Content marketing for product launches

Most product launches generate several pieces of information that usually never make it any farther than the corporate web site.

Here are a few ideas to make content more social, easier to spread and some metrics to help determine which content is most effective.

Web properties: Make them more social
There are several simple ways to make content on your website easier to share. The simplest is to add the share this widget on each page. ShareThis can share anything on the web to your choice of social bookmarking options, post-to-profile and blog choices, Email, AIM, or even as a text message to a mobile phone.

Commenting and users reviews are another way to take a pulse on what the community is finding useful. If you want to take this a step further you can allow user comments and reviews to be posted to social networks, with a simple click of a button. Learn more about tying content to open api's in a previous post "Give your content wings".

Publishing: Spread the word
Most white papers can be broken into several sections, becoming a series of blog post. Let's say you were able to create three blog post. This is three incremental points of interaction that encourage visitors to share their opinion on the topic. Blogs also have the added value of RSS feeds to increase repeat visits.

A great site for spreading the word is Junta42, a content marketing site allowing you to contribute blog post, white papers, events and much more. The list of contributors is a who's who in the online world.

Idea: Contribute each blog post, the abstract of white paper and webcast you are hosting on Junta42.

After a few months of contributing to Junta42 it now ranks as 3rd highest referrer to my blog, generating about 15% of my overall traffic.

Another target for white papers and data sheets is scribd.com. Scribd is a social publishing site that currently has more than 50 million monthly users and more than 50000 documents. An advantage to Scribd is the ability for visitors to embed your content anywhere online, which further increases it's reach.

Idea: Upload and tag all those data sheets your company has created to Scribd.

My favorite site for those presentations trapped on your desktop is slideshare.net. Slideshare is the largest presentation sharing community and a great place to upload and share presentations created as part of your launch.

Idea:You can use the embed feature and write a blog post introducing visitors to what they will see in this presentation while getting feedback on its content thru comments.

Widgets: Make it portable
Widgets serve as a great tool for aggregating activity from various social sites while allowing visitors to place them in locations they frequent. This eliminates the idea of build and they will come.

Idea:We recently used a widget to provide a single view of all content activity from our product launch. This allowed our customers to never have to come back to our site to get the latest content.

There are several tools available for widget building and syndication. For creating widgets I like using Sproutbuilder for widget creation combined with Gigya for tracking and metrics.

Content Metrics: Measure and refine
Each of these sites allows you to tag content with keywords. Proper tagging ensures you are found when users search on the site and when search engines do their crawls.

Measuring the value of these sites can be done in a couple of ways. First, you can look at the activity metrics like number views, comments and places content has been embedded. This give's you an idea of what people are most interested in and where your content is being shared.

The second, and most important for me is how many referrals to our public website came from these sites. Once they are on our site I can then determine whether or not it generated a lead.

Example content metrics
- Top Referrals
- Highest value content
- Most shared
- Top Views
- Most Downloads
- Top Embeds
- Most Favorites
- # Widgets installed
- # Retweets

The issue I have with the traditional product launch is that it implies a single point in time. This was generally accepted in the days before social media, but the mindset of the consumer has shifted. Today they don't mind a constant stream of information as long as it is relevant.

Think about your next "launch" as a point in time where you started a conversation with your target audience, not where you blasted a bunch of collateral.

Is life streaming and privacy an oxymoron?

My SXSW thoughts continue to trickle out, this time on how life streaming effects privacy. The sessions I attended on Saturday prompted me to think deeper about this topic.

The morning started with a very provocative discussion "Is privacy dead, or just very confused" followed by "The future of social networks" by Charlene Li and ended with Russ Unger and David Armano's core conversation "Friendship is dead".

The recurring theme in each one of these discussions was the increasing risk in streaming to much.

In the privacy is dead panel Judith Donath described how we create a perception of who we are to others based on our life stream. She went on to say we need a "digital mirror" to understand how others perceive us based on what we are sharing so that we can tune it accordingly. The question I asked myself, would I change anything?

This panel triggered some excellent hallway conversation as we made our way to Charlene's presentation.The premise of her presentation is that social networks will be like air, it will be hard to tell where one starts and another begins. But in order for this to be achieved we need to have ubiquity in authentication, portability in our networks and an awareness of our activities.

The day ended by drilling deeper into the meaning of "Friends" in a core conversation led by Russ Unger and David Armano. They kicked off this very interactive discussion with a question: "Is having a bunch of followers on Twitter, friends in Facebook or contacts on LinkedIn like collecting baseball cards" Are these people really your friends or just contacts?

The summary of all these sessions was that all the content we stream makes it possible for people we've never met to know more about your life than many of your closest friends.

Someone from the audience told a story about meeting a person for the first time and they knew everyone's name in this persons family and recent events in their life. Kind of creepy, but a reality for those of us who choose to openly share.

Now to my question: Do you think anything about privacy when streaming your location, photos of family etc..

