So, what IS content strategy?

This is what content strategy IS. What is IS NOT:

- Believing more impressions means more marketing.

- Spamming. If you believe the ends justify the means, you are wrong.

- Tactics, like posting on Facebook, or writing a 'Top 5' blog post. Strategy is made of tactics, but tactics are not strategy.

A service company is looking to strengthen its position in its chosen vertical. The marketing director has heard that blogging and social media are the way to do this, so she hires some copywriters to start writing several blog posts per week.

Posting blogs into the ether isn't entirely unlike talking to a wall, so she asks someone for advice.

"Are you on Facebook?"
- Well, yes, sort of...I mean, we have a page, but we don't do much with it."
"Oh, you have to use Facebook, all the time. EVERYBODY's on Facebook. Make posts all the time. And sponsor your posts! Every single one of them! Press the 'Boost Post' button and select the amount of money you want to spend. It will tell you how many people you can reach with that budget. Marketing!"

Our marketing director starts doing this, and she's reaching tens of thousands of people a week with her posts, but the page likes aren't climbing, and they're not sure what the return on this advertising investment is, or how to measure it, or what to measure. So, she hires a social media manager to handle things on that end, and doesn't engage her very much, and doesn't really give her much information to go on.

Soon, the CEO calls the marketing director into his office to ask why sales aren't going up when the marketing budget is so large. She doesn't really have an answer. She's doing everything she was told to do, but it isn't working. She concludes that she received poor advice, and that social media and blogging just don't work.

She never considers that she has a much bigger problem than the possibility of getting bad advice, or making poor hiring decisions.

The marketing director in the story employed tactics that can work, but only if they're coupled with a solid strategy.

Strategy is the identification of your organizational or project goals, taking into account market conditions, competition, and research. If your project were a company, strategy would be the boss.

Tactics are what you do to achieve these goals. Sending a monthly email newsletter is a tactic, as are Facebook posts and blogs. Tactics do the work.

Achieving your goals means using strategy and tactics together.

In Season 2, Episode 17 of South Park, Tweek (permanently spracked out of his mind on coffee) sees gnomes sneak into his bedroom at night to steal his underpants from his dresser. His friends don't see the gnomes until they come in at the right time to help the boys with their class presentation on business.

The gnomes claim to be business experts and outline their business plan thus:

Phase 1: Collect underpants
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Profit!

Given Sun Tzu's sage advice, we know that the underpants gnomes' plan is tactics without strategy, expecting it somehow to lead to profit. Our earlier example of the marketing director is the same thing. She used blogging and social media (collecting underpants), connected it with nothing, and was bewildered why profit wasn't happening.

Here's an overarching strategy that most businesses have on their list - and, for the purposes of this presentation, might be the most straightforward to connect back to your WordPress website:

We want to connect with our customers and increase sales.

(Ideally, you want this to be a SMART goal: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound --- so "increase quarterly sales by 10%" is a better goal than "increase sales." But you get where I'm going with this!)

Now here's where your juicy blogging and social media tactics come in.

Granted, blogging and social media are only two of the possible means of content creation, and since my slides are fairly small, I'm using them as shorthand a little bit.

So, let's go through how you can take your business strategy of connecting with customers and increasing sales and connect it with the tactics of blogging and social media to create a content campaign to get you to the finish line.

Your first step: FOCUS YOUR EFFORTS

Your website should always be the center of your online universe. It’s not enough just to have a Facebook page - look at all the bands who never built a website and only had a Myspace page...even in 2011, before the relaunch.

Most of your social media efforts should be focused on driving traffic back to your website. You should also make sure you're community-minded on social media and reshare relevant content from trusted friends, but your own content should link back to your website.

So, how does this work?

I hear a lot from business owners who want to know how to get a bigger network on social media and get more traffic/sell more products from it. As we've discussed, this is being focused on a tactic rather than strategy, which is the noise before defeat.

You have to solidify your foundation first, and then use social media to build upon that. Your foundation (which, actually, is a pretty good strategy):

- Have a great product / service
- Create trust

Everything else comes from there. A blog is just a tool that will help you forge the relationships grounded in trust that will grow your fantastic product / service business. Social media gets layered on top of all of this. BUT YOU DON'T OWN SOCIAL.

Granted, this is WordCamp so I know I don't really need to sell anyone on the idea that you should have a great website and WordPress is a great means to that end. But just in case...

Relying on social media as your main content repository is a bad idea because, besides being beholden to the social platform to allow you continued access to your customers (hi Facebook), there is also the notion of content ownership. Some of the terms of service of these platforms have some squirrelly language about when and how they can use your content.

Some people don't care about this, but I think those people should reconsider. You'll never have more control over your content than when it's on your own site.

The only property you own online is your website and your email list. That's it. Not your Facebook posts. Not access to people who liked you on Facebook. Not your tweets.

So why bother with social media if there are all these concerns about content ownership and fan access?

If you don’t have a solid product / service offering, no amount of social media will save you. That said, social media matters because it allows you the privilege of engaging your peers, colleagues, clients, and customers directly. It allows you to demonstrate your knowledge and earn trust for being a leader in your community.

Social media is not a broadcast medium. Engage or die.

So again, your website is the center of your universe. Everything comes from and is driven back here. The wheels fall off if your hub isn't strong. Lots of extended metaphor.

