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What Is Red Bull Doing Right with Their Content?

An F1 racing team. An in-house record label. A magazine with a weekly circulation of five million. Sounds like a pretty epic combination right? Red Bull doesn’t just mess around with its content marketing; it employs over 100 people just to work on the stuff. This group of editors, journalists, TV producers, athletes (you get the picture) make up Red Bull Media House, the content production and marketing machine that’s been killing it for years and first put the brand on the map.

You already know what I’m about to say next—brands need to create content that is EPIC! But how can they do that without spending billions on sponsoring a jump from the edge of space or slapping its name on primetime TV show produced in-house (although that would be AWESOME)? Here are a couple lessons in content creation that brands can take away from Red Bull.

1) Create content around the essence your brand embodies.

Be more than just the product you sell. This one’s a pretty “Duh” statement (but one that plenty of marketers still overlook somehow) – obviously your brand is more than just the product you sell. The millions of dollars you’ve already spent on positioning your brand hopefully created some kind of image for your consumers. What is positioning anyway? It’s basically putting an idea in your customer’s head about why they should buy your brand—that’s something you learn in Marketing 101 (which I took last year by the way). I would take it a step further and call this idea the essence of the brand.

When Red Bull sells a can of its product, its also selling the highflying, adrenaline-pumping culture it embodies. Brands need to understand that there’s also a market for the essence that they’ve spent so much money on developing. If there’s a market for it, then your content marketing should revolve around your brand’s essence.

2) Reach people emotionally by playing to THEIR passions.

Even if your product is “boring,” your brand can be EPIC and emotionally involved in the lives of consumers by posting great content they love. Does this mean you can’t ever post about a product again? Of course not. It just means your brand can’t be boring, even if the product is.

Take Xerox for example: their Facebook page is covered in random photos of their products, happy people, a few videos here and there, and a cat taking photocopies of itself. YAWN, Unlike, and move onto something more fun like a man standing at the mouth of a volcanic lake (covered by the Red Bulletin).

(Ed. note: Gary Vaynerchuk’s upcoming book discusses the idea above with a concept called Jab-Jab-Jab-Jab-Jab Right Hook. He basically means, give-give-give, then ask. Focus on consumer-consumer-consumer, then product/brand. It’s a basic human principle: you have an easier time pitching a product or service to someone with whom you’ve developed a real relationship. Back to Xerox…)

What Xerox can do is create content showing how essential the brand is to life as we know it. Every business needs and makes copies daily. You know what would be sweet? If Xerox started posting content about how life would be without it. They could create photos of monks in suits copying documents by hand under candlelight, which they could adapt into a short video series about warring companies fighting over blank paper with Xerox being the only hope left for humanity.

SO CHOOSE YOUR M.O. WISELY

Content marketing needs to be a mantra, not just for social media but also for every medium and marketing channel that your brand uses. It needs to transcend your customer’s perception of just your product and should be based on the essence of your brand—that’s the only way you can produce epic content.

As for me, I think I’ll go crack open a Red Bull and jump out of a plane. Or watch videos of someone else doing it.

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Like this post? Support our group by sharing it, and consider joining Boston Content for free! Dedicated to the careers of local content producers, strategists and marketers. Over 200 members and growing.

Shaman Kothari is regular contributor to Boston Content blog…all the way from Paris! A rising senior at Boston University, Shaman is studying business management and marketing. Offline, he’s in Paris for the semester. Online, he can be found via LinkedIn and Twitter.

7 Steps to Dominating Pinterest: A Visual Guide

The following is a guest post by John Clark (co-founder and CEO of Indivly Magic, a visual content marketing agency and platform).

John and co-founder Daniel Rodriguez operate Indivly Magic here in Boston and can be reached via magic.indivly.com. You should also follow John on Twitter for daily doses of content know-how and news.

Interested in submitting your own content to the blog? We welcome it! Simply submit a post or contact Jay Acunzo to arrange something more creative.

Is a small amount of Pinterest followers/traffic getting you down? Here is how you can absolutely dominate Pinterest marketing. Get ready for more followers, increased traffic and valuable relationships with influencers, if you consistently follow these steps.

As web users become more and more fragmented and inundated with content, Pinterest offers the two major benefits of having both a built-in audience (harder to grow on your own from scratch in today's world) AND having a visual-tilt (easier to capture that ADD-type user that comprises a digital audience).

So here is our easy routine for pinning and winning:

Step 1: Visit Repinly To Search Popular Pins.

This site is very reliable and full of search options to find awesome images that are more likely to get re-pins/likes!

Source: Uploaded by user

Step 2: Try PinReach For Trending More Pinterest Images.

This tool has tons of potential, but like everything involving Pinterest, it's rather new. It seemed to be full of issues for us the last few times we visited, but it is a solid source of trending pins - so give it a shot.

Source: Uploaded by user

Step 3: Look At Bing Trending Image Searches For More Ideas.

PinReach and Repinly don't always have all your bases covered. Head over to Bing Images for a few more ideas, we find it's best to make a note of the trending topics and save this for later. Please be responsible with image rights!

Source: Uploaded by user

Let Your Mind Trace a Vine around All Your Content Ideas

I'm the last guy to suggest you take anything one person says as absolute gospel, whether you're a fan of Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk or Cookie freakin' Monster (okay, so it'd be more like, "AND Cookie Monster," cuz - cmon - who isn't a fan?). Anyways, what I mean is that a single point of view can only provide you so much value.

For instance, there are plenty of things wrong with reading this blog and assuming it's the end-all, be-all of content production, strategy, or marketing advice (not that I think anyone believes that in the first place). For one thing, I write rather informally and in the first person a lot. That's off-putting for some (if it's not, then say hi on Twitter!). I also pull from my own experiences constantly, whether it's Google, Dailybreak or Boston Content - as does Arestia, as does John, and as does Shaman. (Shameless plug No. 2: want to join our merry band of bloggers? We're looking for guest and regular contributors! Simply click the link in the header or right here.)

So, to conclude the longest caveat ever, the danger with picking any one piece of advice or one person as your sensei is that there never exists any panacea. Ever. There's never a silver bullet, so draw from a diverse perspective of the world.

