.

While participation must be sustained and ongoing to create value, programs are periodic by definition. Maybe this week you have a special offer, next week a news release, the week after you’re looking for a javascript ninja. Content serving your own interests is totally acceptable within a social community, so long as it’s not all you bring to the table.

So that’s it. When you think Social Marketing, think Planning, Plumbing, Posture, Participation, Programs. Easy breezy.

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