Your content is a product that gets shipped. With that in light, you should adjust the course as time goes on to keep it fresh and relevant.
Do you use your blog and online outposts to test and experiment? How do you know you're getting results – or not – from your activities? Did you develop a plan and then measure against your goals?
How I do content
Over the last couple of years, I've been testing my own theories, that is walking my talk here at Conversation Agent and in other social network outposts. Many of you have already remarked in more than one occasion that I'm quite prolific. I can do that because I have a vision, and a plan.
Reviewing some of the activities in that plan:
- this blog archives 1,382 posts written over 4.5 years, and about 9,000 of your comments. That's a lot of free content when consumed daily. Yet only I, and a few determined scrapers, which I'll discuss at the end, know where it is and what it's about. The more popular series of posts have been those on content strategy, followed by case studies, and conversations
- shared 3-5 posts authored by other writers/practitioners daily for 18+ months on Twitter -- you can find more information about what I discovered after about one year on the Twitter @ConversationAge effect; the trend has spiked upward since then to include an additional 67,000 clicks on the shortened URL of just 3 posts shared/day
- sharing doesn't stop on Twitter, I also use Google Reader to share links with my network there and on FriendFeed. I wrote about how I use Google Reader
- then there is the Facebook page for Conversation Agent, where I share many of the posts, not all, and add original commentary and discussions. That part of the integrated plan is still taking shape, so look for new activities there soon
- LinkedIn is good for content intelligence and to gather feedback from my network of trusted connections, see how I've done that here when I asked should you outsource social media?
- by far your favorite part of my mix, in addition to the spontaneity and network on the Facebook page, which is really branching out, are my slide decks. I wrote about textbook content marketing on SlideShare
- I use Flickr for inspiration and visual storytelling, which I stream into my FriendFeed account with commentary
- I've also done a fair number of podcasts, including many BlogTalk radio shows, which you can select on the blog's sidebar, or conveniently on this page created for you
- for multimedia content, I've relied on my other site, which will undergo a transformation in coming weeks. It will make more sense, then
You see how my existing content mix includes a lot of the content from the community, integrated with my own curation and facilitated conversation. It has grown very organically, and hopefully has been very useful to you.
In part due to the sheer number of sites that have began scraping this content at an accelerated pace (e.g., the first response had "bemused" as emoticon), and mostly due to a focus on creating a better mix that takes into consideration content usefulness and convenience, as I learned from your interactions across outposts, I will make several changes in coming weeks.
I will still publish fresh and free content here. More conversations, books and tools reviews, and will add my own take on industry changes, campaigns, who's doing good work and why. There will be new elements in the mix, which I know you will enjoy – some will be free, some won't.
Thank you for reading, for your great comments, on which I plan to build more conversations, and look for an update on what's available in coming weeks. Your time and attention are precious to me, and so is your take.
Do you evaluate your content mix periodically? Is that a useful exercise? How many of your changes are due to customer feedback? Do you see your plan through before making those changes to verify with facts?
[to me, content is like a good Italian meal, an excuse to be social, learn, have fun]