Now, that being said, I'd encourage you to adopt this no matter who you follow: when it comes to content production, for the love of all cookies, please-oh-please do yourself a favor and make an effort to build off each and every content idea you ever have in your life. Few things are tougher than starting from scratch each and every day.

In my mind, this looks like a winding, twisting vine that unfolds from a single idea (the central building block of this tangled maze of thoughts) and explores every avenue, every direction, every tangential notion that could possibly add to one of the most valuable things in content production: your idea pipeline. Whether these become a series of posts or simply new, more, or better ideas, you'll avoid staring down a blank screen or piece of paper in the future.

We've all been there: just a big, white, flat screen and no words or design coming out all that easily.

You've heard of the Great White Hope? Well, that screen is the Great White Nope. It's like Dikembe Mutumbo in those Geico ads: "Not today!" (maniacal laugh)

And if you're wondering, I did indeed just use a metaphor and simile back to back. And I'm okay with it. Moving on...

Look, we all have good days and bad days. We have days the Muse strikes us every other second such that we start frantically scribbling all these brilliant ideas in a blur of brilliance. Aaaand we've had days that slog on and on, no creative insight found for miles, only our forlorn thoughts and a stale cup of coffee to keep us company.

But I digress.

No, seriously - I digress. That's how I eliminate those Muse-less days. Every time I come up with an idea for content (e.g. the Content Spectrum post), I'll purposely start digressing from that initial idea and let my mind branch out into new ones. By taking one starting point and letting your mind wander for awhile, you can venture into what John Cleese so brilliantly calls the Open Mode. In this mental state, you are actively pushing for newer and better ideas, which both improves your initial thought AND produces new ideas that you can act on later. Cleese refers to that action, that production stage, as the Closed Mode. (If you haven't seen the video before, I HIGHLY recommend watching it. It is well worth the half hour in your day. it is utterly, delightfully brilliant.)

This is how you build a content pipeline that goes on for days, weeks, months or even longer.

UNREHEARSED EXAMPLE ON THE FLY. READY? GO!

Let's say you're writing a post about coffee and productivity. That's a real nice starting point you got there, don't you think? Okay, don't just rattle off the post and go on to the next idea from scratch. Instead, let that mental vine unfold around the initial thought.

Let's see - coffee provides energy which helps you produce more work. What if there was a way to constantly feel energized? It could be based on sleeping, but that's obvious and written about too often anyway. What about simply managing your schedule? Well, that's more about TIME management. Back to energy: what about ENERGY management? Boom. Post no. 2 has been born.

From there, you can talk about tools to help you take breaks, explore the changing costs between projects and how to stay mentally fresh, discuss creative exercises you can perform alone or with your team to stay energized and stimulated, and so on.

What started as a single post has sprouted into a handful more. And just think - all of that happened in a matter of seconds.

Well, for you the reader at least. For me, I had to agonize over a blank screen until that hit me.

...

Or did I? ;)

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Like this post? Support our group by sharing and consider joining Boston Content for free! Dedicated to the careers of local content producers, strategists and marketers. 175 strong and growing!

Jay Acunzo is a co-founder of Boston Content, the Director of Content at Dailybreak, and a former Googler. He geeks out about turning companies into publishers, the New York Knicks, and Italian cuisine. You should follow him on Twitter or Google+ and say hello!

The Business of Content: #BostonContent Event, March 19

When Arestia and I set out to create our next event, we wanted to identify and address a major hurdle facing any individual trying to carve out a career path in "content." It's a loose, ill-defined path after all - one of the many reasons we launched Boston Content in the first place.

With this in mind, we're excited to announce our next big event, happening March 19 at the Hill Holliday office in downtown Boston. The evening, which we dubbed The Business of Content, will focus on something plenty of content producers and strategists are still figuring out: how to best set up and utilize content to drive business.

In the end, we all dream of the day where interruptive advertising and black hat SEO practices fall away, replaced by actual, honest-to-goodness quality content that tells a brand's story and creates meaningful relationships.

But we're not there yet. Executives need convincing, and strategies need to be fleshed out. This group - you - will drive that change over the next few years. For this particular event, we felt it was important to explore how others are finding success around town. Our hope is that you'll translate the learnings (and the new connections you'll make) into a better, more successful career.

We'll hear from three very different companies to provide you a range of perspectives, with room for Q&A and mingling and beers after. Our speakers will include:

Skyword represents our middle-sized business and is our lead sponsor for the event. Skyword offers a SaaS platform that helps brands and media organizations easily streamline and automate every step of content creation and publishing. They will delve into the market trends and insights that have informed their product development, as well as what's resonating in the market when their team speaks with brands and marketers about content used for business.

Follow Skyword on Twitter.

Hill Holliday represents our largest business and is a full-service, leading ad agency which places an emphasis on choice-based impressions and branded experiences - in other words, content! Members of the HH Content Team will discuss how the agency views content used to market bigger brands across a variety of media, as well as interesting findings from various studies and campaigns.

Follow Hill Holliday on Twitter.

Price Intelligently represents our smallest business, with just a handful of employees. Despite not taking any VC money, Price is earning revenue and self-sustaining. They source most of their leads (surprise!) through content and inbound marketing. Price offers a pricing optimization software that helps businesses stop guessing about pricing their products and services and avoid leaving revenue on the table.

Follow Price Intelligently on Twitter.

IMPORTANT NOTE: RSVP TO ATTEND!

Please note you MUST RSVP to attent - space is limited and 53 State is a security building. You will need to check in. Boston Content representatives will be there to assist.

Special thanks to our partner and sponsor Skyword and to Hill Holliday for hosting.

Over half the tickets were snapped up in the first 24 hours of going live, so we anticipate an awesome event, attended by a wide array of talented folks. RSVP now!

Questions? Just want to say hi? Please do! [email protected] or @jay_zo and @arestiaR

Looking forward to a great nigiht!

Content Croissant: Coke's Content 2020 Mission Is Just the Beginning

Shaman Kothari is regular contributor to Boston Content blog...all the way from Paris! A rising senior at Boston University, Shaman is studying business management and marketing. Offline, he's in Paris for the semester. Online, he can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/shamankothari/ and www.twitter.com/shamankothari

A few years ago, Coca Cola’s Content 2020 mission made waves in the content marketing world with a blueprint about how it will “earn a disproportionate share of popular culture” by 2020. Coke will do this through excellent storytelling, something it has been doing since it conceived the iconic Santa Claus ads 80 years ago. The fact that they finally translated their unique expertise in storytelling into a strategy dependent on content marketing makes complete sense. Let’s take a second look at its stroke of genius. (Editor's note: The video is rather long, so we recommend pulling it up in your browser for a later block of time here.)

