#content stategy

[webzinin]

7 Ways to Utilize User-Generated Content in 2019 http://bit.ly/2GHhlMF

[meegos]

7 Ways to Ensure Your Readers Don't Get Bored and Bail (Infographic)

Appeal to your readers' emotions and to their biggest question, "What's in it for me"?

Appeal to your readers' emotions and to their biggest question, "What's in it for me"?

[hailsays]

Hail's new blog connections

by Tom Barnett

One click publishing to blogs

Hail now integrates with the big three platforms of the blogging world — Tumblr, Blogger and Wordpress. 

When it comes to creating and collaborating on content Hail provides the cleanest most streamlined interface around. It's unique, responsive publications are another key feature, but possibly the most compelling component is the future-proofed formatting, ensuring that not only will your content live on and outlast the platforms it was originally written for, but it can also be published to third-party channels like Facebook, Twitter and as email campaigns with MailChimp.

So, as part of our continuing commitment to make sure your content is wherever your audience goes, in addition to social channels we've now added one click publishing from Hail to the three biggest platforms of the blogging world — Tumblr, Blogger and Wordpress*. Those three are trending stronger than ever, with Wordpress alone accounting for more than 60 million websites.

WordPress was used by more than 23.2% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013. — Wikipedia

If you're a content creator chances are you publish to one of these blogging platforms, and now you can do so with all the ease the Hail workflow affords. Simply connect to the service once and authorise Hail to post on your behalf. Once authorised you can push all your perfectly formatted Hail content, including hero imagery, photo galleries and associated tags directly to your blogging platform with one simple click.

Sign in today and check out the new services added to the Connections tab, or get in touch for more info.

*Wordpress integration works with both Wordpress.com sites and self-hosted installs using the excellent Wordpress Jetpack plugin.

[hailsays]

Check out our brand new app teaser!

[hailsays]

Demystifying content strategy

by Tom Barnett

More photos are taken with iPhones than any other camera — by Jay Wennington

A ‘Content Strategist’ is a fancy job description for someone who plans, curates and publishes content for a business or organisation, and most likely does a little writing themselves.

The discipline has recently taken off as a necessary reaction to the explosion of devices and channels that our audiences are accessing our content on. It seems like every month there’s a new smart device and another social platform to publish to. Chances are, if you’re a teacher, administrator or marketer you’re already familiar with the main components of content strategy—structure, workflow and governance. What you need are smarter tools to bring them all together seamlessly. That’s exactly what we’ve built Hail for.

Structure

It’s our belief, the more structure that is added at the content creation stage the more future-proofed and freer it will be. By breaking up the content in to meaningful chunks; such as ‘headline’, ‘lead’ or introductory paragraph, and the article ‘body’ with separate hero and gallery imagery, we are able to perfectly adapt what is presented to the viewer at every touch point. Hail also employs tags, which have an important dual purpose; they organise your content in the system and categorise it in published formats.

Well-structured, semantic content with key metadata will live on and adapt to the web as it continues to grow and mature, extending out past mobile to the next wave of content-capable devices like wearables, tv and car dashes.

Workflow

Currently, the average content creator writes within a word processor on a desktop, sends it by email for approval/feedback, copies it in to their CMS/Web publishing tool, social media channels, email campaigns, and eventually collates and reformats it for printing in offline newsletters and magazines/reports. They have to deal with a huge number of different interfaces and platform capabilities and when needing to augment the content with photography and video the job is even more daunting. Even more problematic is that the content now exists in many separate silos, all with their own formatting requirements and no central storage or updating pathways.

Obviously, there is serious scope to make the lives of content creators and strategists better and we believe the ideal is the maxim promoted by NPRs API: COPE – Create Once, Publish Everywhere. That’s exactly what Hail provides, a cloud-based software package that empowers your organisation to collaborate on great, well structured content that’s formatted and optimised for the adaptive web. Hail takes it one step further by providing customers with beautiful adaptive and responsive templates for publications, such as newsletters, magazines and yearbooks. Outside of the provided layouts, an API is available so that customers can integrate Hail in to their existing websites, social channels, blogging platforms and the like.

We believe strongly that your content is yours to keep, so although we will keep it hosted and backed up in the cloud, it will always be accessible and branded with your own identity in all published formats.

Governance

Finally, governance is addressed by empowering organisations to invite collaborators with varying permission levels. Content writers and photographers can work independently before submitting articles for approval by editors. Once ready, content can be pushed out to the social channels and curated in to publications by those with publishing rights. This workflow ensures the consistency and quality of the content that reaches your audience.

