ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

Reuters curates Japan earthquake content using Scribble Live

I've been enjoying curating the Tru unconferences and so was interested to see this tweet by Peter Bale, International Programming Director for MSN.

I like the Reuters curation of the Japan earthquake - bringing in user generated content alongside their own real-time reporting and displayed simply - and through Twitter established that Scribbel Live is the curating platform.

There's been criticism of the sensational reporting of the ongoing disaster by news networks so it is good to see a news organisation bringing in a range of voices and sources.

It's a paid-for service but looks good.

When marketing copy just doesn't help - guess the product

Received a brochure through the post the other day. With it was a letter addressed to me and below is the opening line from the letter. The company logo was all over the letter so I knew what I was being sold. But, there is no excuse for flowery writing like this . . .

Inspiration. It's an ambitious word. Conjuring up thoughts of grandeur, brilliance and sway. Quite right, too. But inspiration, in any form, starts with something quite simple: a solitary idea.

And the answer is: Velux windows.

 

Nice piece of aggregation - Guardian at SXSW

The Guardian has produced a great looking page from the SXSW festival in the US which pulls together all the aggregated posts from the Tumblr blogs the writers are using to post content.

Great explanation of how it all works from the Guardia dev blog.

Thanks to Martin Belam for sharing.

Want to produce interesting content? Bring in the community DJ

 

[Pic credit: DJ XTC Only Hit Music]

I ran a track at Tru Stockholm on content. In it we discussed how to create content that people - in this case job seekers, will want to read and share.

One delegate told us that she has a fan page and posts links on it but she finds it hard to make it interesting. I asked if she would find the content she was posting interesting if she was a user and she said no.

In some senses that response goes straight to the heart of the issue. Recruiters, job boards etc think they know what users want. But invariably they don't. Take a look around and see what you think . . .

So, what do users want? Well, if you are producing content and you do not know the answer you really ought to find out. You don't want to spend time and money  on stuff no one reads and your users don't want to be invited to read, view or listen to dull things - they will get bored and won't return.

In publishing a lot of work goes into user personas and what type of content users look at elsewhere and what they would like to look at on your site. That's a good place to start - know who you are writing for and what they would like to see.

Then try things out. One think that came out of our track was this video. We wanted to create a short, fun piece of content that would gets views and get shared. OK, it hasn't had a million views but it got retweeted a lot. It was quick and easy to do.

Another great idea was that of the making yourself the community DJ. Bill Boorman dropped in to our track and talked about the work he had been doing with Hard Rock Cafe and the content on its Facebook fan page. Bill said Hard Rock treats the page as a DJ treats a party:

• Create the environment
• Create the vibe
• Don't do the dancing

This is a good approach - it is about using relevant content to get users interested - Bill has developed a content calendar for the fan page - that enables you to try things out and see what users like. DJs constantly gauge the feeling of a room and change the tempo etc to get things going. This is a good approach to content.

At the Hard Rock, thousands of people have liked the fan page and engage with the brand there - this has really helped the recruitment process - the right kind of people are now in the room (the fan page) and here they get to hear news announcements first. They are treated as special, because to the brand they are.

Outside of Facebook, always consider curating content because it brings value to the community - I did that hear with Tru London and Tru Stockholm. Michael Carty does it here on XpertHR. You will see by the stats - views, comments, RTs - whether it is valuable content. It usually is.

Why it pays to curate content

This is an example of the value of curated content but before I start let me clear up the misleading title - no one paid me for the curation I am about to describe. It would have been nice but I actually wanted to do it anyway.

Also, let me get the downside of curation out of the way now and that is that it takes a lot of time. You can pull feeds of tagged or hastagged content but if you want to hand craft the content ie put it into a new bog post with headline, link, image and them let people know about it then it takes time. Be warned.

Oh, and I am awaiting access to Storify - I hear that could be good for this type of curation. I also did quite a lot of this sort of thing at Reed Business Information (where lots of my former colleagues do this kind of thing) where we used tools such as Coverit Live to curate content.

The curation project I am talking about here is this post that aggregates all the blog posts from the Tru London 3 recruiting unconference. All I have done is pulled together all the posts that have been written about the event (last count 52).

NOTE: if this event had NOT had a hashtag this piece of curation would have been a nightmare. As it was I followed the tag on Tweetdeck and double checked what I pulled from that with a Google search. 

Taking the time to create such a post brings these main benefits:

Good search rank

Your efforts will be rewarded with high placements in the search engine results page  - especially if you are curating event content and lots of people write about it. I curated posts from the Tru London 3 recruiting unconference. Search for 'Tru London 3' in Google and this is what you get.

Add value for other readers/writers

You provide value for those who attended the event, those who blogged about it and those who did not attend the event. You have all the content in one place. Looking at the referrals to the post I see it has been bookmarked in Delicious. By adding a line about the post your including you are also adding a filter - a help to users to let them know what that post is about.

Provide content for other services 

You enable others to use the links to help them produce newsletters or ebooks or whatever else they might use them for. You will get credited for your efforts (and complain if you don't) which is good for you - your efforts have not gone unnoticed. Far from it, you get known for the person who is helping create more value from the content

Build connections

You can provide commentary on your curation project via Twitter or other channels - see below for an example tweet. This enables you to build up connections and reinforce relationships (if you are already connected/have met face-to-face).

