While in a single blog post I can’t tell you how to be a good writer, photographer, or producer, I can offer things you can think about when you’re creating your content. Look at the following list as a checklist before and after you create the content. Always ask yourself, does my content achieve these elements?

Eight things to consider when you’re creating online content:

1. The headline sells the content

Your content’s headline is the advertisement to get people to open and consume the content. Don’t take it lightly. I often begin my blog posts with a headline idea, but then revisit it when I’m done with the post to see if I can make it more enticing.

2. Social networking is not broadcasting, it’s thru-casting

To get the network effect of social networking, your audience needs to pass along your content. If you create a piece of self-serving content that no one else would want to pass along then all you’ve done is broadcasted your message. You want to go through your audience. Want content can you create that someone wants to pass along?

3. People pass along content that makes them look good

People don’t forward content for egalitarian reasons. They share content for selfish reasons. Those reasons are often very subtle and that’s why no one calls it selfish, but if I share a piece of content about “The Celtics” I’m advertising to others that I’m a fan of the Boston Celtics. It makes me feel and look good to be associated with the NBA team. No one sees it as selfish, but that’s what prompted my desire to share the content. I’m not sharing it because I’m working really hard to get the Celtics more publicity.

4. Does the content have a purpose?

All good content does one or more of the following: it entertains, informs, or provokes an emotional response. If you can do all three, then your chances for pass along increase that much more.

5. Tell a personal story that others can relate

When you create story-based content you’re giving your audience the option to sympathize and relate. No matter what content you create, can you connect it to a story so that it’ll be memorable? Whenever I blog, my most popular articles involve a personal story. I get an even better response if that personal story is me complaining about something. But that’s just my brand.

6. Interview others

You don’t have all the answers, nor should you let your audience believe you have all the answers. If your audience sees you interviewing others it increases your sphere of influence. Through social media and search, the act of connecting your brand with others’ knowledge and stories raises your visibility.

7. Create a lot of content

You never know what piece of content is going to stick and people appreciate and recognize publishers who generate a lot of content.

8. Don’t follow models

Tons of people will tell you that you need to write in lists, create “how to’s,” or some other standard technique that consistently ropes people in to your content. Yes, these techniques work, but they’re tired. Your job is to find your own voice and brand and get people to gravitate towards that.

This is far from an exhaustive list of how to create good content. In fact, it’s just an initial guide of questions to ask yourself as you’re building the content. Are you addressing all of these issues? And to those of you creating great content, what questions did I forget to ask?

For more, read my article on Mashable, “HOW TO: Jump-Start Your Career by Becoming an Online Influencer.”

Creative Commons photo credit to reinvented, christopher.woo, splorp.

One of our favorite techniques that we haven’t talked about much is actually a throwback, and that’s supporting your community. What that means is providing support to networks, often non-profit or generating very little profit, so that the communities can still exist and function.

Being a community supporter is huge:

• You’re providing a much needed product or service.
• You’re providing the funds necessary to allow the community to exist and the members to stay connected.
• In turn you’re seen as a connector and a provider to the community.

The community support could be (and is often) as simple as purchasing jerseys for a local little league team or buying bagels and coffee for an industry meetup.

Tie that into social media and content production and it can actually be an incredibly powerful marketing technique.

• Build industry leadership and recognition through community support.
• Connect to the most passionate members of the community. They’re the ones actively involved in community networking events.
• Be seen as an influencer and a connector allowing the community to thrive. That goodwill comes back to your organization in spades.

Have I convinced you of the importance of being a community supporter? If so,…

How can you support your community?

Here are some suggestions of ways you can provide value to your community, and in return receive value back.

• Interview industry luminaries: If you’ve got connections with the elite in your industry, reach out to them, interview them, and share that content with your community by publishing the content on your blog and the online community’s blog. This just falls into the overall advice of creating and publishing media for and about the community group.
• Promote the community’s events: Use your channels-social media, email marketing, website, and blog-as additional marketing channels for the community group.
• Volunteer services: Community groups need the same services that most businesses have. Got an accountant, a designer, or even a community manager with a few extra hours? Volunteer their services to help out.
• Sponsor community meetups: This can take the form of just giving money, or offering to host meetups in your office.

These are just some initial ideas, but I wanted to stress the importance of small community events and how they can impact the overall goodwill of your business. What I’d like to know from you is what experience have you had supporting community events? How have you brought about support and what value has it returned to you?

Creative Commons photo attribution to tony4carr, BigDuff.