The crux of the Content 2020 video hinges on Coke achieving content excellence, which is creating content that is both liquid (stories expressed through every possible connection), and linked (meets business objectives). It sounds like it should be a rule of thumb, but brands still struggle to create content that even just works a little bit. If anything, the key phrase in the video is that brands must produce content that “adds value and significance to people’s lives” rather than producing more noise and hoping to stay relevant. The noise is just brands that ultimately have failed to produce content that is actually liquid, and instead have readily focused on creating “the initial share” as mentioned in a recent Boston Content post. True liquid content is “inherently shareable out in the wild”, not just immediately shareable by the person reading it on a branded channel, and the best way to create such content, according to Coca Cola, is through good storytelling.

(Again, this should be an obvious statement to make, but sadly, the industry mentality has always been push advertising. Getting to content/inbound/pull can be tough for thousands of talented marketers.)

The brands that will succeed in the marketing arena moving forward are those which create mantras like Coca Cola has done for itself: content excellence through excellent story telling. Take IKEA for example, with its “Make Room for Your Life” campaign that amassed tons of views within days of its launch.

(Video and more analysis after the jump.)

Google Trends: One Slick Tool for Content Planning

The following post sits at the first stage of the Content Spectrum: planning. For an intro to this notion of planning, visit our write-up here.

After my first year at Google, most of us doing account management could pretty much black out on phone calls and trust that they'd go well. It wasn't for a lack of trying - most of us really enjoyed working with clients, and I personally loved the aspect of product education that came with the job. But depending on the type of call, we'd all done them enough times that we knew exactly what to say and how to position each product.

Don't misunderstand: this is not meant to sound conceited. It's just that Google used to require early employees in sales and account management to work on thousands (that's thousands, with three zeroes attached) of clients each quarter. So you get kind of used to talking about similar products to similar clients.

(Here's an old pic from the Google Boston office. They've since replaced the couches on the left with treadmill desks. Yup.)

The Right Way to Think About Shareable Content: Ripple and React

Over the past couple weeks, my day job with Dailybreak has required me to interact with a couple large brands asking for people to share their content. It's a reasonable and insanely common request: brands (or their agencies) create content themselves or experiences where users create their own. They then want that content to either "go viral" (if they're bad marketers and still believe you can force that) or just get shared a lot to boost initial traction and activity.

Again, this is all perfectly normal and good. But here's where brands consistently miss the mark: they forget why they wanted shared content in the first place. What's the purpose of this idea of sharing?

>>WHY<< is shareable content important? Don't forget that WHY!

I can't emphasize the word "why" enough. Sadly, just like with any shiny new idea or system, people will forget the "why" and just go for the "what" behind shareable content. It's not uncommon in marketing to get caught up in metrics for metrics' sake, after all, rather than focus on what matters to the business. Why get YouTube views? Why get Facebook Likes? Why get shares?

There are many reasons marketers claim to want branded content spinning across the intertubes. It helps grow your audience, serves as a sign of consumer approval, and boosts impressions (an increasingly outdated metric but one that's still widely used for some reason).

But above all, content creators and marketers should only focus on virality for an effect that can be summed up as "ripple-and-react." You want content that's not only shared once but perpetuated by that initial group's peers, followed by reaction to the content in the form of clicks, discussion, more shares, etc.

Anyone can incentivize folks to share right from a campaign. But why does that matter at all? The true litmus test is whether your content is inherently shareable out in the wild, away from the big calls to act and bells and whistles of game mechanics and prizing.

This means that marketers need to focus BEYOND the initial share.

Here's a hypothetical as to why this is critical and how you can approach a campaign and content creation beyond the initial share.

Let's say the NFL ran a promotion wherein you could create your very own player profile card as if you were getting drafted. The interactive campaign lets you upload a photo of your face onto the body of a player, write a little blurb about yourself, select a position and team, and so on. Pretty great, right? If the NFL wants shares, you could argue that those who created a profile would share it on Facebook, Twitter, et al.

But the lifecycle of that piece of content is likely brief: one person creates something about themselves and shares it to the world. The reaction from friends MIGHT trickle in via low-impact reactions. A "lol, that's funny" here. A "cool, I'll create mine too" there. But ultimately the NFL hasn't started much conversation or true virality.

Instead, let's say the experience instructed users to be the "agent" for a friend. Put THEIR face onto the player, write a blurb about THEM and pick THEIR team. What would likely happen?

You'd add your friend to a fat lineman or studly QB, write something funny or inside-jokey in the blurb, add the jersey of the team you know your friend hates and finally (and this is HUGE), you'd probably share that content WITH THE OTHER PERSON.

"Look what I did to you!" That's WAY more powerful. You've sent a personal, explicit message to someone and called them to act, as opposed to passively posting something for all to see, take it or leave it.

Best of all, your friend would likely react by opting into that experience much more quickly than a generic, broadly shared piece of content because it's engaging them one to one. And on top of that, your circle of friends is more likely to create a ripple effect of shares because it's fun or funny for the entire group - not just the person who created it, as it was in the first scenario.

Admittedly, this will vary from brand to brand, but the core of it holds true no matter what: don't just focus on that first, possibly incentivized, definitely campaign-based initial share. Focus on the entire communal experience. What's shared out at first and blasted in a broader sense is not as important as what's shared among people individually or in smaller groups after that. This is what builds and builds into something remarkable: a vibrant community of brand loyalists who engage with each other, laugh or gain value all because of a branded content experience.

And if consumers think your content is remarkable? Your marketing wins.

How have you gained that ripple-and-react effect in your own content strategy? Let us know in the comments!

Content Marketing Condensed

WELCOME TO THE FIRST-EVER CONTENT MARKETING CONDENSED!

Each week, John Clark (co-founder and CEO of Indivly Magic, a visual content marketing agency and platform) will post his weekly roundup of the hottest new trends, the must-know tips, and the just plain cool content from around the content industry here on the Boston Content blog.

