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Need some inspiration for your content strategy? Here’s a self-explanatory, and awesome, slide deck by Amy Vernon about content strategy from our Think Tank Summer Series webinar back in September.
Key Takeaways
An overview of the types of content that work best
Best practices
A road map of how to create content that works
Direct and indirect benefits of building your content stream
Why it’s so vital to own your own content
What makes a group into a learning community? And what is the role of social media-enabled learning communities in the modern membership organization and other comparable types of knowledge service delivery? I have often written about the Veterinary Information Network’s (VIN’s) virtual membership and business models. At a recent visit at VIN’s headquarters in Davis, California, I was struck by the realization that developmental learning is the basis of every aspect of VIN’s model and practice.
I use the term “developmental learning” to specify learning that is purposeful—leading to specific solutions to specific problems and constantly developing participants along competency-building paths. This is different from open learning in open social networking communities and can become the basis for alternative, revenue-generating models of service.
VIN is the virtual professional association for veterinarians that has successfully challenged the orthodoxy of the mainstream AVMA with a new, virtual, community-based, membership model and is revered by its members, who call themselves “Vinners.” My son Colin, a young veterinarian with his own practice in Fort Bragg, California, is such a “Vinner.” I asked him to walk me through a typical day in which he uses the resources of the VIN community so I could gauge its value through a member’s eyes. Welcome to a day in his life.
That a community or any kind of service can have critical relevance for a member on a daily basis is remarkable to me. What makes it indispensable to members’ lives and successful as the basis of the organization’s business model and value proposition? Below are six foundational building blocks that could be transferred and adapted by other membership organizations:
How these 6 anchoring building blocks can be modified and applied depends on the needs and capabilities of the individual organization. Underlying them, however, are two larger, fundamental mental shifts in service delivery, inspired and enabled by social media:
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What makes a group into a learning community? And what is the role of social media-enabled learning communities in the modern membership organization and other comparable types of knowledge service delivery? I have often written about the Veterinary Information Network’s (VIN’s) virtual membership and business models. At a recent visit at VIN’s headquarters in Davis, California, I was struck by the realization that developmental learning is the basis of every aspect of VIN’s model and practice.
I use the term “developmental learning” to specify learning that is purposeful—leading to specific solutions to specific problems and constantly developing participants along competency-building paths. This is different from open learning in open social networking communities and can become the basis for alternative, revenue-generating models of service.
VIN is the virtual professional association for veterinarians that has successfully challenged the orthodoxy of the mainstream AVMA with a new, virtual, community-based, membership model and is revered by its members, who call themselves “Vinners.” My son Colin, a young veterinarian with his own practice in Fort Bragg, California, is such a “Vinner.” I asked him to walk me through a typical day in which he uses the resources of the VIN community so I could gauge its value through a member’s eyes. Welcome to a day in his life.
That a community or any kind of service can have critical relevance for a member on a daily basis is remarkable to me. What makes it indispensable to members’ lives and successful as the basis of the organization’s business model and value proposition? Below are six foundational building blocks that could be transferred and adapted by other membership organizations:
How these 6 anchoring building blocks can be modified and applied depends on the needs and capabilities of the individual organization. Underlying them, however, are two larger, fundamental mental shifts in service delivery, inspired and enabled by social media:
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Here’s our follow-up post from Bob Le Drew, responding to questions that arose during his Think Tank Webinar on content strategy. View the archive here.
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Content strategy is something that isn’t revolutionary – it’s not rocket science. But it is also important. As associations and NFPs move to embrace social media, they frequently find themselves in a situation where rather than be searching for content, they can be inundated in content.
The basic elements of a content strategy are the same as any communications strategy with some elements of a communications audit on top.
In short:
Questions from the webinar:
Should there be a step [in planning stage] for identifying what content is meaningful?
The triage process is important. There are lots of tools you can use, some free. You can ask your stakeholders what they need. Look at e-mail questions that come in. Use website “heatmapping.” And use your own judgement — if you are able to think like an “outsider.”
What if your website is overloaded with content? How do you determine what’s necessary for the website, versus sent as an as-needed basis as questions come in? (We have an internal website for affiliate staff, but it is overloaded with tools and resources for them. Any advice on how to prioritize content?)