If you want to be seen in search and traded in social media, then you need to make sure your digital marketing strategy, whether it has traditional advertising or not, includes at its core, a content strategy.

It’s easy to say you need to have a content strategy. The question is where do you start, and what considerations must you take into account as you’re building your strategy? Here are some of my thoughts, plus some additional thoughts I culled from a discussion on Quora (“How important is content in a digital marketing strategy?”).

1. Know the breadth of your audience

Your audience is comprised of potential customers, other knowledge leaders, those who see you as a thought leader and pass your wisdom along (a.k.a. “advocates”), and to some degree also your detractors. You want to speak to the needs of that entire audience because they all have potential to help you in their own unique ways.

• Potential customers – Revenue generators
• Advocates – Word-of-mouth marketing force
• Knowledge leaders – Source of more content
• Detractors – Passionate about the space. Can be converted to advocates.

2. Fill the knowledge gap

Your audience requires information to be able to move forward. The question is, “What is that information?”

“[It] rests in the gap between what they do not know, what they conceptualize but wish to understand, and what they understand but want to hone and refine,” said Bonnie Nadri.

3. Utilize content as a relationship builder

“It is said that content is king. I say instead that conversation is king. Content gives people something to talk about. Remember that media is not social, people are,” said Jon Yoffie.

Nathan Ketsdever, a social media & education researcher, echoed Yoffe’s comment saying, “Without content you don’t have any sort of relationship development with a potential customer.”

Years ago I asked the extremely popular blogger Chris Brogan why some of his posts get dozens if not hundreds of comments and others only get a few. He said that the posts that get more conversation are not finished. He purposely leaves them open ended, inviting conversation. The ones that get less response are often him pointing to content somewhere else, sending people off of his site.

4. Hit the street to find sources of content

The people at the highest levels of your organization are often the worst people to ask for expertise as to what are your audience’s top concerns today.

Charlotte Ulvros, CMO at Mynewsdesk advises, “Check with customer support, your experts in R&D etc and maybe even your internal communicators for ideas. They have so much knowledge about the product, the customers and the internal happenings but are often forgotten.”

5. Resist the urge to talk AT your audience

To deliver a successful content strategy you have to lose the marketing attitude of all corporate communications being about delivering your “message.” No one, and I mean absolutely no one, cares about your message. They care about themselves. To reach that audience, you need to lose the broadcast attitude and step into the conversational attitude.

Nadri echoes this belief: “Most business drivers seek to tie strategy to desired outcomes and this often either bypasses or obliterates the mutually beneficial exchange that most digital seekers crave. Anyone can talk AT them, some can talk TO them, but the core of a solid digital marketing strategy is to find the path to engagement and interaction–to talk WITH them.”

6. Extend your knowledge through curation

You can’t know everything, and if you do know everything you garner that intelligence through others. Always seek value from others. As mentioned earlier, look within your organization, but then look to your partners, experts, customers, advocates, and even detractors.

7. Map content strategy out for best SEO results

Just pushing out content with no actual editorial plan is the equivalent of flapping your wings and standing in place. You’re doing something, but it’s not aiming towards an end goal. Have a strategy as to what your voice and content will be, and actually work with an SEO team that can help you determine what those keywords and phrases will be to attract the most traffic over time.

8. Deliver content at time of need

“Content Strategy is not about pushing content into channels–there’s no shortage of content out there–it’s about anticipating needs and delivering relevant information that supports your business objectives,” said Derek Phillips, Content Director at Critical Mass.

Timeliness of messaging is an obsession in advertising and it should also be an obsession of content creation. There are simple things you can do to plan for content creation in time of need (e.g., “Last minute tax tips” in early April) and you can also be curating feeds of information (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, blogs) to see what’s top of mind right now.

9. Support your sales cycle

Content can feed all five stages of the purchase cycle:

• Phase 1: Discovery
• Phase 2: Research
• Phase 3: Purchase
• Phase 4: Use
• Phase 5: Additional Purchase

“Relevant content needs to be mapped to the journey the buyer takes from stage 1: uninterested and unaware in your firm to the final stage: loyal customer. Mapping what content is relevant at each stage and how you plan to deliver that content is the issue,” explained B2B marketer Chris Fell.

For details on how that works, read my whitepaper, “Be the Voice^SM” – Build Your Business by Becoming your Industry’s Thought Leader.

This is your job

This advice applies to everyone. And as summation, I thought I’d include this gem from Gary Vaynerchuk quoted by Timo Mouton, Online Marketing Manager at Explania.com:

“Regardless of what business you’re in, you’re really in the content business.”