John and co-founder Daniel Rodriguez operate Indivly Magic here in Boston and can be reached at via magic.indivly.com. You should also follow John on Twitter for daily doses of content know-how and news.

Interested in submitting your own content to the blog? We welcome it! Simply submit a post or contact Jay Acunzo to arrange something more creative.

Without further ado...enjoy some Content Marketing Condensed!

1. What type of content "takes off"? Emotional content.

Here's a great strategy for developing emotional content on SocialMediaExplorer. Some interesting takeaways from the article: content that is long-winded, conveys emotion, appears high-energy and has plenty of visuals are key elements of content that will "take off." We totally agree with the emotional aspect, since emotions drive memory recall after all. Read the rest of Nichole's thoughts here.

Source: Stock Magic

2. Visual Content Marketing: Using Images

We all know using images in crucial in your blog posts. Data shows that 96% of brand marketers turned to social media to share content and photos/videos drove a 65% increase in engagement on social media. If you want your content to grow wings when distributing it, then you simply must use images. Check out this basic guide to using images in your posts.

Source: mediafusionnow.com

3. 15 Beautiful Stats on Using Visual Content Marketing

For the data lovers looking to tweet statistics, we found a great list of 15 hard-hitting statistics why visuals are powerful to include in your content and actually drive results.

Source: Stock Magic

4. Go Beyond Infographics: 3 Tactics to Try

Good to see a company not advocating infographics as the default visual content tactic (which we think are getting slightly stale). Here are 3 tactics that are not infographics, yet still add visual value to your content.

Source: seomoz.org

5. Awesome Examples of Storytelling through Video

If you are producing video or planning on it for your content strategy, these are fantastic examples from the biggest brands that tell great stories. You can watch the Dove campaign right here:

Source: searchenginewatch.com

6. Don't Trap Your Branding in a Content Cage. It's About Sales-Driven Storytelling!

Local Bostonian Chris Brogan explains how content marketing is about business and less about branding. To take the point about sales further, we believe that blogs/articles can be used as landing pages and we think more businesses should be trying this. It's an unknown fact to most, but there are a lot of successful instances of using articles as a landing page that can be found across major display/banner ad networks. We are going to publish a guide next week that will go into this concept in more detail, so stay tuned!

Source: Stock Magic

7. Navigating Image Rights: An Insightful Public Debate About the Merits of Aggregation

A topic that we think needs to be talked about more is image rights. Digiday posted a great Twitter debate about the merits of aggregation. Is it okay to just "aggregate" images? We don't think so, that is why we started our own stock library with the intention of helping our customers opt out of this movement. We're working on a far from perfect process, where we only "aggregate" images that the author clearly wants to be shared, for example an interesting chart with the companies logo. How do you determine what is appropriate to "aggregate"? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Source: Stock Magic

8. Navigating Image Rights: How To Stay On Ball When Your Creating Content

Not sure how to stay on the legal side of image rights? When in doubt create or legally obtain your images. Here's a great guide how to do just that.

Source: Stock Magic

3 Tools to Keep Content Creators Organized

The great misconception about content creators is that they succeed based on an insane amount of creativity, which ebbs and flows and strikes them like lightning during moments of total creative clarity. And while creativity and a predisposition to create and tell stories do indeed help people succeed in content marketing/strategy, the best of the best will tell you: organization is key.

Living a creative lifestyle means taking your perception of the world (and all you experience and consume in the world) and filtering that perception - both conscious and subconscious - into ideas. This process, according to John Cleese of Monty Python fame, is called the "open mode," in which you explore avenues and pull from your life experience.

The key, however, is moving to the "closed mode" immediately after. This is that state of mind wherein you execute on an idea and turn it into reality. In the content world, that reality means media.

You then must repeat that process again and again to continue to fulfill (and innovate on) your daily job. And it's by no means sheer open mode, i.e. loose, lightbulb-moment creativity. It involves both "modes" of creative thinking and well-organized execution.

Luckily, endless amounts of tools and apps exist to make this process easier. Here are three of my all-time favorites that help me stay organized every day:

TRELLO: YOUR PRODUCTION PROCESS, VISUALIZED

Trello positions itself as a digital whiteboard, though it's closer to a whiteboard that had a child with Wunderlist (an interactive to-do list app).

Trello has three major features: "boards" (simply a naming convention and nothing visual per se), "lists" (those vertical columns you see below), and "cards" (the individual white boxes).

The beauty of Trello is that it's a simple, drag-and-drop-style tool that lets you organize your content product. For example, you can create lists for each person, for a day of the week, or for any overarching category you might think up, while each card can represent a project or element of a project.

At Dailybreak, each writer has their own list. Each card is a project which contains a mini To-Do list. The writers can communicate with a designer straight from the card by @-mentioning them, uploading files, writing notes and color-coding the card.

When production on a project is complete, the writers move their card to the appropriate list on the right side of the board (e.g. "Live Content" or "Mobile Launches" or "Live Campaigns").

I highly recommend exploring this tool as a means to stay organized and, dare I say, have fun with it...

POCKET: YOUR CREATIVE INSPIRATION, SAVED FOR LATER

This app, formerly named Read It Later, functions as a sort of archive to content you find or consume that you'd like to revisit. Two things tend to happen when you're creating content consistently:

1. You start looking to other content published by others as sources of inspiration for your own.

2. You IMMEDIATELY get overwhelmed by this. There's just SO MUCH content out there. There's no way to keep up with it, read it when you find it, and/or prevent content from being rapidly buried in your newsfeed, wherever you read.

I love Google Reader, Twitter, and other apps that are essentially RSS readers. But there's a need to read something urgently or risk losing it forever in the deluge. So I started emailing myself these articles. They, too, were buried rather quickly (or stressed me out because they added to my unread emails). Next, I started bookmarking articles or videos under a folder in Chrome labeled "Ideas" to revisit later. The same thing happened: a stress-inducing list of content that I could access on desktop and (thanks, Android) via mobile with a little hunting around.

Enter Pocket, which lets you simply share something you've found on desktop or mobile to a repository of links for you to read later. You can read the content offline, too - a BIG help to anyone with a city commute.

So to save stress, consider Pocket: you can read things later and not stress about the immediacy of the content nuttiness that is the modern web.