The meme that started a market conversation & provided insight to brand perception

Several weeks ago Kas Thomas an Analyst for CMSwatch wrote a post called “A reality checklist for vendors” where he outlined 15 items that CMS vendors should comply with. The list ranged from some very basic items like how would someone un-install your software to how complex are the pricing models. 

This post triggered the team over Day Software to create a “CMS vendor meme”, where they challenged makers of content management software to answer these questions open and honestly as they did. Jon Marks from LBI stated on his coverage of the meme  “They “called out” the vendors they consider to be their main competitors - OpenText, Coremedia, Interwoven, Vignette, Fatwire, Nuxeo, Magnolia and Tridion.”

I must admit, early on I questioned the intent of Day in doing this. Was this merely a stunt or were they genuinely interested in starting a conversation to provide better tools for customers deciding on their next CMS solution.  Whatever the case it turned out to be a fantastic way to open a dialog with the CMS community, so Kudos to them. 

This activity was valuable in many ways from our perspective. We got to know some great new people like Jon Marks, Irina Guseva and Julian Wraith, continued to gain internal momentum to share more via social media and gained tremendous insight into the perception of our brand.

The biggest indicator of perception was the sheer amazement and shock from the community that Vignette participated at all. Jon’s comment sums up the sentiment best when he said: “Big news. Vignette have responded using a FaceBook note. I gotta be honest, I didn’t think they would. Hats off to them, I say.”

These comments implied a perception of being closed and not an active participant in the community at large. Historically I would agree with this. But as we move forward and work to become more transparent by sharing insights and actively engaging with thought leaders we hope to shift we hope to shift this perception.  

Are you promoting the company’s brand or your personal brand?

This is the delicate balance that exists for those of us representing our companies thru social media. Since conversation is king, those who are great at engaging in dialog both online and offline will likely become the voice of their company whether intentionally or by accident.

In the last several days I have been asked “What happens when a new opportunity presents itself, how will you mitigate your company saying you built your personal brand on company time and try to impede your ability to make a change.” This was an interesting question I had not thought too much about, because I am of the mindset that doing good work on behalf of your company is always first and self promotion or “personal brand” is a by product of this.

When you think of Ford ,Dell or Comcast and social media you probably think of a person and not the brand. That is because this group of individuals has focused their activities on having a positive impact on their business by supporting customers online, and self promotion is not even a consideration.

After thinking about it, there is a simple answer. Show measurable results to your leadership team. While this sounds simple enough, many people are still wondering how they measure social media’s impact on their business.

My approach is to align all my activities and metrics to the 5 goals outlined in my last post “Social media is like running a marathon”. To give you an idea of what I mean by aligning metrics to goals here is a subset of a report I produce for my company’s leadership team.

Goal: “Contribute to community by sharing insights and serving customers”

• Published 5 blog post on dirkshaw.com resulting in 450 page views
• Posted 26 links on twitter that received 858 clicks, (Top links were social media related.
• Provided support to customer via Twitter "Thank you for doing the legwork; proof positive that social media is beneficial for customer relations.”
• Published 2 articles on Junta42 a content marketing site resulting in 160 views.

Here are some guidelines you can use to ensure uour intent is never questioned: Keep a laser focus on business goals, report how your activities are having a positive impact and realize that great work is what builds a “personal brand”.

This may not even be an issue for most, but the fact it was brought up in several conversations recently makes me think it may be for some. Do you think this is something to be concerned about?

Social media is like running a marathon

When starting to think about implementing a social media program you should enter with the mindset of running a marathon, not a 5k.

Setting up a page in Facebook, getting a Twitter account and a blog created is like buying the gear you need to train. But you still need to create a plan for achieving your goal of completing the race.

The lack of goal setting has created a grave yard of twitter accounts, Facebook pages and blogs. Before getting started I worked with our leadership team to agree on the goals we would measure social media activity against, this is what we ended up with:

• Shape perception of company and engage with thought leaders.
• Increase social media relevance of Vignette.
• Increase traffic to vignette.com.
• Contribute to community by sharing insights and serving customers.
• Internally, serve as a social media evangelist and cultural change agent.

Once you have defined objectives, begin listening and learning. Listening is a constant activity that provides insight to the places and topics that are most relevant. Monitoring gives you an interesting perspective that many in the organization do not have, which is why it important to share these insights you.

I write a internal blog post series called twitscoop to share insights learned from listening to the conversations. An interesting one that generated a lot of internal buzz was when I saw a customer had posted a tweet they were looking for alternatives to one of our products. Account teams swarmed.

When describing building relationships online to my leadership team I use the analogy of moving into a new neighborhood. Just because you bought a house does not mean you are part of the community. Networks already exist, conversations are happening and perception towards certain things are already formed.

Becoming part of the community requires walking the streets, saying hi and participating in events. The same is true online. Be patient and get settled in for the long haul, taking a short term view on social media will usually result in failure.

Is there equity in being a micro-famous?

For those of us paying attention to social media you can probably rattle off a dozen or more people who would be considered micro famous.

