Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence sets the strategy and guidelines for all social media content across the company’s far-reaching locations and business units.

It’s quite a task managing all that distributed content. Intel’s Facebook profiles, for example, have around 10 million fans spread across 36 pages (and almost 50 countries). The company also has presence on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

“Our team of nine provides a central POV on everything social,” said Intel social media strategist Ekaterina
Walter. “We help create a social infrastructure that geographies and business units can use. We also create unified branding and presence and then scale it globally,”

Global is Local, Local is Global

In large distributed organizations, content needs to flow from the local to the global, and vice versa.

“We have some content and branding that we create centrally, but a lot of time you have to go specifically local because local is important,” Walter said. “Centrally, we can’t presume to know everything that works and everything that doesn’t. However, sometimes we create programs centrally that are then easily scaled within geographies.”

Similarly, she said, sometimes fantastic ideas begin locally and then the company can implement them in various countries.

As an example, Walter cites the popular ‘Museum of Me‘ application, which allows users to upload videos and photos to a personalized online museum. Developed in Asia for the Asian market, Museum of Me went viral “mechanically,” Walter said, “without any media support.”

“Because we have a central structure in place in the Social Media Center of Excellence, we were able to take that and run it out to all our countries automatically,” she said. “Central support helped us to scale up the content distribution.”

Engaging with Content

The measure of successful social media content –particularly for B2B brands– is the level of engagement shown by its audience, Walter said.

“The number of fans you have is all great and good, but it’s a vanity metric,” she said. “We want to move beyond that to look at who we reach, how often we reach them, and unique compressions within that. For us, the beauty of social is increased engagement.”

In terms of engagement, says Walter, brands should ask:

• Who within the brand demographic engages the most and how does that change across time?
• What does that engagement look like?
• How many likes, comments, and shares does the brand have?

Walter suggests using social media content to bring customers’ opinions in to the fold, including trivia questions, challenges and puzzles.

“Things like that allow you to have true, meaningful conversations around topics that you and your audience are passionate about,” Walter said.

Content Tips

Walter’s #1 content strategy tip is to focus resources on understanding audience. (Use polls and analytics to really understand an audience and figure out what type of content resonates with them.)

Brands should use also analytics to test, track, and adjust new content strategies in flexible ways, Walter said.

“Make sure you know your voice,” she said. “There is no way you can use a PR broadcasting voice and expect your audience to relate to you. Ask yourself ‘What kind of human voice can I develop that people can relate to?’”

And finally, to support content across different locations and business units, Walter said that companies must make sure to document everything. And then they need to distribute that information across all relevant locations so that stakeholders know what works and what doesn’t work.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Check out our interview with Kissane below:

What are the most important things brands should bear in mind when creating a content strategy?

First, we must all recognize that if we don’t serve our users — by easing their work, entertaining them, or genuinely making their lives more awesome — nothing else you do matters. Your brand is what matters most to you, but they don’t care about you. They care about them. And on the web, you don’t have a captive audience. So you serve the user or you become irrelevant.

Second, we should admit that publishing really great stuff on a regular basis over the long term is genuinely hard. You need good processes and tools, and you need to introduce discipline into the process so that you’re not just guessing, not just flailing around throwing random stuff onto the web.

What exactly is a content strategy? Is it just the latest buzz phrase?

If you’re a brand with an online presence, you’re probably publishing a lot of things: website copy, content-heavy interactive features, blogs, social network stuff. You need a plan for keeping track of all of it, making sure it all has a purpose, and ensuring that it’s actually serving that purpose.

That’s content strategy.

In truth, there are other things involved in content strategy in other contexts — huge enterprise documentation/knowledge management stuff, for example, but the part that matters for most brands is essentially a hybrid of communication strategy and publishing planning, with a stiff dose of user-friendly design thrown in.

