How to Curate 6,000 Pieces of Content This Year

Todd Wheatland, VP of Marketing at Kelly OCG, joins the Social Pros Podcast from Content Marketing World in Sydney, Australia this week to discuss producing massive amounts of relevant content, curating your personal brand, and how to get your followers to share your content.
Read on for some of the highlights and tweetable moments, or listen to the full podcast.

Please Support Our Sponsors

Huge thanks to our amazing sponsors Janrain, ExactTarget, Cision, and Expion for helping us make this happen. We couldn’t do it without them!
Listen Now 
Click the play button to listen here:
[podcast]http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/rna9uu/SocialProsEpisode57.mp3[/podcast]
Download the audio file:
http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/rna9uu/SocialProsEpisode57.mp3
The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/socialprospodcast
Find us on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469

Tweetable Moments

“My experience has told me that @Slideshare is hugely underutilized.” -@toddwheatland (tweet this)

“@LinkedIn finally understands who it is. I want to see them take it to that next level.” -@toddwheatland (tweet this)

Spinning Data into Content

At Content Marketing World, Todd announced that Kelly OCG  would be creating 2,000 pieces of content this year (that’s almost 6 pieces of content every single day, including weekends and holidays). How will they do it? “It’s not 2,000 ideas; it’s a far fewer number of ideas,” he says. Instead, they use one piece of data – a research report, for example – and spin it into many different pieces of content telling individual stories from the report tailored to specific demographics.

For such a content-producing powerhouse, e-books and SlideShare are key. Todd is bullish on SlideShare as an as-yet underutilized channel for creating content. LinkedIn, too, has potential, especially in the B2B market and with the recent changes they have made.
We have talked on previous podcasts about leveraging brand advocates and empowering employees to use social, but Todd takes this a step further. The question that interests Kelly is not just, “What content can we create that will interest our fans?” but is also, “What content can we create that our fans will want to share because it shows they are experts in their field?” This adds value for followers (and employees), like any good content would, but it also gives them more of an emotional connection with the brand because it has allowed them to add value to their friends, family, and colleagues in turn.

Social Media Stat of the Week: Brand Instagram Use Jumps from 54% to 59%

While the percentage of brands using Facebook and Twitter has mostly leveled off, Simply Measured released a study recently showing a jump in Instagram adoption by these same companies. In November 2012, 54% of companies were using Instagram, while just three months later, that percentage had risen to 59%. The top 8 brands are currently responsible for 80% of Instagram engagement, but that number is down from 92% in November, which suggests that the companies newer to Instagram are drawing attention, as well.

Jay points out that the most popular brands on Instagram right now are lifestyle brands: MTV, Starbucks, Nike, Burberry, Tiffany & Co, Gucci, Audi, etc. These are the brands you follow to be hip, to stay “in the know.” They are also the brands that are trying to appeal to a younger audience, who are the main users on the Instagram platform. Jeff predicts a rise in Vine activity, as well, once brands see that it is another viable way to give people a behind-the-scenes look.

Social Pros Shoutout

Todd: I’m going to throw three names out there, two of which are colleagues, so let me explain a little bit about what they do.
One of them is Michael Kirsten, who is German. He is a fundamental driver for external communities management: how to engage with the community around content, how to have appropriate conversations through that, and how to, over time, feed that learning back into our content development strategy. We’re actually getting to the point now where we can really tweak what we’re creating, knowing it’s going to have a better resonation as it hits the market.
Another internal Kelly one is a lady by the name of Tamara Achba. Tamara now lives in Switzerland, and she is responsible for Kelly’s marketing in Europe. What she has experimented with very heavily is this tight/loose model for empowering big countries where we have resources and for small countries where we don’t have really resources at all – how can she create a model to empower the social management in those countries? A lot of visual content, a lot of sharing, a lot of very lean scaling to hit 30 countries with high frequency.
Bill Boorman runs a series of groups called Tru Events. There’s going to be probably 100 of these. It’s been like a TED-X model where basically you can decide to do one of these if you follow the framework.
It’s an un-conference type model where someone leads a track, but basically anyone can call BS and take over that track, and have more value to idea. The idea is you’re not just watching one person, sitting in the audience; everyone’s part of the discussion. These are all around recruiting techniques, methodologies and things. The thing that I’ve learned most from Bill is deep understanding of social channels. He’s probably taught me more than anyone about platforms like LinkedIn. The value of structuring profiles, the value of how sharing content can influence.
See you next week!