Creative Commons photo attribution to Shane Kelly (2), Ed Yourdon, and Stuck in Customs.

Influence measurement services such as Klout and Kred are trying to ride that wave of attaching a numerical indicator of our ability to influence others. I’m a little down on these services solely because they predominantly just measure Twitter behavior and they give higher credence to the sharer of content than the creator of content (read: “Do Online Reputation Measurement Services Like Klout and Kred Support a New Kind of Plagiarism?”)

Regardless of the debatable quality of these services, they’re being used to easily determine influence. The question is do we understand the theoretical underpinning of what creates “influence?”

When do you influence?

When we talk about “influencers” we’re looking for those individuals that have the ability to affect others.

Here are some theoretical thoughts on influence:

• You can’t bestow the title “influencer” to yourself: While you can call yourself a doctor, lawyer, or whatever other profession, you can’t call yourself an influencer. That’s a title that’s bestowed upon you by someone else, and never directly to you. Someone who values your thoughts and content will refer to you as an influencer to another.
• Influence is different than having an audience: An audience member is one who is tuned in and entertained by what you do and say. To influence goes a step further and causes one to take action Or they can cause you to make a behavioral/emotional change.
• We are all influencers: We all have the ability to influence our family and friends.

In a discussion on Quora about “When can you call yourself an influencer” there was amazing consensus that influence is not about counting followers, retweets, etc. Influence is just about your ability to affect change in another person. I’d like to believe that’s true, but people keep saying they don’t look at the numbers, yet it’s the only thing we actually look at when we refer to someone as an influencer.

Enough of the warm fuzzies, how do I know who are the influencers?

Regardless, of the theoretical there is still a desire to uncover who is influential online. That’s why the influence measurement services have done so well. They put a rating to the person and provide the methodology. Problem is no one looks at the methodology. They just look at the number. I see your number is higher. That means you’re more influential, right?

In the discussion, my favorite response was from Yuriy Gumen, VP, Product Management at mBLAST, who in the midst of the theoretical discussion about influence pushed others to realize that we still have to solve the issue of discovering who is influential online. He boiled influence it down to five factors. I added a sixth one, Quality:

• Volume: How much content the person produces?
• Quality: What is the value of the content produced? (this weeds out content farms and spammers)
• Popularity: How many people are “listening” to the person?
• Authority: How many experts are “listening”-citing the person?
• Relevance: Is the content created by the person relevant to your area of interest?
• Action: Can this person produce a butterfly wing effect?

We actually do have ways to measure all of these things, yet the current measurement systems are doing a poor job. They mostly rate popularity, authority, and relevance but only within Twitter. I’d like to see influence measurement systems take all six into account.

In other news, TIME released its list of 100 most influential people today. I made TIME’s list of 100 people they didn’t consider influential.

Creative Commons photo attribution to Anirudh Koul, Photos by Mavis, and laubarnes.

Show me yours before I show you mine

The reason these “install this app” requests were so universally abhorred is because they were asking to give up personal information with no perceived return in value. The app gets to track everything I read and broadcast it out to my entire personal network? What I do get out of it except reduced privacy?

One may argue that the return in value is the actual article itself or the knowledge of what your friends are reading. But that’s already happening. People share articles they want to share and there’s no requirement to be tracked by an app on Facebook in order to read it. What’s the value return for me? My personal online behavior has a lot of value. I’m not just going to give it up because of one interesting article I saw that I could easily view by another means.

Luckily, I’ve seen a dramatic decrease in these apps. Hopefully they’re vanishing.

We accept usability tracking when we really don’t understand what’s going on

Even though our behavior online is being tracked via online ad networks, it’s generally confusing to us as to what’s being tracked and how we could opt out of it. But when we’re asked point blank, “Do you want your behavior to be tracked online to better serve up ads and other content,” the answer is most often, “No.”

Four years ago I attended a conference called the SWAT Summit where a representative from the research firm IDC presented a study that showed that people didn’t want their online behavior tracked to serve up ads. But then later in the study the representative showed that a huge percentage of people used free webmail programs like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail that are advertiser supported and DO track the content of your email to serve up more targeted advertisements. I asked the IDC rep, “Have you actually done a cross analysis between the people who said, ‘I don’t want my behavior tracked to serve up better ads’ and the people who use webmail tools.” She didn’t, but she said she would get back to me on that. It’s four years later, and I’m still waiting for her to “get back to me on that.” (As a side note, in the history that I’ve heard that phrase, “I’ll get back to you on that,” no one has ever “gotten back to me on that.”)