Content strategy isn’t only for large institutions with dozens of collaborators, Hail’s workflow, structure and adaptive publishing benefits small groups and individuals also.

The content of the future is future-proofed and able to outlive the original platforms it was written for, greatly extending it’s shelf life, so it can continue to perform and provide a return on investment. By revolutionising your content creation with Hail you’ll be best placed to take on the adaptive web, ensuring you continue to provide your audience with well branded, beautiful and engaging content.

[hailsays]

Getting started with Hail: Articles & Status

by Tom Barnett

Articles in the dashboard — by Tom Barnett

Learn all about creating Drafts, Readying for feedback and Publishing articles online.

When you create a new article in Hail it’s labelled as a Draft and is only accessible by you. This allows you to take the time required to work on it without any other members giving you feedback until you feel It’s Ready.

When you Ready an article you are changing its status to share with the rest of the organisation. Now all members, contributors, curators and the organisation owner, will be able to read and comment on your article. All members except the contributors will also be able to edit your article and add it to publications.

A Ready article becomes live on the web when curators change its status to Published. Once published an article is accessible through Hail’s Content API even if it hasn’t yet been added to a publication. Additionally, a Ready article will automatically have it’s status flipped to Published if it’s added to a publication. That’s because it’s assumed that the article is good enough to be seen by the general public, even if the publication itself hasn’t yet been published.

A Published article can be pulled from the web by removing it from any publications and/or unpublishing within the edit article view. This will return it to the Ready state. Alternatively it could be deleted, which will remove it from any published forms as well as from the content archive in your organisation.

This collaborative workflow ensures the consistency and quality of the content that reaches your audience. If you have any questions, just get in touch.

[hailsays]

Getting started with Hail: Tags & Taxonomy

by Tom Barnett

Tag tree — by Jim Larrison

Tags have a very important dual purpose; they organise your content within Hail and categorise your content in published formats.

Tips and best practices for tags:

Only organisation owners and curators can create and edit tags. All members can add tags to content.

The tags you create within Hail can become visible to your audience through publications and the Content API. So be sure to tag with care ;-)

New tags automatically appear as filters in the article and image lists and are immediately available to add to your content.

To tag content simply edit the article or image and click on Add tags. Then, as you begin typing you will be presented with a list of matching suggestions from your existing tags.

Content can be tagged multiple times. For example, an article on the Junior Futsal Champions could be tagged with Futsal, Sport and Indoor Sport.

The more time and attention you give to creating meaningful tags and categorising your content, the more dynamic and future-proofed your content will become. Tag-based taxonomy will create rich connections between articles and help to serve up relevant content to your audiences.

Hero photo by Jim Larrison

[hailsays]

The newsletter reimagined for the digital age

by Tom Barnett

Catching up on the go — by Sergey Galyonkin

Publish your content in a completely new way. Ideal for weekly, monthly and short-term periodicals, the Newsletter style is perfect for scannable content with prominent notices.

When we first launched Hail we wanted the initial publications to be innovative and impactful, so we designed and developed the Magazine style with large, engaging photography and a strong focus on the cover feature article. 

The Magazine’s aesthetic and page-like navigation best suits smaller, brochure-style publications with cohesive themes, but what if you want to publish a larger, more diverse collection of articles, that may only have a time frame in common? That’s where the Newsletter comes in.

Don’t be fooled by the name — we’ve taken the classic newsletter and completely revamped it for the contemporary content landscape:

Because of the broad, and likely contrasting nature of the individual articles, they are presented as separate, interlocking content blocks with full hero photography, lead paragraphs and gallery thumbnails to entice readers to dive deeper.

We recognised that Newsletter articles may be less likely to feature photography than those chosen for a Magazine, so text-only articles have been optimised for maximum impact.

As Newsletters contain potentially dozens of articles we included a new way for readers to navigate by their interests. This was quickly achievable because the content you create in Hail is so easily categorised with tags. We brought that powerful categorisation to life in the Newsletter by including the article tags at the top of the first content block to act as filters. For example, if a reader just wanted to check out Sport related content from the Newsletter they can click on the tag and all the non-sport content blocks will temporarily fade away.

Equally important for a newsletter are the accompanying Notices. These are also prominently highlighted within the first content block.

As always, the Newsletter publication as well as the individual articles are optimised for social sharing through Facebook, Twitter and Email. This increases your brand’s reach and audience growth as more and more people read your beautifully presented, accessible content.

So if you’re a Hail user check out the Newsletter publication type today, you’ll find it as an option for both new publications and you can even swap the style of existing ones.

Then be sure to let us know what you think, we love getting your feedback and your comments often help shape future Hail features.

Hero image by Sergey Galyonkin