Subtitle: What I learned at BlogWorld L.A.
Write it. Just hit publish.
Those were my closing thoughts during a workshop I gave on how to utilize the real-time Web for better storytelling. We get so distracted by processes, editing, review cycles and proper tone that we miss the boat. We miss an opportunity to tell a story when telling that story is most vital.
Being able to tell a story is more than the words you use. Sometimes, just writing from the heart is the best way to ensure that people listen to your story. There’s no strategy that enables you to tell a story. While at BlogWorld & New Media Expo, I had a fair number of informative and enlightening experiences.
I got to meet Cloris Leachman. Thanks to Amber Osborne, aka @MissDestructo, for taking this great picture.
I got to attend my first-ever Kings game. Here’s the view from my seats at the game. Thanks to Brian at shareasale.com for these tickets!
And I even got to learn something along the way. The main thing I learned is that at the end of the day, the stories we get to tell are just content. Creating content is fun. Being able to start a new email or a new blog post or a new tweet is fun. Getting to tell stories for a living is amazing. If you happen to be able to make money from the stories you tell, that’s even better.
My workshop focused on how to create a strategy and utilize the technology available to tell better stories faster. While I was telling my aunt (who happens to be a newspaper publisher) about this, she asked me “How is this different from journalism?” Without hesitation I smiled to myself and said “it’s not.” My background is in reporting, so telling a story, quickly, is a skill I’ve been able to make work for me.
It’s just content
At our hearts, we are all storytellers. We want to connect our clients and business groups with customers, reporters and shoppers (they’re all “influencers”), and we want to do it with soul and passion and adept skill. As communications professionals, there is nothing more fun than telling a great story.
I was surrounded by food bloggers, mommy bloggers, tech bloggers and even bloggers who blog about blogging. All of them, though, are storytellers creating content. As communications professionals, we tell stories. We work with clients to create messaging and compel people to act. There are countless pieces of research on how to appeal to emotions and how to optimize for search. You can A/B test your headlines. You can put a picture above the fold or you can add a video.
But at the end of the day, your story is just content.
At BlogWorld, CC Chapman shared the story of a site created by the U.S. Army to tell the stories of soldiers on the front lines and returning from home. Go spend a few minutes reading their stories.
These are human stories told without editors and without a content calendar or SEO in mind. Whole platoons can write from the front line in Afghanistan. No filters or editors at all. And the Army is adamant about the blog having a human voice. If the U.S. Army can speak human, you can too.
Measure twice, cut once
The old carpenter’s adage seemed to ring true here as well. Being able to prove your mettle was an underlying trend at BlogWorld. From back-channel debates on what constitutes science to super smart people like Tom Webster presenting enough stats to melt your mind, the emphasis on measurement and analytics was clear. Here at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, we place an emphasis on measuring actionable metrics and using them to influence the decisions you make.
Having the tracking systems in place that show both where traffic goes and whether the goals you have in place are accomplished is vital to the continued success of your content strategy. Content and storytelling doesn’t have to be all for profit. Telling stories and communicating with an audience is great in and of itself. Being able to track performance and metrics, you can create actionable plans for future content strategies.
Products such as Ripple Effect and Narrative Network® make deciphering the streams of information easier. It’s up to you how you want to act on it.
There’s perpetual discussion about the ROI of social media. The person that tries to claim that social media doesn’t have an ROI is seriously flawed. If you can’t track, test or convert on the content you’re creating, you need to rethink your strategy. Everything has a metric. ROI means being able to track the outs of what you’re putting in. It may not have a dollar sign in front of it, but it does have action.
So, just publish. Just tell a story. Just remember to tell the story you want to tell and tell it the best you can.
As a communications professional, one of the best parts of my job is getting to tell a story. Being able to connect the information that our clients have with customers, media and analysts that are looking for the latest innovation or product announcement is why I log on every day.
In an age where everybody is an influencer, being able to tell a story well is essential. The adage “it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it” has been redefined. The words you use are now as vital as the medium you use to convey the message. Gone are the days of issuing a press release and relying upon the nation’s media to tell your story for you. Instead, we can instantaneously shape the day’s news events simply by posting to Twitter or Facebook. Real-time communications is an essential part of the overall integrated communications landscape.
