Short form content marketing?!?
Want to learn more about content marketin? Discover how to build a content marketing team with your clients.Yeah, I made that one up just now, largely influenced by some conversations I've had with Joe Pullizzi on creation and growth of his namesake phrase content marketing.
So what then is short form content marketing? Some (including myself) have called this presence building. We do things like schedule tweets and status updates using tools like Hootsuite, Engage121, Tap11 and the plethora of other dashboards out there in order to stay in front of our audience of friends, business associates and customers.
But, I do see a a difference I see between the two phrases. For me, presence building encompasses much more than simply tweeting other's blog posts, mixed in with our own. In part, presence building has quite a lot to do with building the actual platforms. For instance:
All of those things help us and our brands build presence. And, there's a hell of a lot more that goes into it. Trust me.
It was Shel Holtz who calle Twitter a "type of web 2.0 telegraph system" in his book, Tactical Transparency (affiliate link). That phrase has always stuck with me.
I'll argue that things like our Facebook status updates, tweets, captions on the pictures we upload fall into this area. Really, any brief expression of our thoughts, ideas and experiences limited by the character-counting rules of any technology platform falls into this category.
We use this short form content in our everyday online conversations. It helps us to distribute larger object of content to the communities in which we participate. For bloggers especially, the brevity of a tweet makes for a killer gateway drug that can easily hook an audience into wanting a bigger fix.
Want to know my opinion the secret sauce that makes it all work?
First, I think Chris is right. If you come to the social web with an actual desire to be 'social' and talk with folks (rather than at them), you'll do pretty well. Automation isn't evil, but used with the wrong intentions it's great power will definitely cause people to turn their backs towards you and your content. Take away this: automation in social media is like alcohol -- use it responsibly.
But I think there are three more ingredients that make the secret sauce of short-form content marketing so tasty.
For tomorrow, we're going to get a little tactical. I want to show you how I use Hootsuite to make short form content marketing work in my favor. We'll cover three big ideas:
Will you come out to play tomorrow?