5 Tips on Crowdsourcing Content for Marketing
Content is an essential vehicle for corporate storytelling, attracting and engaging customers to buy. Organizations are commencement 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.
I wrote about this recently on ClickZ, “Crowdsourcing and User Generated Content“, offering pros and cons plus a few tips. Here are 5 of those tips with some additional commentary based on discussions with consultation members at the recent SES San Francisco conference:
Interviews. Raising questions is one of the most vital ways to crowdsource content. The method to use depends on the desired outcome. Asking the community for suggestions of whom to interview and what questions to question is a fantastic way to get people involved. Interviewing industry thought leaders provides the brand’s consultation with unique content and makes a clear 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 delivery 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 apparent and permission for reuse should be obtained before republishing. Those familiar with the Q&A communities can word questions to attract answers 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 fantastic quality responses and over 30 comments on the post.
Contests Ensuing in Content. Examples of contests in which consumers produce their own videos and share metaphors abound on the social web. Search engines like any kind of content, especially text.
Example: In the past, Marketing Pilgrim ran a fantastic 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 if 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 first 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: Instigator 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 excellent 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 thoughts. Each industry and community is uncommon and with quality analysis and creative thoughts, organizations can accomplish content creation objectives as well as better engaging and on the rise their social networks.
Have you overcome content creation and scaling issues by crowdsourcing? What creative content sourcing thoughts have you implemented?
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