In a few weeks, I’ll have the honor of presenting an hour-long workshop at the upcoming BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Los Angeles. On Friday, Nov. 4, I will be presenting Real Time Content In No Time: How to create and manage a content strategy that is nearly real time to show that a content strategy does not have to be created three months in advance in order to be effective. By utilizing search trends, emerging social trends and analytics, it is possible to create a multichannel communications strategy that reaches your audience and influences it to act — regardless of the timeframe.
Here at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, we have the opportunity to work with innovative companies to tell great stories in the moment. But those stories, even though they were created in real time, couldn’t have happened without advance planning and strategy.
I’ll be talking more about this in the coming weeks, but for now, I want to invite you to join me Nov. 3–5 at the Los Angeles Convention Center for BlogWorld. If you do want to register for the conference, you can use my special code: BWEVIP20 when you sign up to get 20% off of ANY pass (that means $300 off of the full access pass). So, go register now and I’ll see you in LA!
We’ve all seen them in blogs, but besides the cool design they create, what are tag clouds good for? In my time here at WE Studio D I have developed a number of blogs for clients, and with each one it seems like I hear a new theory on what tag clouds are for.
It’s for SEO
Probably the most popular answer I hear is that the tag cloud is some sort of magic tool to help you reach top rankings in search for the terms you list in the tag cloud. Consequently, people litter their blog posts with dozens of tags, some barely having anything to do with the blog post topic.
While the tag cloud will not hurt your SEO campaign, it is by no means going to be the answer to your SEO dreams. Getting top rankings for specific search terms in your blog is more about how those terms are used in the content of your blog post, linking strategy, etc. That is a whole other post in itself … I am getting off topic here.
It’s for the Trippy Design
Yeah, the tag clouds look pretty sweet when there is a lot of content in your blog and you have used the tags appropriately. In most tag clouds, tags used often are large in font size, while not-so-often-used tags are in a smaller font size. It’s fun to see the pattern it creates, but there is another reason for the tag cloud.
User Experience
Ultimately, the tag cloud is a way for your blog’s readers to visualize the content of your blog. In addition, it gives another way for readers to navigate to the content they want to read more about by clicking on the tag that interests them.
So the moral of the story is, only use tags on your blog posts that are relevant to the specific post you are writing. If you are worried about traffic and getting more visitors to your blog, just work on creating good content your readers care about. Trust me, your readers will thank you, and the visits will come.
Photo courtesy of daniel_iverson.
This week marks some great new enhancements to WE’s product Ripple Effect. The challenge, as with many products, is taking product messaging out of the “our product gives you feature blah, blah.. and oh yeah…blah“ — and translates that into something of business value.
This challenge is probably also shared by Intel. Take microprocessors — what takeaway to you get from a product announcement for a 22nm 3D Ivy Bridge processor? For us non-IEEE mortals, that chip means better performance and battery life than anything out there — allowing about twice as many transistors to be crammed into the same space as current 32nm chips. That’s got some tech types (and stock market analysts) VERY excited — especially as there’s demand on mobile, tablet and other devices to do more in less space and with less power.
Our Ripple Effect product shows which influencers or online publications had the biggest, most positive and longest lasting impact on a specific campaign, launch or announcement — say… the Intel 22 3D processor announcement last week.
The two views above show online linking and Twitter activity for the Intel announcement. In summary, the 25 websites and outlets covering the event produced 34 original posts, generated 570 comments. The subsequent ripple through social media included 204 links to the original posts from blogs and other online sources, and 2,906 tweets pointing to the original posts. That’s some pretty significant engagement!
What’s interesting is how much sites like Engadget, Ars Technica and the BBC were able to engage their audience. These three sites alone produced 68 percent or more of links and Twitter activity, and 91 percent of comments. In summary — these online publications had a significant Ripple Effect.
Through personal and professional experiences, I’ve come to learn that many people approach content creation (and blogging, in particular, for the purpose of this post) with a “Field of Dreams”-esque, “if you build it, they will come” outlook.
While content may be king, the Internet is littered with millions of good, if not great, blog posts, videos, photos, sites and other pieces of content that don’t receive the royal audiences they deserve.
Efforts to generate awareness are often underdeveloped if not completely overlooked. Now that everyone has platforms to publish content, flagging down potential readers is more important than ever.