This is a straightforward example of how you can approach curation. It does take time but it does add value for others and anyone can do it (who cares enough to want to)- it is especially useful for events.

 

When was the last time B2B content made you laugh?

Just because it's business to business doesn't mean the content has to be serious all the time. Does it?

Of course not. Why? Because we are all human and we like to laugh and to be entertained. I think B2B journalists tend to forget that readers are human and do actually enjoy the lighter side of life.

I have been looking back at some of my B2B acievements and some of them make me smile - the Diet Coke sponsored IT hunk of the year at Computer Weekly, for example, makes me laugh and cringe in equal measure. To think we printed a gallery of 60 hopefuls. I won't go on.

But seriously, content that puts a smile on your face will probably be shared and is probably far more engaging than some journalists might think.

A good example of engaging and funny B2B content is Tim Relf's Field Day blog over at Farmers Weekly.

Amazon Jobs a jobs board for the future?

Amazon Jobs - now there's a good idea. What a jobs board could look like  . . . well, I think it is :-)

Whilst at last week's recruiting unconference Tru London 3 Amazon croppped up in a couple of discuussions. This got me thinking and the result is this post - this is me thinking aloud so apologies if it it is not well formed.

First, Amazon is the leading cloud services provider so it could run all agencies' applicant tracking systems in the cloud. So why don't agencies just hand over that responsibility to the cloud? Amazon has the expertise that could reallly transform what an ATS could do.

And then there is Amazon's understanding and application of data - again something that could transform the quality of applicant data for recruiters and agencies.

It would also bring its product marketing expertise to jobs - imagine what that could look like.

If this is a simplistic view of what an Amazon Jobs could do for agencies then it is because I am not a recruiter. Apologies NOW.

What could really be a game changer is if jobseekers were treated to the Amazon user experience. I am a big fan of the Amazon user experience, I like the way Amazon talks to me, presents me with relevant content and how it uses data on people 'like me' to refer me to things that might be relevant for me.

User generated content and how it is organised and presented is great. It is subtle, targetted and relevant. If I want more I can find it. So, I am a jobseeker (true, actually) and I visit Amazon Jobs. What do I get?

• Access to the biggest jobs database in the UK - up-to-date, no replication
• An oppoortunity to give Amazon Jobs information that will relate to the type of information I will be served up. Easy to edit and update profile
• Great search and recommendation experience based on other people 'like me' . . . people like you also searched on etc
• Great content that supports the type of job search I am carrying out - and this is a biggie for me. I would expect to see high quality, very focussed content that would help my job search. This is not done very well by job boards right now.

As I said, these are a few thoughts and not well formed. Maybe this type of job board already exists?

The more I think about it the more I think an Amazon Jobs sounds like a good idea.

10 social media job descriptions in a wordle

One of my job search RSS feeds is for social media jobs. Today I thought I would take 10 advertised jobs and create a Wordle of the job descriptions to see if there is anything surprsing.

Wordles work by making words bigger based on their frequency. So, the more a word has been mentioned in the 10 job descriptions I have picked the bigger it appears.

I don't think there is anything surprising. Most employers are looking for skills and experience in the following areas: social media, content, creativity, engagement.

One thing is for sure: these are marketing roles. That makes it more challenging for the likes of me to land such a role. Couple of things occured to me:

1. I can understand that businesses put social media into the marketing function but what of other areas of the business that use social media? Anyone who creates content on a regular basis will use social media too. Optimising the rest of the business could be very powerful for businesses
2. Other functions in the business such as internal communications, HR and learning and development are starting to use social media tools so I would have expected to see some roles advertised that reflect this. That is not the case - not so far anyway.
3. The job descriptions make little play of internal engagement with social media ie these are outward facing roles. Surely this is a missed opportunity as other teams within businesses will be using social media tools internally and externally. Will social media become siloed in marketing?

The job descriptions used:

1. Social media creative lead
2. Social media community executive
3. Social media analyst
4. Head of acquisition marketing/social media marketing
5. Social media account director
6. Social media content producer
7. Social media director
8. Social media manager
9. Social media consultant
10. Digital social media analyst
    

 

Why not adopt the unconference model within your business?

This week I'm going to the TruLondon recruiting unconference. I went last year (that's one of my pictures from last year's event) and really enjoyed it - see my post on XpertHR.

This year I am going back in a freelance capacity to help out Lesanto and the blog squad ie I will be producing content from the event. I'll also be listening in to the different tracks and look forward to meeting some interesting people in the recruitment, HR and social media world.

To find out more on this week's event, look at:

The TruLondon schedule

What is an unconference?

And follow the week's activities on Twitter on the #trulondon hashtag

No doubt the event will be a great success which is why I think organisations should consider adopting this type of format for knowledge sharing and helping build connections internally. Why do I think this?

Marketing wants better media, media wants better marketing

I keep banging on about this fuzzy area where marketing and content live. Today two posts presented the flip sides of the content and marketing coin: content is what business needs and marketing its content is what the media needs.