Content Creation

You don’t engage in social media activities for the fun of it (although it can be fun). You’re in business, and you have business goals to meet. You think that using social media will help you meet those goals — like making money — but how. You need a clearly defined social media strategy. Strategic clarity will guide you in meeting those goals. Without clarity, your social media activities become scattershot and vague. They lack energy because they lack focus.

Focus on your social media goals

Why are you engaging in social media? To build relationships, to position your company as a thought leader, to better understand your customers’ needs, to build credibility through word of mouth, for direct sales. Whatever your goals, you need to clearly understand them and focus your content on helping you reach those goals. Always ask yourself, what action do we need potential customers to take to help us meet our goals?

Match your content to your audience

Who is your audience. Right now. In the particular social media channel you’re using. Are they people who don’t know you? Show them that you have insights about industry trends. Offer original research, link to other highly regarded sources of information. Are they prospects who know your brand but don’t know that you have a solution to their problem? Use customer stories that demonstrate that you’ve solved similar problems for others. Are they almost ready to buy but aren’t sure who to buy from? Use content that compares you to your competitors or content that implies a recommendation. Include case studies and examples of how your ideas were applied successfully.

Make it clear — it’s not about you!

When considering your content, your audience is asking themselves one question: Why should I care? They are only engaging with you because they believe there’s something in it for them. You need to make it clear that you appreciate that, and that your content has been created specifically because it has something in it for them.

For more information

• Social Media Content: 10 Ways to Energize Your Conversation
• Social Media Examiner: Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
• Survey of B2B Buyers’ Use of Social Media

Online video is fast becoming a marketing staple. According to research by Unico, fifty-five percent of marketers are currently using videos, with another 20% planning to use them in the next 12 months. Video is a particularly good tool for showcasing brief snippets of thought leadership. It engages your audience in ways that images and words cannot. And for that reason alone, you should add it to your mix of thought leadership marketing methods.

I just came across a fascinating website for creating video slideshows — animoto. You can create a 30-second video for free; for $30 a year you’re not limited to 30 seconds; and for $249 a year you can remove all the references to animoto and make the video totally your own. It’s a great tool for those on a very tight budget or those just learning how to implement video in blogs or websites (yeah, that’s me raising my hand).

The tool takes graphics or slides or even short video clips and creates quick, professional looking videos. You can edit the videos, add text, add music, and even remix to automatically create a different version using the same images.

I created the video above very easily using the automated tools of the animoto software and images that we already had of content we’ve created.

There are other free video tools available that I have yet to try. Screenr lets you record your computer screen. You can easily create a video of a slide presentation or demonstrate how to use an online tool. Pixorial and JayCut are free tools for editing your videos online, adding text or special effects. So take a look at these tools and let me know how they work for you.

More Information on Video

• Eight Ways to Use Video to Boost Your Marketing
• Online Video Best Practices
• Videomaker: Your Guide to Creating and Publishing Great Video
• Video Production Tips

We just launched the first issue of our free monthly newsletter, B2B Content Marketing. The newsletter offers tips that will help you generate and nurture leads, improve customer retention, and position your firm as a thought leader in your market. B2B Content Marketing features include the following:

• Custom Content, where you’ll discover best practices for writing, editing, designing, producing, and distributing great content, both online and in print;
• Content Critique, where you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t with our detailed analysis of a firm’s content marketing practices;
• New Research, where you’ll get the latest information on B2B content marketing best practices; and
• Helpful Links, where you’ll be linked to sources of content marketing best practices, events, blogs, and more.

So be sure to check it out and subscribe today (if you subscribe now we’ll send you a copy of our forthcoming e-book, Building Your Brand with Thought Leadership Marketing as soon as it’s published).

Now that you’ve put all that effort into creating your great thought leadership content, what are you going to do with it? You probably published it originally to engage your prospects and customers. But to reach new and larger audiences you should regularly republish your content on a variety of online media sites. Your content will not only show up when people search those sites for your topic, but these postings can help you move to the top of general search engines as well. For example, when you search “thought leadership marketing” in Google, an e-book that I posted on Scribd shows up in the top ten listings. That’s higher than this blog!

So, where should you publish? Here are my top ten sites for repurposing your content (and I recommend that you use them all).

• SlideShare
• WhitePapers.org
• BNet
• BetterManagement.com
• Scribd
• Manyworlds: Thought Leadership for Business
• YouTube
• Ezine Articles
• ArticleBiz.com
• BusinessIntelligence.com

Do you have any sites you’d like to recommend?

The following 10 errors in grammar and style bug me. When I’m reading thought leadership marketing content and come across one of these, I stop reading. And I wonder why a “thought leader” is making this kind of mistake. I’ll continue to read, usually, but I’m now questioning the credibility of the author. There’s no excuse for making these mistakes. So just follow my advice and your credibility as a writer will go unscathed.

