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7 Ways to Bring Your Community into the Content Creation Process

This post was authored by GEORGY COHEN and originally published in January 2012 by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI.) It serves as a good follow up to our Dec 2011 webinar. We recently rerecorded the webinar.

Content is a critical interface between ourselves and our community. It helps us achieve organizational objectives, reinforce our brand, and communicate key messages.

We, as community managers and content marketers, are well-positioned to create relevant, useful, and interesting content that serves both our audience’s needs and our goals. We live and breathe those goals, and we know our brand identity almost as well as we know ourselves.

But just because we can do it all on our own, does that mean we should? The truth is, our brand belongs to our community as much as it belongs to us, if not more so. That identity is not a decree that gets passed down; it is shared and, more to the point, it is co-created. While we shape and communicate it, they are out there living it.

It’s tempting to approach community management like we are conducting an orchestra. We want to lead a performance of everyone playing the same song in tune. But I think of it more like the scene from “Big,” where Tom Hanks’ character is playing “Heart and Soul” on the giant keyboard with the CEO of MacMillan Toys. In truth, we are writing and playing the song together.

Simply put, if our brand is a story, our community members are the co-authors. Their investment in our brand is a potent commodity to tap into. Finding ways to leverage that investment is powerful — the authenticity of their external perspective can bring tremendous value to our content marketing efforts. To that end, here are a few ways to integrate our community members into the content creation process.

1. Let their expertise take center stage

Whether it’s through the contact form on our website, an old fashioned phone call, or a query via Twitter or Facebook, we may spend a good part of our day answering questions from customers, prospects, and other interested parties. While we are perfectly able to answer their questions, there are likely experts within our community who are just as qualified to address issues and share their experiences. Queries present a great opportunity to highlight their expertise.

Use your social media channels to solicit responses to a query you feel others may be able to answer. Be sure to share those responses (just the accurate ones, of course) with the original requestor; you can also collect them into a knowledge base of questions and answers powered by your community.

Highlight their responses on your website, give credit where credit is due, and make this type of crowd-sourcing a regularly scheduled item in your editorial calendar in order to keep the knowledge base growing and up-to-date. After all, customer service is often the best marketing.

2. Activate your community in real time

The value of real-time content can be short-term, but high-yield. When a window of opportunity presents itself — say, due to a breaking news item or a special event —relevant content has tremendous potential to be viewed (and appreciated) by a large audience. Once that window closes, however, the content’s value and potential drops sharply. It’s a tricky proposition that requires being in the right place at the right time, ready to turn around and execute on short notice.

The same goes for soliciting content from your community. Activating your community members in real-time will help you see their true colors. Here are some options you can explore:

  • If there are current events with relevance to your organization, ask people to weigh in while they’re still hot topics of conversation.
  • Repost customer questions, and let others respond with their answers.
  • Share reporter queries with your audience and encourage them to post their take.
  • Use both online and offline channels to encourage event attendees to post pictures of themselves (preferably holding something with the company logo with a big smile) or share feedback on the day’s activities.
  • Got a deadline you want people to hit? Get your community to spread the word for you.

Also, pay attention to what is happening in the world at large. Anything from a particularly striking sunset in your city to Thanksgiving dinner to an awards telecast can spark a conversation and content creation around your brand. Tools such as Storify — which allows you to curate bits of content from various online sources and stitch them together into a narrative — can help tie all of the responses together.

3. Leverage the power of the hashtag

Whether it’s on Twitter or emerging channels like Instagram, hashtags are the topical threads that bind people and conversations on the web. By spurring conversation around a popular hashtag — whether it’s related to an event, a product launch, or just a brand theme — you can not only get your community talking about you, but you can trace and organize that conversation.

Using social conversation tools like Storify or Cover it Live, you can capture tweets from a selected hashtag and embed the collection on a webpage, blog post, or online article. A Twitter widget can simply scroll a raw feed of all tweets with the chosen hashtag (though be aware of the attendant risks of publicizing a feed you can’t edit). Alternately, you can simply mine the hashtag thread for interesting tweets that you can retweet, highlight as testimonials on your website, or use to inspire blog posts.