It was amazing to me that IDC hadn’t seen that obvious headline. “People’s Desires for Ad Behavior Contrast their Actions.” This may because of ignorance, or it may be out of laziness, or it may because they’re willing to give up personal information if they are FIRST presented with a very positive value exchange. (e.g., “How would you like this really cool free email program?”)

Automatically sharing our online behaviors is a combination of noise, a privacy intrusion, and phenomenal behavioral data

Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about how sharing will be the default action of any online behavior. So much of what we do is being shared, sometimes with our knowledge, and sometimes without. For example, I often don’t realize it but every time I listen to a song via the service MOG, it gets shared out to my network. Don’t you have guilty pleasure music? Would you want that information spread to ALL of your contacts?

With regard to the automatic sharing of articles that people are reading, this is completely inappropriate because the reader hasn’t had a chance to judge whether the article is worth sharing. All that’s been proven by this application is here’s a headline that is enticing enough to get your friend to click on it. Is there a way to take that broadcast back and say, “Wait, I clicked on it but then quickly realized it was useless and I don’t want my followers to think that I approve and recommend this article”? Yes, you could do that by deleting your post, but it’s already out there before you made the decision. There’s no need for these services except as a privacy intrusion. People are already sharing articles and they’re doing it after they’ve made the decision that it’s worthy of sharing.

Ironically, this overwhelming volume of content was the number one complaint that I heard at the SXSW conference. Here’s a video I shot at the Mashable party at SXSW for Dice.com where people were talking about their social media pet peeves.

Here’s the full response to that Facebook status update. What do you think?

Creative Commons photo attribution to marc_smith.

Success in engagement requires flipping that thinking. How can you help your audience express themselves or have a desired experience through your brand? What environment can you create that allows the customers create an experience on their own. You will never have any success if you try to force them to engage by shouting at them with marketing messages. In fact, that usually delivers a negative engagement, explained Paul Greenberg, godfather of CRM, who talked with me at the Zoho User Conference, Zohlics, at Burlingame, California (Disclosure: Zoho is a client of Spark Media Solutions, my business).

The main trick to successful customer engagement is to give the user a desired personal experience through your brand. Let’s take a look at some successful examples:

Examples of good customer engagement techniques

• Simpsonize or OfficeMax’s “Elf Yourself” – Perfect example of personalizing something through a brand. In both cases you’re uploading a photo of yourself that’s then being converted via the brand’s image.
• Photo booths – Let people take fun photos of themselves that are post produced with your brand.
• Twitter chats – Give people an avenue and voice to engage with your audience through an event that’s sponsored through your brand.
• American Girl store experiences – As Paul Greenberg explained to me, the American Girl stores allow girls to get their hair done with their doll, see a play with their doll, or have lunch with their doll. When he talked with dads who took their daughters, they all admitted they paid an absurd fortune to do it but would do it again because their daughters loved the experience which is often very difficult to place a price tag.
• Thought provoking questions – If you nail the right nerve, a good thought provoking question via a blog, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever can spark others to express themselves.
• Coupons – The most popular of them all. No one is forcing you to use them, but the company is giving you the option to engage with them in the most preferred method, with their products and services.

In all cases you want to create an environment for a shareable and repeatable experience. If you want any of these things to go “viral” it’s very important to make the sharing experience as easy as possible. Any extra hurdle will reduce sharing dramatically. For example, I’ve seen photo booths that will get your photo online in four days and others that make it available immediately after you take the photo plus there’s a station that allows you to share the photo right then and there with your social network. Guess which photo booth was more effective? The moral is to reduce all barriers to sharing. And I mean all barriers. If you can reduce a single click, step, or action, do it.

What’s your favorite customer engagement technique?

This is definitely not an exhaustive list of all the different ways one can spark customer engagement. I’m eager to hear your favorite techniques. Please add them in the comments below.

Creative Commons photo attribution to Amycgx.

Luckily for me and a fellow classmate, Sheldon, the demand for statistics tutoring was at an all time high. The two of us were in incredibly high demand and we fortunately made a lot of pocket cash during college.

The greatest benefit of teaching and writing about statistics at that time was that I really got to learn the subject. While studying and taking tests was valuable, it didn’t lock into my brain until I began teaching.

Since those days in college I’ve noticed that my understanding of subject matters are always heightened if I actually write about the subject. It is for this reason I suggest you do the same.