Is it a buzz phrase? I don’t know. It’s a decent description of the thing that I do every day for companies and institutions and publications, and clients are really hungry for the work. Twenty years into the evolution of the web, organizations have realized that content matters for everyone who wants to do business or gain attention, and someone needs to wrangle it. It’s not “just” editing or planning or content management, but it includes aspects of all of those things.

I kind of don’t care what we call it, as long as we do it well.

What are the most common content strategy pitfalls that companies should avoid?

Two major pitfalls:

1. Trying to build a content strategy without knowing who you’re trying to serve and what they really want and need from you. The way around this is to spend some time thinking about and studying your users/readers/customers before you do anything else, and then make sure that whatever you create serves core user needs, instead of just broadcasting “messages” that you hope will stick.

2. Doing too much. The web doesn’t have fixed boundaries, so a lot of companies put huge quantities of content online and then ignore it — or they churn out a ton of stuff that no one’s looking at or using. The web is limitless, but attention is bounded and in very short supply. Show respect for your users’ attention by making it easy for them to find and use what they need. Don’t try to do everything. Do something only you can do — content people love and can’t find elsewhere — and you’ll win.

A lot of these things sound like common sense, but then you look at the content that’s out there, and you see that companies and institutions that should really know better aren’t attending to these basics.

Content strategy can get much deeper and more sophisticated, but there’s no point in trying to implement elaborate measurement and analytics systems, for example, if you don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish — and whether or not your users care.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Halvorson joined four others on a SXSW panel entitled “Rude Awakening: Content Strategy Is Super Hard.”

“Once we begin to make those connections, we begin to see that content is more than what it is. It’s more than the product. It’s a process that goes right to the heart of our organizations,” says Halvorson.

Content strategy spans user interface design, marketing materials, internal communications, technical documentation and more.

People working in these different fields, often with different technologies, need to learn from each other in order to create the best pathways to a content strategy, said Erin Kissane, content and editor at Brain Traffic, and author of “The Elements of Content Strategy.”

The panel — which also included Mark McCormick, senior vice-president-customer experience at Wells Fargo, Karen McGrane, a managing partner Managing Partner at Bond Art+Science, and Joe Gollner, a director at content technology firm Gnostyx Research — tackled the following talking points, which touched on three essential elements of content strategy: planning, context and metadata.

1. Content strategy is just content planning.

Content strategy needs to be built on top of your communication strategy and other existing business strategy definitions. This can be a scary prospect if such definitions don’t already exist — but content strategy naturally leads into solving that issue. Content strategy impacts all of customer service interactions.

Content strategists need to be assertive and learn other disciplines to be able to apply content strategy to their teams.

2. Context first!

On the web, we create templates and buckets that we dump content into. This needs to stop.

There’s a lot of opportunity with mobile and responsive web design. Content strategists need to take the lead on the subject.

Content drives form. Not the other way around. Mediums are delivery devices.

3. We need to teach writers about metadata.

Content needs to be flexible and fluid across a variety of devices and in different contexts. People need to think about creating flexible content for future reuse.

People need to make the mental leap from webpage constraints to flexible content. We’re not writing documents anymore. We’re writing packages of content and ideas that can work across channels and devices. We’re not just writing. It’s video content, user-generated content, syndicated content. Meta data is one of many tools to wrap our heads around.

Image courtesy of Flickr, librarianinblack

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

The only problem is this distinction doesn’t work, says Facebook’s Content Strategist Tiffani Jones Brown.

“You cannot make a division about the interface. The idea that only some content needs a system is wrong. It all fits within a design system,” said Brown.

There is a strong connection between content and design, says Andy Chung, a designer at Facebook. When he worked at Mozilla, one of their content interface strategies was to focus on reducing complex issues into simple statements.

Content strategy is about design; the two are interrelated, says ex-Boeing content developer Keith Robertson. (At Boeing, Robertson sometimes had to choose words based on pixel size.)

“Content strategy is process driven. There is workflow and audits. You need to ask ‘Who is the audience?’ and ‘What problems are you trying to solve?’,” says Robertson.

