The motto of a content marketer is “sharing is caring”. How so? It’s his motive behind his success.
Effective, successful content is engaged-in; it’s passed around industry networks, and trends on social media for a while. But it doesn’t stop there: prized content gets bookmarked by readers (or aspiring readers) — in other words, it’s BOTH engaged-with, and engaged-in.
Then what happens to content after it gets bookmarked? Is that its final destination?Unfortunately for us marketing content consumers , this is the reality for many, as we know it.
But that doesn’t make it a good reality.
Up until now, there’s been so much content out there, do we still know what exactly are we engaging-in? And with who? Does anybody know?
And what happens to content that we never get around to, or worse, never cross paths with?
It’s time for a change.
Our Content Tomb
We’ve OD-d. Too many articles, too much sharing, the good stuff is buried deep, beneath it all. We want to share, but we also want to care about what we’re reading, and about what we’re writing.
How do we find the succinct, fresh balance between: insightful content that our discriminate eyes can identify among heaps and heaps of writing, without sacrificing our precious time as marketers?
We do want our hands to be knuckle deep in content, but at the same time, we need our hands for other things, too.
Are you sure you’ll be able to consume all that?
Every follower we gain on Twitter is a leap of personal progress, and every ingenious newsletter we subscribe to, opens a floodgate of wisdom to our doorstep.
At the same time, the more people we engage with online, the more content is inevitably latching on to our networks. In other words, the more insightful content we’re adding to our reading list.
Part of Twitter’s modus operandi is that there’s no limit to how many people you can follow on Twitter.But in no way are these social network champions saying that you can derive knowledge and insight from however many followers you have.
We want to share the good stuff, we want to read the good stuff, but what if there’s too much stuff? How can we know it all, read it all, see it all, AND win them it all?
Killed by a Bookmark Folder
This is how us content addicts name our bookmarks folders; Or at least, how I name mine.
Should content consumption, stop at consumption? It doesn’t! It should translate into action. True, it’s in our bookmarks, which in theory suggests it’s our most treasured 2,000 word keepsake. But, what it actually means is: We know that we should and want to read it, as soon as we have time, but that time will probably never actually come.
In other words, we’ve temporarily stored the excitable reading material in our content graveyard. Not because it’s past it’s date, but rather, because of our content backlog.
Going with the Content Flow
As it is now, the consumption flow looks like this:
What we’ve needed all along is a solution that will actually carry over our favorite nuggets into our content marketing workflows.
When a content marketing pro is continuously replenishing his content education, his ultimate goal is to optimize his marketing campaigns, his social channels, and his overall content strategy.
How Long Will it Take?
In order that your content marketing workflow be as good as its initial ideas, the momentum needs to be present from A to Z. But does that mean that consumption flow will be even longer than it is already? Surely, if you add momentum to a process, you’re adding weight, so the speed will be slower.
Actually, no, it’s the exact opposite; If we realign the motions within the process of content consumption, yes, both the speed and the momentum change.
The momentum — grows, and the speed, well, it actually gets (even) faster.
Action Items Speak Louder than Words
On a recent Google+ Hangout, John Mueller said it all:
So I really wouldn’t focus so much on the length of your article but rather making sure that you’re actually providing something useful and compelling for the user. And sometimes that means a short article is fine, sometimes that means a long article with lots of information is fine.
In an ideal world, from tomorrow until infinity, all pieces of content would be done according to John’s guidance. But truth be told, we’re still in a style over substance era, and until John’s nugget penetrates the content-sphere around us, we need some intervention to make his wisdom ring true.
We need tangible ways to make sure that we’re cutting through the fluff, reading the quality content that we dream of, and rescue it from our content graveyards.
4 ‘Too Good to Be True’ Tools and 1 hack for Marketers to Fight for Their Lives.
1. Zest.is
Zest is a new tab Chrome browser extension — each time you open a new tab on Chrome, Zest is there.
Pro marketers suggest articles to the Zest admin, who must manually approve them before they are posted. The criteria is quite simple: “only the most in depth, relevant articles with actual value.”
The effect this has on content consumption is that Zest users will only be suggested articles that fellow marketers recommend. So the content on Zest actually goes through two filters before it is consumable: two marketers must vouch for its splendor before it gets suggested to the marketers’ community for indulgence with a zing!
As a content marketers’ tool, Zest targets the practitioners themselves. It’s about making the content marketing pros do their job better.
Some would say that Zest is solving the ‘infobesity’ epidemic — too much content, everywhere! But cherry picking reading material for content marketers isn’t the only place to make a difference.
[Disclaimer- I’m Zest’s Co-Founder & CMO]
2. CliClap
CliClap is the next-generation sharing tools for content marketers”. It lets content curators pin additional content to what they’re already sharing. The mission behind CliClap is to help companies achieve their business goals by means of a smart content distribution platform that facilitates the engagement they’re striving for via social media.
What does it do, though?
Whoever uses CliClap can add additional content recommendations to the content you share — regardless of whether it’s native to your company, or if it’s external content that you’re curating.
The content consumption in CliClap is directed at the customer whom companies are trying to engage. Because there is an infinite amount of shared content flooding social media feeds, brands are getting lost in the crowd. CliClap helps companies generate qualified leads, increase app installs, brand visibility, and in sum, all flavors of engagement.
It’s Give and Take 101: share a bit of extra content, and users will pay it forward.
3. Nuzzel
Nuzzel’s tagline is ‘News from Friends and Influencers’. It’s a news app that lets Twitter users discover content exclusively from friends and influencers, aka, the people they want most to be hearing from.
Nuzzel basically understands that if your friends like it, odds are that you will, too. It’s not always good enough to understand that you’ll want or don’t want to consume content based on how many total shares it has on different networks.
If 5,000 likes were thrown at one piece of content, who’s to say that they represent a community of marketers that you identify with? Who’s to say that the content’s takeaways will help make your next infographic even better than your last?
But, if 250 of those likes are results of your friends’ or your influencers’ engagement activity, it’s safe to assume you’ll want in on the action
4. ContentGems
ContentGems is a content discovery engine. Everyday, it scans tons of articles from the best online sources and presents you, the content marketing pro, with a stream of the most relevant and timely content. ContentGems knows what you want to read, and will make sure you do so. One great thing (or perhaps, the greatest) about ContentGems is that it relieves you of your ongoing desire to dig up the best content that’s out there.
You can kick back and relax, because ContentGems has got your back.
IFTTT: The Content Hack
Fellow marketer Neil McHugh wrote about a great hack that makes our content flow just that much juicier; Neil suggests using IFTTT to automate your content flow, to make the consumption process as simple as possible.
May I Please Have Your Content?
In practice, Nuzzel meets you somewhere in the middle between Zest and CliClap. ContentGems is like your personal news feed that will teach you everything you need to know about the industry.
All four tools are built on the reality that infobesity is taking over the web. Readers, writers, sharers, and overall marketers alike, have proved that we need a solution that filters out content that’s of lesser interest to them.
And the IFTTT hack, it speaks for itself. Made for marketing pros, by a marketing pro — need I say more?
So what do we want exactly? We still want the same thing, insightful content. But as reality tells us: the more content there is, the insightful tier becomes less and less noticeable.
We still want to read just as much, but it’s quality over quantity, my friend, and that’s what it means to have higher (all the while faster) momentum.
What tools are you using to fight back against content overflow?
[Thanks to the mighty Orlee Gillis who helped me bring this article to life]