Comprised of

This one’s easy. Comprised of is wrong. Always. Just don’t use it. It drives me crazy when I read it. If you must use comprise, use it without of. Wrong: An office is comprised of desks, chairs, and computers. Right: An office comprises desks, chairs, and computers. Unfortunately some dictionaries are allowing the use of comprised of because it’s been misused so much it’s now somewhat commonplace and therefore somewhat “acceptable.” Not by me!

, and

Place a comma before and when it introduces an independent clause but not when it separates two predicates. What’s that mean you ask? Notice that in “The early records of the city have disappeared, and the story of its first years can no longer be reconstructed” the group of words before the comma has a subject (records) and a verb (have), and the group of words after the comma has a subject (story) and verb (can) as well. In this case, use the comma. In “He has had several years’ experience and is thoroughly competent”, don’t put a comma before and because He is the subject of the group of words before and (“He has had several years’ experience …”) as well as after (“He is …  thoroughly competent.”).

Capitalized Words

Don’t capitalize words willy-nilly. You capitalize a word when it’s a name or a title. It’s not good enough to just be a noun, even an important noun. So if you’re writing about a Marketing Department, don’t capitalize it, like I just did, unless you’re talking about a specific marketing department that’s officially named Marketing Department.

It’s its

It’s means it is. Always. It’s a contraction like don’t (do not), shouldn’t (should not), won’t (will not). You get the point. Its is the possessive of it. It belongs to or possesses something. “My BlackBerry lost its connection.” We often confuse the two because most possessives use an apostrophe: “I lost my BlackBerry’s case. Yes, that’s right, I lost its case.” If you’re not sure, just read the sentence as if it says it is. If it doesn’t make sense, then it’s its.

Then than

Use then to refer to time. Use than to compare two things. If you’re not looking to know when (then) use than. Now isn’t that easy.

Dangling participles (What?!)

A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject. Participial phrases are short groups of words that often begin a sentence to add vigor to your writing, sometimes combining two short sentences or thoughts. The problem occurs when the phrase doesn’t modify what immediately follows. Wrong: “After rotting in the cellar for weeks, Jack threw away the oranges.” This sentence smells. The subject of the sentence is Jack, so the sentence is saying that Jack is rotting in the cellar. But you really want to say that the oranges are rotting.  Right: “After rotting in the cellar for weeks, the oranges were thrown away by Jack.”

Commas again

Enclose parenthetic expressions between two commas. Wrong: “Jane’s husband, Charles paid us a visit.” Put a comma after Charles as well as before. It’s called a parenthetic expression because you could also put parentheses around the expression: “Jane’s husband (Charles) paid us a visit.”

Different than

Different than, like comprised of, is wrong. Always. Just don’t use it. One thing differs from another, so use different from.

” “

I often see writers use quotation marks to emphasize a word. Don’t do it. Use quotation marks around words or sentences because you are quoting something. Or you use quotation marks around a word or phrase when you are trying to imply so-called. In the first paragraph of this blog I referred to “thought leaders.” The quotes mean that I am referring to so-called thought leaders. Note that when I actually use so-called in front of the word, I no long put that word in quotation marks. You can also use quotation marks when you use words in special ways, like for irony or slang. Just don’t use quotes for emphasis. Good writing will take care of that.

However,

Avoid starting a sentence with however when it means nevertheless. Wrong: “The roads were almost impassable. However, we at last succeeded in reaching camp.” Right: “The roads were almost impassable. At last, however, we succeeded in reaching camp.” It is proper, however, to use however to start a sentence when it means in whatever way or to whatever extent. Right: “However discouraging the prospect, he never lost heart.” Note that however in this sense is not followed by a comma.

More Information on Writing Well

• Library Spot: Grammar/Style
• The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser
• The Elephants of Style by Bill Walsh

There are two general types of e-books, each with its own purpose. The first is the e-book that was originally a printed book that has been converted to an e-book (see ebooks.com for thousands of examples). These books are usually 100-400 pages long, almost all words, with minimal design — you know, a book. They are expected to be read starting at the beginning and continuing, reading page after page, until you’ve reached the end. These books are usually produced by publishers and made available for sale, just like traditional books only online. They are usually Adobe Acrobat files or in proprietary formats for e-reading devices like the Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, and others.