One good strategy is taking out half the content, Robertson continues. But content strategy also looks at the context to simplify it.

“If you have to do content on your own, make sure every word serves a purpose. This takes time to understand. But one exercise makes sure each content piece is very tight: See how they fit together,” explains Robertson.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Rdoke

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

“We can change the world, build a business, and have fun,” says Stone, who identified three elements with the potential to “totally transform the definition of capitalism as we know it today.”

These are: 1) a desire to change the world, 2) the ability to build a business and make money from it, and 3) having fun while doing it.

Stone, author, blogger, and Inc Magazine Entrepreneur of the Decade, calls these three keys the new success metrics for capitalism.

“Change is not a triumph of technology,” says Stone. “It’s a triumph of humanity.” Twitter enables people to communicate in real-time, which in turn enables individuals to become a crowd driven by a common purpose. 

“When you think of creativity as a renewable resource,” says Stone, “every challenge becomes fun.”

In order to succeed spectacularly, “you must be willing to fail, be totally embarrassed. You have to go for it.”

It is important to get involved in causes early, says Stone: “The earlier you get involved, the more impact you’ll have over time.”

Image courtesy of Biz Stone

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Tens of thousands of pages of content are spread across the HBS site alone, with fresh content being added daily, using a content management system embedded in a SharePoint platform. 

So, how does HBS manage this ever-growing mountain of content from website data to email newsletter and social media updates? And what can other content creators take from the HBS experience?

We spoke with Brian Kenny, chief marketing and communications officer at HBS, to find out.

Content Mountain

“The way to manage a diffused website like ours is to distribute responsibilities across the marketing function,” says Kenny. “So, creating web content is the collective responsibility of our marketing and communications team as they work to tell our story.”

In total, 15-20 people are involved in HBS’s content creation team, supported by school faculty.

“The faculty come up with the ideas. Then editors and writers take those ideas and help to shape them in a way that we know we can reuse and make relevant to different audiences including academics, practitioners, alumni, and other stakeholders,” explains Kenny.

“Our job is to animate the mission of the school through stories about the impact that our teachers, faculty, students, and alumni are having in the world. Sometimes that plays out in the form of developing content – the ‘content’ to my mind is really just a method of storytelling.”

Caring for Creators

Large, complex organizations looking to develop a content strategy should actively support and encourage content creators by supplying them with easy-to-use tools and providing clear content creation guidelines, says Kenny.

Towards this end, HBS has created a web council of people involved in managing the school’s digital content. The council — which has developed into a community of content creators — meets to share best practices and new ideas.

“We’ve found that it’s a very rich discussion every time they get together. They learn about what their peers are doing across the school and share ideas. And we benefit from a collective knowledge increase each time this group gets together.” 

Write Once, Publish Often

One of HBS’s content strategies is to leverage one piece of content across many sites, says Kenny.

“Our ‘Working Knowledge‘ e-newsletter, for example, goes out once a week to about 150,000 subscribers. Its mission is to interview faculty about early stage research and emerging ideas. We leverage that content across every other area of the school from the Exec. Ed. Group and the alumni relations group through the MBA group and on our homepage.” 

Similarly, articles from the print and digital editions of HBS’s alumni magazine can be found on the HBS homepage. 

Broadcasting via Social Media

Despite being early adopters of Twitter and having a four-year Facebook presence, HBS uses social media platforms in what could be seen as a traditionally academic fashion, says Kenny.

“We’ve been pretty good at using those social media platforms as broadcast tools to push content, but we’ve been less good at using it as a social tool. If you look fundamentally at academia, we’re used to teaching people. Perhaps, we’re not so good at listening.” 

However, taking inspiration from the way academics at HBS develop their ideas through dialog with colleagues and business leaders, Kenny wants to use social media as a tool for generating discussion and creativity. 