EVERNOTE: YOUR BRAIN, OUTSOURCED

Evernote, like Pocket, can connects both desktop and mobile by syncing together, so you can access your information wherever you go. By now, most of us know Evernote. In case you're new, the best way I can describe it is to call it a smarter, digital version of a notebook, organized neatly into folders.

My Evernote is like my brain outsourced to an app. The top-level folders (called notebooks) are broken into my major commitments in life: Dailybreak, Boston Content, Writing, and Personal Stuff.

Under each are folders, with notes in them. For example, in my Boston Content notebook is a folder called To Do, where new projects and ideas are saved as individual notebooks. I also have a note for "people to contact," as we're about to do some quick Q&A posts with content minds around town. (Email me if you want in!)

The beauty of Evernote is that, unlike your desktop's folder system, you take this one with you. Kinda like your brain, only digital (unless you're a robot, in which case, you must be a very advanced robot to be reading this blog).

What are the tools you use to stay organized and prolific as a content creator? Any other organizational hacks you use regularly?

Is Content Marketing Too Idealistic for Brands?

Everyone in advertising looks for the quick solution to their problems, whether that's the latest social network or the buzziest new strategy (content marketing ranks up there). The problem with that approach is that - surprise! - content created for business is supposed to add value to consumers first, promote your business second.

Before you get your blog in a bunch, remember this: the entire purpose of a product, service, or brand is to solve a problem and add value to a consumer's life to begin with. The idea of "consumer first" is by no means new or unique to content production. It IS, however, a sorely overlooked aspect of content creation. I'd argue, however, that 100% of business is knowing the market and then finding solutions for it. If you have a great idea but the market doesn't know it wants that, you'll need to DUMP cash towards marketing to change perception…or invent the next Apple.

I'm an idealist at heart but a realist at work: I won't be creating the next Apple ever…at least not by design. That's just silly to start out thinking like that.

A better approach might be to think, "I can be THE solution in XYZ for my customer/user base." To hone your product, you need to know that market. And as marketers are slowly realizing, your content IS a product. There are tons of moving parts to it, from planning to production to distribution to analysis.

So base all your decisions on this notion of consumer interest. It's not a cliche - it's reality. The purpose of content is to be consumed or interacted with (notice I didn't say "shared" - we'll get to that). Because your entire goal is to get noticed and become a regular part of a person's day, you need to figure out what people allow into their daily routines. (Here's a hint: when it comes to media, people consume stuff they love. So make stuff they love. It's not rocket science, but we like to complicate things because we're "professionals.")

You're now a media company as a content producing hub for your customers, and, needless to say, you want to act like a GOOD media company. So play to the passions and interests of the people that you want interested in you. People are emotional creations - even those who make decisions based on data or a list of features CARE about data and features, and caring is profoundly emotional.

So, if you know your consumers well, you know how to gut-check yourself as you create content and ask the all-important question: "Does my content help my audience overcome a negative or achieve a positive?" Your consumers want content that addresses what you KNOW and not what you DO. So if you're selling new hiking boots, you can convert people emotionally by becoming a pseudo-media outlet offering tips, tricks, stories, and fun or educational media around hiking, for example. Inevitably, when someone thinks "hiking," they'll think about your boots.

Brands are what others view them to be, nothing more. By controlling and filling up an "emotional well" inside people, you're able to resonate and stick in their minds. You're able to become a trusted, valued part of their days.

This is all well and good if you're a creative person at heart. The pushback usually seems to be, Will this resonate with brands?

Let's see: content plays to the emotions others feel towards something, wins them over, and creates behavior. Once they're emotionally in tune, they'll return again and again, recommend and share, and it gets easier (read: cheaper) to re-engage and interact with them over time.

There's a word for that in marketing.

It's called loyalty.

Do you buy into content used to promote your business? Why or why not?

How to Run More Effective Brainstorms

Ah, the brainstorm - that ubiquitous, evil, but somehow necessary step in idea generation. When has it ever worked to perfection? Never. Why does it seem to penetrate into every organization that involves creativity and (currently) content production and marketing?

Because they FEEL productive. Think about it:

Everyone is huddled together in a room with a shared mission.

Your boss will inevitably be watching, so shouting out thoughts like a drunk monkey throwing its own, umm, let's say "ideas" makes you seem super innovative.

At the end of it all, you look at the carnage of whiteboard scribbles and exhausted but fired up employees and think, "We could find the cure for world hunger at this rate! YAHHHH!"

But then, more often than not, the idea spins away into oblivion, never to be executed, or perhaps to be executed in such a way that it scarcely resembles your precious idea (thanks, management).

All snarking and cynicism aside, brainstorms are just plain hard. They can easily waste loads time you probably don't have, and they lack productive, efficient processes at most organizations.

Prolific and efficient brainstorms, however, are entirely possible provided they have the proper structure in place. I'm by no means the first (or millionth) to write about the need for proper structure. What I hope to be instead is one of the first to discuss an approach so beautifully simple that you'll be once again sold on a brainstorm's ability to create actual, honest-to-goodness ideas you can implement.

HOW TO BUILD A BETTER BRAINSTORM

First, establish one meeting leader. This is the basics behind any meeting, but a single person needs to guide the conversation. They have three distinct responsibilities:

At the beginning, present the goals of the meeting and ensure the conversation remains relevant to them.

Throughout the meeting, ensure nobody shoots down ideas or naysays. Brainstorms aren't about execution just yet - they're about potential. The leader fosters an environment where ideas can flow.

At the end, collect the notes and help the team execute on the best idea(s) afterwards.

Second, grab a huuuge stack of sticky notes. Yes, sticky notes.

This is the single most under-rated tool ever. In a world of digital everything, trust me on this: go analog.

The actual meeting will look like this:

GOALS: Meeting leader outlines the core goals: boost awareness of a fairly new product; drive user-generated content; college email signups.

IDEAS: Working through each goal, meeting leader asked for attendees to write as many ideas on a sticky note - 1 idea per note - as they could in 60-120 seconds.

IDEA COLLECTING & GROUPING: When time is called, each person goes through their sticky notes out loud. No one is allowed to comment and/or nay-say. This is idea generation 101! If someone has the same idea as the person speaking, they're encouraged to alert the meeting leader. Similar ideas are grouped together on the board.