4. Curate and celebrate

Psychologist Carl Rogers once said, “Man’s inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.” Listening to our community members is integral to communicating in a way that will resonate with them. By listening, we can monitor our brand and find our fans (and foes); but, more to the point, it also helps us discover a trove of content and conversation. Turns out, the community is already talking and creating content about us, so why not use it to your advantage?

Tracking terms or hashtags on Twitter, finding blogs that mention certain keywords via Google, and subscribing to tags on Flickr and YouTube are just a few of the ways you can listen to the community chatter. Then, you can curate the resultant tweets, blog posts, photos, and videos to create a community-authored reflection of your brand. Don’t be afraid to celebrate content that isn’t your own. In the end, it doesn’t matter who created it; it just matters how well it tells your story.

5. Reach out and ask them to contribute

Along the same lines as the earlier point about letting your community members be the experts,sometimes getting your community involved in content creation is as simple as asking the right questions. Use your social platforms, newsletters, and other touch points to solicit responses to queries. You want your audience members to be interested in you, so it’s only fair to show some interest in them.

The questions you ask could be about your product or organization, for example, “What should we do better in the new year?” or, “What’s the most interesting way in which you’ve used our product?” Butyou can also use this as an opportunity to get to know your community members, and let them get to know each other, by asking questions that will be interesting to them, such as, “What are your new year’s resolutions?” or “How do you beat the winter blues?” or “What’s your favorite vacation getaway?” These are easy, straightforward topics people like to talk about and for which pretty much everyone has an answer.

6. Get a little chatty

In an e-commerce context, live chat functionality has been shown to lead to increased conversions and time on-site. In a content marketing context, live chat can help make our websites more dynamic, draw visitors who may not regularly go to our sites, and give our audiences the opportunity to shape our content with their questions and to feel heard. A live chat is great content both during the chat and as an archive after the fact. Also, topics that come up during a live chat may inform future content.

Rather than just publishing a Q&A interview or a two-minute video with a subject matter expert or notable individual, schedule and promote a live chat with them. One of my favorite services that deserves more ink than it gets is Cover it Live. As mentioned before, it not only can help you curate social conversation, but also allows you to host and moderate live web chats that you can embed on your website.

7. Add the sound of music

Music is the soundtrack to our lives, so make it the soundtrack for your content, as well. Social music services such as Spotify, Grooveshark, and Turntable.fm have become popular spaces for audiophiles to build networks around musical tastes. Spotify and Grooveshark are centered on the creation and sharing of playlists, while Turntable.fm combines a chatroom with collaborative DJ function.

Find relevant themes — they could be related to travel, holidays, exercise, geography, current events, you name it — and use your social platforms to ask people to suggest songs they think would fit. Create those playlists via Spotify or Grooveshark then share the links. On Turntable.fm, you can create your own room and encourage your community members to join and play songs around a chosen theme.

What other ideas do you have for integrating your community into your content creation efforts?

Image Credit: Marcin Wichary (flickr creative commons)


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Maximizing Facebook

I was lucky to attend PRNews’ Facebook Conference on August 9, 2011 in San Francisco. It was one of the best social media conferences I have attended and was packed with practical tips, excellent case studies, and quality speakers.

Another highlight was that participants sat at the same group tables for the entire conference. I initially balked at the set-up, thinking that I would be stuck with the same people all day, but in the end I found it to be a comfortable and natural atmosphere for networking with peers from all walks of life. With very little effort, I was able to meet interesting people and make useful connections.

The speaker line-up was excellent and their presentations were inspiring. Specifically, I learned the importance of engaging your fans in a two-way dialogue, and how to enable your organization to support an institutional social media presence.

EdgeRank: Making it to the Top of the Newsfeed

Ever wondered how Facebook determines what posts make it in to a user’s Top News?  Michael Jaindl from Buddy Media provided some very useful information about EdgeRank, which is the algorithm that builds the news feed for each user.

For those of you who like equations, consider:

If you are like me and can’t get past the first symbol think of it like this: fans who have previously engaged with your content are more likely to see your page’s updates than fans who have not. In addition, the fan’s type of engagement (post or create, comment, like, tag, etc.) and how long the user has been a fan also factors in. This is why you want to issue posts that spur interaction.

