Six exceptional ways to get your content shared today

If a trees falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Creating great content does your brand no good if nobody sees it. Getting your audience to share your blog, video or coverage to their online network is, clearly a great way to make sure more people see it, as well as see your brand.

I’ve combed the web for advice on getting content shared, as well as adding my own insights and experiences, to bring to you six exceptional ways to get your content shared today.

Pick the right social network

The Digital Buzz Blog looked at how articles on Mashable were shared over a three week period. As you can see from the infographic, each social network has a bias as to what type of content its users share. So, when you’re planning your digital marketing strategy, be sure to focus on the right channels.

Write like yourself, says Lifehacker

“There are millions of blogs on the web today, so it isn’t easy to stand out. However, if you notice, the top or most popular bloggers have large readerships because of their unique voices and perspectives and the interesting things they share.”

Make it easy and compelling

At university, my PR lecturer Bill Nichols drilled into us that everything we do must be easy and compelling. In digital, it must be easy to share your content, by including Like and Share buttons on the page. Your content must also be compelling. Think about what would make you want to share a post, of you weren’t connected to the company in any way. Is it of interest to your friends that like travelling? Or your colleagues in the sales department?

It’s not about you

Most marketers worth their salt know this, but when pressures set in from the powers that be to promote the company/product, or to create a certain volume of content, it can be hard not to give in. As ever, Econsultancy have written a great blog on content marketing, and their opening point is that your content should be about your audience, customers, potential customers, people you want to connect with on some level. And they probably don’t care about you all that much...

Talk to your otaku

Over the past 50 years or so, people have become very good at targeting the mass market, the majority. The thing is, they have become very good at ignoring marketing messages. They actively ignore TV ads, banner ads on websites, celebrity endorsements. So you need to find the people who are listening. Otaku is a Japanese term for a group who are obsessively interested in a certain thing, and Seth Godin advises you to find your Otaku, and talk to them.

People love pictures

It’s a well know fact that imagery helps engage people - from billboard advertising or a press release, to tweets and blogs. And social media platforms are changing to adapt to our love of all things visual. According to SimplyZesty,

“Images are easy to digest, immediately accessible, and don't require effort on the part of the viewer.”

To give you an example of something that has worked really well on social media, that I worked on a few years ago for HSBC. It’s called Expat Explorer, it is a tool based on survey results that lets you find the best place in the world for you to live, based on your priorities. Its blog was so shareable because it always had fresh content, cutting the survey results in different ways. It has a ready made otaku because a lot of people who move abroad create new communities online, and love to connect with other expats, which is what the blog and Twitter feed are all about. It increased its network by getting guest bloggers on to talk about their experiences. It was very visual, as you can see in the tool.

I’d love to hear about any other companies are people who do “shareability” really well.

Getting digital buy-in

In my previous post I mentioned the “we’re all marketers now” phenomenon, as outlined by McKinsey. It made me think about how daunting a prospect this could be for many marketing professionals out there. Making the transition from a sales-focused organisation to a marketing-focused organisation can be a painful process, so how, and why, do you do it?

Now, clearly this is not a particularly new idea, and there are plenty of companies out there who do it very well. The reason I wanted to focus on it in this blog, is because the rise of social media and digital marketing means that the marketing approach makes so much more sense in this new world. If your customer is always connected, your company needs to be prepared for that.

There are two predominant pain points in this transition, which to some extent overlap, and which marketers need to be aware of. The first is that when a marketer walks up to someone not in marketing and says “you’re now involved in digital marketing” it often doesn't go down too well. People are busy, and don’t want to be palmed off with other people’s work. Yet it needs to become part of their daily workload, and management and marketing need to work together to discover the best way to to this.

The second, connected, point is that the majority of people outside the confines of the marketing department don’t fully ‘get’ digital, and digital marketing. There is a huge internal communications campaign that needs to be done to get everyone on board and trained up to become a digitally enabled, marketing-focused organisation. We've all heard the “I’m putting a man on the moon” anecdote, and this even more relevant in today’s market.

For anyone struggling to get buy-in from their peers or seniors on the need for digital to be an organisational effort, I have two resources I think you need to be aware of. The first is a great little presentation called The Ultimate Guide to Explain Digital (To Your Colleagues). It breaks down how each department can (and should!) contribute to the digital marketing effort.

Secondly, my good friend Peter Thomson has written an excellent book on just this topic. It’s called Tickle: Digital marketing for tech companies. Although, it’s definitely not just for those in the tech sector. It goes into detail about how digital marketing-focused organisations operate, and how to achieve the all important buy-in from the top.

As a marketer, getting the whole company of board with digital can seem like an insurmountable task, but it is incredibly important to the success of the organisation. It is fast becoming expected that a customer will get the same experience of the company whether they are interacting with them online or offline. With the right support and resources, it can help catapult your success. Good luck!

Where does traditional end, and digital start?

The debate about digital communications versus traditional PR practices seems to ebb and flow, but I have seen quite a few people writing about it recently. To me, it seems like we need to take a step back and forget marketing for a moment, digital or otherwise.

The US Department of Labour looked into the changing workforce in the 21st Century, and highlights the difference not only in the job roles available today, but they way people search for jobs. Looking at this real world example of the changing way people live helps us piece together how to market to them.

So how does this apply to the PR profession? First of all, Pete Hendrick, managing director, at agency Rocket Communications, said the following in an article on PR Moment:

“I think it's widely recognised that the traditional PR agency of old is on its way out”  

I think key point is that “we’re all marketers now”. Sales organisations are transforming to marketing organisations. And the role of marketing will have to be distributed out across the company, to ensure a clear and consistent message is being sent out from every angle, and we as professionals will need to be able to support this. Whilst in the past, traditional communications channels enabled the marketing department to tightly control the medium and the message, digital is fracturing this, and marketing needs to find a new way to retain control of the message.

In essence it’s about helping our clients find the core message, and identify the channels appropriate to convey that message to the audience. It’s about creating touchpoints, creating the journey or narrative, and creating engagement.

The ability to identify and analyse the needs of others is still key, whether you’re looking at digital or traditional comms, says Social Media Today. I would go as far as to say, you must to be able to understand the needs of others regardless of whether its digital or traditional. In today’s fractured media landscape, we as marketers must be able to guide our clients to their target audience, whether they live their lives on Twitter and get all their news from Google Reader, or still have a Nokia 3310 and have never heard of LinkedIn.