Come Out, Content, Wherever You Are (How to Repurpose Hidden Content)

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August 2010, Issue 78

Featured Article
Come Out, Content, Wherever You Are (How to Repurpose Hidden Content)
By Jake Wengroff, Global Director, Corporate Communications, Frost & Sullivan; Twitter: @JakeWengroff

We've all been there: fresh out of ideas, nothing to promote. Nothing new to say on the company's homepage, nothing compelling to write in a press release, nothing exciting to share in an e-mail campaign. Turns out that being creative requires....being creative.

Enter social media. Just being creative or clever for the company website or a press release doesn't cut it in the age of tweets, updates, status messages, podcasts, e-books, wikis, message boards, videos, photos and the like. The irony of it all is that the proliferation—or deluge—of online content has actually made marketers' ability to create content even easier.

There is content hiding everywhere within a company's marketing, communications, sales, human resources and senior management departments. Rather than having to keep reinventing the wheel and scramble at the last minute, here are some quick tips to help you when you're in a bind and need fresh content quickly.

1. Keep a file of "evergreen" content.

This can include interesting facts about your client or company, the company's position on ongoing industry issues, or an award or recognition the company won in the last one to three years. Such information is good for use in down times, when no critical news is about to be released, or there is a general lull in the news cycle surrounding the company.

Also, you may want to record when evergreen information is released, and time these items accordingly so that you have a steady flow of information that continually seems fresh. Rewording or rephrasing old news—a challenge—would most certainly be in order.

2. New source material: Your HR manual.

That's right: The human resources policy is ripe material to be tweeted out or added to a company profile on LinkedIn. Well, not the whole manual, but any information related to a company's core values and beliefs should be used in the social media/communications program. In a world in which trust in corporations is put to the test every day, reading about a company's commitment to human capital could bring immeasurable corporate brand integrity.

And for extra credit: Make it compelling enough so that any employee would want to post this on his or her Facebook wall.

3. Salespeople can tell you what they do best.

Every organization these days wants to know how to sell better. Software, seminars, books and websites all give insight into this mysterious corporate function that seems all-important during this ongoing recession. Ask your salespeople for examples of strategies or tactics that worked for them, and keep a list of these best practices. The material can become the source for an article, pitched to a reporter covering the sales industry, truncated into a series of tweets, or recreated into a PowerPoint presentation on SlideShare.

4. Ask and ye shall find.

With so many free online survey vendors out there now (ZipSurvey, ZapSurvey, Zoomerang, SurveyMonkey, among at least one dozen others), you can now easily set up a survey and send the link to your clients and/or suppliers, asking them their opinions of working with you, or also their thoughts on the industry in which you operate. Use the tools to tabulate and analyze the data and voilà—you have information which makes for a nice little press release, article for your website, presentation for SlideShare, and all the Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn updates one can possibly hope for.

5. Go ahead, make a video.

Fortunately and unfortunately, the social web cannot get enough video. Video is the fastest growing category of media consumption, and video is consumed by both consumers and businesses seeking information about a company, technology, products or simply news. However, for all the talk about Flip Video Camcorders (I almost bought the $40 Panasonic version in a Chirp/Redbox kiosk last weekend), shooting quality video remains difficult. Editing it to make it even remotely suitable for viewing inside and outside the company's four walls is even more difficult, time-consuming and expensive, if you require video editing software.

To secure quality video in stealth mode, find out in advance where and when company executives are speaking at events, and contact the organizers for any footage which can be edited and used for your purposes. For even faster video content, turn on a webcam, and record 1–2 minutes of a representative from your company giving opinions or advice on a relevant topic. Some webcam software includes direct integration with Flickr and YouTube, making it even easier.

Will it seem amateurish? The good news is that by now, the world is used to—or even expects to see—homegrown, everyday video. This keeps in step with social media's promise to broadcast the voice of the people.

Repurpose Your Content, but Don’t Let It Get Stale

Finding the sources of content is indeed the difficult part; but syndication of your hard-won content should be easy. What makes for a great press release can also make for a great blog post, pitch campaign to reporters, content for PowerPoint slides for SlideShare and a number of short messages for the Twitter Stream. The ability to syndicate, adjust and repurpose content from one format to another is key for any marketer or communicator involved in a company's social media marketing program.

One more word of advice: Syndicators and aggregators may seem to facilitate this process (i.e., automating your LinkedIn status to create a tweet on Twitter and vice versa), but for each social media property, be sure to make it unique, keeping in step with your presence on that particular site.

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Jake Wengroff is global director of Corporate Communications, Frost & Sullivan.

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