Some key take-aways to generate engagement:

  1. Be explicit: if you want people to comment on your post, say something like “Please comment.”
  2. Ask questions or ask fans to fill in the blanks in a statement: “Angela Merkel visited the  ____ lab in Switzerland last Friday.”
  3. Encourage fan engagement: Thank your fans and weigh in on their comments.
  4. Relate to current events.
  5. Include links, but beware! On Facebook, it’s best to use a long url that shows its origin rather than a shortened one.
  6. Post videos.
  7. Post games and trivia.

To learn more about EdgeRank, download Michael Jaindl’s presentation (PDF) and download the Buddy Media whitepaper about Facebook’s EdgeRank (PDF).

Engaging Audience through Dialogue

Dan Mogulof, UC Berkeley’s Executive Director of Public Affairs, presented the university’s social media strategy aimed at engaging its active student population through social media.  Using as a case study the school’s decision to cut the budget for their softball team, Dan showed how the university initially failed to engage its students and address their concerns. In the end, the softball team survived the cut and UC Berkeley learned a thing or two about audience engagement through social media.

Dan’s presentation clearly showed how staying out of the conversation is no longer a viable strategy for companies and institutions alike. The traditional model of pushing emails and publishing news is no longer enough to really listen to your audience and engage with your more passionate supporters. Although not public yet, UC Berkeley has developed a very interesting app through Facebook called Sproul Plaza (named after the location of many student protests on campus) that will provide fans a place to voice their concerns and share their thoughts, in a forum provided by the university. Another cool factoid about the Sproul Plaza app: it was developed by a firm made up of university Alumni.

Download the presentation for a preview of the new app.

Developing a Content Strategy

There were many statistics thrown around about when and how often you should post on Facebook: 0.5/day, at noon, at 7:30pm, etc. The correct answer will vary depending on your organization and your audience, etc. Janette Crawford from Storenvy shared an example of a weekly content calendar she created with the type of Facebook  content to post each day of the week:

  • Monday: “Like this if…”
  • Tuesday: Fill-in-the-blank
  • Wednesday: Your Own Photos/Videos
  • Thursday: “Quote”
  • Friday: Fun!
  • Saturday: Question
  • Sunday: Viral Photos/Videos

Although this may seem simple, it was a good reminder of the different kind of posts possible. As always, test your audience and be patient! If your audience has not been particularly responsive, try with low threshold items such as photos and videos which require a simple “like” and then gradually step it up to questions and polls.

Download her presentation (PDF).

It Takes a Village

Regardless of your brilliance and hard work, it does take a team to build and sustain presence on social media. For that, employees need to know the basics. A social media policy does more than delineate processes and structures. It gives employees guidance on what they can share through social media and what they cannot. A social media policy enables employees to participate and contribute./

Christi McNeill, Southwest Airline’s Emerging Media Strategy Specialist, shared how social media is structured and some very interesting details about their social media policy. Consider that Southwest became active in social media in April 2006 and it was not until five years later that they developed a social media policy for their organization (published in January 2011).  Developing a social media policy took Southwest’s team six months. Working closely with their human resources and legal teams, the social media policy was distributed company wide and is now required reading for all employees.

Christi McNeill’s advise:

  • Clearly outline your strategy and goals: this will be make it much easier for the rest of the company to understand what you are trying to do.
  • Force your teams to think outside of the organizational chart: outside users and/or clients don’t care about hierarchy, they want answers.
  • Equip your employees to understand and embrace social media: provide them with resources for more education and training if needed.

Download Southwest’s Social Media Policy (PDF).

Being Prepared

Last but not least, Tim Marklein from WCG (a global communications firm) reminded us all to anticipate conversations that may arise when using social media for your organization. Consider the process flow below for managing issues that may come up.

What’s really important to consider is that not ALL issues merit a response. This seems to be largely driven by whether or not resources are available to address them, which is a reality that all organizations face. Regardless of the details, the above chart is a reminder that any plan is always better than no plan at all. Putting one forces you to prioritize issues, identify who would respond to them, and ultimately avoid making crucial decisions at the eleventh hour, when mistakes are easy to make.

Download his presentation.