#boston content

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:

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.

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.

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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.

Working in content, whether you create that content or distribute it to promote your business, requires us all to generate ideas and execute them. So if we're to keep our jobs and stay in the industry, we need a seemingly unending number of ideas.

Sound like a tall task? Maybe. But generating ideas is only difficult if you draw from a very narrow view of life. It's no secret that consuming quality content that provides diverse perspectives can help you be more prolific and creative. But these sites can be hard to find sometimes - there's just so much damn media being published daily.

So to help you stay well-rounded, creative and productive, here's a list of four sites - all serving different purposes for your process - that you can visit regularly to get those oft-elusive creative juices flowing:

1. TED.com

The Mothership of awesome ideas, TED offers some of the best, most inspiring talks you'll ever see, from business to creativity to social movements and much more. Many of you already know and love TED, but it's worth mentioning here. After all, few things inspire creativity and productivity better than listening to groundbreaking ideas delivered by passionate people. (Personally, I make it part of my routine to watch one TED talk prior to sitting down to create content. I find myself energized, motivated, inspired, and other uplifting words.)

Need a place to start? Try Simon Sinek's all-time great talk about finding your "Why" and inspiring action or Elizabeth Gilbert's uplifting and eye-opening discussion on your elusive creative genius. 

(By the way, these talks can get pretty deep but can also prove pretty damn useful to rewatch and share with others, so I'd highly suggest dropping them in an Evernote file or bookmarking them to watch again!)

2. Brain Pickings

Writer, journalist, and timeless content aficionado Maria Popova searches the far reaches of writing and thinking to find only the best, most intriguing content. From F. Scott Fitzgerald's 13 recommendations for using turkey on Thanksgiving (hilarious) to the daily routines of some of the world's most famous writers (insightful), you can get a charge out of Brain Pickings, either in your RSS reader or by subscribing to her weekly newsletter.

You can read a great article about her in the New York Times.

3. Seth's Blog

Seth Godin's blog is an old standby for thousands if not millions of readers. To be honest, I'm actually not a huge fan and cringe at including it here because it seems stereotypical. But it's absolutely worth viewing it from a production and execution standpoint. Whether or not you appreciate the contents of his work, Seth blogs ALL. THE. TIME. The man just won't quit, and he owns the idea that consistency trumps virality (though he's got a big enough reach now that he can achieve both). Because of that, even if you're not in marketing and don't appreciate what he says, you can at least appreciate how he says it: regularly, without stopping, and without hype or spammy SEO practices.

4. Content Marketing Institute's blog

Again, this is another widely-known outlet but offers so much practical advice (despite the usual amount of hype) that it's worth mentioning. CMI talks mainly about using content for generating sales leads and gaining brand exposure, but let's face it: whether you're on the marketing team or at an agency or just creating media because it's entertaining to your users, we all share the need understand tools and approaches for getting our content in front of our target audience.

Creating content means we all stick our necks out there and publish our names and projects to the world for criticism, most of which isn’t actually visible to us. It comes in the form of thoughts others have -- naysayers who shake their heads but don’t actually comment or even friends who humor us but don’t necessarily understand why we do this stuff, here on Tumblr or on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or our own companies' platforms.

This can all add up and cause that blank page or that empty screen to seem more intimidating than it really is. The task at hand is always taking an idea or set of ideas, some our own and some taken from others, and turning those ideas into reality, something for others to consume. That's damn scary! 

The little hater in MY head tells me that I don’t know enough at my age or in my city or with my skill set to distribute knowledge that others find valuable. The hater tells me that - you know what? - Boston Content just isn't going to succeed. It's not good enough.

He tells me that my affinity for digital communication and social media and online content is misplaced, that this stuff isn’t important, it’s not going anywhere, and it’s mostly just a way for tech geeks to get in touch with each other in a public way.

It tells me that my writing skills have eroded since college, and that my job at Dailybreak doesn’t stack up with academia, law, medicine or finance.

But the problem facing my little hater TODAY is that he’s in my head -- the same place where all my confidence, ambitions, desires to be great, love of helping others and all the positive traits that make me ME also live.

So my little hater’s gonna lose. 

It's time for another event!

If you're like us, you love the content industry largely due to one thing: you get to spread compelling stories to the world.

We'd love to swap stories with you over some drinks on August 29th from 6-8pm at the Lansdowne Pub (we'll be in the larger private room, cash bar). RSVP here: bostoncontent.eventbrite.com

After our panel event, we heard from you that more mingling would be a great next step. Taking that to mean "more drinking" (err, "storytelling"), we're excited to reconvene and keep building this community group. 

Remember: all are invited! But we'll likely geek out a bit over what bonds us, and that's digital content production, strategy, marketing, and innovating for business. 

See you there!

- Jay and Arestia

Help us spread and grow! Suggested tweet: 

Excited to attend #BostonContent's Meet Up Drink Up to mingle w/ the city's best content industry ppl. Join in! bostoncontent.eventbrite.com

Dave Levy is a PR guy with a love of media who writes longish at State of the Fourth Estate and shortish on Twitter at @levydr.

My third shipment of razors arrived during the middle of last week from the affable and fantastic folks over at Dollar Shave Club. Which means, if you carry the two, that I in fact quickly in love with the folks over at $SC not too long after their incredible video was posted in early March. The blades actually are f*cking great, so you should see this smooth face every two to three days, maybe more frequently since it's just so damn dashing.

Problem is, unless I suddenly go through some second round of puberty, by the time my fourth shipment shows up at the end of June, I'll have to have a shave party for Teen Wolfs in the greater Boston area. I'm not even halfway through April's set of blades and here comes another set of five. Look, the rate I'm getting razors far surpasses my actual need. At five razors a month, we're talking five to six days per blade, which at me is a max of three shaves. I don't go through razors that fast, and can get at least five shaves out of each. I like being baby face and I assume the Boston tech community prefers it to the scruff, but that's just an impractical shaving-to-blade ratio.

Which brings us to the most important question: Why the hell is manscaping relevant to Boston Content? 

The short answer: because having too many razors is an awesome problem for a consumer to have when they bought them because of a YouTube video.

The long answer has to do with why I bought the razors in the first place (the video), as well as how much fun it was to talk about it and share it among other friends (the actual act of passing it along, and laughing about it with someone else) and then the incentive for me to make sure my friends registered (I get a free month for every friend who does it through my link). This is content as part of the business strategy, not content for the sake of content. 

We see all these things fly around the 'nets, gone in days and we chuckle, sure, but did it move product? Did it meet the business goal? If you ask me, $SC did. Even if I could provide razors to cover the Men's *and* Women's US Swim teams in London by the time August comes around, I still love it. And look, I'm still talking about it.

That's good content.

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We agree, Dave. We agree.

If you'd like to submit content to be published on our blog and shared throughout the magic kingdom of kontent kalled Boston (err, just go with it), then click the link to the right or email me. Happy creating!