Still not using social media to its full effect to promote your content? Well, maybe you can take a lesson from the President.

A couple Sundays ago, President Barack Obama pulled a what’s known as a “Full Ginsburg” by appearing on all five major Sunday morning political talk shows on the same day. Obama was plugging his healthcare reform package, and hitting all the talkies at once, and although politically risky, was really the only way to spread his message far and wide.

Why? The multiplying effect.

• Obama makes his plea on each of the news shows. Most politicians, policy wonks, assigning editors, and the entire staff of Politico are watching.
• The first round of stories and blog posts come out that afternoon. Other bloggers and commentators weigh in.
• The first round of response stories gears up and the second round of stories moves on smaller news outlets. The number of readers and commentators grows.
• And so on and so on and so on.

By Monday morning, anyone who follows the news knows what Obama’s healthcare plan is.

So for your next blog post, I want you to try what I’m going to christen a “Full Brogan,” named after social media marketing maven Chris Brogan.

Your blog post starts with you. It will be read by the usual visitors to your blog, but unless you are Seth Godin, that’s probably not a really large chunk of the populace.

So seed the post all over the place: via your Twitter feed, on your Facebook page, on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Fark. If you are feeling really jaunty try Mixx, Newsvine and Sphinn, among many other choices. All this Johnny Appleseed activity comes with a two-part caveat. If you are not already a member of one or all of these communities, you are going to have to join; and likely, until you’ve spent some time there listening, adding to existing conversations and starting some of your own, it’s not likely that the pebbles you are tossing in these very large ponds are going to make waves of consequence.

But if you keep giving and keep sharing quality content, eventually, the multiplying effect will take over. In August, I seeded a blog post on MIT’s Personas project around on several sites. The next morning, I checked the hit count on our blog and the numbers had gone through the roof. We’d had three months worth of hits in one day. A look slightly deeper into the blog stats saw the bulk of the traffic coming from one source: Reddit.

Determining why the post got so much attention gets a bit trickier, but it ties into how you take care with making your contributions to social media sites and not just start seeding willy-nilly.

Make sure you write a descriptive headline. This may be the only part of your material that gets read by most people and is likely your only chance to hook them.

If the site has communities within the community (like Reddit), take the time to find the right one to post to.  If you have a story about programming, but you place it in the general story pool, you may miss the core of your audience.

Pay attention to the metadata requested by the sites, especially tags, keywords and summaries. It’s should be obvious, but it bears repeating: This is how people will find your contribution when they search within those sites. (And this should not be any extra work; you should have created this data at the same time the story was written, right?)

Finally, all this is not to say that you should ignore Mother Google by failing to keep up with your SEO best practices. It’s not the active seeking of content consumers that you’re doing through your social media seeding, but it’s still important (and requires much of the same metadata).

Let me know how your “Full Brogan’s” go.

—Jonathan

(@bentpiton)

Art from http://www.timboucher.com/

Years ago I lived in Rhode Island and worked at an MIT startup, the commute was painful—5 1/2 hours a day—but the experience was worth it. Downtown Providence was an up and coming city in the late 90′s and Newfangled Graphics had the coolest sign in town. A ‘This Old House’ + small-press nerd + web fashionista wooden sign that implied, “Yep, we’re that good.” I didn’t know much about them back in 1996 but I have come to love their work and methodology. Here we are 13 years later and Mark O’Brien and the smart folks at Newfangled Graphics are now Newfangled Webfactory but still going very strong. In this video they talk about their Grayscreen prototyping process.

Grayscreen Prototyping video by Newfangled Web Factory.

For the last four weeks of so, I’ve been practicing a good writing habit. As soon as I get into the office, before I check my emails or agenda for the day, I write for ten whole minutes.

Week one was automatic writing. Lately, I’ve been assigning myself little writing assignments for my ten minutes.

This morning, nearly fresh out of ideas, I turned to Google for a writing prompt. I had NO IDEA how unhelpful the results would be. Here is a sprinkling of the most appalling and least helpful:

1.    Poking fun at you, a relative gives you a dubious award at a family picnic. In a twist, you accept the award and give a short speech. Write the scene.

2.    You are running for president of the writing community. What promises do you make to swing voters in your direction?

3.    When was the last time you saw a coaster? What meaning of the word ‘coaster’ inspires the best memory for you?

While these prompts might meet with some success at a senior center writing seminar, content writers need more meat, more action. If we’re going to spend time writing for ourselves, before we start a day of more writing, certainly we can find a more provocative muse than a coaster, or the prospect of being president of the writing community.

Here’s a prompt from the notebook of yours truly, inspired by my recent fascination with historical fiction.

•    Choose a story from a news source of your choice. (Sparse, AP wire or police blotter stories work the best for me.) Write a scene based on the characters involved in the news story, either leading up to the main event of the story or explaining what happens after the news story comes out.

Do you set aside time to write for yourself? What do you do to get your wheels turning?

—Wendy Joan

Bookmark hell from ian alexander on Vimeo.

Learn the all the notes. Sing all the songs

Whistle While You Work

Business goals, gap analysis and taxonomy definitions are useful tools for determining what should be said where. And the different tactical delivery methods: (video, how-to article, mobile, info-graphics, social media) dramatically affect the presentation and context of the content,  helping us determine the how. Combined with budgets, calendars, SEO, style guides and a host of other details, Content Strategy attempts to responsibly create quality content and put it where it is most appropriate, in the most viable format. What song we whistle while we are doing it is inconsequential, as long as it is in tune with rest of the symphony.