Here’s my advice on how to learn through publishing (NOTE: My suggestions are very focused on taking notes at conferences and events):

Taking notes is not enough

So often I see people taking notes at a conference and it appears to be just busy work. Many people feel that if they’re not taking notes, they’re not actually doing anything. The problem is we rarely take the time to look through our notes and make sense of the information. While the act of writing something down helps in the memorization process, it isn’t until you review that content, organize it in your own thoughts, and then regurgitate it with your own spin that it becomes a part of what you truly understand.

Don’t just submit a summary report for the office

If you’re sent to a conference by your company, you’re often required to come back and report on your findings. Why people treat this as some sort of top secret mission, I don’t understand. All the content at the conference (except for private conversations) is public information. There’s no reason your report should be isolated to just your company. Anything you write for your office that doesn’t have specific private mentions of what your company is doing should be made public as a published blog post or other type of media (e.g., podcast).

Publishing helps you organize the data collection process

If you know you’re going to be writing some content from a conference or some other event, you will (if you’re smart about it) collect the information in a logical way. When you’re done collecting the content, you want it to help you with the writing of your final product. For example, you might write a summary post of the highlights of the event. In such a case, you’ll start to note the best stuff at the event as you’re collecting information. BTW, you don’t learn this overnight. It takes a while to start to understand how to efficiently collect information for production.

Challenge the status quo

Often you will hear information at an event that doesn’t settle with you, or doesn’t make complete sense. Don’t assume it’s gospel because the keynote speaker, who got paid $10K, said it. Challenge the claims. Engage in debate. Ask a question during or after the session. Write about it on your blog and send the speaker a link to your article asking him or her to weigh in.

Attract like-minded people

By putting a post out on a certain subject you have announced to the world that this is an area of interest to you. The act of reading your article qualifies you as someone who is also interested in this type of content. Publishing is essentially an excellent “interest” matchmaker.

Ask your audience questions

It’s one think to attract like-minded people, but to actually know who they are and learn from them, you need to ask questions. Go for more introspective questions beyond stating your idea and then saying, “What do you think?” which unfortunately comes off as “What do you think of my brilliant idea?” If they agree with you, they won’t bother. If they don’t agree with you they’ll also not bother, as they probably don’t want to waste their time engaging with you. Instead, show some humility and admit you don’t have all the answers. Say that you’re truly looking for input on said issue and you’re hoping others can offer up some experiential examples.

With that said, I’ll ask you the reader, how do you best learn from others? Does the act of publishing help you, and if so do you have any specific techniques that help you learn better? If not publishing, what other methods do you use?

Creative Commons photo credits to kpwerker, MissChatter, thebrandery.

• Here’s What’s Wrong with Social Media: Sharing without Consumption – on Spark Minute
• Why Sharing Online Content Might Be Too Easy – on Mashable

In summary, the two articles show multiple cases where aggregate sharing of content exceeds actual consumption. While it’s difficult to show motive, the following about sharing and online identity appears to be true:

• If sharing is a means to promote content, then total consumption should be a multiple of total shares, not a fraction.
• People will share content via Facebook and Twitter without watching or reading what they’re sharing. They are reacting to the content’s headline.
• The act of sharing is incredibly simple. It takes only a single click of a Facebook “Like” button or a Retweet button to share across your entire social network.
• Share buttons are usually placed right below the headline. One only needs to read the headline to have the motive to share.
• People share content to their network as an expression of themselves. In aggregate, your online sharing is a component of your online brand.
• Services such as Klout and Kred measure your online presence, but only via microblogging services such as Twitter and Facebook. They put little value of content creation outside of microblogging. For example, they won’t measure this blog post by itself. I will only receive credit for it if someone tweets it out with my Twitter handle, @dspark. If they tweet it out without it, and then someone retweets their tweet then the original tweeter gets the credit and score boost and I receive nothing even though I’m the creator of the content.
• Companies take these third-party ratings as a measure of Internet influence. One friend applied for a job that required him to have a Klout score of at least 30.
• High ratings on these services result in increased prestige but also free services and products. For example, because of my Klout score I received a free phone from Microsoft.

Accessing your audience’s audience

I recently returned from a social media conference in Las Vegas produced by Ragan Communications. One of the repeated themes said by both of the keynote speakers, Brian Solis and Chris Brogan, and many others was the fact that to enable social media you need to speak through your audience. The point of social media is to get access to your audience’s audience. It’s not really “social” media if you just put out a broadcast to your own followers and it just sits there and no one relays it. Therefore, the only way one can speak through their audience is to actually create something that people want to share.

