Content Marketing Show 2012 – Part 2 – Stories, Data, Journalism

OK, on with the show. Last night I started writing up some notes from the Content Marketing Show 2012. Today I continue. As promised, I will keep this short and sweet.

Stories That Scale by Anthony Mayfield

Anthony works for Brilliant Noise and can be found @brilliantnoise. The key notes are:

• Big Data, Big Stories
• Using “joined up data” – in a business, cross departmental information
• e,g. US Elections – Data linked to Story Telling – stories told based on the data gathered – Obama was not pissing in the wind.
• Recommended reading: The Real Marketing Lesson We’ve All Just Learned by Neil Perkin
• Having editors and data analysts working together – new to big business, something bloggers almost naturally do.
• Forresters Content Ecosystem
• Recommended Tool: stortystream.it – Story Telling for Brands
• White Paper to Read: brilliantnoise.com/nokiapaper – “This paper outlines Nokia’s thinking around its global social media strategy developed with Brilliant Noise.“

Good if you have lots of data! This was one of the talks that seemed to be aimed at bigger businesses and agencies.

Tales from a Content Marketing Rookie, by Mila McLean Homburg

Mila @MrsHombur works with Kelvin at Site Visability. She spoke from personal experience mostly. On Twitter she describes herself as a “keyboard warrior“.

• Traditional Marketing Matters – offline, targeting, segmentation
• STRUCTURE CONTENT AROUND THE BRAND (and what is popular about the brand)
• Know Your Client (or yourself!) – Goals? Keywords?
• Target the Audience – who are you writing for? Use PERSONAS
• Know where the audience spends time online
• Speak their language! If the target audience are teenagers, know how to communicate effectively
• DO IT PROPERLY – Always review and edit your work (unless writing up some conference note that nobody will ever read)
• Proof read, style, layout etc.
• Be Proactive
• Think Big! Go beyond blogs and articles.
• “Make your project double amazing“
• Set standards and do your best

5 Things You Always Wanted to Know About Journalists But Were Afraid to Ask by Désiré Athow

This topic excited me – reaching out to journalists always seemed a sensible option, but never quite knew what to do. Désireé @desireathow is an editor and has worked with many journalists over the years. Here are my key notes:

• PR Journalists tend to be more social that traditional journalists – a good thing
• Match content from source to readers – target the right journalists!
• Google Panda has made content marketing more important.
• Journalists actually dislike PR / outreach
• Case study of “Doritos Gate” – I got lost here, struggled to follow the relevance of this.
• Journalists love EXCLUSIVES – Give your news to one paper and it could work best for you
• An EXCLUSIVE could just be tweaking existing content – I see this in the press and it annoys me! So often a news story turns out to be 6 months old.
• Journalists are Under Pressure and Short on Time – Help them meet targets to write new content
• Journalists get a lot of emails – but, many prefer to get an email that a phone call or Tweet.
• Emphasis on Extending Audience – if your news will reach a wider audience then more chance of it being used.
• There are only a finite number of journalists relevant to your business area – get to know them
• Use Twitter, LinkedIn etc to follow and interact with them, build a relationship
• Journalists tend to reply on personal accounts, not business accounts.
• Find 10 -15 and network with them
• PASSION drives them
• Work on those phone calls (although he said emails may be best)
• Grammar and spelling – check your article thoroughly before sending