Progress Of Open Government in Australia

My colleague Craig Thomler recently delivered this very insightful presentation. 

Open government progress in Australia from Craig Thomler

4 Reasons To Outsource Content Creation

Peter Yorke is among India's most experienced communicators

Content marketing may be new to Australia but elsewhere it is more established. Take India for example.

My friend Peter Yorke runs a very successful content marketing agency in Bangalore India.  We recently spoke about why a company might want outside help to implement a content management strategy.  

Peter has been helping Indian B2B companies - mainly in the tech space - develop and share content with customers and others. He has been doing this for nearly five years and has come the conclusion that outsourcing content creation and strategy carries distinct benefits.

• Firstly, outsourcing provides flexibility.  It lets companies scale their content creation activity up or down depending on their budget or what's happening operationally. And  it can provide the surge capacity if serendipity delivers an opportunity too good to miss.

• Contracting content creation guarantees customer service levels.  You're paying for a content asset (piece of work) tailored specifically for your audience.  Being a commercial arrangement you can be confident it  will come in on time and within budget, making things more predictable than relying on internal staff who, let's be honest, are often diverted off to other priorities.

•  An outside agency brings a fresh set of eyes to your operations.  They can spot a good case study for online publication or turn up a story to round out a speech although it's been sitting under the noses of staff for some time.

And finally, Peter points out that content marketing is still so new, CEOs just may not have the in-house talent to start up a content marketing strategy. 

What do you think?  If content marketing is all about relationships should you keep it firmly in-house? 

Listen to how Peter uses content marketing templates to guide staff and help clients. 

If Content Marketing Was A Train ....

Stop, go, pause.  Stop, go, pause.

Traditional marketing and most PR moves from one campaign to the next. You plan, implement, await  results, adjust and then start over again. Traditional approaches are like a milk train chugging from point to point, stopping at all stations along the way.  It is slow and steady and with with a lot of stops and station masters along the way putting themselves  between you and your customers.

On the other hand content marketing is like a hi-speed inter-city locomotive. You hop on and you're there for the journey.  The crew and passengers are together until they safely reach their destination and during their travels get to understand and appreciate each other. 

Related post:  Content marketing: why now?

  

50 Stats On Content Marketing

50 Stats You Need to Know About Content Marketing from NewsCred

Making Content Contagious

Jonah Berger busts myths on why people share information

 In a recent Harvard Business Review podcast, Wharton Professor and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger, revealed the results of a recent study on why things catch on online. 

So why do we share some information but feel disinclined to pass along other material?

As communicators we may intuitively know positive content is more easily shared than negative information. And naturally people like to share things that make them look smart, 'in the know' or ahead of the trends. 

Yet it seems that emotions are a bit more complicated than that.

Berger reports positive tends to be shared more often than negative information. Yet emotions like anger and anxiety can induce powerful reactions that impel us and others to share content.

Also it seems negative publicity is not always bad for a brand. Berger notes:

" What our research found is that even negative word of mouth, even negative publicity, can increase sales if it increases awareness or accessibility. For small businesses or products that most people don't know much about, even a negative can be a good thing because it lets other people know that the product exists. I'm not suggesting go out there and get negative word of mouth. But what I am saying is negative isn't always as bad as we think it is..." 

 And what about controversy?  Can that make your content contagious?  

PR practitioners know a little controversy can sometimes be very handy in causing conversations and drawing attention to an issue.  Yet this too is not clear cut.  Berger's research shows we might be ready to share controversial issues with those we know.  Yet we can hold back from passing along really controversial information - such as news on abortion, asylum seekers or political preferences - for fear of offending others or drawing hostile reactions particularly from those we don't know. 

So how do we best spread our information round? Do we frame our content as positive or negative, aim for controversy or avoid the difficult issues?

It seems making your content contagious really does require some deep thinking from the outset.

Listen to Jonah Berger's interview here.