Create your editorial calendar

     An editorial calendar is like a roadmap for content creation, showing you what kind of content to create, what topics to cover, which personas to target, and how often to publish to best support your inbound marketing strategy.

Set up your editorial calendar

• Create a Google calendar or a spreadsheet to record your editorial plans. You should plan at least three months in advance, but it’s even better if you can develop a plan for the next six months or even an entire year.
• Work backwards from your marketing goals to guide your plan. Look at how much traffic, how many leads, and how many customers you are aiming to generate each month. Analyze you previous marketing efforts to determine how many pieces of content you typically need to reach those goals.
• Fill in the dates on your calendar with specific publishing tasks, such as updating blogs or social networks daily, posting new videos or podcasts each week, publishing an ebook or hosting a webinar each month, and so on. For each date, list the topic, the title of the piece, and the targeted persona. The goal is to create a good mix of content types, topics, and personas to make sure you’re covering all your segments.
• Note the SEO keywords, the stage of the buying cycle, the call-to-action, or other inbound marketing goals that each piece of content must address.
• Make note of important dates or external events that are good hooks for specific topics or types of content. For example, retailers could highlight major holidays such as Christmas, Halloween, or Mother’s Day and plan content that fits with the seasonal theme. B2B marketers could note important industry trade shows they plan to attend, and schedule blog updates, recaps, or videos generated at the event.
• Look for opportunities to repurpose content. For example, the publication of a new whitepaper or research report could generate several weeks’ worth of blog posts that each share details or small nuggets of data from the complete report.
• Create separate tabs for each kind of content you publish, such as blog posts, webinars, ebooks, videos, etc. That way, you can make sure you’re publishing enough of each kind of content, and spreading that content appropriately among your targeted personas and stages of the buying cycle.

When to call up your calendar

     By the end of this process, you’ll find that you’ve filled up most of your calendar with detailed plans for content. No more coming to work in the morning wondering what you’re going to publish to maintain your inbound marketing goals!

     If there are a few holes, that’s okay. You want the flexibility to capitalize on news or hot topics as they arise over the course of the year. For those weeks when you can’t find the inspiration for, say, another blog post, calling up your calendar will give you a great visual reminder of what you’ve covered already and what you’re planning to cover next week or next month, so you can at least narrow down your options.

     Now that you’ve completed the four stages of developing your content strategy, let’s take a look at some tips for filling up your calendar with content that will inspire your prospects to consume your content, share it, and take action!

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Tips for creating killer content: keep a list of evergreen content

     Not everything has to be pegged to a major news story, hot new trend, or the latest buzz on social media. In fact, sometimes it feels like you can’t find anything hot or new to write about.

     At these times, it’s helpful to turn to your evergreen content. Evergreen content covers topics that are always interesting to your audience regardless of seasonal trends, economic conditions, or other external factors. For instance, some evergreen topics include:

• Ideas for saving time or money
• Personal health and fitness advice
• How-to articles that address universal problems for your audience
• Inspirational articles

     Evergreen topics not only help you fill holes in your calendar, but they are an extremely valuable asset for inbound marketing. Thanks to their evergreen nature, this type of content can continue to drive traffic to your site for months or even years -- as long as there’s an audience out there searching for the kind of advice you’re sharing.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Tips for creating killer content: follow industry news

     You must be plugged in with news and trends related to your industry if you’re going to create relevant, timely content. It’s easy to follow even dozens of news and commentary sources:

• Subscribe to RS feeds from bloggers that cover your industry or speak to your target audience.
• Subscribe to email newsletters from niche publications that cover your industry, as well as your vendors and even your competitors.
• Set up Google Alerts for non-branded keywords related to your industry, your products, and your persona’s pain points.

     By checking these feeds every day, you’ll find tons of content ideas. You might write a blog post that comments on a major news headline, or explains why a certain event matters to your audience. For example, a travel agent could use news about economic turmoil in Europe as an opportunity to blog about what the Euro crisis means to travelers. You might notice a trend burning up the blogs and media outlets in your niche and decide to create a webinar on the topic.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Tips for creating killer content: look beyond your industry & audience

     Being relevant doesn’t mean you can only write about your niche. In fact, looking beyond your niche and making useful connections between seemingly unrelated things is often the inspiration for fun, eye-opening content.