“We need to engage people in discussions around some of the big ideas that are coming out of the school. Our publishing section has done this pretty successfully. They put their leaders directly in discussion with editors around big ideas. And their website hosts running discussions and dialogues back and forth between the readers and the editors.” 

Targeting Business Goals

In line with HBS’s overall marketing strategy, Kenny’s team is using social media to target conversations around entrepreneurship. 

“Even though the term ‘entrepreneurship’ was literally created at HBS and we have a history of entrepreneurship going back fifty years, we still are not thought of as a place for entrepreneurship. People typically think of MIT or Stanford instead. So, we have a challenge there and we’re trying to change people’s perceptions about us in this area,” explains Kenny. 

Kenny’s team closely monitors conversations about entrepreneurship on social media platforms to develop new ways of injecting their presence into online discussions. 

“Tracking social media helps us to understand whether or not our content is creating a spike in the social media realm, whether we’re starting to become more common to those conversations, and in fact, we’ve been able to crack an increase in our presence in what we consider to be the most influential dimensions of entrepreneurship on the social networks. It’s a great way for us to gauge whether or not we’re moving that needle.”

Image courtesy of Paul Bodine

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

You may not know it, but the Suns have content marketing pedigree, too. In terms of social media, the Phoenix Suns are dunk after slam dunk.

In 2008, their social network, PlanetOrange.Net (produced by Suns’ vice president digital, Jeramie McPeek) won an Emmy for Advanced Media – one of twelve Emmys the Suns (and associated ad agencies) picked up that year.

Breaking Records

The Phoenix Suns are even early adopters of Google+.

But the Suns’ content team isn’t resting on its laurels. Suns recently announced that they have hired Kayte Christensen to become the first social media sideline reporter in pro-sports.

“Kayte’s a big social media user. So, we’re excited to bring her in, as she knows social media, she knows basketball, and she’s got broadcasting experience,” says McPeek.

‘She’ll give the fans watching television at home an idea of the trending topics on Twitter and what fans are saying about the game on Facebook. Her team might pick a question or two from Facebook or Google+ and either answer the questions for the fans, or throw [them] back to the analysts to answer as the game continues.”

The Team

Coaches, players, the digital team members, broadcasters, photographers, dancers, family members and business teammates are all on Twitter.

The team’s main portal, suns.com, reaches 5 million fans per year. With 79,000 twitter followers and almost 625,000 Facebook friends, that’s a lot of people to keep supplied with content.

So how do they do it?

The Suns’ website is managed by a team of nine — five of whom have content creation as their primary role, says McPeek.

“We have two beat writers who cover the teams. We have two guys whose primary role is to shoot and edit video for the web. And one guy who is completely focused on social media updates,” explains McPeek.

The department budget is “well over” half a million dollars, with a lot of that spent on salaries and equipment. Other staff members include a photo archivist, who creates photo galleries for the website, and a graphics and coding specialist.

Present and Future Channels

Check in with the Phoenix Suns on Foursquare.

The Suns use a wide range of digital content channels to reach fans, but the team’s primary channel is its main website, says McPeek. Besides that, the team has a presence on Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and Google+, YouTube and a blog.

To ratchet up involvement, the team also has plans to use GetGlue — a social network for entertainment that enables users to “check in” to TV programs, movies, and music.

“We’re always looking at new opportunities to come up and [will] try to figure out which ones make sense for us to jump into as well,” says McPeek.

The Suns recently partnered with Demand Media to use its fans’ community system called Pluck. Pluck offers syndication, blogging, user interaction, and news aggregation software and services.

“Hundreds of big brands use Pluck to host branded social media sites. The Chicago Bulls, the Cleveland Cavaliers . . .  they all have a Pluck fan community sites and there are a lot of other big brands out there that do as well. So we’re making the move over to them,” says McPeek.

Social Media Ambassadors

The Suns recently recruited a roster of 12 volunteer “social media ambassadors” to perform functions like moderating message boards, monitoring Twitter feeds, and spreading news to fans through social media.

