Which Makes Social Work: Inspiration or Perspiration?

Social Pros on the Road

First, it should be noted that this episode of Social Pros is brought to you from the car, where I am driving Scott Stratten and myself from Content Marketing World back to Indiana. The audio quality is not the best, but the conversation is pretty great.
Scott Stratten has published four books, produces a weekly podcast (including video), and has speaking gigs lined up nearly weekly to talk about marketing (or un-marketing, as he refers to what’s really effective in the marketing world). Yet produces one, maybe two blog posts per year. The reason? Quality over quantity.
Scott is a strong believer in only producing content when it’s stellar. There’s no point in churning out content three times a week if it doesn’t provide value to the audience—if no one wants to consume it. So for Scott, when he has reached the point of feeling like, “It’s so epic that everybody I know has to see this right now!” That’s when he sits down to write a blog post.
But then, he also doesn’t rely on his blog for business revenue. So he also thinks there has to be a happy medium between quality and quantity. We may not agree on everything, but Scott agrees with me on this subject:
“More content is better than less content as long as the content is good.” —@jaybaer

In This Episode

• Canadian pet peeves
• Finding the middle ground between only creating content when it’s stellar and creating consistent content
• Twitter’s shift from a watering hole to a voyeuristic platform
• The differences between and values of Facebook and LinkedIn Groups
• Why social groups are just another version of online forums
• The difference between developmental and generational communication shifts and why the difference is so important
• Ideal video content lengths and which platforms to use
• Periscope’s value for behind-the-scenes content
• Reverse ninja product sponsorship

Quotes From This Episode

“I was always one to say if you don’t have anything to say impactful to your audience, then don’t say anything.” —@unmarketing

“On all the forums, until you got a certain number of votes from the membership who had built that community, you were on watch. They had no problem saying, ‘You need to go.’ That’s our problem. We don’t say, ‘You need to go,’ in these platforms anymore.” —@unmarketing

“I think what doesn’t get talked about a lot in our circles is the huge point that relevance plays in this world.” —@unmarketing
“Sometimes I think, ‘Are you saying millennials because it’s young people?’ Brains of younger people are different than when you’re 40.” —@unmarketing
“When I start reading articles by a company here in the states that said, ‘Out of the 350 people we hired, 349 have left within this year. Millennials are terrible. They hate work. They are not loyal.’ You don’t have a millennial problem. You have a company problem if 349 people leave. ” —@unmarketing

“The problem is sometimes the word podcast, people automatically think, ‘I do it or I don’t.’ Or, ‘I understand it or I don’t.’ And, ‘I’m either that person or I’m not.’ It’s just content that can be delivered, audio, video, written, or in chunks or in clips depending on how you want it.” —@unmarketing

“The technology can’t be the content. Me talking to Periscope saying, ‘I’m talking to Periscope’ can’t be the content.” —@unmarketing

Resources

• Scott’s Twitter
• UnMarketing, Scott’s agency
• Scott’s books, such as “UnMarketing” and “UnSelling”
• The UnPodcast
• Patrick O’Keefe’s “Managing Online Forums“
• Content Marketing World

See you next week!