If people aren’t able to find your blog in the first place, obviously, you have no chance of getting them to read it.
While I’ve watched many colleagues and clients get frustrated with the lack of inherent interest in their blogs, I always ask them to consider whether they’ve given a particular project the attention to amplification it needs to even show up on the radars of their potential readers.
Being associated with a well-known brand, company or cause will make the going easier, but getting readers is often incredibly hard work regardless of what your built-in audience might look like.
Before getting too discouraged by low view counts, think about what you can do to raise awareness.
Whether it’s as simple as pointing to your posts through your personal social media accounts (and possibly setting up dedicated profiles), or leaving comments on relevant blogs, or playing with ad buys on Facebook or SEO tweaks on Google and Bing, or one of countless other actions, make sure you’re thoughtfully attracting the right kind of attention to your blog.
Great content is a critical starting point but, ultimately, it is that extra effort spent on generating awareness that will ensure a wider audience (beyond just your coworkers and immediate family) will actually be able to find and enjoy the fruits of your blogging labors.
Image by John Bollwitt.
Whether it’s Facebook updates, blogs, reality television or some other medium, audiences are using digital means to connect with other people or brands. For the most part, we have moved beyond vapid ads filled with falsely happy people and dry fact sheets that offer information, but no story. Audiences want engaging content.
Creating the kind of credible and authentic content that audiences will engage with is something that I covered in recent posts about what a body of content says about your brand and moving from being a publisher to a media outlet.
Your website should be a hub of content.
But once all this engaging content gets created, where should it live? And how will audiences find it?
The place to start is your organization’s website.
For the first years of the Web, sites were mostly static. Mostly that was because updating content on the Web was a laborious and technical process. The birth of blogging software and sites changed that paradigm. No longer did you need to know Dreamweaver or pay for an expensive content management system. The explosion of blogging, and now social media, has been led by simple content management systems and publishing platforms. But the innovation in site updating hasn’t spread to the corporate and organizational side.
Now is the time to leverage the power of your organization’s website to create a storytelling platform that hosts content and serves as the hub and engine for social media content.
With an engaging design and a state-of-the-art content management and publishing system, and by using social media to distribute content and leverage search, your website can deliver deeper engagement than traditional advertising. And you don’t have to pay to have someone else post the content.
Ford’s digital properties are a good example to follow. The automaker created The Ford Story to engage with audiences in a new way during the depths of the industry crisis. Now Ford connects its storytelling platform to its corporate home page (which aims to drive sales) with its media site that provides building-block content for influentials.
Microsoft’s News Center is another good example of leveraging an owned platform.
I’m presenting this week at the AdAge Digital conference with our Microsoft News Center partners on using a digital newsroom to tell a story about a brand. I hope to see you there.
Tac Anderson has a great post on the career path of social media practitioners. As with any emerging discipline there isn’t a set direction. In his post Tac provides some suggestions on evolving your career:
- “You Can’t Own Everything, Don’t Try”
- “Become the Enemy: Management”
- “Evolve or Move On”
What if we took the same suggestions for evolving social media at the enterprise level?
You Can’t Own Everything; Don’t Try
You might not be able to own everything, but you can take what you’ve learned and be a champion to extend those learnings to the rest of the organization. Customer service, engineering and sales can all benefit from social media programs. The challenge enterprises face when extending social media across multiple businesses is one of scale, voice and process. Companies that have mastered social media from a communications standpoint should equip and structure their organizations to provide guidance and governance to the other business lines. Setting up extensible workflow tools is a great starting place, but also designing a communications channel that listens, engages and routes appropriately across the organization is critical.
Become the Enemy, Management
Instead of tweeting and posting to Facebook, imagine stepping back and watching all the tweets, Facebook posts and engagements across the organization, then providing direction and strategy to improve the big picture. By harnessing and providing direction to the entire organization — and equipping other employees to use social media — you can create bigger change, faster.
Evolve, or Move On
When social media first became a discipline circa 2004, there was a new platform or medium every six months. Today, most organizations have established a core platform focus (example: blogs, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare). So evolving today means maturing how the platforms are used and maturing the organization’s use of them. At the same time other platforms will emerge, so organizations and social media leadership should continually test and create point of views for emerging platforms.