The micro-famous were out in full form this week at SXSW, Vignette was a sponsor of the Austin Tweetup where Guy Kawasaki was in attendance. I sat next to him for a little while and the stream of people who came over was insane. One guy even had the nerve to pitch him while he has clearly enjoying relaxing on the couch drinking his OJ.

A very similar situation occurred while talking to Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester at the mix at six. People literally would come across the room one and the other to say hi or introduce their products. I can’t leave out the “simple man” David Armano, who joked about being the Sasquatch of sxsw because of the tweets referring to “an @armano citing.”

All of these guys got to where they are because of their intelligence, likability and the constant stream of value delivered to the community. When they blog or tweet about something people listen and usually act.

I recently experienced this first hand, Jeremiah posted a tweet recommending my blog (thanks for this) for people interested in corporate+social and within a few hours there were a dozen retweets, 20+ new followers and incrementally increased my site traffic by ~200 visits.

Another example of leveraging the equity of being micro-famous was when Armano used twitter as a mechanism to help raise money for a family who was in need of a place to live. He was able to use his personal equity to raise over 12,000 to get this family back on track.

We seem to be arriving at an intersection of supply and demand. Demand is coming from companies looking for full time employees to act as their voice in the community. They will likely not get any of these guys but will have access to some really bright people who are well on their way to making a name for themselves in their respective markets.

As the demand for people who understand how to build community around a brand continues to grow, is it possible to assign a value or somehow monetize all the time it took towards establishing yourself within the community? Or is it simply what is required to being successful in certain roles now?

Living near, working near and playing in Boulder

This post is a little off topic but the people at Boulder.me are collecting stories from local bloggers on “What does boulder mean to you?”. I figured I should participate since I draw so much inspiration from this community and living here.

Living: Notice my reference to near, that is because live about 10 miles from Boulder in Broomfield. About 2 years ago we packed the family up and made our migration to Colorado from Atlanta. Our initial plan was to stay in Denver, that was of course until we took a trip into Boulder and spent a beautiful sunny day on the Pearl Street mall. We were immediately hooked on the positive energy and the quality of life for a family. Ok that is the living part.

Working: I am a telecommuter for a company based in Austin, which means I have to be very proactive in networking in order to meet new people. After doing some research I stumbled across the Techstars and Colorado Startups and found a goldmine of people and places to gather.

The first event I attended was the Newtech meetup and experienced the passion, commitment and community that exist around technology and start ups. The community here is what really has me hooked. Boulder has some of the brightest and most down to earth people I have ever met, even when you crash their sushi gatherings post meetups (that would be me).

Playing: My favorite thing in the world to do. The outdoor activities are amazing. I am an avid cyclist who has cycled in most parts of North America. In the past I would have had to pack the bags and head for the airport to experience the type of riding I can now do from my front door. Every ride is like I am on vacation.

The people, the passion and the vibrancy of the community is second to none and I am proud to call this my home, even if it s Broomfield.

What it's like to play here.

Tip for PR pro's, You don’t just tweet a release.

My role is at the intersection of marketing, communications and brand management. I recommend how to and how not to integrate social media to accomplish the goals of each team. It has not taken long for me to understand the “traditional” mindsets in each of these spaces.

One of my recent observations was while discussing how social media's role as part of a press release. I am no expert in communications but know that you don't just "Issue a press release and then tweet it” and say you have successfully integrated social media .

The reason this statement sounded so wrong may have been because social media was an afterthought, and creating a conversation was out right foreign. Twitter was viewed as a place to push information without the understanding of the time that is required to build relationships. This is not an overnight process.

In my mind a press release is “A” way to share your news, messages etc. But the traditional release has always left a bit to be desired for me, they do nothing to encourage dialog and leave me feeling as if the company is just beating their chest.

Here are a couple of ideas for creating a conversation around your next press release.

Engage in dialog on the key messages you are trying to deliver, a simple example of this would be by posing a question to your followers on twitter and giving them a link to a blog post to share their opinions.

In your release reference your blog within the first or second paragraph so that it has maximum visibility, placing the link to your blog in the footer again feels like dialog is not really encouraged or is an after thought.

If you are looking for good examples of integrating social media into your public relations check out the work the team at Future works is doing. They built the Budweiser social media newsroom which is an excellent example of giving people a place to discuss your news.

Jeremiah Owyang has also developed a PR scorecard for social media vendors that I would argue could be applied to any company.

If you have some good or bad examples I would love to hear them.

What are you doing to monitor compliance with social media guidelines?

Defining your social media guidelines is great first step to encourage employees to participate on behalf of your brand, but are you monitoring if employees are complying with these guidelines.

The thought of ensuring compliance did not cross my mind as something I needed to add to the monitoring list until recently. I was trolling around Facebook researching how companies are using pages and groups. While doing this discovered how a group of employees were using Facebook pages on behalf of their company.

They had essentially created a spoof on their competition. I could see this being an example of what not to do, the damage control for this could possibly be huge. After seeing this it dawned on me that I must also monitor compliance of guidelines so we do not end up in a situation like this.

What are you are doing to monitor compliance? How do you address employees who are not complying?