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So now I understand communities.
What's my first big step to develop real content for them?
>> A mistake a lot of people make is that they write content that is trying to
establish themselves as the know it all expert.
And that's the worst thing you can do.
And you've been listening now to them for a few weeks, or a few months.
You understand that you've engaged the influencers and the experts.
Let's pretend we're doing our very first piece of content for this audience.
>> Okay.
>> A lot of times people don't know how to start.
I can't just pontificate about something.
So there's a safer strategy.
You should start by instead of saying you're an expert, take your audience,
find a topic that they're really interested in, go out and
with your pool of experts and influencers, find two great articles about that topic.
It could be opposite sides of an argument or it could be the same side.
It really doesn't matter for this.
What you want to do is to take those and put it into a format where you're
essentially becoming an influence,r or an expert, without actually saying that.
And so here's how to do it.
It's really an interesting formula and it works really, really well,
regardless of the community you're going after, regardless of the topic.
The first sentence of your article.
Should talk directly to the target audience.
So if you are going after content strategists, you ought to say content
strategists comma and then make a statement they would all agree with.
So, let's say our articles were on the importance of knowing your audience,
you can say content strategists comma.
It is vital that you understand your audience deeply
to create content that will be really relevant to them.
That simple statement, every content strategist would agree with.
And whether you are going after fashionistas or people that restore cars,
you can always make a statement that they will agree with relative to the articles
that you found because that's the topic you're talking about.
Then the second sentence is where you say as a up and coming content strategist, I
have found two articles on audiences that I think you'll find really intriguing.
And so what you're now saying is, hey, I'm not an expert.
I want to be kind of and I found two that you'd really like.
So, you're starting to filter stuff and
focusing them on something that's really important.
So now, the next paragraph, you simply start by talking about the first article.
Don't throw in your opinions, just talk about it.
So you're going to say, I found a great article by,
and you put in the person's name, and you link to their LinkedIn page.
Who wrote an article in, and you do the publication and
you link to the publications page and the title of the article was this and
you link to the article.
Now you have plenty of links that will help your search engine
when people are searching for your topic.
Then what you do is you simply in three sentences or less summarize the article.
What did it say?
What did it tell you?
Don't do bullet points, don't make it complex.
Just say the basic theme was this and here's what he or she advises to do.
Then what we do is if we're doing a print,
we'll put a picture in between the first article and the second.
Then a second article we treat just identically to the first.
Put in the links, get plenty of citations, don't be confrontational,
don't condemn anything, just say here's what they said.
>> So before we move on, you're the author.
I'm new and I'm nervous and I do just what you said and
you read the summary of what I said about your article, video,
whatever, and you say, he didn't get it.
Am I at risk for getting flamed because I just didn't quite get it or
what's the reaction of the expert going to be?
>> Well here's the thing that's interesting about communities.
Is that if you're in doubt,
or you just aren't sure, take your paragraph and send it to the expert.
And say hey, I loved your article.
I wanted to summarize this in an article I'm writing kind of contrasting two
different views, did I summarize this correctly?
We had one student who was doing it on new music, modern music, and
he sent it to the author, and
the author said, well you're kind of missing a part that you really need.
I'm going to contact you with a world famous composer, who's an expert in this,
and you talk to him and he'll tell you what you're missing.
Well you know, that's great.
People always want to help each other, especially experts.
And so, when in doubt, ask them and you'll find that they'll respond to you.
They're not going to say, well you can't publish it because the more you publish
them, the higher their expertise, if you will.
>> Okay, now let's go on.
>> Okay. >> So you summarized the two articles.
>> Right.
So now all we want to do, we've given the summary.
So now we want to start establishing our expertise or our influence at the minimum.
So what you say is based on my review of this and my, you know, work that I am
doing in content strategy, here are three action items I would recommend.
Or three recommendations, three action items, three tips, that I'd recommend you
consider the next time you do your content strategy or whatever your topic is.
And then what you want to do is you want to have three bullet points.
Not five, not five thousand, three.
And the reason I find three works is that people are really busy, and so you
want to make it so they can immediately remember those and three is enough.
You know, when I close out your blog or
your article I want to be able to remember what you said and so three works.
Alright?
And the other thing is,
when you do your bullet point action items, you make them really short.
A lot of people think well it should be a sentence.
No, it should be two to three words, maximum.
Think strategic.
Go multimedia.
Things like that that I can easily understand and
then what you do is you put those in bold.
You put a dash, and then you can write the sentence to explain it.
>> One sentence?
>> One sentence.
And then, you summarize it with one sentence.
And you're done.
It essentially establishes a piece of content from you that is not
going to cause a adverse reaction within the community and
it's going to be something that they'll find very interesting,
informative, and be able to move forward with it.
[MUSIC]
Candy LeeProfessor
John LavineFounder, Professor and Director, Media Management Center
Randy HlavacLecturer, Medill IMC; CEO, Marketing Synergy Inc