     Social media researcher Dan Zarrella calls this concept “combined relevance,” and recommends it as a way to create content that gets noticed and goes viral. After all, your customers and prospects have a lot of different interests, so when you offer something that features two of those interests in a surprising way, you’ve got a good chance of really connecting with the people who care about both of those things.

     Keep your eyes open for combined relevance examples wherever you go. A terrible experience with an airline after a canceled flight could spark a blog post about the importance of customer service. A popular movie might inspire you to compare the characters to products that your business sells. If the coach of your favorite football team makes a terrible decision, mull over how that scenario applies to business management.

     The possibilities are endless once you get used to looking at the world as fuel for marketing content.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Tips for creating killer content: conduct original research

     Customers, prospects, bloggers, and reporters covering your industry LOVE new data. Find ways that you can mine your recent sales information or your audience for unique new research about your niche.

     For example, the online luggage retailer Suitcase.com created a Consumer Luggage Report by surveying its customers about their luggage preferences. “People responded very quickly to us and told us what they are looking for,” said John Ebb, the company’s CEO. Traffic to the Suitcase. com’s blog jumped five times after the report was published, according to a MarketingSherpa case study.

     SurveyMonkey and SurveyGizmo make it easy to conduct online surveys of your audience. But if you don’t want to create a survey, you can look at sales data for interesting trends about your marketplace, such as your top selling products, the geographic distribution of your customers, customer shopping habits (time of day, day of the week, etc.), or demographic breakdown of your customers.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Tips for creating killer content: write annual and “best-of” features

     Round-ups, reviews, and look-backs are classic techniques that magazine publishers use to fill their pages – especially at the end of the year or during summer doldrums.

     Find places in your own editorial calendar for features, such as:

• A compilation of your most popular blog posts for a “best-of” ebook each December.
• A list of top products of the year for a retail niche.
• A “summer reading” list of great business books for a B2B audience.

     Such topics are easy to put together and will most likely appeal to a broader audience. Try to think of some creative and fun lists to put together as that will help you stand out from the rest of the marketing campaigns during a very busy sales period.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Tips for creating killer content: take your video camera everywhere

     Creating video content doesn’t have to be a big production process. It’s easy to shoot new videos if you always carry an iPhone or another pocket-sized device on hand.

     Here are a couple simple video ideas:

• If you see a question on Twitter that someone from your company can answer, film their response and tweet a link to the video.
• Always bring a camera to trade shows or other industry events and shoot short clips, such as interviews with compelling industry experts or audience surveys. A simple premise, such as asking ten people to share the coolest thing they saw or learned at the trade show, can be edited into a great video blog post.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Tips for creating killer content: repurpose content

     Almost every piece of content you create can be adapted, reused, modified and republished in another format. Make a habit of finding multiple ways to package and distribute the same information in different formats.

     Here are a few ideas:

• Combine text from an old whitepaper with new videos to create a video (multimedia) ebook.
• Turn videos into blog posts and ebooks. Each video can form the basis of a new blog post that includes a link to the video along with examples and takeaways.
• Use webinar questions and comments to create a new ebook. Once the webinar is over, you can compile the most interesting or commonly asked questions from the audience with answers from your team for a nice piece of content that directly addresses your prospects’ pain points.
• Share all company presentations in multiple formats. Post the slides on SlideShare, upload a video of the speech on YouTube, and create a series of blog posts that dive into specific points discussed during the presentation.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Tips for creating killer content: keep a content backlog & style bank

     Regular blogging is a cornerstone of inbound marketing, so make sure you’ve got plenty of ideas on hand for updating your blog at least daily. Keep a backlog of the topics you want to cover. Style banks present another great tool to facilitate your writing strategy. Style banks generally encompass writing templates and design ideas that result in fresh and compelling content.

     Ideas for your blog style bank include:

• Bulleted lists
• Book, movie, and product reviews
• Photos and captions
• Videos
• How-to guides
• Interviews

     The style bank is a great resource for your occasional blog contributors and ebook authors, who might not know where to start when they’ve been assigned a piece of content. Your backlog will also help your more frequent contributors get over occasional bouts of writers block.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Tips for creating killer content: recruit a team of content creators

     If you are reading this ebook, you are probably the one who creates most of your company’s inbound marketing content, but that doesn’t have to be the case. You can use many different voices from inside your organization. Technical folks, customer service people, C-level executives, product managers, and others in your organization have a unique take on important aspects of your business. Get your coworkers to contribute by:

• Asking them to write occasional blog posts relevant to their job functions.
• Interviewing them and posting short videos that share their expertise.
• Inviting them to give short presentations or answer questions in webinars.

