I went to a huge college. And by huge, I mean almost 40,000 undergrads.
By nature, this meant that I spent a lot of my class time as follows: find a seat in a lecture hall among 400 of my “closest friends,” listen to one professor in the front of the room talk for 45 straight minutes, take notes, leave, repeat.
I recently partook in a discussion among some fellow community managers on the best ways to learn about the industry and how to train its future generations. When the conversation reached the point where we all shared the “training” we went through ourselves, the answers began getting interesting. Continue reading
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.
In our last #leancontent meetup, UserVoice’s Evan Hamilton shared some great advice on creating and distributing content. The main questions answered included:
1. Why Content?
2. What Type of Content Should I Create?
3. How Should I Distribute my Content?
4. How do I Reap the Benefits of Content?
5. What Tips Can You Provide for Content Creation?
Check out the writeup to find out the answers!
See on leancontent.it Continue reading
Did you know that there’s a place where many of your customers live and actually want to talk to and hear from you in real time? It’s a magical land, it’s real, and it’s called Twitter.
Twitter is one of the most efficient tools out there to connect with your audience, to share engaging information and content, and even to provide personal customer service. If you do it right, it’s a gold mine; if you don’t, it could result in disaster.
It may be true that “gold mine” and “disaster” are the two extremes and that it’s possible to be alright at Twitter, but who strives to be mediocre? If you want to rock it and make sure each and every tweet is the best it can possibly be, take these 6 tips into consideration the next time you sit down to write the perfect tweet.
These are the slides of my talk at the Product Summit last week in San Francisco. Some say “good products don’t need marketing”. But from researching the problem you plan to solve to building the initial community around your product and evangelizing your market, content is involved all the way. So how can startups and small product teams be efficient and impactful with their content strategy?
Some key takeaways from an awesome presentation by Guillaume on Lean Content Marketing:
Marketing Matters!
The myth that not all startups need marketing is simply untrue.
Marketing is more than just talking about your product.
Though publicizing product launches, updates, and new releases is a part of marketing, it doesn’t do the trick on its own, but content marketing can be costly and time-consuming. The solution?…
#leancontent
According to small business consultant Elynn Fish (and almost every business owner out there), “slugging it out” as a small firm in a new market isn’t easy. Some of the most important things in building a consulting firm include getting and keeping clients, creating cash flow, and convincing your prospects that they need your services.
Last Thursday in the grand return of #scoopitchat, I teamed up with Elynn to discuss some best practices for developing a small consulting business in a digital world.
Continue reading
Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day, and I find myself reflecting on all of the lucky occurrences that helped get me to where I am. From Penn State to Paris, and now, San Francisco, it’s been quite a journey. This is my story.
2012 was quite the year for social media blunders. From American Apparrel offering a 20% coupon to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy deal with their “boredom,” to #McDStories to the worst hijacked hashtags, some brands proved that they need more than a few tips.
It’s time to be frank. Here are 7 ways to make yourself look terrible on social media. (Pro tip: you’re not supposed to do them.)
My name is Ally Greer. I’m a marketer with expertise in content marketing and curation. You’ve probably never heard of me.
With over 500 million users on Twitter, 175 million on LinkedIn, and over a billion on Facebook, you probably haven’t heard of most people on the Internet. The bad news is that this also means most of those people probably haven’t heard of you either.
That said, I’m certainly not here to tell you how flooded the Internet is and discourage you from jumping into the information pool. In fact, I’m telling you to do the exact opposite. Although it isn’t likely that all 500 million people on Twitter will be following you by the time you’re finished reading this (or ever), there are a few ways to look what we call “information overload” right in the face and use it to your advantage.
In a digital world characterized by an overwhelming amount of noise, everyone is struggling to find relevant content from people and brands with an expertise on a specific subject. Content curators are the ones who step up to the plate.
According to Michael Brenner, cofounder of Business 2 Community, content curation is the process of identifying relevant content for your audience from multiple sources, modifying or editing that content to reflect the needs of your audience and delivering the content to the appropriate channels of distribution.
The truth is, you’re probably already curating content. Do you share links on Twitter? Do you Retweet content that you find interesting? Do you write blogposts referencing content that’s been created by others? If so, you’re a curator. You know what you’re talking about, you know where the best content on your topic of expertise is, and you put it together for the world to see. But, the question still looms: if no one knows who you are, how will they find it? Continue reading
This evening, we were happy to host the co-founder of the awesome social media tool BufferApp, Leo Widrich (@LeoWid), who shared five awesome lessons that he’s learned over the last two years of developing his very own content marketing strategy.
At the time of its creation, Buffer App didn’t have any users and its two young founders tried relentlessly to get any tech blogs to cover them. When this didn’t work, the co-founders asked themselves, “if no one else will write about us, why can’t we just write about ourselves?”
Since Leo was the “marketing guy,” he was charged with putting out as much content as he could to spread the word about Buffer App. Two years and a highly successful social media app later, Leo has learned some of the most important lessons in content marketing:
1. Pick Quantity over Quality
2. The Hidden Power of Images
3. Copy and Steal
4. Help 1 other person with each piece of content.
5. Show your passion and culture
Read more on leancontentmarketing.tumblr.com