Content Strategy Mimids

Most everyone can recognize the song of the Blue jay, Seagull or (fill in your regional bird). Each bird’s song is distinctive and helps them mate, protect, and communicate. But Mimids, the family of birds that includes mockingbirds, are one of the few birds that can mimic the sounds of other animals, including other birds. This is their most powerful tool and the foundation of how they survive.

Content Strategy, a broadly under-defined term, fits rather well into the family of Mimidae (Mimids). Our tools and roles are centered on our ability to mimic, understand and interconnect many different practices. Sometimes due to our ability to whistle different tunes, we are viewed as extra, unnecessary or covered under the punch list of another practice. When this is true it is usually due to poor project management or unsatisfactory vendor assessment/selection.

Great content strategists are like that friend you have who is just as comfortable (and charming) discussing Renaissance art at an Upper West Side gathering as they are graffiti in a Brooklyn rail yard. They are the kind of people who, years after knowing them, you realize they speak Swahili and went to Rice on a basketball scholarship. They are multi-faced, fascinated and fascinating. They are happily many sides of many coins and their ability to sing the appropriate song at the appropriate time, without sticking to a style, or favorite key, is what makes them valuable.

In the Content Strategy (CS) world there are four basic families:

The Mimid Families

Content Strategy Technologists—are perfect for projects that are CMS heavy (assessments, migrations, template setups), or require medium-to-heavy code/data base lifting or understanding in order to bring a project to fruition. The technologists are usually technical project managers or coders who understand that technology that just pushes numbers around is called a calculator. And calculators aren’t all that engaging to read on a Sunday.

Content Strategy Editorialists—are perfect for projects that require managing and organizing content at the nuts and bolts level (content inventory, style guide creation, editorial calendaring and curation.) These folks are writers at heart but stole away from the Underwood years ago and realized that content needs technology. *See bankrupt magazines and newspapers.

Content Strategy UX/IA’ers—are perfect for projects that require managing and organizing content at both the macro and micro level (gap analysis, wire-frames, content identification). Content Strategists with IA/UX leanings are a powerful blend of logic, information architecture understanding and have a particularly valuable focus on the space where content meets and becomes information. Go Team OmniGraffle!

Content Strategy Designers—are perfect for projects that require managing and organizing content when design is a key element of how and why the information is being presented to the user. There are some designers who simply copy the text the copywriter gave them from WordPad to Photoshop and make it pretty. There are others who ask questions like “why are we saying this on this screen.” Wireframes, information architecture and even some front-end coding are tools in their belt. These people usually have great haircuts.

Detailing these four types of Content Strategists is not meant as a selective quadfurcation but more as a glossary of the broad skill-set under the Content Strategy umbrella. And while each of the above may have leanings towards one strength, be it Design, UX/IA, Editorial or Technology, the practice itself hinges on the practitioner’s ability to understand all the notes and know when to sing which song, when to listen and when to hit shuffle.

—Ian

We can argue about what’s the new black, but one idea that’s gaining a lot of credence is that mobile apps are the new websites.

Think about it: If you are a smartphone user, how many apps do you have and how many of those apps supplant the actual website for mobile use? A quick count on my phone reveals apps for: The Weather Channel, ESPN, Facebook, Twitter (Nambu), Pandora, Google Earth, The Wall Street Journal, Fandango, The New York Times, AccuWeather, fring (IM client), and National Public Radio. That’s 12 websites that I never visit from my mobile browser because the apps provide the same content in a sleeker and faster format.

I also have apps that allow me to complete other tasks that would have previously been handled through the browser as well like mapping, getting the surf or ski report, foreign language translation, star maps (the constellations, not celebrities, though, no doubt, there’s an app for that too), dictionary, hurricane tracking, the U.S. constitution and stock quotes. More websites I won’t be browsing ever again.

And then there’s the special category of app that also lives on my phone: the disposable app. These apps mostly focus on specific sporting events like Wimbledon, The U.S. Open, etc, and allow me to get specific updates all the live long day. (I’m still hoping for a Tour de France app next year.)

And while these apps may have a limited shelf life, they were by no means constructed in a slapdash or haphazard way; these are quality apps that meet the needs of serious fans and often involve partnerships with heavyweights like IBM. These apps appeal to enthusiasts, so there is little margin for error.

What else should you think about when planning to include apps in your next content strategy presentation?

1.    Functionality. I love Nambu as my Twitter app because it takes me to web links without leaving the app. But for corn’s sake, don’t overload the thing with features. Think Thoreau: simplify, simplify, simplify.

2.    User Experience Design. This may be your chance to create the lean and mean website you’ve always wanted but can’t ever have because of institutional inertia. For example, The Weather Channel’s website is an ad-choked nightmare with a user interface designed by Hannibal Lecter and a search function run by Mr. Magoo. I never visit it because it makes me angry. I only reluctantly downloaded the mobile app because I hated the website so much. All hail the clever and wiry programming geniuses who put together The Weather Channel’s app. It’s simple, elegant and it just works.

3.    Realize and accept that some apps will have a short life. This does not reduce their value, if anything, even more thought must go into design as you only get one chance to get it right. The U.S. Open tennis tournament just concluded and I will likely never open that app again, but I opened it several times a day during the tournament.

4.    Does this mean you shouldn’t optimize your site for mobile browsing? Of course not. Though, if you are going to make your mobile site crappy (Yes, I’m talking to you CarandDriver.com.) don’t make it impossible to switch to your main site when you see someone’s using a mobile browser.

Where do mobile applications fit in your content strategy? Let me know in the comments.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

Photo by respres