     You can also look outside your own company for help creating content. New online content marketplaces are springing up to connect marketers with legions of freelance writers and editors who will take on blog posts, ebooks, and other writing jobs for you. You can specify the topic, your desired style and tone, and your intended audience, and you typically don’t have to pay unless you accept the finished article. HubSpot customers can easily find external writers using Zerys or the WriterAccess, both apps available in the HubSpot Marketplace.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Tips for creating killer content: monitor social conversations

     Social media gives you a real-time feed of what your prospects are talking about. If you listen carefully, you’ll find plenty of good hooks for new content. Not only that, but content that’s generated from social conversations points to the type of information that gets easily distributed via social media.

     For example, if you see many people asking the same questions about a product or service you provide, you can create content to provide information regarding those questions. Many people go on Twitter or Facebook to ask for recommendations about choosing new vendors or service providers. Why not create an ebook to provide suggestions, which you can then share the next time you see someone asking for a

recommendation?

     In order to be efficient at monitoring social media conversations, you’ll need to use some marketing software that helps you filter the discussions and identify the ones you are most interested in. You can do that using tools such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck and if you want to measure leads and customers, HubSpot’s social media tool.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Map content to the buying cycle

Identify your buying cycle
     Content plays a critical role in every stage of the inbound marketing process, from generating awareness about your company to helping convert leads into customers. But the types of content you should use to achieve each of those goals are often very different from each other, which means you need to ensure that you’re creating content for every stage of the buying cycle.     First, consider your buyer personas and study the results of your past marketing efforts to identify the key stages that a prospect goes through before becoming a customer. Here are the four stages of a typical buying cycle:

• Awareness: the prospect gets acquainted with your brand or realizes they have a need for your product/service (blog posts, social media updates).
• Research/Education: the prospect identifies the problem and researches potential solutions, including your product/service (ebooks, webinars, industry reports).
• Comparison/Validation: the prospect examines the options and begins narrowing the list of vendors (case studies, demos, customer testimonials).
• Purchase: the prospect decides from whom to buy (analyst reports, detailed product info).

Map your content
     Next, identify the types of content and channels that work best for each stage of the buying cycle. Of course, your prospects may engage with certain channels throughout the entire buying process, such as reading blog posts or following your brand on social media. However, marketing studies have shown that certain types of content play particularly important roles at specific stages of the decisionmaking process

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Conduct a content audit

     Now that you’ve constructed buyer personas and developed a better understanding of your audience, don’t rush to create new content for them. Instead, take stock of your previous efforts by conducting a formal content audit.

     Content audits are a great way to see how well you’re covering the topics that are important to your audience, and whether you’re maintaining a good mix of content types. Auditing your existing content also helps you find holes that you can fill with new content pieces, or identify great pieces of content that can be repurposed into other formats to reach even more prospects.

     To conduct an audit, collect and examine all the content you’ve created in the past year or more – everything from blog posts and podcasts to ebooks, videos and webinars. Create a spreadsheet that lists all these items by their title and label them according to:

• Type of content
• Topic covered
• Buyer persona
• Date created
• Leads / customers

     Next, study your spreadsheet for patterns: Are you light on non-text content, such as videos or webinars? Are there certain topics you are writing about too frequently or infrequently? Have you developed tons of content for one buyer persona while neglecting others? Which topics generate the best results for certain types of content (i.e., are there topics that work better for webinars than for ebooks?)

     Conducting a content audit and analyzing your results should help you draw up a list of goals and guidelines for future content creation, such as increasing video production, developing more content for certain personas, or identifying a list of future topics for future webinars or ebooks.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Know your audience: develop buyer profiles

     Develop a profile of each persona’s typical online behavior. You know who they are and what their needs are, now think about all the ways they research a potential purchase on your site or on others. Here are suggestions of the questions you should ask:

• What do they do online? Do they read blogs? Are they active on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks? What kind of search terms do they use? Are they email newsletter subscribers?
• What kind of information do they tend to consume online? Educational pieces? Trend articles? Interactive tools like calculators or worksheets? Do they watch videos or listen to podcasts?
• Which of your products do they spend the most time researching? How do they use those products?

