5 Tips on Crowdsourcing Content for Marketing

Content is an essential vehicle for corporate storytelling, attracting and engaging customers to buy, Lee Odden blogs. Organizations are beginning to get that, but struggle with content sourcing and how to scale. Besides hiring an editorial staff complete with corporate journalists, one of the most valuable sources of content for online marketing comes from your brand’s community.

Tapping in to what customers care about related to your products /services and what your brand stands for can be a gold mine of meaningful content. Here are 5 of those tips with some additional commentary based on discussions with audience members at a recent SES San Francisco conference:

Interviews. Raising questions is one of the most basic ways to crowdsource content. The method to employ depends on the desired outcome. Asking the community for suggestions of whom to interview and what questions to ask is a great way to get people involved. Interviewing industry thought leaders provides the brand’s audience with unique content and creates a positive association between the “brandividual” and the company.
Example: Tapping multiple industry thought leaders for their definition of “content curation” for a blog post that received substantial distribution and return visits.

Social Q&A. Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn, and sites like Quora can provide very useful platforms to present questions and attract answers from a variety of people. Of course, your intent needs to be clear and permission for reuse should be obtained before republishing. Those familiar with the Q&A communities can word questions to attract replies from specific influentials who might not otherwise respond to a content participation pitch via email.
Example: Posting a question to LinkedIn related to the “shift in direct marketing budgets to digital“, that received great quality responses and over 30 comments on the post.

Contests Resulting in Content. Examples of contests in which consumers produce their own videos and share images abound on the social web. Search engines love any kind of content, especially text.
Example: In the past, Marketing Pilgrim ran a great contest for a search marketing scholarship. The articles written by contestants drive traffic to Andy’s website and also become content on it. To top it off, the articles were compiled into an e-book.

Comment Feedback Loop. One of the most meaningful ways for a community to engage with a brand is through comments on a company blog. Asking readers to participate in a dialogue by commenting can result in content that is better than the original blog post. Brands can then recognize blog commenters by drawing attention to the “best of” comments through a separate blog post or in a newsletter.
Example: See TopRank’s Online Marketing Newsletter for an example of this in action, where comments are curated into a section called, “What the Online Marketing Blog Community Has to Say”.

Book Authoring by Community. Reaching out to industry experts to share their insights as part of a larger project, such as a book in print or an eBook can be very effective.
Example: Author Michael Miller did this with Online Marketing Heroes, of which I was a part. He interviewed 25 successful marketers; the results of those interviews became the book published by Wiley. Numerous companies have connected with industry thought leaders for content and compiled the responses into an eBook. A good example is Jay Baer’s – Staggering Social Media Insights: The Best of the Twitter 20 eBook.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg for creative content crowdsourcing ideas. Each industry and community is different and with quality analysis and creative ideas, organizations can accomplish content creation objectives as well as better engaging and growing their social networks.

Have you overcome content creation and scaling issues by crowdsourcing? What creative content sourcing ideas have you implemented? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Does your business engage in social media? Then you must have a social CRM strategy: How can you integrate social collaboration functionality with your existing systems? How do you staff your SCRM efforts? How do you transition from listening to engaging in conversations, and which ones should you engage in? How do you get the results of those conversations into your CRM system? Start with understanding the following.

1- Google Is Your Friend
One of the great CRM questions is, "how do I find out where my customers are talking about me?" The big social media standard bearers -- Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn -- are obvious first thoughts, but often customers congregate on smaller sites that are more narrowly focused on their vertical markets or their unique interests.

Discovering these rich niches of often-intense conversation could prove far more lucrative than relentlessly panning in the waters of Facebook or Twitter for a nugget of discussion about your business. So how do you find these smaller, specialized channels? Do you need to throw significant cash at it? Is there a tool you can buy that will magically reveal these social media mother lodes?

You can surely blow a lot of dough on technology to find them, but before you do, make your task easy: plug in the name of your company, the names of your competitors, or keywords that pertain to your business into Google Search. It'll return results for those terms and, with a little digging, it should reveal many of the significant smaller social media channels where people are talking about you.

2- Make Sure To Show Up At Your Own Party
These days, online marketing pieces and company websites have lots of little Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media icons strewn about their landscapes inviting customers to click on them to friend, connect or subscribe to them. It's remarkably easy for designers to add them to their pages, and it's also remarkably easy for marketing managers and other executives to tell designers to add them to their pages.

Unfortunately, it's not quite so easy to recognize that when you plaster an icon on company content, you're making a commitment to be part of the conversation -- not just when the content is published, but for as long as that standing invitation is open to the public. If you're going to tell people to follow you on Twitter or Facebook, then you'd better be there for them.

Don't start inviting people to your Facebook or LinkedIn page or to follow you on Twitter unless you plan on having a real, ongoing presence there. And, for heaven's sake, don't invite them to a customer community of your creation if you don't have a genuine commitment to maintaining and participating in that community.

Engaging haphazardly is worse than not engaging in the first place, because it asks the customer to do something and then fails to honor that action. Customers get the same level of non-communication, even though they have actively done something extra to get it.

3- Once You Go Social There Ain’t No Coming Back
One of the terrifying things about social media is that it takes control of the company message away from designated spokespeople and distributes it around the company. Especially when people love their jobs, their blogs, tweets and status updates may be chock-full of information that the company may not want in the public sphere yet.

This isn't happening because employees all over the world have decided to maliciously divulge important material or to sabotage marketing efforts, said Greg Gunn, vice president of business development at HootSuite. It's happening because most companies don't bother to educate their employees about how they should talk about the business on social media.

So tell them. Unless you include them in the company's understanding of how social media should be used in discussing the business, don't be surprised if they say things you don't want them to say.

For example, for competitive reasons, it's not OK for the engineers at a software company to blog about new, revolutionary features before they are announced. Do they know that? And do they know the date when the project they're working on will be announced? If they do, then you could effectively multiply your marketing efforts, with your traditional marketing being supplemented by the blogs and tweets of your developers.

Here's a non-technology example: Marketing creates a new, official name for an incentive program, but the sales department fails to get the word, and the socially active people in sales continue to use the old name, creating confusion among the customers and, ultimately, the impression that internal chaos reigns inside your business. Did sales get the memo -- not just about the name change, but about how the program needed to be referred to in all circumstances, including on social media?

Companies need to realize that everyone in the business is potentially a source of company information in the social era. You must help them deliver a controlled and coherent message about your business, and that entails keeping everyone inside the company informed about marketing and messaging plans. It also means making them aware of the importance of bringing things they learn through their conversations back to the business when appropriate.

So make sure you have a sound strategy in place before jumping into social media. Make sure all your employees are aware of the dos and don’ts you have put in place. Most importantly, make sure your internal communications are clear and followed. If you have any questions let us know.