Writing Engaging Content

Social media and the explosion of (potential) digital destinations has bubbled up the question about content.

What is best to write about? How much do you need to write to attract readers and buyers? How long should posts be? And occasionally, still, what is a blog? One thing is for sure, everyone is looking for definitions and "how to's".

This is a slightly, if not totally different question you were asking yourself when you were considering a (more or less) static Web site.

Over there, you learned to be more minimal, embed keywords in titles and throughout the page and speak to the search engines.

By and large writing for the Web ended up being optimized towards making people take direct action onto something else via offer. The user experience crafted to make you take the most direct path from reading to buying or at least inquiring about a product or service.  

Our session at MarketingProfs B2B Forum Developing Robust Online Content to Keep Prospects and Customers Engaged with Mike O'Toole, President and Partner, PJA Advertising and Marketing, Christopher S. Penn, CTO, Student Loan Network, Phil Juliano, VP of Marketing, Novell and moderated by Matthew Grant focused on writing engaging content for the next Web and the socializing of information.

Content-centered marketing is undergoing a transformation, one where the content is moving from:

• promotional to non-partisan - some call it thought leadership - the exploration of market trends, patterns in customer behavior, insights into the meaning of certain collective stories and attitudes.

• highly-controlled to less-controlled - I also like to expand this point to the thought of going from highly structured to highly flexible. Think about your content not in terms of the whole construction any more, but the bricks, each with the ability to serve multiple purposes in your prospective customers lives. More legos than logos.

• occasional to ongoing - it was always about the sum total of the parts in communications or integrated marketing for best results. Today with many social networks it is easier to see and aggregate the life stream of your business - from LinkedIn to FriendFeed to Facebook, they all allow a combination of feeds from many separate social media.

• corporate voice to authentic, personal voice - this is something that organizations struggle with. Who should embody the voice of the company and why them when they become popular? Have you seen the movie Flash of Genius? There is one memorable dialogue in the movie where the inventor is talking about using elements that already existed and combining them into a new thing - with new results.

Even when you message carefully, the same words in my tone of voice are just not the same to you. Plus there is the small complication of people seeing someone as embodying your brand who may not be in the C-Suite. There's a clear cultural chasm that some organizations will need to think long and hard about on this one.

• one-way to conversational - the one overarching concern remains that of message consistency. How do you keep that with such a messy medium that is conversation?

These points are all interconnected, it does go back to having a deep knowledge and understanding of your subject matter. That is by far what is going to make you most comfortable with this transition. If you think about it, it's the same as with speaking at events - you should be a subject matter expert to address not just the topic, but the how to part of it, which comes out with questions.

How do you go about it?

(1.) Start with a marketing strategy that is built upon business objectives. What are your success criteria? This will come in handy when it's time to measure results.

(2.) Make the content useful so that it elevates the person who is using it. What is more likely you will share - something that makes you look good or something that is really clever?

(3.) Use a consistent message even with diverse voices - one mechanism for that is story. Come back with me in time and think about when we did not have the written word. Stories were passed on from generation to generation verbally. The knowledge was part of the collective ownership and teaching. Our brain is engineered to respond to narrative, it's the shortcut it uses to retain lots of information in a smaller space in a way that makes sense to us - and occasionally saves our lives (survival).

(4.) Think situationally about content - it depends on the platforms where it is/you are and the people who are there and for it to work it needs to be always on. If you read fiction you will know that the best novels have a moment of tension where the hero/heroine and the other main character connect - usually they fall in love. That invariably happens in the midst of a shared experience, when they are both touched by the same circumstances. Engagement has a better chance when there is a strong shared experience and people go from immersed to involved.

The other side of platforms and people is to use the right voice and tone for the right medium and have consistency in commitment by the people who participate in those platforms. The first six months are probably akin to a honeymoon. You got started and are very excited at the prospect of working with this new thing. However, it is after that period of time that content really starts working for you, just about when you're ready to give the experiment a break.

(5.) Don't be afraid to lose control - because you never had it in the first place. In fact, the more you open up to feedback, the more the feedback you received is useful and honest. Fear is what makes your content uninteresting. You're so afraid to commit to it, to the passion that might come through, that it read bland.

Losing control of your content will seem like a ridiculously small cost when compared to losing your business because nobody is talking about you. Participation is also content. While much of this may not seem new, it is still very hard to do. Why do you think that is? What are the questions and concerns you hear about?

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Related posts:

Top Ten Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Fails

50 Content Ideas that Create Buzz

Twitter - Macro Insights from Micro Interactions

© 2006-2009 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[Jon Buscall]

I thnk the point about story and storytelling is crucial here. I've recently been talking with two customers who have a large number of employees. Both seem to forget that every one of their team is a potential brand ambassador and that the stories they tell about the company and products are important.

I think internal company newsletters / intranets can be an excellent way of reminding employees of the corporate story and refining it in a subtle and engaging way. This in turn then passes on to the way they communicate with clients.

You can't expect your people to use stories unless you create a culture where stories are used and celebrated.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Internal communication is crucial, especially inside a large organization where people may not have the opportunity to speak with each other frequently or to be exposed to the company narrative. I often tell our people that we are all in public relations. Good thoughts.

[Harriet Meth]

This is a great post Valeria, full of valuable insights. Thank you.

Your thoughts on consistency, voice and story are most intriguing because they go to the heart of what it will take to realize the full potential of conversational marketing. We're just now starting to see the first tentative steps as companies try to identify who represents their voice and the types of stories they want to tell.

In the 15 years I've been consulting with companies, message inconsistency has continued to dog businesses of all sizes, industries and geographies. Hopefully companies will continue to develop storytelling as a core competency so they can balance the need to communicate a consistent message without attempting to control it.

[Matthew T. Grant]

Valeria - Thanks for sharing the fruits of our discussion at the MarketingProfs Forum and, speaking as the moderator, thanks for being such an active and thoughtful participant.

It's worth reminding people that to make content "shareable" it should also be made "snackable" (as in "easy to consume") - as Mike O'Toole from PJA (http://blog.agencypja.com/2009/05/28/uncategorized/5-rules-for-creating-content-that-rules/)puts it.

In addition, we need to be able to re-purpose, repackage, and reuse our content. As Jason Baer (http://www.convinceandconvert.com/) likes to point out - a white paper/eBook, for example, can be sliced up into blog posts, presented as a podcast, converted into a deck with commentary and serve as a webcast, etc.

In the end, for most organizations, I would say that the problem isn't so much creating content (they probably already have a lot of it) but figuring out how best to syndicate and distribute it.

[Traffichoney]

Thanks for the great post Valeria. Social media also a helpful feedback mechanism and good marketers bring that perspective back to the company's marketing strategy as well as product design and development. I've written a similar post from a marketing for startups perspective. Do take a look. Would love to know your thoughts on it. http://bit.ly/qANcp

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Harriet - what I'm seeing from some companies is a desire to have people represent the organization in social media who do not have the consistency, voice, or story to be there. In some cases it's the most junior person with no business experience, in others it's the very official person with just the talking points. Along with message inconsistency, we will see a lot of voice inconsistency. The issue is still control.

@Matthew - you remind me of the media snacking project out of the UK. Many of our customers have different learning styles so it's important to present information in a multitude of ways. I would also add how to best present it as in writing it and editing it.

@Traffichoney - there re many advantages to keeping the communication lines open with customers, one of which is that of being able to ask them what they like, what they want to see, learn about, hear, etc. Thank you for stopping by.