     The result of this process should be a detailed description of your personas’ demographics, needs, and behavior. The more detail you pack into your persona development, the easier it will be to create content for each of your target customers and to know where to promote that content.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

Know your audience: build your buyer persona

     Like publishers, inbound marketers must have a detailed picture of their target audience in order to create optimal content for them. Who are your ideal customers and prospects? What are their biggest concerns, needs, and interests? Where can you reach them – on search engines, social media, or blogs – and what kinds of content do they prefer? These questions will help you develop buyer personas.

     Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

     Start developing personas by researching your existing customer base to identify the most common buyers for your products and services. You may have several different types of buyers, so give each one a detailed description, including name, job title or role, industry or company info, and demographic info.

     For example, a community bank’s biggest customers may include small business owners and mothers managing the bank accounts for a family of four. In this case, the bank’s marketers might name these personas “business owner Bob” and “Mary, the busy mom,” and extrapolate details about their responsibilities, the typical size of their business or household income, what geographic region they’re in, and so on.

     Based on those profiles, you can outline the pains, needs, and challenges of each persona by asking yourself several important questions:

• What are the biggest problems they are trying to solve?
• What does he or she need most?
• What information are they typically searching for?
• What trends are influencing their business or personal sucess?

     Analyzing the path that prospects take on the journey to becoming a customer is a great way to get insights about the needs and challenges of your target audience. If you use a marketing platform like HubSpot, you can see which search terms brought prospects to your site, how long they stayed on your site, which pieces of content they viewed, and which forms they’ve filled out. Such lead intelligence will help you make better decisions when identifying the characteristics of your ideal customers and ways to nurture your new prospects.

     Source: A practical guide to killer marketing content (HubSpot) e-book

How to learn from companies outside your industry

     Too often, companies look to learn from industry case studies. However, many great examples of success exist outside your line of business.

Marketing lessons from the grateful dead

     In 2010, Brian Halligan, HubSpot’s CEO and co-founder, and David Meerman Scott published their book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. Their goal was to showcase the many marketing lessons stemming from the creative minds of these unique musicians.

     This reinforces the notion that no matter what industry you represent, you can learn from totally different business models.

Don’t limit yourself

     So many businesses, David points out, copy the competition or learn from companies only in their own industry. If you are a B2B technology company, for instance, you start obsessing over what other B2B technology companies are doing.

     Stop intentionally limiting yourself in this way! You can learn so much by looking at what an independent consultant or a non-profit, or a rock band, or a church is doing to market its services or products.

Learn from the companies you love

     Ultimately, the practices you want to adopt are the ones you admire. “Think about the companies that you love to do business with,” David says. Their market or category of products don’t matter all that much. What can you learn from them and how do you apply it to your own business situation? That is the focus you need to develop.

     Source: The ultimate how to marketing guide (HubSpot and David Meerman Scott) e-book

How to get found online as a local business

     Trying to get found online as a local business comes with both advantages and challenges. In this chapter, we discuss a few ways to surface in local search engine results.

Connect with industry thought leaders

     Connecting with industry thought leaders offers an effective way to draw highquality inbound links and create buzz around your company name. Have you been following a popular blog in your industry? If so, can you reach out to the author with ideas for creating content together? Such type of collaboration can grow your reach and make you more appealing to folks who research carefully before they make a purchase decision.

Focus on GPS-enabled services

     As people continue to embrace the usage of smart phones, they also start relying on location-based applications with GPS functionality. These apps offer quick ways to find out which transportation services are in your area, whether your friends are nearby and where to go shopping or grab a bite.

     Examples of such applications are Google Latitude, Foursquare and Foodspotting. So pay particular attention to these platforms and the special opportunities they offer to businesses.

Check out some case studies

     Not sure how to start growing your local search traffic and leads? Check out some success stories. One example David Meerman Scott points out is Mike Pownall, DVM of McKee Pownall Equine Services. Mike uses social media, especially Twitter, to reach horse owners in Toronto which leads directly to business growth.

     Source: The ultimate how to marketing guide (HubSpot and David Meerman Scott) e-book

Blogging software

     As mentioned previously, blogs are run by software, so one of your first chores is to determine what software you want to use and get it set up.