EXTRAPOLATION: As ideas come out, each sticky note is placed on the board. Then "what if" scenarios emerge. From each single idea sprout more and more. These too go on stickies and up on the board.

The output of this approach is a meeting where everyone (even those not prone to shout out in groups) gets their say, ideas flow, and each idea yields more and more. By the end, the meeting leader and any key stakeholders have a breadth of concepts to pull from, matching the best ideas with the goals or problems at hand. As you whittle down to only the best ideas, you begin to think through execution and realistic implementation of those ideas.

Then (and ONLY then) do you begin to critique the ideas, preferably without the team in the room. Ideas are your babies - like, brain babies or something - so it can be difficult to foster a creative environment if you critique everyone's thoughts on the spot. Better to do that behind the scenes and protect everybody's beloved…um…intellectual infants?

Regardless of the goals you have or the terrible jokes you use, the end result is the same: a brainstorm approach that wastes minimal time while maximizing the actual ideas brought to the table.

Have you come across effective ways to brainstorm? How do you conduct yours at work?

The Struggle to Analyze Content's Success

In an earlier post, I introduced the Content Spectrum: four simple phases in your content operations that can help you make sense of the loose, frightening project of owning “content” for your business. Its goals are simple: be efficient, be thoughtful, and keep your and your company’s goals in mind the entire time.

Details on the first three steps, Planning, Production, and the basics of Distribution, can be found in separate posts here, here, and here, respectively.

In wrapping up this series of posts, I'll talk briefly about Analysis. And boy, can this get ugly. There's no use mincing words: we're all VERY good at creating content and even understanding how to distribute that content to the right audience, but when it comes time to report back about how it's performing, well, there's not a clear set of TRADITIONAL metrics that work. But I don't think that matters, as I'll discuss below.

ANALYZING CONTENT TENDS TO OVERLOOK WHY YOU STARTED CREATING CONTENT

As you try to measure success, don't forget why you began to plan, produce, and distribute content in the first place. The entire premise behind content is that it's consumer-initiated, making each and every impression more powerful than, say, that of a banner ad. In fact, a study by Boston-based ad agency Hill Holliday suggests that when consumers choose to spend time with your brand, it boosts the brand's marketing effectiveness 27x!

So impressions as a core metrics? Not gonna do the trick, since you're stuck comparing the millions of (mostly useless) views of your banner to thousands of (much more powerful) interactions with your content.

Impressions impress no one, as they say. (I'm not sure who THEY are...but it seems like something they'd say.)

Other metrics can be quite useful if you have a boss with the right mentality. In other words, your boss cant think like a direct-response advertiser. These metrics include clicks, shares, time spent engaging, comments, and all other interaction-based actions.

IT ALL COMES DOWN TO YOUR COMPANY AND YOUR GOALS

This probably sounds like a cop-out, but analyzing your content all comes back to your specific goals. Just as saying, "I want tons of Facebook Likes!" only matters if you know WHY, creating content only matters if you have a goal in mind for that content. Consider it a new product that you now own, as consistency trumps virality every time. What are your goals for that product? How will you not only manage it, but measure it and justify it?

Unfortunately, the marketing world gets cluttered with buzz and bull, so it's easy to lose sight of this fact. Search your feelings, you know it to be true...

At Dailybreak, we have three distinct goals for our content creation:

#content marketing #boston content #content spectrum #content analysis #measuring success of content

The Content Spectrum: The Basics of Content Distribution

In an earlier post, I introduced the Content Spectrum: four simple phases in your content operations that can help you make sense of the loose, frightening project of owning “content” for your business. Its goals are simple: be efficient, be thoughtful, and keep your and your company’s goals in mind the entire time.

Details on the first two steps, Planning and Production, can be found in separate posts here and here, respectively.

In this post, I'm introducing the basics of Distribution, which is such an enormous topic (you can basically call it marketing). Therefore, I'll tee up just a few of the must-know concepts that I've seen firsthand, and I encourage you to explore other marketing- and content-focused blogs for more details, as well as future posts here.

THE PURPOSE OF CONTENT IS NOT *PRODUCING* CONTENT

As I mentioned in the post prior to this one, the stage of the Content Spectrum known as Production is the stage that receives 99.9% of all attention and emotional energy, which is not at all surprising. After all, creating content requires creative people who love - um - creating. But regardless of our personal preferences and my abuse of the prior sentence, content creators hired to work under a brand must realize something rather intuitive but perhaps a little harsh:

The purpose of content used in business is to get the right content in front of the right people, at the right time. Yes, it needs to be great content that focuses on the consumer, and yes, we're about to enter an era full of crappy content thanks to this field gaining buzz (ugh). But the end goal of most of our companies, as much as we all don't like to admit it, is to make money, and so there's more to using branded content than simply producing it.

(Side note #1: Please don't twist my words here. You don't want to go about creating low-quality content in high quantity, as that's what contributes to the aforementioned crap. You should be thoughtful and focus on the user first, because ultimately this is all about getting a consumer to think highly of your brand and attach themselves emotionally. So don't create tons of crappy content. We're all counting on each other to create high quality stuff.)

(Side note #2: Just because the work you do includes the need to distribute content doesn't mean that you shouldn't also create for the sake of creating. You should absolutely produce media on the side just to exercise your brain, improve, and feel fulfilled. Making is a muscle, so creating content can be the perfect exercise regardless of reaching people afterwards. Need an outlet or ideas? Join Boston Content!)

CONTENT DISTRIBUTION 101

Again, your marketing counterparts will be heavily tasked with distributing your content, but there are some terms that everyone should know and keep in mind:

Content hub: All content needs to live somewhere, so be sure you establish a hub that you own and operate. A social outpost (more on that below) is totally fine to replicate that blog feel, but ultimately, your blog doesn't fall under the Ts and Cs of a third party. You need a home base that you own.

Social outposts: Once you've got your home base set up, syndicate your content across your social channels. Start with one (e.g. LinkedIn) and get really good at it before stressing yourself out and spreading yourself too thin. There are dozens if not hundreds of social networks where your prospects/consumers live. Be great at one and build an effective community there, because social is more than just posting TO people, it's interacting and listening. So: one social network to start.