You can't drive your car on just the rims. Social media is kind of where the rubber hits the road. If our strategy involves connecting with customers, we should be doing that where they live and hang out -- on social media.

Social media and blogging is sounding like an awful lot to think about and even more work, right? You're not wrong. It absolutely is. Automation is one way to ease some of that workload. However, there's a right way and a wrong way to use automation.

Google Reader has gone away, and many people use social media as a way to find curated articles to read, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for you to blast your blog posts across Twitter, Facebook, etc. just because you can. Social media is not an RSS feed.

However, this is not to say that your new blog posts shouldn't go on your social networks, because yes, absolutely they should -- but you need to consider the medium when you make those posts.

If you're like a lot of people, you probably do a lot of your writing outside of business hours, as it's easier to concentrate when the phone isn't ringing and emails aren't flying in. So if you just straight-up automate your posts when they're published, they could be going onto your social networks at odd times -- 8 PM, 11 PM, 2 AM. Social media is fairly ephemeral, so timing is key. And, with Facebook, from where you post matters. I'll get into that in a couple slides.

You can use WordPress to publish a post at a particular time, so even if you finish writing in the wee hours, it will publish at a reasonable hour, but that still might not be the ideal time for your social networks. And your ideal time for Twitter might be different from the ideal time for Facebook. Take a deep dive into your social network analytics and see when the best time to post is, and schedule those posts accordingly. (And don't be afraid to post it multiple times on Twitter - only about 1/5 of your followers see any given tweet.)

There's another presentation later today about using editorial calendars, so I recommend you check that out if these sorts of things interest you.

The great Jeff Turner wrote a blog post that describes why you shouldn't automate everything just because you can. It's more about one tool, namely Buffer, and how it now lets you connect an RSS feed and how that's not necessarily a good thing, but it also considers how automation isn't all bad. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Making your content ready to socialize is a major step. Otherwise, someone may go to share your content and find that Facebook won't recognize and include the photos on your site, creating a link post that's just a mess of text. Or, they'll tweet it and leave out a tag to your Twitter account.

This SEO plugin will actually help wrap your content with the necessary HTML tags to tell Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus how to tag and display your content when it's shared.

Facebook
i. Adds Open Graph metadata to content architecture

Twitter
i. Adds Twitter Card metadata to content.
1. Note: Once you add everything in, you still need to run your site through the Twitter Card Validator.

Google Plus
i. ?

Which plugins to use depends not only on how often you blog and on what topics, but also what social media accounts you post your content to and why.

Click to Tweet: https://wordpress.org/plugins/click-to-tweet-by-todaymade/

Quotable: http://wordpress.org/plugins/quotable/

-- These two plugins help you create pull quotes of key parts of your posts that are pre-formatted with your post link and Twitter username. It streamlines the process of sharing soundbites of your content.

Now we get into some of the things you should keep in mind when developing content for Facebook.

Here's a thumbnail sketch of some good practices for sharing on that platform.

Here are some good tips for Twitter.

Google Plus gets picked on a lot, but it's incredibly useful for community building and blog engagement. Don't underestimate it!

I spoke at WordCamp Orange County this summer, and one of the points I made at the time was that you should make sure to set up Google Authorship on your site, which requires you to have a presence on Google+. However, Google announced not so long ago that they're killing Authorship due to low adoption, and due to the fact that when people did set it up, they often set it up incorrectly. Google says they're still using Authorship as an indicator of authority, but not putting much weight on it.

However, Google+ lets you engage in discussion groups as a brand page, which Facebook doesn't let you do. And because of Authorship, many people on G+ are other bloggers and content creators, so it's a good place to engage other businesses if you're on the B2B side of things (depending on your vertical, of course).

I'm glossing over email lists quite a bit, but because it's such an important tool for outreach (not to mention one of the things you own online), make sure you have an email signup integrated.

Chris Lema (chrislema.com) does a great job of segmenting his email lists by frequency (weekly vs. daily) - his blog posts get populated into the email and he doesn't have to slave over each individual message.

If your sales funnel is robust, you can segment your list for the various points of your funnel and eventually you're only hitting the people who are ready to buy with your most aggressive sales content. This keeps your unsubscribe rate low and your conversion rate high.

... If your wheel is weak, I hope you have a AAA membership because you're gonna get stranded otherwise.

Just like I'm connecting the end of my presentation back to the beginning, make sure you always connect your tactics to a strategy, and that your strategy uses tactics as fuel in the gas tank.

You won't get anywhere if you're just driving around in circles, aimlessly.

So, what could our marketing director from earlier have done differently?

- Identify the strategy. What exactly are we trying to do here?

- Use content calendars. What content are you going write? When will it come out? Is there an event or series of events that relate to your goals? Plan around, leading up to, and after those events.

- Tailor and time. You have to speak differently on Twitter than on Facebook, and both of those are different from your blog. What is most effective for you to say where? Also, when is it most effective for you to say it?

- COMMUNICATE. Externally: use social media socially. Don't broadcast; engage. Internally: Don't assume that just because someone is a great copywriter or social media manager that he or she can read your mind and do what needs doing, because unless they're answering calls for the Psychic Friend Network after hours, that ain't happening. Delegate ownership of certain goals or sub-goals to people doing the work. Give them responsibility and allow them to deliver.