     A quick search for blog software will turn up dozens of options. But for the sake of this publication, we are going to focus on just a few of the leading choices:

• WordPress.org: WordPress.org offers a free, open-source blogging tool that has many things going for it. This is the tool I use on my blog and it’s hard to imagine going wrong with this tool. This is software that you download, configure, and upload to your Web host. Because it is open source there are also many beneficial add-ons and plug-ins that can add even more power to the software. The downside, if there is one, is that you must be able to get through a bit of technical tinkering to make it work, but it’s very straightforward.
• WordPress.com: This is a hosted version of the WordPress software that allows you to easily create a blog that is hosted by WordPress. The benefit of this approach is that there is no real setup, you simply sign up (it’s free), choose a theme, and start blogging. The downside with hosted blogging platforms is that they are not as flexible and might not deliver as much search engine benefit because the content does not reside on your website domain.
• TypePad.com: TypePad is another great hosted service with many features and a simple startup process.
• Compendium Blogware: Business-targeted blog system that works around targeting keywords and phrases.
• Windows Live Spaces: Based on simplicity and familiarity, Windows Live Spaces offers users a free, quick, and easy way to get started blogging.

     Source: Let’s talk, Social Media for small busniess, version two (John Jantsch) e-book

A blog primer

     In simplest terms, a blog is software that allows anyone who can type to post content to a website or blog home page. The content is generally displayed much like a journal might be written, in reverse chronological fashion.

     This content can be anything the author chooses to write, or post, as it is referred to in blogging terms.

     Now, on the surface, what this means is that anyone can update a website that has this blogging software installed and that’s a great thing. Websites benefit from change and blogs make it easy to change, update, and add content.

     But, there’s much more. Blog software also allows:

• Readers of the blog pages to make comments and add their own content.
• Readers of the blog to subscribe to the content so that they are automatically notified whenever the content is updated.
• Search engines to receive notice or pings whenever the content is updated.

     All of the above items happen automatically once the software is configured. Blogging is such a great tool because it allows you to more easily accomplish many of the marketing objectives that today’s small business must address.

     A blog is your ticket to creating:

• Content
• Context
• Connection
• Community

     And if that isn’t enough, know this—search engines love blogs! If for no other reason, consider creating and frequently posting relevant, keyword-rich content to a blog, hosted on your domain, because it will dramatically improve your changes of ranking well in the search engines.

     Source: Let’s talk, Social Media for small busniess, version two (John Jantsch) e-book

Facebook: what should you be monitoring?

     We use it for fun. We use it to check out our kids’ and grandkids’ photos. We use it to share our love for brands, engage in online contests organized by various companies, or let a company know when its customer service has failed us.

     These days, the content on Facebook almost fully mirrors many individuals’ lives. People make their personal profiles their homes for their likes and hates, and businesses can use Facebook Pages as a gateway to interact with people.

Facebook business page wall

     Your Facebook Business Page wall is the “home” where your business’ fans, friends, customers, and critics can all interact directly with your company. They can post questions, comments, feedback, or fan mail. Fellow fans of your business may interact with each other. Many individuals will interact with the content your business has posted itself.

     There are four ways people can interact on your Facebook Business Page that you should be monitoring:

• Wall Posts: Facebook users can post content to your Page’s wall. They can say good things, complain, talk about a recent experience they have, anything! People can even post photos straight to your Facebook wall. These remarks are user-generated content about your brand.
• Comments: Comments are an opportunity to react to a wall post. Both you and your fans can comment. Consider it a mini conversation that spurred from the original post.
• Likes: The classic thumbs up! If someone “Likes” a wall post, this means they like the content of that post. This can also be translated to mean “I agree”.
• Recommendations: One of the latest features Facebook has introduced is the opportunity to leave recommendations on a business Page. In order to take advantage of this functionality, you need to install the Recommendations plugin, which will display personalized recommendations from other Facebook users.

     Another important thing to understand about the content that gets posted to your Page’s wall is that the more people interact with a specific wall post, the more viral that post becomes. For example, when an individual posts something to a Page’s wall, that action is also referenced on the wall of that individual’s personal profile. Same goes with liking and commenting. Also, wall posts that receive an exceptional amount of “likes” and comments often show up in other Facebook users‟’ News Feeds. Let’s talk briefly about that...