And that comes back to my first point that people are selfish sharers. We share as an expression of ourselves. If a headline alone can speak enough to your personal brand then there’s no reason to actually consume it. If you just want to gain benefit from it, all you need to do is share the content.

Understanding these realities and think about the content you’re creating and the headlines you’re writing. Are you just broadcasting information about how great you are? Or are you putting something out there that would spark a conversation? Or is it something that people want to share that would reflect positively on them? Is it funny, insightful, controversial, informative, and/or speaks consistently to a specific aspect of your industry? If you want others to share your content, think about how you can make them look good, not you. Don’t worry, you’ll get the recognition through the sheer manifestation of their giving you access to their audience. But it can only happens if they share your content. And that’s only going to happen if you give them the opportunity to use your content for selfish reasons.

Creative Commons photo credit to Fire Monkey Fish and Britta Bohlinger.

To cut to the chase, the post revealed some data that showed certain behaviors, specifically from journalists, resulted in higher engagement (e.g., likes, comments, and shares) over average posts. Here’s a summary of the data and advice (The numbers are all in comparison to an average Facebook post):

• Journalists have seen a 320 percent increase in their subscriber numbers since November 2011. Those numbers are mostly fueled by the “people to subscribe to” recommendations.
• Journalists aren’t just broadcasting their articles. A quarter of their posts ask questions and those result in a 64 percent increase in engagement.
• Nearly two-thirds of all journalist posts include links. If they add some commentary to those links it results in a 20 percent increase in referrals.
• Almost a third of the posts include promotional language like “read my post” or “check this out.” Those posts get a 37 percent lift in engagement.
• Twelve percent of the posts have photos. Posts with photos get 50 percent more likes than posts without photos. Photos in general can increase engagement from 200 to 400 percent.
• Current events with commentary and analysis triple their likes and get twice the number of shares.
• Direct pleas, such as reader shout outs will result in quadruple engagement. Asking for recommendations will triple comments.
• Humor is your best friend as it has been for journalists resulting in 1.5x “likes” and 5x more shares.

Personally, I’ve tried many of these behaviors and while I couldn’t give you the exact statistics, I would agree with Facebook’s study. One thing I would be wary of is the promotional posts. Notice that they’re about 30 percent of total posting. I think if that ratio were to increase the pass along wouldn’t be as favorable.

Do you have any tried and true Facebook posting techniques that work for you? Let us know.

Creative Commons photo credit to Halans.

1. Not only are you competing with others on products and services, but you’re also competing to be your audience’s primary information source.
2. As the quality of your competitor’s content improves, your audience’s expectations increase as well, rendering your content either obsolete or just average.

This article got me thinking about how hard we try here at Intertainment Media to create content and invent new formats. Whether it’s on the Ingaged Blog, the IndyCar fan site Social Racing Grid, or through our services KNCTR and even Ortsbo.

Needs, demand, and figuring out the next big thing in content

Each of the services Intertainment Media produces has different content needs depending on audience demand. But often the audience doesn’t know what it wants and we have to foresee what they want. For example, Apple’s products were not developed out of audience interviews and testing. Henry Ford famously said (or maybe not), “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Asking the audience what they want is often not a good course of action.

Content creation and distribution formats is a never ending game. We constantly have to concern ourselves with the form of content, how it’s being created and presented, plus we have to create the content itself. Each one is a full time job in itself. But to stay relevant, you have to be doing both continuously.

While our content could be very successful today, it could hold no interest tomorrow. We see this all the time as TV shows and bestsellers that were popular one day no longer hold an audience’s interest.

To maintain relevancy, I realized I had to always be asking myself:

• Are you distributing content via a means the audience is currently using and wants to consume (e.g., blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos)
• Are you listening to your audience’s concerns and delivering answers in a timely fashion?
• Is your audience listening to you as a leading voice for information and advice or are they looking to others?
• Are you creating new thought pieces that become pillars for others to create discussions?
• Are you experimenting with different formats of content production and gauging audience reaction and engagement?
• Are you experimenting with different formats of content distribution (e.g., new video sharing tools, chat applications, widgets)?

Uggh, that’s so much, you might think, and you’re right. It is a lot of work. But if you make it a part of your daily thinking then it doesn’t become additional work. It’s part of an ongoing process that’s necessary if you always want to be seen as current, relevant, and interesting with both the content itself and its presentation.

Creative Commons photo attribution to FontShop and Werner Kunz.