The Suns also run a social media series — nights where fans connected to the team through social media can come to the stadium and get discounted items, such as tickets and t-shirts, or even meet players or members of the board.

ROI

McPeek’s team can track ticket sales through Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

The ability to build engagement with fans is more important than pushing content or generating revenue, though. “The biggest benefit of social media is growing our fanbase more than generating revenue. Although we are doing that as well,” says McPeek.

ROI, check. Fun for fans, double check.

Image courtesy of the Phoenix Suns

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

In December 2011, Explore Chicago surpassed 6 million visits for the year — the highest annual total since its 2009 launch and a 40% increase over 2010, making Explore Chicago the top travel and tourism website for Chicago, based on traffic volume. Not bad for a non-profit website.

Explore Chicago is only one part of the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture’s online offerings, which include a blog, a strong Foursquare presence, and Twitter and Facebook accounts. (In total, the office of tourism is active across nine social media platforms.)

“We are tourism leaders in the realm of social media. We had the very first visitor Concierge Twitter feed. We were the very first tourism agency to work with Foursquare, and we now have a total of four Chicago branded badges — including the Windy City badge, which was the very first city badge that Foursquare produced,” says Pam Morin, director of marketing at the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture.

A Fall 2011 study conducted by Nichols Tourism Group and the National Laboratory of Tourism and eCommerce at Temple University found that Explore Chicago significantly influenced $172 million in direct visitor spending and $3 million in local taxes.

“We’re incredibly proud of this website, that we’re able to do so much with such a small team and such a small budget,” says Morin.

So, how does Explore Chicago manage to generate content for all these feeds and platforms with a staff of just three (two of whom are technology rather than content experts) and a small marketing department?

User-Generated Success

The key to the site’s success, says Morin, is user-generated content.

For example, Explore Chicago has more than 1,000 “cultural partners” throughout the city, who provide them with information on a regular basis via a web form that automatically populates Explore Chicago‘s event listings.

That’s immensely helpful to the Explore Chicago team (which edits each listing before it’s posted), but it’s just scratching the surface of the site’s user-generated success, which spans blog content, photography, and video.

The Explore Chicago Flickr account, for example, has enabled 3,000 photographers to submit photos.

“Photography is incredibly important on a tourism website,” explains Morin. “People want to see where other people have been. This is how people do research on places that they’re going to visit next. They want to see what it is like on the ground, and we just love the instantaneous impact that these photos have,” explains Morin.

ExploreChicago also employs almost 200 volunteer bloggers for the Insider Profiles section of the site, where locals can share their insider knowledge of the city.

“They live in different neighborhoods. They are all different ages. They all have different occupations and hobbies, you name it. They give us their take on Chicago, and we have found that this has been incredibly popular content,” says Morin.

“User-generated content is incredibly important to us. Chicago is an incredibly proud city. People from Chicago love to talk about Chicago. We’ve been so thrilled with how generous people have been with their opinions, and with their thoughts and creating content for us.”

Content Tips

Morin advises content managers to create — and stick to — an editorial calendar.

“We absolutely would not be able to do what we do if we didn’t create an editorial calendar. We have so many things that happen internally, that we would never be able to manage the external information if we weren’t very, very, well-organized,” says Morin.

She also advises content creators not to write a single word of content… until, that is, they have thought through how that content will be used across all the organization’s communications platforms, including Twitter and blogs.

Image courtesy of Explore Chicago

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

NASA's main website received over 141 million hits in 2011.

That makes NASA a more popular web publication than media powerhouses like The Economist, Gawker, and The Daily Beast. Not bad for a bunch of astronauts.

Here’s how NASA manages to publish news, video, photography and mission updates that engages and satisfies millions of people every month:

Local Divisions All Contribute & Distribute Content

Photo via NASA.gov

NASA’s massive content operation is driven by its myriad offices and divisions, most of which have their own publishing teams. It’s a huge resource for creation, but can be a challenge to manage, says Brian Dunbar, content manager for NASA’s main portal.