Facebook news feed

     Your “News Feed” is exactly that: a feed of what Facebook assumes is the most relevant and important items occurring in your network. Your goal should be both to react to important items in your business’ News Feed and get your wall posts featured in others’ News Feeds.

     Source: How to monitor your Social Media presence in 10 minutes a day (Rebecca Corliss, Hubspot) e-book

Twitter: what should you be monitoring?

     Oh, Twitter. While we love you and the benefit you can provide, the mad clutter that you produce is sometimes overwhelming, daunting, and hides the valuable information we as marketers should catch.

So what type of information and tweets should you be looking out for?

• Relevant questions about your company: If someone tweets, “Should I buy X product or its competitor’s product?” you want to be ready to respond. If not directly by offering helpful content about your business, perhaps you could point that person to a customer of yours.
• Relevant questions about your industry: Being helpful by answering someone’s question is a great way to develop credibility with that person. In the event they need a product or service related to the one(s) your business provides, they might end up coming to you!
• Requests for support: If a customer tweets a request for help (either directly to you or perhaps to their network), you should notice that tweet and respond accordingly. Happy customers are essential for the long-term results of your business.
• Complaints and feedback: Critics are always out there, and it’s important to acknowledge and resolve issues as they come up.
• Praise: Please sir, can I have some more? Praise is a wonderful thing to receive! Why not say thank you? Retweet it. Save it to your favorites. Send that person a t-shirt! It’s wise to appreciate those who appreciate you.
• Competitor mentions: Competitor intel, anyone? Other people are praising, complaining, and asking questions about your competitors, too. You should monitor those conversations, if only for the information and data.

     Now that you know which types of tweets to specifically monitor, you can create your plan accordingly. Also, don’t be afraid to be proactive with your social media lead generation efforts. Make sure you are posting your fresh content and always link to landing pages that will help you capture more information about your prospects.

     Source: How to monitor your Social Media presence in 10 minutes a day (Rebecca Corliss, Hubspot) e-book

LinkedIn: what should you be monitoring?

     I would argue that LinkedIn is the most business-focused social media site out there. There are more than 135 million professionals around the world using LinkedIn as of November 2011. Its purpose is for networking, recruiting, content promoting (when relevant!), and generating thought leadership. Let’s focus on the last two.

     LinkedIn is a great platform for individual employees to develop thought leadership and grow a company’s reach as a whole.

So what should you be monitoring on LinkedIn to do just that?

• LinkedIn Answers: This section of LinkedIn is a great way to showcase your expertise. Many LinkedIn users use this feature to request information,  resources, business tips, and advice. Similar to Twitter, LinkedIn enables you to monitor questions that are relevant to your business and industry. By taking a moment to respond with a thoughtful answer, you could win “Best Answer”. When answering, you also have the opportunity to link to relevant resources. Did you or your company recently publish a blog article that addresses the topic in question? You should link to it!
• Group Discussions: LinkedIn members also interact often within LinkedIn Groups by posting discussion questions, topics, and more to the group. These discussions offer other opportunities to answer, comment, and link to your resources when it makes sense and is valuable to the community.

     Source: How to monitor your Social Media presence in 10 minutes a day (Rebecca Corliss, Hubspot) e-book

Google+: what should you be monitoring?

     Google+ is not just another social network. It’s a network tightly connected to the world’s leading search engine. Such an explosive combination is certainly going to impact the life of marketers.

     For instance, Google is introducing Direct Connect, a feature that will let searchers call up a Google+ page by simply adding a "+" before their queries. In addition, the +1 button will also remain present not only on search, but also on company blogs and elsewhere. “We introduced the +1 button as a way for your customers to recommend your business across the web - on Google search, in your ads, on sites across the web and on mobile devices,” wrote Dennis Troper, Product Management Director at Google+ Pages.

So what should you be monitoring in regards to Google+?

• Comments: Once you set up your Google+ business page, make sure you are monitoring the comments you might be getting on posts. What are people saying? Are they liking your content or do they have feedback for improvement?
• Circle Streams: Don’t forget to monitor the stream of information being shared across your different circles. There could be interesting discussions that pertain to your industry and can give you opportunities to jump in the conversation with further insights.

     Source: How to monitor your Social Media presence in 10 minutes a day (Rebecca Corliss, Hubspot) e-book

Quora: what should you be monitoring?