Community building: Social outposts are great places to PUSH content. They're even better to pull in consumers by being relevant, conversant, and human. Let's say you select Twitter as your main social outpost. This means that, in addition to sending tweets linking to your content hub proactively, you should be searching for key terms using twitter.com/search and diving into that conversation. If I sold rugged, outdoor apparel, I'm searching for terms like "hiking" and "camping" and interacting like I would at a cocktail party, not at a pulpit. I'd put down the marketing bullhorn and instead mingle and offer others drinks, stories, and jokes...so to speak.

"@MyCustomer Enjoy your hike in Maine! DEFINITELY check out #4 on our Top 10 Places to Hike in New England list: [link to my hub]"

Partnerships: Establishing partnerships with other blogs for guest posts and cross-posting, as well as collaborating with others on content production, can help you both grow reach and be more prolific.

Scheduling: Rolling up under both social outposts and partnerships is scheduling. Be sure you establish timelines for everything, similar to how you schedule your content production. Map resources and deadlines carefully: How many tweets per post? What times will they go out? When will your partner guest post each month? And so on...

GETTING STARTED

To get started, ask yourself one simple question: Can I/we create content every single day? If the answer is an emphatic YES, then get aggressive and establish your own hub like a blog, as well as several social channels to start distributing content and interacting. But more often, your answer will be a NO, and so I'd encourage you to pick your spots. Create content when you can, and spend the rest of the time establishing partnerships with bigger reach than you. For most companies starting out, the goal is to produce content to distribute through high-impact channels, since you don't have the production power to build an audience bit by bit just yet.

DISTRIBUTION DECISION TIME!

Creating is an act of self expression, so we're all very tempted to create content all day, every day, without thinking about distribution. It's less than fun for some creators, after all, to think of their projects as a vehicle to promote a business. But if we stick to our roots and realize that we can promote our brands with content that's plain old awesome for consumers, then we'll be in a great place in our own careers: a content creator who also understands how to effectively USE what you've created.

Good luck!

#content spectrum #boston content #content marketing #content distribution

Content Production: The Most Dangerous Phase of Your Content Operations

In an earlier post, I introduced the Content Spectrum: four simple phases in your content operations that can help you make sense of the loose, frightening project of owning “content” for your business. Its goals are simple: be efficient, be thoughtful, and keep your and your company’s goals in mind the entire time.

Details on the first step, Planning, can be found in a separate post here.

Today, we’re focusing on the second step in the process - the phase that most will think of when you talk about content created for business: Production.

THE PITFALL OF CONTENT CREATION IS PRODUCTION

One of the great things about the modern web, in which all companies can produce content, is that thousands of creative professionals are suddenly very valuable to brands and businesses. The starving artist can finally buy a sandwich.

So naturally, the interests of many content creation professionals is just that: creation. There's a certain art and beauty in the act of creating something. You take an idea and bring it to life. Your perspective on life becomes valuable to others, and you're able to communicate stories in powerful ways. Plus, thanks to social networks, you can instantly reveal to others what you've spent time creating.

Because digital content combines this most excellent act of creation (a self-expressive, enjoyable process) with the act of social sharing (adding a level of guaranteed exposure), the temptation is to leap right into the Production phase right away.

This is a huge mistake.

Look, it's incredibly important to be very, VERY good at creating media. Too many businesses churn out crappy content that tries to game the SEO system (sorry, but it's true - you know who you are). And yes, too many businesses get stuck in process or planning meetings for the sake of them. But none of this changes the fact that staying organized and careful about what you create and how you create it, as well as where you distribute it and how it's measured and optimized, is all paramount to success.

THE K.I.S.S. APPROACH TO PRODUCTION: KEEP IT SIMPLE, SUCKA!

(That's the acronym, right? I was never good at business jargon...)

I love simplicity, but creating and controlling media can seem anything but simple.

If you're the one responsible, you're probably hoping to be this:

#boston content #content creation #content spectrum #content production #creatives #content marketing

Planning: Easy to Skip, Crucial to Execute When Creating Content

In an earlier post to the Boston Content blog, I talked about how four simple phases in your content operations can help you make sense of the loose, frightening project of owning "content" for your business. I'm calling this the Content Spectrum, and the goals are simple: be efficient, be thoughtful, and keep your and your company's goals in mind the entire time. Above all, don't just jump into creating content and then blast that to the world - the process MUST be carefully followed because producing and controlling media is such a loose, far-reaching idea. So many moving parts can derail a project and eliminate success.

While it may be fine to sit down and churn out a personal blog without much thought, chances are pretty darn good that your company has real business objectives to hit.

Today, we're focusing on the first step in the process: Planning.

Planning requires that you look ahead to Production, Distribution, and Analysis and map out the various steps, resources, and due dates along the way.

In the eyes of too many, planning seems corporate and too process-driven, but having launched content both big (e.g. Chevy campaigns) and small (like weekly templates to meet quotas) for Dailybreak, I can tell you with absolute certainty: a lack of planning and foresight can lead to hours upon hours of wasted time, unnecessary back and forth, and tons of frustration. Things won't run smoothly, and you won't hit your, your company's and/or your client's goals.

GOOD PLANNING EXAMPLE: THE CREATIVE BRIEF

At Dailybreak, our planning stage often includes one key stakeholder (a sales rep, an account manager, or an internal project lead) filling out a creative brief for my team of writers, designers and content strategists. These briefs cover topics ranging from creative assets to which we have access (e.g. a video made by a third party), due dates, production owners, and more. They're simple documents that take just a few minutes to complete, but they are critical. Because "planning" is an idea that doesn't directly produce anything, skipping this step is often both easy for others to do and more or less guaranteed to result in chaos and failed projects.

It's your job to ensure that doesn't happen.

Here's a loose example of what a creative brief looks like for a project focused on graphic design:

THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN PLANNING YOUR CONTENT

Start by focusing on the OUTCOME: I can't emphasize this enough. Not only should you scope the project, but you should very clearly define the metrics of success that you're using. Why is this so critical? Because as the person responsible for creating content, if you list out your colleague's or team's idea of success up front, you can accurately and confidently make decisions or even change the project to hit those goals. After all, others know what they want as an outcome, but you know how to get them there. Unfortunately, they may not understand that the content they want produced comes into conflict with the results they're seeking. Knowing success metrics upfront helps you gently move them to the right solution while pointing to their goals the entire time.

