Feeding the Content Beast

Curation Insights (Feb 1 2012)

1. 

   Recently, we hosted a webinar titled Feeding Your Content Beast, featuring Pawan Deshpande from Curata and Rick Burnes from Hubspot. If you missed the webinar, take a moment and check it out here. The webinar included an overview of why content is important and tactical tips on how to feed your content beast with some creative blog post ideas.

   During the webinar we conducted a short poll to get attendees thoughts on their own content creation efforts. Take a look at the breakdown and answer it for yourself and your own organization. Let us know how often you’re creating content by posting a comment on this blog or pop us a tweet at @ContentCurating.

    

   We had a number of questions during the webinar, three in particular I'd like to provide some additional information and thoughts. I encourage you to chime in with your own thoughts and experiences as well.

   1. TIME TO CREATE CONTENT
   As the poll question and our data shows, having the TIME to create new content is the biggest barrier for most people. One way to overcome this barrier is to ask for others within an organization to help out. How do we inspire others to within our company to create content?

   Mandating content to be created by everyone in the organization could work... or not! Without going that route, one way would be to pose to each of the departments the opportunity to participate. This is their chance to provide their unique perspective to your industry on how they see things. Offer a few ideas or topics on what they could blog about to get their creative juices flowing.

   Another idea would be to interview a person from each department and get their unique perspective. The interview provides a great forum for conversation which leads to some great insights you may not have garnered otherwise, and is lends itself to a quick and easy blog post.

   2. Test Your Content (it’s tip #9.)
   Attendees where looking for a bit more information on how to conduct content tests. A lot of marketers regularly conduct tests before launching a big campaign to ensure they are confident in their message. A test can be defined as showing your coworkers some creative to see which the like better, or can be a small email campaign where you send two emails with the same content but update the headlines.

   Think about how you can translate these testing ideas with your content. One way would be to create metrics around your content, maybe it’s the day you post your original blog posts and then track the number of page views week over week when you post a new article. This will allow you to be able to compare the results for each post and will give you some insights into what’s working and whats not.

   Maybe it's how you are sharing out your content as well, one week focus on sharing the content over facebook and then the next week share it over twitter and see which has higher page views.

   The key to testing is to ensure you identify one variable that you'd like to test against, if you include more than one variable then you'll have a difficult time figuring out what worked and what didn't.

   3. Curation and Copyright.
   There were a few questions during the webinar about any issues posting content from other sources. Pawan wrote a great blog post on this specific topic that you can check out.

   But remember:

   • Do not re-post the original content in it’s entirety
   • Include clear attribution to the original content
   • Take the opportunity before you re-post a snippet of the content to provide your own opinion as to why this content is important or relevant

   Please let us know if you have any additional questions or if you’d like to watch the webinar, a video and pdf of the slides are located here.

   If you’d like to try out content curation for yourself or your organization, please sign-up for our 30 Day Free Trial. No obligation. No credit card required.

    

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