The other e-book type is primarily used for marketing, especially thought leadership marketing or content marketing. They are usually 24-60 pages long (some are longer, some shorter). They are designed specifically to be e-books. By that I mean they are designed to be read online. They often have extensive graphics, including photos, illustrations, graphs, sidebars, callouts, a broad range of type sizes. This type of e-book is often read out of order — these books are often reference tools with discrete sections that address specific topics of interest to the reader. The e-books are usually Adobe Acrobat files since the reader, like the e-book, is free. The following are a few bits of advice for creating a well-designed, effective marketing ebook:

• Make it clear to the reader up front what value they’ll get in reading the e-book — and then deliver.
• Write your e-book in chunks — short chapters, short paragraphs, bulleted lists, lots of subheads. This makes it much easier to read online. The e-book examples below demonstrate this perfectly.
• Design the e-book for online reading (most people read online rather than printing ebooks, even long ones). That means thinking about how the reader will see the book on their screen — consider publishing the book landscape. And make your type larger than you would in print.
• Use fonts that are optimized for online reading, particularly for smaller type. For sans-serif faces I like Avenir, Calibri, Franklin Gothic, Frutiger, ITC Kabel, Stone Sans, Transport, Trebuchet, Universe, Verdana. For serif faces I like Berling, Cambria, ITC Charter, Constantia, Georgia, Serifa, Stone Serif, Trump Mediaeval, Utopia. For a great source of fonts, check out myfonts.com.
• Use consistent styles throughout the book to guide the reader. For example, the body text should look the same throughout the book. All titles should be the same font type, size, color — the same goes for subheads, callouts, captions, etc. Roger Parker offers great basic design advice in 14 Biggest e-Book Design Mistakes.
• It’s difficult to read a line of type that is much longer than 4”, so design your ebook accordingly. If you use multiple columns, don’t have the text at the bottom of the first column continue at the top of the second column on the same page, causing the reader to scroll. Use white space or graphics to keep the line width narrow.
• Take advantage of the “e” aspect of e-books – use bookmarks, links, and other devices to make it easier for the reader to navigate throughout the book (think of the e-book as a website).
• Create a table of contents and use page numbers so the reader knows where they are at all times. Provide a link to the contents page on all other pages.
• Optimize your Adobe Acrobat-based ebook for search engines — yes, search engines will analyze your PDF files. How to do it is too complicated for this blog, but Galen De Young wrote a helpful, succinct blog offering 17 Strategies for Optimizing Your PDFs that I recommend you read.
• You want to use your e-book to engage your reader, so you might want to consider something unusual to connect with them. Create a form or survey for them to complete and send to you — with a simple click of the mouse. Add music, animation, video.

The e-book provides writers and designers new opportunities to creatively engage their reader. Take advantage of those opportunities. There are thousands of free e-books available online for you to compare (although many, if not most, are poorly written and designed). Three of my favorites are The eBook eBook by Jonathan Kranz and designed by Ciano Design, MarketTech 08 by Dana VanDen Heuvel, and Lost Control of Your Marketing by David Meerman Scott. If you have favorites, let us know.

Welcome to our Thought Leadership Marketing blog. I’m Jim Pennypacker, CEO of Dance Communications, and we will explore ways to position yourself or your organization as a thought leader in your market. We’ll discuss what it means to think about your market, how to think about it, and then how to communicate your thinking to an audience. We hope this blog becomes an enlightening exchange of knowledge, so please join in the conversation.

We see thought leadership marketing as the intentional positioning of you or your organization as an authority, resource, and trusted advisor on issues that your audience cares about. This positioning is accomplished using a variety of media, including books, newsletters, blogs, e-mail, events…. It allows you to earn trust and build credibility and recognition, differentiating yourself as one who clearly understands the business and needs of your audience. And most importantly, it mobilizes your audience to think and act — engaging with you over the long term.

Thought leaders can be found throughout organizations. The key is to understand who your audience is and to make sure that they see you as the thought leader. You can be an internal thought leader, seen as the go-to person by senior executives as well as others in your organization for your knowledge. Or you can be a market thought leader, demonstrating your knowledge to a broader audience outside your organization, encouraging them to engage with you. And in fact the thought leader might be your organization as a whole, not just you. In any case, you need to understand who your audience is and how to reach them effectively. Most importantly, you need to clearly understand why you want to be a thought leader in the first place — what message you want to convey and what your goals are.

In this brief introduction, we’ve mentioned about a dozen issues that we’ll be discussing in more detail in future blogs — building trust, selecting media, identifying goals, delivering your message, thinking, leading, marketing, and so on. We think you’ll find, as we do, that effective thought leadership marketing requires continual learning. Please join us.

More Information on Thought Leadership Marketing

There are a few other organizations that specialize in thought leadership marketing. In particular we appreciate the work of The Bloom Group, Wellesley Hills Group, and The MarketingSavant Group, and we encourage you to see what they have to say on the subject. Also, Linkedin has a thought leadership marketing group for you to join.