Manage expectations: During planning, you have the ability to set proper expectations in terms of turnaround times and gauge direction by proposing loose frameworks for concepts ("What if we did THIS?"). Your job is not just to execute but to be the content leader in the room and manage expectations. Doing so then let's you...

Allocate resources appropriately: Remember in school, when teachers would only award the 100 or the A+ for tests in math or science? Your papers could never seem to get that perfect score. That's because the amount of edits, ideas, and hours spent on a humanities project can go on forever. You can ALWAYS tweak a paper, an article, a video, or a graphic. Media is only "final" when you decide to stop working on it and publish it. By stepping back during your planning stage, you can be sure to allocate resources more concretely and decide who's in, who's out, in order to be more efficient when you move to production.

TOOLS TO HELP YOU DURING PLANNING

There are myriad tools and apps available to help you during this stage. Just a few that I've personally used or have seen others use:

Google Drive: docs that are shareable are critical

Dropbox: (ditto)

Trello: a project management web app that's simple and almost fun to use; they've dubbed themselves "white boards with superpowers," and I agree (available on desktop and mobile)

Wunderlist: an interactive To Do list (desktop, mobile)

A team-wide "Idea Board": At Dailybreak, this is a spreadsheet that lists headlines, topic labels, links to sources of inspiration or resources, and a standalone list of content "templates" we run. Templates are more turnkey or regularly posted items that can be published quickly and predictably while the team spends time fleshing out more unique or complex ideas. After all, your audience - or boss - demands content regularly, so a repository of ideas and quick-hitting templates help you meet the demands and still have time to, yanno, sleep and stuff.

Creative Briefs: these will look drastically different company to company, project to project, but putting the scope and goals of a project on paper in the same format every time develops consistency, sets expectations, and helps avoid missing details or deadlines.

Bottom line: be sure to plan things out carefully to collect all the many moving pieces behind creating content. When you're ready to move forward and confident you have goals set, resources allocated, and expectations properly communicated, move onto the next phase: Production.

Next time, we'll explore the Production phase of the Content Spectrum and explain why we all spend too much time thinking about this step in our creative process.

* * * *

ENJOY THE ARTICLE?

Boston Content launched in 2012 to help support and grow content industry careers in Boston. Let us know how we're doing and keep us and the community energized and active:

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Jay Acunzo is the co-founder of Boston Content and currently serves as Director of Content at Dailybreak. Formerly an online media consultant at Google, Jay's work has been published by the Huffington Post, iMedia, Venture Fizz and more.

#boston content #content spectrum #tools for content #creativity #dailybreak

A Simple, Efficient Way to Think About Content at Your Company

Congratulations: your company (and you, of course) officially "get" the need to create online content regularly. Your management team understands that businesses today are faced with a real opportunity to lead the conversation about their industry, products, brands and customers. They can be thought leaders, entertainment outlets, and media channels that add value to their target audiences - all by creating and distributing digital content.

Your business gets all that. So, um...what now?

How, exactly, is a company supposed to handle its content operations? Grasping the idea of generating online content is one thing; successfully executing is entirely another matter.

Having launched literally thousands of pieces of content at Dailybreak in just over a year, with varying goals behind them, I've tried to codify what it means to create content and make it work for you in ways that help the business. But the process of creating content can be tough to pin down at first. Even that sentence is misleading: creating is only one part of the process. It requires so much more to be successful.

Personally, I know exactly how the responsibility of owning and somehow controlling media to work in your company's favor can be utterly frightening. You need to master so many different things, but the best place to start to stay sane and productive, I've found, is this simple approach that I'm calling the Content Spectrum. Always be sure to gut-check yourself. Ask where you're at on this spectrum, and be sure you proceed methodically and carefully along the way, hitting on all of it, and being mindful that you need to stop to think through each.

FOUR PHASES OF YOUR CONTENT OPERATIONS THAT GUIDE YOUR SUCCESS:

Over the next few days, we'll dive more deeply into each phase to flesh out ways to think about and address the various steps in the process. But the goal remains the same: keep it simple, always hit each of these steps, and manage the expectations of those around you that this is 100% with the goals of your business or brand in mind.

Does your team operate similarly to the Content Spectrum? How does your approach differ if not?

#boston content #content production #content strategy #content spectrum #content analysis #content planning #content distribution

UPDATE: Join Us for Our December Roundtable

UPDATE: Roundtable #2 has been canceled due to scheduling conflicts. We unfortunately lost our venue temporarily, but never fear: we have 10 total members planning to attend the Tues meetup! See below for details and RSVP or just show up :)

- Jay

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In the spirit of practical, useful, and more intimate ways to build community and spread knowledge, we're excited to organize two small gatherings in December. Our hope is that they'll spark new connections, ideas, and future conversations.

Since spots are limited, please only RSVP if you plan to make it to respect others who wish to attend. (Thanks!)

Roundtable #1:

GENERATING IDEAS AND STAYING ORGANIZED

Content producers, strategists, and marketers are often tagged with two incorrect assumptions:

1. Your ideas - ie the value you bring to any organization - are "lightbulb" moments that just happen due to your "gift."

2. Your role, which is partly or entirely creative work, necessitates a loose personality and free-flowing, unstructured days.

Let's chat over a few drinks about the truth, and share experiences to learn how to execute on that truth: content industry pros can and must find ways to generate ideas regularly and predictably while staying incredibly organized and regimented. How do you generate ideas and how do you stay organized to succeed?

When: Tues, Dec 18 @ 6:30 PM

Where: Dailybreak's office (100 N Washington St, 6th Floor, right off North Station)

Sign up here!

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Roundtable #2: << THIS HAS BEEN CANCELED AND WILL BE RESCHEDULED

TOOLS, APPS, AND RESOURCES TO BE MORE PROLIFIC

Because of the natural tie between creativity and content production in business, it's easy to assume that our work is inefficient. And while it absolutely requires people like us, there are myriad tools, apps, and resources available to help us be even more prolific.What are you using/reading to plan your content, create more and better content, and distribute it in the right places, to the right people, at the right time?

When: Thurs, Dec 20 @ 6:30PM

Where: Starbucks in Kendall Sq, corner of Ames and Broadway

Sign up here!

Stay tuned for our next big meetup coming in 2013!

#boston content #boston meetups #content creators #creatives #content strategy #content marketing

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