10 Steps to Make Your Content a Powerful Asset

I often work with clients who are overwhelmed by their content, information and digital assets. For many individuals and companies, their content (pictures, text, video, etc) is a mess, a liability and a cost center. It takes focus and effort to turn the content from a liability into an economic asset, but the path is straight-forward and very achievable. Your organization will benefit internally and externally; creating a smother-running operation on the inside and promoting your message to the outside. You may even create additional revenue streams once you wrangle all those assets.

This is continuous publishing in a global digital media environment. Control your content before someone else does. Today much of your content is digital. And it has escaped your grasp. Below I’ll describe your ten to-do items. You’ll get control of your content and you’ll grow to understand the power and value that content will bring you.

1. Discover. Identify your existing content. What do you have? What format is it in? Perform a content inventory or content audit. Create a content matrix, a spreadsheet of all your pieces and their attributes.

2. Develop your Core. Create the essential main ingredients of your content. This is often called Single Source where a team develops base content that is used in multiple locations or formats. Crystallize your message down into the essential ingredients.

3. Prepare for Community Involvement. Your content will be captured, quoted and manipulated. Plan for it. Make your community plan. Much like a business plan, but it outlines your philosophy, approach and rules for your audience/social network. This is user-centered content creation: know your audience. Give them a voice. Give them tools like widgets or online forums.

4. Architect Your Content. Use information architecture theories and approaches. Put your content into categories that make sense. This is often called bucketing. Try doing a card sort. Your community may begin to add categories and tags to your content if you let them. This “folksonomy” approach can be powerful.

5. Create you Multi-Destinational Plan. We are in a cross-platform world. Your content will live on more than the three screens (TV, computer, mobile). Create a delivery method attribute matrix to predict where your content is most likely to land. Remember we are in the age of the globalization of content. Understand translation and localization.

6. Acquire or Build Your Tools. Content management tools will most likely be needed. Make you build vs. buy decision. Visit the CMS Matrix to get comparison information.

7. Design Your Content. Separate your content from the way it is presented. Determine the base elements of your visual brand and stick to ‘em.

8. Document it. For internal use and the retention of institutional knowledge, please document your content adventures. Develop style guides and knowledge management practices to ensure knowledge transfer to others on your team or others who may follow in the future.

9. Tell your Story Continuously. Assign, hire or rent full-time staff to constantly add new content. Generate Continuous Content. Become thought leaders. Quality content and real content wins. Don’t fill a page with keywords and call it content. Humans and machines can tell what good content is and they seek it out.

10. Track it. Define your metrics for success and document your benchmarks. Analyze your numbers. Watch them change. Modify your behavior based on results, not assumptions.

Social Searching and Collaborative Filtering

In the early years of this century, my friends and I finally got what we were half-expecting. We figured that as soon as enough of our friends joined the internet, we would have enough interaction data to begin to realize a true benefit of online communities: filtering on the likes and dislikes of our social circle. We were finally able to discover stuff instantly based on what our friends and family were discovering.

With sites like StumbleUpon and Last.fm stealing the social media headlines, I took some time to explore "social searching". I present this list of search engines that filter results based on things other than keywords; like collaboration and input from social circles or like-minded community behaviors or implied meanings.

hakia
A semantic search engine that brings relevant results based on concept match rather than keyword match or popularity ranking.

Acoona
Accoona's proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms deliver relevant results by merging online and offline information and by analyzing search terms rather than just matching keywords.

bessed
Find websites that are ranked well by your peers. Leave comments about sites or recommend information.

Powerset
Employing technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language.

ChaCha
Mobile search solutions plus live human guides to help you find what you are looking for.

Squidoo
Squidoo's goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search.

sproose
Sproose is a user powered search engine that allows users to contribute to the ranking of web pages by voting for pages they find useful. Sproose also enables users to browse pages that have been voted and/or tagged by other users making it easy to discover new and interesting pages in a social network environment.

Eurekster
A custom search portal around the topic of your choice powered by your community.

Business Networking Online

My posting from July 2007 listed websites that helped people schmooze and network.(see original post)

Since I posted that, many new web sites are appearing to challenge the mighty LinkedIn for supremecy.

itzbig
Built to serve professionals like you, itzbig puts you in control. Anonymously explore opportunities in real time with instant feedback. Keep tabs on the market in case your dream job appears or a life change pushes you toward a "Plan B."

Jigsaw
Jigsaw is an online directory of more than 7 million business cards. Every card on Jigsaw has an email address and phone number, allowing members to bypass gatekeepers and get directly to decision makers and influencers. Jigsaw has become a required resource for sales people, recruiters, marketers and small business owners.

ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is the premier business information search engine, with profiles on more than 37 million people and 3.5 million companies. ZoomInfo delivers fresh and organized information on industries, companies, people, products, services and jobs.

Ryze
Ryze helps people make connections and grow their networks. Members get a free networking-oriented home page and can send messages to other members.

Viadeo
Discuss different topics, share your expertise and make new business contacts with over 1,800,000 business professionals in the Viadeo network.

FastPitch
Fast Pitch is the fastest growing business networking community in the world. Their online network provides you with a one-stop shop to network and market your business. Make Connections, Post & Distribute Press, Market Your Company, Market Yourself, Promote Your Blog and more.

IncBizNet
IncBizNet is an online business networking community and database created exclusively for private companies.

LinkedIn Competition

Some of the more successful social networks to emerge are focused on a specific audience. For example, business networking sites have taken common tools found on community sites and created value by connecting professionals in new and useful ways.

LinkedIn is the big kid on the block and has become extremely popular. It gains value as more users join.

I have also found biznik to be useful. They bill themselves as "Business networking that doesn't suck." Their software allows professionals to arrange in-person events and promote them.

For those in the media industry, there is MediaBistro.com. They are "career and community for media professionals." They've done a good job of raising awareness of their services in Seattle by throwing networking parties in local bars.

Some organizations are taking the next logical step by creating their own social networks using enterprise social networking tools from companies like Connectbeam who talk of harnessing the collective mind of your company.

We'll have to wait and see if anyone can catch the front runner, LinkedIn. They have a huge community, but will some upstart with better tools swoop in to steal the show?