How can you catch more fish? By using more poles.
If you’re going to create social media content to establish or perpetuate thought leadership for you, your company, or your clients, you can’t silo your ideas.
The old method of thought leadership was to create a white paper. A carefully crafted, highly edited, incredibly boring, 18-page tree killer that you provided for download on your Web site.
Guess what? In a 140-character world, a white paper feels like reading Moby Dick. Backwards. While covered in maple syrup.
Mmmmm. Info Snacks
Don’t put all your thought leadership eggs in that one, large basket. Like a salad at a fancy restaurant, deconstruct that white paper and instead create an array of info snacks that you can sprinkle across the Web.
Each of those snacks will be consumed by a slightly different audience, and perhaps more importantly each will be indexed by search engines, multiplying your inbound marketing opportunities geometrically.
Let’s think about how this might work in practice. Let’s say your core concept is that Blue Cross/Blue Shield in your state is helping improve the health of the citizenry through community health initiatives like immunization, exercise classes, and so forth.
Sure, you could create a report and a press release that talks about the good works of BCBS. You could probably even get a reporter to write about it in the local paper, or the TV station to grab some footage of the line for flu shots. But that’s not “atomizing” content (in the words of Todd Defren from Shift Communications). That’s siloing content.
Instead, you could create:
- A blog post about how immunizations work, and whether there’s a danger of injecting people with live virus.
- A blog post about the effectiveness of immunizations in controlling infectious disease.
- A blog post about the history of immunization.
- A blog post that compares the impacts and benefits of various types of exercise (aerobic vs. anaerobic, etc.)
- A blog post that reviews equipment you might need in BCBS exercise classes like fitness balls, yoga mats, steps.
- A “biggest loser” style contest in major cities in your state, including weekly blog posts, Facebook page, and videos of weigh-ins.
- A video blog post (also on YouTube) interviewing an immunization nurse and discussing the craziest/funniest things he/she has seen (good for humanization).
- A video blog post (also on YouTube) showing scenes from an exercise class, and interviewing participants.
- A weekly podcast that features discussions with fitness instructors about easy fitness tips that consumers can do at home.
- A Powerpoint or Keynote presentation (uploaded to Slideshare) that covers the history of immunization and its importance in modern public health.
This doesn’t even begin to exhaust the options, and doesn’t include content on Wikipedia, Google Knol, Hunch, Squidoo, or blog comments.
Thought leadership via social media content is about thinking big. And then thinking small.
Are you ready to fish?
(photo by Laszlo-Photo)
About Jay Baer
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Fitness Tips – Get More Bait in the Water | Social Media Marketing | Social Media … [link to post] – Nice Read
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Soc Media Link: Get More Bait in the Water | Social Media Marketing | Social Media …: Each of .. [link to post]
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Get More Bait in the Water | Social Media Marketing | Social Media …: A video blog post (also on YouTube) int.. [link to post]
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Get More Bait in the Water | Social Media Marketing | Social Media … [link to post]
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RT @jaybaer A great reminder for us all! Get More Bait in the Water Convince & Convert [link to post]
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RT @jaybaer Get More Bait in the Water | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Consulting – Convince & Convert [link to post]
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Marketing article: ‘Get More Bait in the Water” [link to post]
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RT @jaybaer Get More Bait in the Water. Excellent article on promoting what you know with little dough [link to post]
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RT @PeggyDuncan: RT @jaybaer Get More Bait in the Water. Excellent article on promoting what you know with little dough [link to post]
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More good advice – fish where the fish are: in lots of ponds – [link to post]
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Deconstruct that white paper and instead create an array of info snacks that you can sprinkle across the Web. [link to post]
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RT @JayPeete: Get More Bait in the Water | Social Media Marketing | Social Media … [link to post]
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R u ready to fish? RT @randylewiskemp Marketing article: ‘Get More Bait in the Water” [link to post]
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Awesome post : Use more social media “info snacks” to reach larger audience [link to post]
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[...] Leave a comment Go to comments I love this description of white papers from Jay Baer on Get More Bait in the Water ( yes I’m a victim of my own snark having posted multiple white papers on our Web site) [...]
[...] and utterly… inspired by Jay Baer over at Convince and Convert. His blog post titled Get More Bait in the Water has a great thought that pushed me to write this blog. “Thought leadership via social media [...]
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RT @randylewiskemp Marketing article: ‘Get More Bait in the Water” [link to post]
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Social Media Marketing. Get More Bait in the Water | | Social Media Consulting – Convince & Convert [link to post] #Facebook #Twitter
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Brilliant post about spreading your thought leadership articles around – More Bait in the Water [link to post]
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RT @tweetmeme Get More Bait in the Water | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Consulting – Convince & Convert [link to post]
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[...] of inbound marketing. Create content about your brand, and distribute it as widely as possible. Get more bait in the water. Optimize EVERY piece of content for [...]
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