#leancontent

I do a lot of writing and documentation. Hence most of the websites I visit are based on writing, editing, publishing, blogging, reviewing, coaching, online-courses, etc. And yes, I come across websites expressing variety of moods and expressions. 

The term “lean” comes actually from Toyota manufacturing days. They wanted to reduce their risk. They didn’t want to build a bunch of cars and ship them out and hope that somebody bought them. So they started this just-in-time manufacturing or “Lean” manufacturing. It reduced risk, reduced waste, and created higher profits.

Following the above strategy, we understand that lean content requires to be Reliable, Authentic, and Direct. And here is an example which I have come across and found engaging from the customer point of view:

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To me the above content is (a) Reliable - it sets user’s expectation; (b) Authentic - feels like real conversation and (c) Direct - the information gives me exactly what I need to make a decision.

Last week, Ashley Tate, Content Lead for SEOMoz, flew all the way down from Seattle to speak at our Lean Content meetup. Ashley has an extensive background in blogging, content strategy, and community management, and had some awesome insights to offer! (Also, she has the cutest dog ever.)

It’s interesting to hear the many different definitions of lean content, as they’re all unique yet based upon the same concept. Here’s Ashley’s:

Lean content is:

-All about testing and finding out what works and what doesn’t

-Easily shared across multiple platforms

-Able to be repurposed and reused across time

                    It’s all about metrics.

The first thing that Ashley talked about was metrics. Don’t run away - as scary as metrics can be, they’re one of the most important parts of a content strategy, and guess what? Anyone can come up with them!

SEOMoz has a super handy widget that publicly displays the highest priority metrics for measuring the performance and effectiveness of your content. These numbers include:

-Likes (in the form of a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”

-Social Shares

-Comments

-Visits, pageviews, and average time spent on the page 

                 After defining these metrics, Ashley reminded us that you don’t have to be a data expert to analyze them; you just have to be “someone with excel on their computer.” With the simplest numbers, you can easily gauge what content people (quite literally) like and dislike, what turns out to be the most shareable, and what people spend the most time reading. Comparing these numbers for each of the different types of content that you’re experimenting with can be extremely helpful to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

At SEOMoz, Ashley conducted some experiments with the metrics described above, and she learned lots of interesting things that helped her to create the best possible piece of content for her community. She focused mainly on the numbers as well as the emotional reaction of the community to different types of content, and collected and examined data to find out what the SEOMoz community wanted to read more of.

Some of the key takeaways from this effort included:

-Guides work (leading her to create “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO”)

-Specific topics work better than umbrella topics

-Long content wins

-The best way to create new content is to base it upon the feedback from your first successful content series

On Content Mining

The second part of Ashley’s presentation focused on a concept known as content mining. Content mining, she pointed out insightfully, supports lean content.

“When you’re running lean, the best way to find content is to look at what already exists around you.”

                        Ashley explained that most companies are actually “sitting on content gold” and don’t even know it yet! About a year ago, they realized that this was actually the case at SEOMoz. They had lots of content coming in from many different sources, but didn’t exactly have the right strategy to figure out what to do with it.

To figure this out, they took the following steps:

-Identified content sources

-Tested existing content

-Reached out to their community for guest posts

-Focused on “big content” projects

-Created community-friendly posts

So, now that the strategy is figured out, what steps can actually be taken to get the content created and out there?

Tap your content avenues

Ashley advises looking into the different ways to discover as well as to push content. These include blogposts, user generated content (UGC), videos, webinars, and social networks.

Test, test, test!

A pattern is starting to develop here! It all comes back down to the metrics. Make sure you’re keeping track of those numbers, so that you can test the community’s reactions to different types of content. As many content experts have explained in the past, and many will continue to explain in the future, the answer isn’t written in stone; each business has different needs and each community will react uniquely to various types of content. The only way to find this out is - you guessed it! - testing!

Lean on your team members

Just because the content strategy is led by one person, this doesn’t mean that that person has to be the one doing all of the creating. Chances are, there is a diverse team of multi-talented people working for your company, and it’s extremely helpful to leverage each of their strengths in your content strategy! Have an awesome engineer with a technical background? Have him tell his story in a creative blogpost, or create an awesome graphic. Does your latest intern have a cool story of how they found your company? Let it be known to the world! This is all brand-developing content that keeps your community interested.

