Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Other People’s Content (OPC) to Jumpstart your Social Media Effort
Skip Shuda, Team and a Dream
Social Media Marketing provides businesses with an inexpensive approach to getting the word out about your business. Yet many small business owners are frozen to inaction by the sheer number of options and the dynamic nature of the Social Media world. Still others fear that they aren’t creative enough to participate in the Social Media conversation. How should I start? What if I can’t come up with regular content for my Social Media efforts? How can I find good ideas for my Social Media conversations? In this post, we’ll examine some simple tricks for creating great content for your Social Media efforts, even if you aren’t a New York Times columnist.
Not finding your creative juices flowing? Worried that you won’t be able to keep up with the demand for your blog or other Social Media efforts? As long as you credit (and link to) the original source, leveraging Other People’s Content in today’s Social Media is actually encouraged! In fact, national speaker and marketing guru David Newman and guest columnist Lisa Sasevich made this recent post entitled “How featuring other people brings you more than good karma”.
Here are some ideas and examples of leveraging OPC.
- Create your content over beer. Really. Gather a few experts, buy them a pint or two – and record their thoughts on a topic. It can make a great podcast. Our client Chariot Solutions, a leader in Open Source Software Development, did exactly this to create this Podcast on Open Source Integration Issues with a number of in-house experts.
- Take your digital video camera to your next conference and interview experts with an impromptu format. Social Media Expert Beth Harte did this in her recent Blog Post about generational differences in Social Media at the Philadelphia Social Media Club (@SMCPhilly). Watch the second video in this blog post to see her simple interview question posed to a series of thought leaders.
- Be an Aggregator. Collect various points of view and post a summary. Simply ask a good question on LinkedIn or a similar forum and use the results (acknowledging the contributors) to write a blog post summary of people’s responses.
- Try your hand as a commentator. Read a recently published research report on the Web, write a paragraph or two of good commentary in your blog. If you don’t have time for a paragraph or two, Tweet about it. For a terrific example of this approach on Twitter, take a look at Glen Gilmore’s Twitter account @TrendTracker (www.twitter.com/trendtracker)
- Reuse, recycle, refresh – Stack ‘em across channel. Once you find a good blog post, maybe through someone you are following on Twitter, you can jump into the conversation as an evangelist. I found Beth Harte’s post above by following her on Twitter. She captured the opinions of thought leaders on video, added them to her blog and tweeted about it. Alone, this is a good demonstration of reusing the same content on multiple channels. But then I piggybacked on her genius by being the first to make a comment on her blog. I then retweeted her original Tweet to Twitter. Since my comment was on her blog, I got traffic from that. Later in the day, I retweeted it to my business account. Our site had a 50% bump in traffic that day.
You don’t have to be a genius or creative editor to participate in the conversation – but you do need to add value. You can be an aggregator, a commentator or an evangelist. We need all of them. Give it a try and come back to update us on your efforts here as a comment. We can all learn together – and you’ll get credit and links to your Web site for your comments!
BIO:
As an advisor-builder with a sense of adventure, Team and a Dream® founder Skip Shuda has a passion for helping startups and small businesses execute on go-to-market strategies using his experience, lessons and tools to assist fellow entrepreneurs. Team and a Dream helps to accelerate the launch of web businesses through a focus on the creation, refinement and deployment of strong eBusiness models. Their work involves market and competitive assessments, internet marketing and social media strategies. Skip is an active participant and speaker in the Philadelphia entrepreneurial community. His work includes teaching at the Wharton Small Business Development Center and consultation with the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern PA, two key economic development engines in the Philadelphia region. He runs the Integral Philly Meetup community. You can follow him on Twitter @SkipShoe and @TeamandaDream . He blogs at the Team and a Dream Corporate Blog.
Posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Marketing, Small Business, Small Business Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
2 Comments | “Other People’s Content (OPC) to Jumpstart your Social Media Effort”
Jeff,
I think you missed the point of the post. I wasn’t suggesting that sharing other people’s content was the only way to create content, but that it was a way to engage in a conversation. This blog is for small business owners who are trying to build traction – and I think the suggestions made in the post give them a tool for helping to create some traction by participating in conversations that others have started. If you ever read the cluetrain manifesto (www.cluetrain.com), you’d understand that markets are conversations – and that participating in them is key.
You can call it stealing – but then you are pretty much missing the point of the Web. The whole Web phenomena is based on sharing (links are the heart of the web). If you think that the participating in Social Media marketing is highly overrated, then what are those whacky investors who just put $100 million into Twitter thinking!? Not to mention those mis-guided folks at Google who purchased YouTube. C’mon man! Join the 21st century!
People ARE still figuring out the best ways to monetize social media. However, that doesn’t mean you should ignore the conversations that are taking place right now on Twitter, YouTube or on your blog (if you had one). Sometimes those conversations involve your brand. Sometimes they give you a chance to introduce a novel idea. And sometimes they involve building on an idea that someone has already promoted (hence the point of my post here).
Which brings me to my last point… which has to do with “industry leadership”. Chariot Solutions may not be as big as Red Hat, but they are a partner with leaders like JBoss (part of Red Hat) and Spring Source. They do have nationally recognized developers on their team and are well respected in the Open Source community. They run the Emerging Technology for Enterprises Conference in Philadelphia each year to sell-out crowds from all over the country. They generate a number of podcasts and other content that is popular to Open Source Developers. I call that leadership. I applaud any firm in any industry that helps advance the conversation the way Chariot has.
Lets stop pretending that only Harvard-trained professionals are qualified to leading marketing efforts – and lets start helping small businesses to take ownership of their own marketing conversations.
Skip Shuda
Team and a Dream
Sure, stealing is such an honorable strategy…
I know you did mention correct attribution of quotes, etc, but it’s pretty un-original. Ok, highly unoriginal.
Why do you think that developing one’s own content is hard work? Do you honestly believe that re-Tweeting, etc. is a differentiating factor for any business? Of course it isn’t.
Finally, to call your tiny client Chariot
‘a leader in Open Source Software Development’ is highly disingenuous. Of course, it got them ink, but it’s not true. What, did Red Hat file for Chapter 7? Put things in perspective.
Social marketing is highly overrated at this point, what everyone is talking about because we all have time to talk in a down economy, and is not the silver bullet for much of anything. You didn’t quantify a ‘50% increase in web traffic’. Going from one hit to two, for instance, is a 100% increase, although I wouldn’t brag about it.
Finally, while this is a no-budget alternative, the jury is completely out on whether it (a) actually works, (b) is worth something, or (c)can be monetized. The social media conversation is much like the dotcom conversation of 2000: a lot of talk, not much action, and ultimately, it swallowed tons of cash for no good reason.
We all know that web traffic does not equal new clients writing checks. Since there is no ROI equation on something that’s free, forget about that idea. But where is the revenue? For you? For your ‘leading’ clients? Quantify, please, exactly what they got, how much they made (within NDA limits, obv), how you think they never would have gotten it without this method.
Sure, it’s all you do, all you sell, and thus your mantra. That doesn’t mean that it makes money, yet. Tweets are also about what people had for lunch and what their dog just did.
That, to me, isn’t a business conversation at all. It’s a complete waste of storage space.
Jeff A. Gregory
Brand Counsel, LLC