     Quora is becoming the new go-to place to ask questions and get answers.

     The quality of the community is quite high. A person may ask, “Why did company X make Y business decision?” Oftentimes, the most highly voted answer is given by the CEO of the company. For users, it’s a great opportunity to learn collectively from a large group where the best answers rise to the top through voting.

What should you be monitoring on Quora?

• Questions: Your primary goal for monitoring Quora, similar to LinkedIn Answers, is identifying questions relevant to your business and industry that you should answer. If someone posts a question about your company and there is no representation from your company among a stream of answers, that is a lost opportunity to guide the message (or deflect negative sentiment).
• Topics: Topics are broad categories of questions like “marketing,” “business,” “books,” etc. If you are a marketer, you should be monitoring the “marketing” sections for opportunities to respond to questions that give you the opportunity to flaunt your and your business’ expertise.

     Source: How to monitor your Social Media presence in 10 minutes a day (Rebecca Corliss, Hubspot) e-book

Blogosphere: what should you be monitoring?

     It goes without saying: blogs (writing, reading, and commenting) should be a major part of your social media and marketing strategy. Maintaining a blog is a great way to create content that drives visitors to your website. Reading quality blogs keeps you in the know of industry trends, news, data, and more. Commenting is a great way to expand your reach by appearing below someone else’s content as well as causally introducing yourself (as a brilliant commenter) to the author of that blog.

     It’s also very important to be aware of what others write about your company in order to respond properly. Even if only to celebrate quality articles written about your organization when they periodically appear, you should know what the blogosphere is saying about you.

Make sure that within your monitoring campaign you are tracking relevant...

• Blog Articles: You should consider blog articles just as important (if not occasionally more important) as news coverage! You should know who is writing about your company and what they are saying. Are you generating major coverage regarding a product launch or another piece of news? Is there some sort of controversy occurring around your industry? Competitors?
• Comments: What are people saying in response to articles about you, your competitors, or your industry? Should you weigh in as well?
• Links: Links make the inbound marketing world go round! Do the blog articles written about you also include links back to your website? If not, perhaps you should send the author a friendly note. If you created content that a blog article is referencing, you should be credited with a link.

     Source: How to monitor your Social Media presence in 10 minutes a day (Rebecca Corliss, Hubspot) e-book

Kony 2012

     Invisible children’s Kony 2012 campaign has been one of the most successful campaigns using social media in history. If you don’t know what this is about, you can watch the video they wanted to spread and an explanation of their objective: make Joseph Kony (the world’s worst war criminal) famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice. In this case, notoriety translates to public support. If people know about the crimes that Kony has been committing for 26 years, they will unite to stop him. Secondly, we want Kony to be famous so that when he is stopped, he will be a visible, concrete example of international justice. Then other war criminals will know that their mass atrocities will not go unnoticed or unpunished. (www.kony2012.com)

     Invisible children used this video to make their message circulate on the Internet as a typical viral marketing campaign. Although the most important is the cause for the one they are fighting for, to the one we give all our support from Viral Marketing Blog, we are going to analyze this phenomena under the marketing point of view: as an excellent example of the way social media has to be used.

     Althoug the campaign is still current, it’s a long time since it started to spread in the Internet.  But it’s now the best moment to take into account it’s results; it’s impact.

     Anthony Wing, a Forbes contributor, proposes 12 lessons that social media can learn from Knoy 2012 (Link to the original article: www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/03/09/12-lessons-from-kony-2012-from-social-media-power-users/):

• Be Positive: The first part of the video just shows people connecting with each other, the birth of a baby, the pride of parenthood and the value of friendship. Joseph Kony doesn’t even appear until 8:46.

• Get Their Attention: Early on [1:38] the voiceover tells you, “The next 27 minutes are an experiment. But in order for it to work, you have to pay attention.” A bit presumptuous, but you’ve been warned.

• Make It Personal: At 1:55 we see a child being born in what looks like an American hospital, and by 2:39 we understand the identity of the voiceover and the baby: ”My name is Jason Russell and this is my son, Gavin.”

• Invoke the Mainstream Media: KONY 2012 is peppered with references to “old media” for validation. ”This has been going on for years?” Russell says on camera in Uganda. “If that happened one night in America it would be on the cover of Newsweek.” [5:56] There’s and a fake TIME cover of Kony that reads “Worst in the World,” next to a real TIME cover of supporter George Clooney [23:35] and a fabricated New York Times front page that reads “KONY CAPTURED” [22:27].

