Back in 2001 Forrester Research asked people why they returned to a website and the overwhelming answer was ‘content.’ It’s still true today. Success in online PR and social media depends on the quality of your content. It’s about engaging people and the key to engagement is discovering what your audience thinks is good content. It's not up to you to decide what to publish. Your content strategy should be based on what your audience needs and wants.
In social media people are creating, reading, saving, tagging and sharing content. If you don’t produce the kind of content they value, it won’t get re-published or shared. How do you know what kind of content to create? Listen and observe. In the past we had to rely on agencies to have a ‘bright idea.’ But when you really listen to your audience, content opportunities easily spring to mind.
Example: A mortgage company discovered that young mothers in their first home were very concerned about the housing market and the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. They were looking for information in language they could understand. The company saw that they could write articles and do video interviews with their experts in a way that would answer the questions of concerned young mothers.
Example: A natural soda company that makes ginger products saw lots of discussion on Twitter about the health benefits of ginger. Immediately ideas started to flow about how to participate in this conversation – studies, recipes, articles, videos.
Example: a non –profit involved in drug rehabilitation found out that women turn to blogs for information, advice or recommendations. (2009 BlogHer Social Media study.) And what they value most is a review or comment from someone who has used that product or service. Since women are the ones who most often call the rehab centers – a wife, mother or sister of the addict - it was obvious that they needed to create content around the stories of women who had saved their families with this program and get it to women bloggers. Telling your story online in the right place to the right people gets results. But you need a well-thought out content strategy based on solid research to get those results.
I have been providing online content strategy and web production management for over ten years now and love sharing best practices, planning and integration strategies to companies who really want to improve their relevancy to their audience. Understanding your online audience and creating relevant business goals is the best first step.
Michael - International Web Guru
Get Mike Story for a consultation today: emailstory@gmail.com
Gmail made a tweak last night that brings better contact management to the service. When you click the “To:” or “CC:” links in front of each address field, a box pops up with your contact list. It is a simple change, but it saves you from having to go to another page to find a contact.
Most of the time, Gmail users probably won’t use this feature because Gmail already gives you a list of auto-complete suggestions as you begin typing in a name into the "To:" field. These are based on people you’ve communicated with recently, and usually does the trick. But if you haven’t emailed someone for a long time, their name doesn’t pop up. It also doesn’t help if you can’t remember their name.
Anything that reduces the amount of steps it takes to complete an email is a plus in my book. However, this feature is a bit hidden. You have to click on the “To” or “CC” links to expose it, something many people might only do by mistake the first time (which is why I’m telling you).
The contact chooser also works for groups.
Posted in Web Technology
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Tagged CRM
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Haggling Over Pact Close to Resolution; Upfront Payment Is Sticking Point
by Michael Learmonth Published: July 27, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Yahoo is close to making Microsoft's Bing its search provider.
The deal, which would make Microsoft a more credible competitor to Google, is likely to be announced this week, and seems likely to be based on a revenue share, not on a big fat check upfront, as some at Yahoo had hoped.
Yahoo's request for an upfront payment (it is said to have asked for several hundred million), in addition to revenue guarantees that would amount to billions over the course of the deal, caused a breakdown last...
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12seconds has had an iPhone app for a while now. Unfortunately, it was fairly crippled because iPhones couldn’t shoot video, so you had to take still pictures and make 12 second collages. Now, with the iPhone 3GS you can shoot video. And so 12seconds is making its app a whole lot better.
Unveiled today at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event, the “12seconds Video Messenger for Twitter”, is an app that’s all about sending short video messages to your friends. And while 12seconds already has a social graph of its own from its website, it understands that Twitter’s social graph is much larger — and so it’s laying this new app on top of that.
Basically, how it works is that you record a video and then select the friend (or friends) you wish to send it to. This friend is then sent a direct message through Twitter with a link to the video. Or if they have the app also, it comes in through there. This is different than a lot of the current Twitter video offerings out there in that it has a main focus on messaging between smaller groups of people rather than the public, though you can do that too. And this app utilizes the iPhone 3.0 software’s new Push Notifications to let you know when you have a new video to view.
12seconds undoubtedly hopes to make use of the new iPhone 3.1 SDK that was just released to developers. It is rumored to have some subtle changes to the way it allows apps to handle video.
And while
Twitter is the key social graph that 12seconds is targeting with this app, it will eventually roll integration with other social networks as well, including the big one, Facebook.
The app should be available soon in the App Store.