And with regards to “Evolve, or Move On,” move on might be the right career move if your org won’t evolve.
This post also appears at http://murphypdx.com.
Let me first be clear and say that this isn’t a live blog of Apple’s WWDC event where Steve Jobs announced the next version of the iPhone.
But I was completely blown away by the number of live blogs covering the event on Monday. Live blogging has been around for a while, but it has really taken off in recent months, and I think WWDC was the most intense flurry ever.
A quick sample of the search results for WWDC live blogs
I’m passionate about live blogging because it is such a great storytelling tool and its a cheap and fast way to capture an event.
I’m also surprised at how rarely it is used as a tool by organizations. Often, companies will spend months planning an event to showcase a new product or initiative. But put little effort in coming up with a way to both capture the event or share it with folks who are interested, but can’t attend in person.
Live blogging is excellent for both of those needs. It should be something that is done by every organization whenever they put together a significant event. It isn’t hard, there are plenty of places to learn how.
The layout of a live blog also makes it ideal for reading later. Often, I will go back and read the live blog to get the full story of an event. Indeed, looking back at old WWDC live blogs is a great way to remember how the product and the company got to where it is today.
Do you read live blogs? Is your organization covering its events by live blogging?
“His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy…”
These opening lyrics from Eminem’s hit song “Lose Yourself” talk about fear of rapping in front of an audience. He knows his lyrics are good. He knows his style is good. But in front of an audience, well … “He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out … He’s choking how, everybody’s joking now.”
And that’s how a lot of us feel about blogging. As our own Tac Anderson pointed out at a team off-site yesterday, the word “blogging” generates almost the same reaction in people as “public speaking.” I can relate. As I sit trying to write this the anxiety is there – I know my idea is interesting (or is it?) but do I really need to share it with the world?!
Yes, I do.
For a communications professional it is as important a skill as knowing how to write a press release or messaging document. It is something I counsel clients to do, so I need to know how to do it. I need to know what the experience is like and what types of information and content are needed. This knowledge gain won’t happen magically, so it’s important to stop stressing and start doing.
So where to start? Here are some ideas for dipping your toes into the blogging waters.
- Read other blogs regularly. Just as with anything you want to be good at, you have to study and be receptive to new ideas.
- Find a subject that interests you and write about it on a personal blog. This is a great way to get comfortable with the sound of your digital voice.
- Look for inspiration everywhere. My idea for this post came out of a nine-hour meeting! (Granted, I was surrounded by smart people so I was jotting down ideas all day.)
- Celebrate your own voice. The Internet is a melting pot of ideas and interests. No one is right and no one is wrong – it is just happening and you can should be part of it.
- Accept that you won’t instantly have readers or people commenting on what you write.
- Don’t over-engineer it. Just get your thoughts down, check your spelling and publish.
- Have fun. I’m not kidding. As I near the end of this post I’m smiling. I did it. Phew.
What keeps you up at night about blogging? If you are a reluctant blogger, how did you get over your fear?
Photo from EW.com
To be honest, I’m more than a bit worried when it comes to kids and their communication skills. I’ll take it multiple steps further and say I’m concerned about the current trends around how we all get and share information.
While Idiocracy was an absolutely terrible movie, it did paint what many fear may just be the future of mankind. For those who have avoided wasting 84 minutes of your life on the film, allow me to summarize the concept briefly. In the movie, survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the dumbest as laziness and an obsession with mindlessness has rotted our species’ brains over time. We in turn are left with societies that can’t think for themselves and spend days on end watching trash TV, contributing nothing and rapidly devolving.
Results from a recent survey by the Pew Research Center underscore what may be construed as a similar, though far less exaggerated decline. The study, which was released on Wednesday, indicates that the percentage of teens and young adults who actively blog has dropped off by about 50 percent when comparing 2009 with 2006. As was predicted, the other main trend of the study revolved around the meteoric rise in the popularity of social networks.
As long(er) form methods of communication drop off in favor of status updates and wall posts, where will the future content creators of tomorrow hone their writing skills? Will uploading mobile photos and clicking “like” displace thoughtful discourse and ultimately lead to a dumbed-down society? Before LiveJournal there were journals but what comes after them both?
Image credit: Marind
