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Tag: Social Media Today

7 Key Steps for Social Content Curation – Quiet Marketing

Lately I have been focused on Content Curation as a secret weapon in your Social Strategy.  Did you know that 60% of B2B marketers plan on spending more on their content marketing next year than ever before?

content marketing

What is Social Content Curation?   It is a plan to create content, distribute content, promote content, and measure its success in the social world.

7 Steps to Great Social Curation:

  1. Conceptualize:   Before you begin, think through your plan and goals for your social content.  Think through details and leave nothing to chance. This requires a lot of preliminary research on your part.
  2. Plan your space.  Select where to place the content.  Where you place content will help you shape the content.  For instance, content on Pinterest is different than a blog!  Did you know that SlideShare is a great place and the largest curation of social presentations?  How do you leverage the right tools for your content!
  3. Know your audience.  A good curator needs to understand the audience and to fully communicate and let their Point of View (POV) speak out to the public and to better listen and meet their desires.
  4. Secure commitment, resources and budget.   Who will be your Subject Matter experts(SMEs)?  Make sure you secure their time and if you need, money to create the right graphics, video, and pictures to make your content come live.
  5. Create content.  Make sure it is great content.  Writing well is a necessary skill for a curator.  As is the use of video, pictures, presentations, and all valued content for your area.
  6. Communicate your content.  You have spent a long time on researching and organizing your content; now you want to maximize the viewing for your content and make it truly memorable. Imagine a top rated infographic, or blog.  Allow time and budget in order to be able to effectively contextualize your work.
  7. Have an Opening! Just like a museum curating an art exhibition, make your Social Content opening fun, exciting and memorable. You want to create an exciting buzz so that people will keep coming back.  Schedule your opening and begin the opening with a bang — maybe a SocialChat or a Tweetup.   Just as a museum would begin the opening with a live art or music performance or light show, these items !

TGIF: To #FF or not?

Yes, today is Friday.    You will start to see a lot of #FF.

What does #FF mean?  Well, starting back in 2009, Twitter fans created this hashtag as a shorthand for Follow Friday.

Should you #FF?   YES !  Why?  Well it helps you introduce new users to a great social tool.  In addition, it allows you to show appreciation and thanks for the followers you have that retweet you, or support your thoughts, and more.

To be authenticate, don’t FF just because folks follow you.  Do it because you recommend them for a reason.

I like recommending a person and giving great attributes about them, like this:

ff

I avoid doing big groups as to me it doesn’t tell me why I should consider following someone.

So given today’s Friday … #FF someone you know!

The Marble Effect! Build an Intentional Social Business Ecosystem! #ibmsocialbiz #socialbusiness #socbiz

 

 

marbles

 

The Marbles have 300% more surface area!!   So what does this have to do with Social?

Your voice gets magnified the more people in your network.   Your POV and listening impacts the best solution.

Take a look at this picture where you have a tiered Marble impact.    The upper tiers have impact and have direct linkage and work with a Social Business Manager.  The term “brand ambassador” has been a round for ages, but do we really want to create brand ambassadors?  The analogy isn’t quite right.  Nor do we want to put pressure on people to mindlessly share content on their personal networks.  So you need a bit more of a nuanced approach.   An intentional social enablement system!

multiply your impact

IBM has been working on a bunch of different enablement tiers that create an ecosystem of social enablement for IBMers.  Starting with a foundation of guidelines and policy – see our Social Business Coffee Break from yesterday blog post!  – and moving up to general education about social media, cybersecurity and reputation for all IBMers in the Digital IBMer hub.  From that tier, IBMers can move into the Forward Thinker Program which enables them to be surfaced on ibm.com and other external experiences – and also to be identified for the IBM Select program, which is a small group of high-tough, bespoke plan enablement for the top tier.  All of this is managed by people from many different areas within IBM – the social business managers…we’re not suggesting that we create a whole department of social business managers, but this is definitely an emerging set of skills that people need!

I’d love your thoughts on this approach!!!