Use your community

Who knows what type of content your community loves better than your community itself? Once your content strategy is off the ground, think about asking your community members to contribute. Ashley’s example is “YouMoz,” the SEOMoz blog filled with content solely from the SEOMoz community.

In addition to this advice, Ashley reiterates that “using your brain” doesn’t hurt either. Spend time sitting down with your team and just talking about what types of content could work for your strategy, and how to make that happen.

To learn more about SEOMoz and Ashley Tate, don’t hesitate to reach out to her on Twitter at @ashletate!

In this week’s edition of Scoop.it’s lean content meetup, we were honored to welcome the the Content & Community Director of UserVoice, Evan Hamilton. A self-described “maker of stuff people like,” Evan makes the community management magic happen for the software-as-a-service provider of customer support tools.

                    During his talk, Evan answered five important questions that content and community managers often ask. He started off by clarifying that “content” is not just writing; it also includes tweets, photos, and even speaking engagements. From there, he moved into the aforementioned five sections of his talk, recapped here: 1. Why content? Per Evan, the main purpose of creating and distributing content is to “build trust and loyalty by providing extra value to your consumers.” It’s one of the best ways to be more than just a service provider and to form real relationships with your customers. Further, it’s been scientifically proven that customers who interact with content are more likely to say that their experience with a company is “excellent” rather than “fair” or “good,” with nothing about the product experience changing. 2. What Type of Content Should I Create? Unfortunately, there is no right answer to this question. No two brands are alike, and for that reason, no two content strategies are either. The best way to figure out what content works for your brand is trial and error. Evan’s best advice is to “move fast, and do things,” because you can never be sure what will stick and what won’t. For example, a few weeks ago during the SuperBowl, Evan had a spur-of-the-moment content idea that took him approximately ten minutes to create, and it stuck and got a vastly larger number of clicks than he expected. Then, a few days later, he and his team worked on a social campaign including an image and a story that they were extremely proud of, and it hardly took off. Thinking on your feet and being able to analyze results in real time are the best ways to figure out what type of content you should be creating. 3. How Should I Create and Distribute My Content? The number one rule of content strategy is to create a content calendar. This involves laying out different categories of content, varying contributors to the content strategy, and most importantly, ensuring consistency in content creation. Evan’s best advice for content calendars? Be ahead, and don’t start until you’re ahead. Plan out your content for at least a few weeks, have it written or created, and then launch your strategy. This way, you will always be able to stay on top of it and ensure that you don’t fall behind or get overwhelmed. As for distribution, the sad but accurate truth is that content doesn’t just explode on it’s own. A few tips to distribute and market your content:

Don’t make it spammy. Include the name of your brand once or twice, but make sure it doesn’t sound like you’re trying to sell.

Make it easy to share. This means including social media sharing widgets, quotable sentences, and - you guessed it - simply asking readers to share.

Write about others and @mention them when sharing.

4. Getting the Benefits In order to have successful content and reap the aforementioned benefits, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. First, make sure your readers know that your brand is creating the content, but in a way that isn’t openly promoting your brand. Shameless self promotion is one of the easiest ways to lose the trust of your readers. Second - and on a related note - don’t try and directly convert the consumers of your content into business. Content is for providing value, and that value in turn should be enough to make your readers want to check out your brand. Lastly, create a sub-brand if you can. Evan created UserCentered, a blog focused on “people dedicated to keeping their customers (happy).” Following on the previous two points, creating a new brand that isn’t directly related to your business can give you more legitimacy in the content space.

5. What Tips Can you Provide for Content Creation?

People love stories. Find your current customers or users who are doing great things with your product and tell the tales of their success.

People love numbers. Provide compelling data to back up your claims.

Guest posts can be dangerous. Be careful who, if anyone, is going to be writing for you. To avoid a conflict, try interviewing others instead.

Cheap tricks can work on occasion. Break out that “Top 5” list if you want, but, please, make sure it doesn’t suck.

Here’s a no-brainer for you - write good content! Put 110% into it or nothing at all. Bad content is worse than no content at all.