• Pull the Heartstrings: Russell uses his son, Gavin, and his young Ugandan friend, Jacob, for raw plays on emotion: Jacob’s is introduced through Gavin’s pointing to picture on wall and saying, “Jacob is our friend in Africa” [3:56]; Jacob is the first thing you see on the Invisible Children’s Facebook timeline [4:00]; Jacob breaks down in wailing sobs when discussing his despair at living and the murder of his brother [7:14]. It’s manipulative, yes, but boy does it work.

• Make it Time Sensitive: At 8:40 the screen announces, “Expires December 31, 2012.”  There is no explanation in the video of what that means, or what the benefit would be of the video being vaporized from the internet at the stroke of midnight, but the expiration date is clearly meant to convey a sense of immediacy. The theme song also reinforces the sense of compulsion with the refrain, “I Can’t Stop” [26.52].

• Make It Simple: In what is perhaps the video’s greatest coup (and also, perhaps, its undoing) we see five-year-old Gavin’s reactions to father’s explanation of who Joseph Kony is and what the war’s about [9:19]. The “bad guy” forces these children to do “bad things” against their will. How does he feel about that? “Sad.”

• Make It Real (Briefly): After he explains Kony to his son in a simplified manner, he gives the grownups a bit more detail. “Kony abducts kids just like Gavin,” we are told [10:50]. “For 26 years Kony has been kidnapping children into his rebel group the LRA, turning the girls into sex slave and the boys into child soldiers. He makes them mutilate people’s faces.” We see a rapid fire slideshow of ten horrifically slashed faces. “And he forces them to kill their own parents.” OK, I get the point, really bad guy.

• Give it Scale: “And this is not a few children. It has been over 30,000 of them.” We zoom out from a closeup of a few Ugandan children to a crowd of thousands. [11:39] Similarly, the point of the video is to get Kony’s name and picture in front of millions of people around the world through hundreds of thousands of posters, stickers and (since it’s election time) lawn signs.

• Use Celebrities: IC has identified 20 “culture makers” and 12 “policy makers” to “target” to help get the word out (20 + 12, get it?) [23:16]. The 20 culture makers run the psychographic gamut: Oprah, Mark Zuckerberg, Lady GaGa, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Gates, Jay-Z, Justin Bieber, Rick Warren, Ellen Degeneres, Ben Affleck, Rihanna, Stephen Colbert, Warren Buffet, Taylor Swift, Ryan Seacrest, Tim Tebow, Rush Limbaugh(!) and Bono. The 12 policy makers cant somewhat to the right: George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Harry Reid, John Boehner, Kay Granger, Mitt Romney, Stephen Harper, Ban Ki-Moon, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Patrick Leahy. Although Clooney appears on camera, it is unclear what the rest of these people’s relationship is to IC, though their visual inclusion does imply a certain assumed validation.

• Create Events: The video wheels out poster artist (and now convicted criminal) Shepard Fairey to say, “Here are these really simple tools. Go out and rock it.” [25:00] This sets up the major focus of this viral video effort, to get people to sign up and receive “action kits” to be used on the night of April 20th for an overnight postering session called “Cover the Night.” [26:36] Widely publicized public vandalism in the name of political change is not the kind of event every social media entity would choose, but it seems to fit the ethos of this group. The fresh faced activists in the video seem to be unconcerned that some of their wheat pasting might be considered vandalism, but so be it.

• Make It Easy: The video ends with the obligatory call to action: “The better world we want is coming. It’s just waiting for us to stop at nothing. There are three things you can do right now.” [29:25] “1. Sign the pledge to show your support” (that’s easy) “2. Get the bracelet and the action kit” (how?) “3. Sign up for Tri to donate a few dollars a month” (oh, that’s easy too) BUT, when you click on the donate button there’s a message below the donation options that says, “A minimum monthly commitment of $15 is required to receive the Kony 2012 Action Kit with your TRI membership. Due to the overwhelming response to KONY 2012 your kit delivery is not guaranteed before April 20th.” Not quite the same the “few dollars a month” they keep referring to in the video! And if you don’t sign up for the monthly plan you can’t order a kit a la carte. You can, however, download and print kit materials for free (easy!)