Again, the triage process is important. Look at the site’s activity, use the web stats (you do HAVE web stats coming in, right?). Heatmaps. Figure out what they’re using. Mae it prominent. what they’re not using but is sitll necessary can be relegated to an internal page, a library, or some other place. The key is to bring your audience into the process. They know what they need. Listen to them.
How much is too much? We struggle with deciding what isn’t useful for members down the line.
There are great sites like Jakob Nielsen’s that have tons of usablity research you can draw on. Without getting into your specific situation, you want people to have immediate access to the content they need most and most often. If you’re providing advocacy for animal shelters, you want draft letters to lawmakers, background sheets, and the other things that your members will need to take action right up front. Ask the users. Or if you can think like a user, ask yourself.
(related) How do you navigate the politics when analytics show that something’s not useful?
If you have stats on your side, that’s helpful. We people who care about content and messages and communication frequently get criticized for not having numbers. But if you can show that a given piece of content is “underperforming” – that nobody knows and/or cares about it – and you can back the assertion up with hard numbers from surveys, Google Analytics, or other studies, you can turn the situation from an “I’m right! No, I am!” to a “the numbers tell us this isn’t a high priority for users.”
How do you balance your own content with sharing of others’ content? We know there’s the 80/20 rule, but does that actually work well in your experience?
I’m not a giant fan of rules as anything more than guidelines. Sometimes there just may not be content from others to share on a given day or week, so what do you do? Much better, in my opinion, to focus on sharing QUALITY content. Set up listening posts using tools like Google Reader or social media management dashboards like Hootsuite or Jugnoo, then share the best and most appropriate content from people you trust and respect.
Do goals need to be measurable? Seems like a lot of content goals are soft, like “raise awareness” or “tell the story” or “create a more human voice”
It might seem to be hard to measure a goal like “create a more human voice.” But you could, theoretically, come up with measures like sentence length, word length, and the like. Most people don’t use “prestidigitation” – they say “magic.”
More often, however, I think goals that aren’t measurable aren’t soft — they’re BAD GOALS. Raise awareness? Of what? By who? How aware are they now? How will you measure that? Rather than a fuzzy goal which can’t be measured, why not:
“We will increase the mention of our organization in people’s FB posts by 10% between now and fiscal year end, from approximately 50 mentions to 55.” Or “We will increase the number of sites linking to ours by 20% in the next 4 months.”
What’s the difference between content strategy and content marketing?
Content marketing is a specific use of content. Content strategy is the set of principles and plans that underlie all of the uses of your content. Marketing has an implication that there is a “sale” at the end of the process, which isn’t necessarily the case in the association market. But I think that you can think of a membership, a partnership, or any number of other actions taken after you share content in some way with a stakeholder as a “sale.”
But to me you shouldn’t be “marketing” your content without first having done some thinking about the strategy behind this. Otherwise you’re like a ship without a compass.
What’s more important…policy or process?
Wow. That’s a philosophical question. My gut reaction is that the two complement each other. You need policy to inform process. You need some principle behind what you’re doing to guide how you’re doing it. Process is the operational aspect of it, while policy is the principled side. The two have their impacts on different areas of content strategy and development, I think.
Read more on our Think Tank Summer Series below and access the archives here.
Gini Dietrich is the CEO of Arment Dietrich, an integrated marketing communications firm based in Chicago. She also is the lead blogger at Spin Sucks and, of course, co-author of Marketing in the Round with Geoff Livingston. This is the first of three follow-up posts related to the awesome Marketing in the Round Think Tank webinar that Gini presented for us as part of our Think Tank Summer Series. Get the recording here. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here.
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You made it! The final blog post in the series of three about Marketing in the Round, written by Geoff Livingston and me.
In the first post, you learned about breaking down silos and budgeting for your marketing round. And, in the second post, you learned about staffing and measurement.
Today we’re going to look at how to build your business case and get executive buy-in.
As a middle manager, how do you bring your ideas forward and build enough trust to be able to adjust on the fly?