Write content you’d like to refer back to in the future.

Check out Evan’s blog or find him on Twitter if you’d like to ask him any other questions.

This is the presentation that Scoop.it CEO & Co-Founder Guillaume Decugis gave at the Startup Product Summit on Feb 7 2013 in San Francisco.

Recently, we had the pleasure of hosting a meetup at Scoop.it HQ in San Francisco about a new concept we are developing in tandem with the community called #leancontent. Roughly, #leancontent is an evolution of content development and content marketing strategies. Lean Content focuses on developing value-adding, modern web media around a central thematic element as defined by a content strategy. What is produced can be translated across media types (ex. A blog can turn into an infographic, into a podcast) and distributed effectively and efficiently with specific focus on the social web and strategic communications.

The Scoop.it Director of Content, Clair, gave a short talk about impact versus time spent developing the concept (the examples used were the Qualcomm keynote at CES versus the US Government’s response to a silly petition, both are viral, one good.. one bad) and the fundamentals of what #leancontent should be:

Fat vs Lean: Avoid “fat” content by avoiding more traditional marketing materials, like whitepapers, etc. The newest research shows that a video or an infographic can be more effective for converting audience members to leads.

Value-adding: Every piece of content developed by a brand should have a purpose outside of “Buy my thing.” There should be an inherent value an audience member can draw from the content itself, which will draw people to your content (and your brand) over and over. For example: a blog post about your newest feature could include material on how to leverage the feature, or perhaps principles for using the concept of your feature.

Flexible: One-hit-wonders are not cool. Think about how to repurpose each piece of content you are planning before you build it. If you can’t repurpose it in at least 1 way, don’t spend your time developing it.

Thematic: Every brand has a “big message.” For Scoop.it, it’s about “expressing your unique perspective.” Each piece of content developed for our brand should support that big idea in some way. Our pieces often feature strong opinions or education resources about learning and edifying knowledge bases.

Strategic: Always develop the “why” in your content. Each piece of content should have a reason beyond direct advertising -- ask yourself “how does this piece of content support my greater content and business goals?”

We also had the Head of Content at TaskRabbit in house, K. Tighe, and she gave an incredible presentation about stealing content development ideas from other industries. Most notably from Lighting and Set Design, Politics, and Journalism.

From Lighting and Set Design:

Feel your light: Any performer can “feel” their light -- they know when they are lit and when they are not. Use your audience’s reaction to your content and how they engage with it to dictate what you continue to produce. It’s okay to not produce every type of content about every topic in your industry.

Don’t Make White: When you combine colors of light on a stage, they make white. Choose lights (or pieces of content to develop) that best augment your brand and the big picture you are trying to illuminate.

From Politics:

Surrogates: Use your peers to help forward your brand. The Obama campaign (whether you voted for them or not) had an incredible list of external speaking on behalf of their campaign from vastly different areas of expertise, including Eva Longoria and Bill Clinton. These well-respected external personal brands only elevate your own.

Preach to the Choir: Preaching to the choir is how to make them sing. You want your audience to proactively share your message, so feed them content they will want to share.

From Journalism:

Word count, word count, word count: Know the appropriate industry word counts for each piece of editorial content you produce. Waxing poetic in 3000 words in a blog post is not acceptable and will not help you reach your goals. An exercise: write a typical 500 word executive summary. Then cut it in half. Then cut it in half again. Then make it a 140-character tweet. This will force you to focus on the things that are actually important.

Evergreens: Otherwise known as the “rainy day” repository. Develop a few pieces of content that you can pull out of your back pocket when something falls through the cracks.

Deadlines: Public shame is the only way to get people to produce on time. Create a public editorial calendar and make it very obvious when people are late on their deadlines. Don’t be afraid to crack the whip, content development is an engine and it needs gasoline.

The bigger message is that many concepts in other industries can be applied to your content generation effectively, if you look outside your box. Think about what types of marketing have been most effective personally for you, and then see how you can leverage the reasoning behind those tactics for your own brand and content generation. Feel empowered to experiment and see what works and what doesn’t with your real audience, and don’t feel stuck inside the “best practices” paradigm. You never know what is going to resonate with your audience, so ask them!