Marketing

Content Marketing and Social Networking: Popular Sites that Work for You

September 14, 2010

“Content marketing” was lauded as the buzzword for 2009. But as we dig deeper into 2010, it’s evident that the buzz hasn’t waned – content marketing still flicks off the tongues of executives everywhere.

OpenView launched a jam-packed Content Marketing Workshop last fall. Speakers included Joe PulizziJonathan KranzAndrew DavisMike VolpeChris Baggott, and Christine Perkett.  Since then, many of our portfolio companies have been executing various strategies and requiring operational support for their own content marketing campaigns.

Don’t have a content marketing strategy in place yet? Here are some pointers on how to get started:

  • At first, don’t worry about what content you’d like to start producing. Take a breather. First, consider the goals you’d like to accomplish with a content marketing strategy. For example, the content you create for brand awareness may be very different than content for lead generation.
  • Plan which customers and prospects you are targeting with your content strategy. To do so, you need a fundamental understanding of your target personas. For more about target personas, check out this blog post.
  • Once you’ve nailed down your strategy, set a content schedule and commit to it. Failing to meet your schedule — such as “forgetting” to update your company blog — is breaking a promise to your customers who expect to see consistent updates.
  • Keep your company’s brand in mind. Overstepping boundaries can lead to an embarrassing flub. For instance, you don’t want to create a rap video of your employees if you’re a prominent financial services organization.

Once you have your goals and strategy in place, it’s time to conquer the Internet. Here’s a list of popular and influential social media channels, with explanations on what they are and what they do, that will help you leverage your content marketing strategy.

Promotion

These sites, perfectly suited for promotion, enable you to post links to different content that encourage your followers to interact with your brand.

Twitter

The 140-character micro-blogging service is a massive success and very much on the minds of millions of people. Many users access the site via third-party mobile apps, meaning Twitter is constant and always on the go. Comcast provides a great example of the power of Twitter. Infamous for poor customer service, Comcast became proactive in repairing its company brand by addressing complaints on Twitter.

Yammer

Unlike Twitter (which can get bogged down with spam accounts and tweets), Yammer is built with the business enterprise in mind. Yammer is used for private communication within organizations or between organizational members and pre-designated groups. Yammer just announced that it reached the one million users mark — an excellent sign of the service’s growth.

FriendFeed

Touting itself as conversational rather than a one-sided blurb machine, FriendFeed allows businesses to share with each other and also reach outside parties.  FriendFeed is a lot like Google Wave—which didn’t get stellar reception due to its rather confusing nature – in that it’s often used as an internal collaboration tool for documents and presentations.

Social Networking

Speaking of buzzwords, social networking is definitely one of the top for 2010. Not only are billions of people logging into their favored social networking sites multiple times a day (on average, Facebook users spend 7 hours on the site per month), businesses have used these tools to create engaging personalities for their organizations.

Facebook

The granddaddy of them all, Facebook now boasts half a billion users and continues to grow. Facebook recently brought its “like” button to the masses – developers can now incorporate the “like” button onto their websites and if a user enjoys your content, it appears on his/her Facebook feed.

MySpace

I mention MySpace not as a recommendation but rather as a site to avoid. While Facebook keeps getting larger, MySpace has seen dwindling numbers and despite efforts to revamp its brand, continues to fail.

LinkedIn

Sharing your accomplishments and making new connections has never been this simple. LinkedIn is the premier business networking site, with over 70 million users in over 200 countries.

Google

: Google tried its hand at social networking with Google Buzz, which immediately exploded with privacy complaints. Its Buzz has since waned, but Google hasn’t given up. Recent reports indicate that the world’s leading search engine is planning a Facebook competitor called Google Me. Keep an eye out for this one.

Video

Create different videos to show your brand’s professional and fun side—just keep it appropriate (read: no rapping grannies).  If video is a medium your company wants to invest a lot of time into, check out this comparison of all the different video sites on the Internet.

YouTube

YouTube is synonymous with online video.  Serving up over two billion videos daily, YouTube is an excellent way to expose your brand to a new audience. All your company has to do is create its own YouTube channel, upload an unlimited number of videos, and distribute that URL.

Metacafe

Metacafe is just like YouTube but with a lower user base and a different type of adult content filtering, a community member reviewer panel, VideoRank, and Wiki-editing of metadata.

Viddler

What differentiates Viddler from the rest of the pack is its paid service for businesses, which includes enhanced features such as a customizable player, the ability to create a private community, detailed analytics, priority encoding, HD encoding, iTunes support, branding and control over advertising, including a revenue-sharing option.

Vimeo

Vimeo is user-generated only – you won’t find commercial videos on this site. This might be a good or bad thing, depending on your angle.

Photos

Give your brand a face by posting pictures from team building events, workshops, and conferences on these sites.

Flickr

Flickr is the most popular option. The site is ranked in the top 50 trafficked websites and hosts more than 4 billion images. Free accounts give 100MB of storage and paid accounts offer unlimited storage.

Photobucket

Photobucket gives users 500MB of free storage, but additional storage requires upgrading to a Pro account.

Picasa

Google’s photo-sharing site was just updated to include photo-editing software from Picnik. This addition could prove helpful if your photos need a touch-up.

Document Sharing

Upload your corporate presentations, white papers, brochures, and e-books to these free sites.

SlideShare

SlideShare originally started as a go-to spot for sharing PowerPoint presentations, but now supports Word docs and PDFs. Posted content can easily be shared on social network channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The site receives over 25 million monthly visitors.

Prezi
Instead of just sharing, why not create a presentation directly on the web?  Prezi has built-in software that allows you to do just that.  Check out Prezi’s step-by-step guide to creating your next slideshow.

DocStoc

and Scribd

These sites are similar in that they both feature posted content and allow uploaders to make a buck off their materials.

Tagging and Sharing

Bookmark or tag your content items so they can be more easily found and shared.

Delicious and Digg

Similar to Facebook’s “like” button, these two social bookmarking sites have icons that are all over the web. The more tags your content receives, the more it’ll be promoted on their respective sites.

Diigo

: Diigo is slightly different in that your Internet “highlights” are stored and organized in the cloud and can be accessed anywhere, including via desktop or mobile phone.  Check out the new features in version 5.0 that enhance the Diigo experience beyond simple bookmarking.

Take advantage of the plethora of available websites to help build, guide and perpetuate your content marketing campaign.  Service providers seem to pop up every single day, so keep your eye out for the latest and greatest.

Content Marketing Director

<strong>Amanda Maksymiw</strong> worked at OpenView from 2008 until 2012, where she focused on developing marketing and PR strategies for both OpenView and its portfolio companies. Today she is the Content Marketing Director at <a href="https://www.fuze.com/">Fuze</a>.