The best way to bring your ideas forward, is it build a business case for what it is you’re trying to achieve. For instance, are your competitors doing something you think would benefit the company? We have a client who we are pushing to do video. For the past two years, we’ve been trying to get them to do video. But it wasn’t until their competition began doing video that they thought it was a good idea. Another way is to find out which companies your executives would like to be like, as your organization grows. Find out what they’re doing and bring that information forward.
Then, because you’ve built trust around bringing those ideas forward, you’ll begin to adjust and improve on the fly. It may take a few weeks, or it might take a few months. Either way, be patient. It’ll happen.
Is marketing not often its own silo?
Sure, it is! That’s part of the problem. Every discipline is its own silo. Think about it this way: Let’s say marketing is doing a big push to raise additional funds in one particular month. Or you’re having a contest. The campaign begins, they’re using the social networks to talk about it, they’re sending postcards, they’re doing email marketing, they may have even bought some Facebook ads. But they forgot to tell the receptionist or customer service or IT and the website goes down from all of the extra traffic or people call or email to enter to win and no one knows what they’re talking about.
When you create a marketing round, everyone knows what the other is doing and there are no surprises. By no means are we advocating that you don’t go back to your desk and do what you’re good at doing. On the contrary. It’s more about communication and working together so there are no surprises and everyone is working toward one goal.
What if everyone else is annoyed by marketing pushing this?
They will be, for sure. I can’t remember who said it, but there is a great quote about creating change. It goes something like, “First they’ll adore you. Then they’ll fight you. Then they’ll join you. That’s when you will have won.” If people aren’t annoyed by your doing this, you’re not doing it right!
Re using market research to get executive buy-in – associations are often guilty of saying ” we’re unique, those examples won’t work for us.” What advice do you have for getting the right kinds of case studies?
Ah…the age old we’re different so we don’t have any competition. Baloney. You compete for dollars in some sense. Maybe it’s extracurricular activities or other associations, but you have competitors. Figure out who they are and build your business case based on what’s working for them and what’s not working. It may not be another non-profit organization or an association. Maybe it’s the park district or a school or, heck, Apple. Find a way to show your executives how you can be successful based on those types of organizations.
And that, my friends, is that. Three blog posts. Lots of really great questions!
If you’d like more context to these questions, I’m pretty sure Maddie and her team will let you download the on-demand video. You can find that by clicking here.
And, if you have additional questions, don’t be shy about asking them in the comments here. I’ll stop by a couple of times a day to see how I can help.
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Gini Dietrich is the CEO of Arment Dietrich, an integrated marketing communications firm based in Chicago. She also is the lead blogger at Spin Sucks and, of course, co-author of Marketing in the Round with Geoff Livingston. This is the first of three follow-up posts related to the awesome Marketing in the Round Think Tank webinar that Gini presented for us as part of our Think Tank Summer Series. Get the recording here. Part 3 coming up tomorrow! Part 1 is here.
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Here we are again. The second in our three-part series about Marketing in the Round, written by Geoff Livingston and me.
We’re taking your questions in order to help you integrate your marketing and communications, choose the right approaches, and measure your results.
In the first post, you learned about breaking down silos and budgeting for your marketing round.
Today we’ll take a look at staffing and measurement.
How do you identify the right person to be at the center of the round? What traits should that person have?
As a communications professional, I’d love to say it’s my peers. Unfortunately, I can’t in good faith say that. You need someone in the center of the round who understands how each of the disciplines work and when to bring each into the fold.
That person likely has worked at an organization where they were integrated and they were exposed (or even worked with) other disciplines. For instance, I worked in the PR department at an ad agency. They did advertising, direct, and public relations. So I was exposed to many different disciplines in the work we did for clients.
You want someone in the center of the round who knows how the other disciplines work, how to measure the results from those tactics, and when it’s appropriate to bring in (or remove) each.
There’s a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the new position of Chief Marketing Technologist – is “marketing in the round” possible in one role, or is it all about connecting multiple roles?
The chief marketing technologist, as it’s being positioned in the blogosphere, is the person who ties together marketing and IT. We always joke that the role of the marketer is to try all of these new tools and the role of the IT professional is to make sure they can’t connect to them from work.
Never before have marketing and IT needed to work so closely together so roles are being created to not only integrate the two departments, but to do it smoothly while also understanding the security risks IT professionals are trained to watch.
Could the person in the middle of the marketing round be that person? Sure. As long as he or she also knows how to integrate the other disciplines.
What skills do you need to have on the team vs skills you can outsource?
I believe pretty strongly that your audiences, customers, stakeholders, and employees want to have a conversation with you online, not some PR or marketing professional who doesn’t work inside your organization. That said, there are many things an outsourced professional or agency can do to free up your time to allow your internal team to have the conversations. Things such as strategy development, creation of an editorial calendar, scheduling of updates, monitoring the conversations, finding news and links of interest, and coaching. But your internal team should have the authority to not only have online conversations, but be able to make decisions that will create a happy customer.
Re SMARTER goals – how do we know we’re measuring the right things?
Unfortunately, the online world has been rife with fans and followers and views and traffic for the past few years. I call these ego-driven metrics because they sure make you feel good, but they don’t necessarily mean you’re converting. You want to figure out how to measure things that drive to real business results. For instance, my experience is in the for-profit world, so there are three things we measure against: Increased revenue, shortened sales cycle, or improved margins. If you’re not in the for-profit world, perhaps you are doing things that help you get bigger and better grants or creating opportunities for more fundraising. Whatever it is, those are the right things to be measuring against.
What are some common metrics that work across an entire marketing department?
I come from the for-profit world, so the metrics we consider for every client are: Increased revenues, improved margins, and/or a shortened sales cycle. In a non-profit or membership-based organization, you could consider increased funding, larger donations, or more members. These are the types of things that will allow you to measure a return-on-investment that is music to the executive team’s ears.
If you’d like more context to these questions, I’m pretty sure Maddie and her team will let you download the on-demand video. You can find that by clicking here.
And, if you have additional questions, don’t be shy about asking them in the comments here. I’ll stop by a couple of times a day to see how I can help.
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Gini Dietrich is the CEO of Arment Dietrich, an integrated marketing communications firm based in Chicago. She also is the lead blogger at Spin Sucks and, of course, co-author of Marketing in the Round with Geoff Livingston. This is the first of three follow-up posts related to the awesome Marketing in the Round Think Tank webinar that Gini presented for us as part of our Think Tank Summer Series. Get the recording here. Part 2 and 3 coming up tomorrow and the next day!
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A couple of weeks ago, I presented a webinar about Marketing in the Round, the new book written by Geoff Livingston and me.
Maddie Grant asked me to keep the presentation to about 35 minutes so there was plenty of time for questions.
And questions there were!
There were so many questions, we thought answering some of them would make a good blog post. But then that one blog post turned into three.
Some of this Q&A (and the subsequent others) will be most valuable to those of you working inside associations or non-profits because that who the audience was for this particular webinar. But some also will be valuable to you if you’re looking to integrate your marketing and communications in a way that harnesses the wild, wild west nature of social media and allows you to effectively measure your efforts.
So fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride!
How can we relate this to smaller staff associations?
The nice thing about the marketing in the round concept is it isn’t built for one sized team. The idea is that you integrate the disciplines in order to drive the best results. You might be using one of (or a combination of) the four approaches we discuss in the book – top-down, direct, groundswell, and flanking – or you might be breaking down internal silos to actually talk to one another.
If your team is small, it’s likely you have what’s called lonely silos. You’re working on a small team and you have a great rapport, but you each are responsible for your one thing – or your one discipline – and you forget you have to communicate to everyone else what it is you’re doing. This creates silos, which don’t allow for a flexible and nimble organization.
Break down those bad boys and talk to one another!
Maybe the silos are not an issue…but the overall integration is still hard. Are the rewards and incentives the key?
Incentives and rewards are key, in fact. No one is going to do something extra for their job if it’s not required. At least, not for very long. They may have the best intentions to do so, but then life and the real job responsibilities get in the way.
So make integration part of one’s job and reward them for doing it well. The rewards don’t have to be financial, either. If you believe what Dan Pink says in Drive, people are not motivated by money. Sure, we all need money to pay our bills, but the day-to-day activities we do can be incentivized by other types of things that motivate us. Such as gift cards to restaurants or theater tickets or expensive hair tools. Find out what motivates your team and reward them that way.
How do you prioritize budgeting if you’re starting something completely new–like digital marketing, SEO, or social media?
You know, I hate to use “it depends” as an answer, but it really does depend. The nice thing with the digital tools – particularly social media – is they are free. Now, don’t get me wrong. The time involved in using those tools is not free, but you have the opportunity to test some things without spending a bunch of time or money.
My best advice is to create a listening program. You can do this with tools such as Google alerts, Jugnoo (who is a client, but I’d still recommend them because their tool is wicked cool), and Social Mention.
What these tools do is allow you to monitor what’s being said about the industry, your competition, and even you online. Once you figure out where people are spending their time online, focus your energies there first. Don’t try to be all things to all people or jump on every new tool. Once you figure out whether or not there is an opportunity, then you can figure out how much time and money to invest in doing it right.
What percentage of the budget should be experimental?
Gosh. I don’t know if I’d say there is a percentage of your budget that should be experimental. Rather, I’d make it part of someone’s job. For instance, maybe they spend an hour a day (or half an hour) looking at new tools, reading the reviews and blog posts, and determining whether or not it’s something you should invest time in learning more about.
It’s pretty easy to tell, within a year of a new product/tool launching, whether or not you should experiment with it. For instance, I’d recommend all organizations use Google+ just for search engine optimization purposes. Google looks very kindly on returning search results for the content that is shared through Google+. But if you’d asked me a year ago, when the tool came out, I would have guessed it’d have been more of a social network.
So I’d say allot some time each day to learning more about what’s out there, but let things settle before you decide whether or not you should integrate something new into your overall program.
If you’d like more context to these questions, I’m pretty sure Maddie and her team will let you download the on-demand video. You can find that by clicking here.
And, if you have additional questions, don’t be shy about asking them in the comments here. I’ll stop by a couple of times a day to see how I can help.
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“When you hear “analytics”, you might think of webmaster tracking visits to their site. But learning analytics combines this sort of data analysis with student interaction in online education tools, aiming to create a more integrated and customized learning experience. It uses intelligent data, student performance and analysis models to find out how students learn and improve on their experience. Find out more about this educational revolution.”
Is anyone thinking about learning analytics related to your educational programming? I find this FASCINATING. Comment here or contact me if you’re doing anything like this that I could write about here on the blog.
http://newsroom.opencolleges.
Don’t miss the third webinar in the Think Tank Summer Series this Thursday at 2 pm ET! (Miss the first one on Pinterest, or the second on Google+? Never fear, all webinars in this series are being recorded, and no matter when you register for the series, you’ll get access to all five.)
For years, organizations have been challenged with departmental silos that prevent them from communicating with their customers in a coherent and clear voice. The ascendancy of social media and the marketing department’s failure to make it a measurable revenue producer has only accented this problem.
Many marketers are still trying to figure out where social belongs and how to measure it, while still managing traditional disciplines.
In this Marketing in the Round
You will learn:
Gini Dietrich is the CEO of Arment Dietrich, an integrated marketing communications firm based in Chicago. She also is the lead blogger at Spin Sucks and, of course, co-author of Marketing in the Round.
She will help you figure out how to integrate your marketing disciplines, break down silos, and measure results!
p.s. need a discount code? Contact me (maddie[at]socialfish.org) and I’ll get you 50% off.
I needed to come up with a list of organizations we have worked with for a federal government RFP, and holy cow! We’ve worked with so many great associations, I can’t help but share the list with you. This list is only a sample, and doesn’t include the many, many organizations we’ve done speaking engagements for, either.
One of the amazing things about having worked with so many groups is that we have association case study examples–or a contact name, or a source to pose a question to–for pretty much any idea that might come up, and for pretty much any industry vertical. That means that all of you, whom we have worked with in the past and today, make Lindy and I better at our jobs every day as we all grow and evolve and mature our social business presence. So thank you for being part of the SocialFish family!
If we’re not working with YOUR association yet, check out the Hire SocialFish page to get a better sense of how we work with clients and our quarterly updates, posted to the SocialFish News category. And please ask us for references from anyone on this list. We’d love to work with you and help you optimize and maximize your social media capabilities.
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