“We’re a very distributed organization,” Dunbar says. “I’m at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., but we also have 10 field centers, including Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Jet Propulsion Lab in California.”

NASA also has multiple lines of business from its human space flight group and aeronautics office to the Science Mission Directorate. Dunbar estimates that NASA has 1,600 public websites. In other words, the challenge goes beyond simple geographical distribution.

“We’re not just geographically dispersed, but we have multiple programs,” Dunbar says. “So we do have trouble
sometimes having so many websites. And sometimes one field center is focused more on, say, a particular milestone or a more narrow aspect of the mission, rather than the bigger picture.”

Each NASA field center has its own public affairs office, which handles social media content. Additionally, almost every NASA mission and program has its own outreach office generating unique content for social media and the web.

“Many of the people in the outreach offices are supporting websites – (sites not in www.nasa.gov) – and putting their primary efforts there,” Dunbar says. “Sometimes it’s honestly hard to get a little bit of content – even some very important content, because the people who are charged with posting that content – are being charged with posting it elsewhere.”

In total, Dunbar estimates, NASA has more than 100 people working to create, manage and distribute this content across some 160 different social media channels. Most combine their content role with other responsibilities, like media relations and public affairs.

It’s not possible to set a unified content strategy across such a distributed organization, Dunbar says.

“Honestly, we don’t have a formal content strategy in terms of knowing the kinds of things we’re going to be pushing out at any particular time, or for how we integrate these things together,” Dunbar says.

In House Curators Work Under Contracted, Professional Editors

Photo via NASA.gov

A team of six at NASA headquarters create and manage home page content for NASA.gov, ranging from photo galleries and feature stories to video and mission updates. Dunbar’s annual budget for the home page is about $120,000, which pays for one editor on a contract basis.

The content management team at NASA headquarters has been using a customer satisfaction survey from ForeSee to gauge public reaction to the site – until recently, that is.

“We used it to really try to measure how people feel about the site and to make sure that they’re getting what they need,” Dunbar says. “It’s been a very useful tool to track when traffic is going up, and satisfaction is going up – when those two things are arising – you seem to feel like you’re doing the job.

“The unfortunate thing is that my budget got cut, and we lost the access to the customer satisfaction survey. I’m still struggling to get it back.”

Events Drive The Editorial Calendar

Photo via NASA.gov

Story ideation is a constant battle for publishers, a recurring task that often bogs down content marketers especially. NASA looks to its own internal news events as fuel for rich content to publish.

NASA.gov has had 141 million hits so far this year – making 2011 a record year by some 20 percent. This spike in traffic is attributable to some major launches, including the Space Shuttle’s last mission and the launch of the latest Mars Rover.

“There’s no question that traffic to our sites is very heavily event driven,” Dunbar says. “In fact, in the two years that we’ve had drops in traffic, it’s been years that we haven’t had as many major events.”

The launch of the last Space Shuttle mission in 2011, for example, saw a spike of almost 500% in the amount of daily traffic.

Robust, Interoperable Tools Manage The Content Flow

Photo via NASA.gov

Dunbar’s team uses eTouch‘s Digital Asset Manager, a content management system specially designed to enable NASA
employees to upload their content to NASA.gov without needing to know HTML.

Unfortunately, eTouch is no longer supporting the software, but Dunbar is keeping a close eye on the development of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) as a possible replacement. (CMIS enables different content management systems to talk to each other.)

“Internally, we have interest in different websites, but of course the public just knows NASA, which means that they don’t know where to go to on all these other websites,” Dunbar says. “So if we’re not going to bring all the content into one repository, then at least having CMISes that could talk to each other would be very useful.”

NASA is an excellent example of an organization that, while not traditionally a publisher, manages to use its internal news and assets to produce content that captures the imaginations of millions.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently