Unchain my heart’s… content

Last week I lamented the lack of true downloadable content and the unnecessary gates that limit their usefulness.

This week, I thought we could look in the other way and see how we can truly liberate content through the various marketing channels.

Today, just simply putting something on your website is not enough, because no one will notice it, and the Googlebot might not even pick it up. Here are 4 simple steps to ensure that your content is set to make a difference in a world full of noise and hype:

1. Make your content really consumable
Of course your content, whether it is a document, a presentation, a graphic or even a short video clip should be relatively light weight, standards-compliant so that it can be readily consumed by Internet audience using any platform/browser/OS.

It is equally important that your content is as easily indexable by the major search engines as possible. For a document, this means that it should be in Unicode or ANSI text encoding, with as little frills as possible. For a flash animation or streaming video, it is obviously harder to get indexed, but pay attention to the file name, keywords and metadata as well.

2. Tell the world about it
This step is rather obvious. you need to tell the world about what you have just uploaded, in as many channels as is appropriate. Today, Facebook and Twitter have all the buzz, but do not forget the other social media channels: Digg, Reddit, Delicious, etc. To really use these well, you need to devote some amount of effort into building your own network, your virtual persona and your credibility before you can use them to broadcast your content.

3. Track the audience’s interaction with the piece
  Be sure to set up elaborate tracking mechanisms to track readers/downloaders/viewers of your content. Most social content sites offer some degrees of viewer analytics, but you can also use free tools such as bit.ly, tweetburner, ow.ly, SimpleTrackBack to track mention or visit to your content.
  It is also helpful to set up social monitoring reports to track and capture any interaction around your content. Tools like TweetLater, SM2 (by Techrigy, now Alterian) let you set up keyword monitoring of major social media sites) and also send you a daily report of all those instances.

4. Be ready to respond and interact with your audience
Publishing the content is just the first step. You are tracking the audience so carefully because you want to respond and interact with your audience. Approach this with an open mind and take criticism or skepticism in stride. After all, if people are offering comments on your piece, you have already achieved 70% of your goal in publishing the content: be heard and be known. You should always offer explanation and engage responders in meaningful conversion, and never forget to use the opportunity to bring up even more content you already have sitting around.

These are the steps we would recommend to our portfolio companies as part of our business development services performed at OpenView Labs to help those companies excel in sales and marketing execution.