Digital Daredevil
As my Social Media Practice course comes to an end, we were tasked to come up with a social media pitch for an organization to flex the knowledge we’ve garnered throughout the semester. For my social media pitch, I’ve centered my project around a local organization, Duke Farms.
Before even starting up a social media page, an organization must understand content. In previous blog posts, I’ve talked about how to construct a content strategy and have pulled together a quick guide identifying the differences between content strategy, content marketing, and content creation. In this week’s blog post, I will be walking you through how I created an example content calendar for a local nonprofit organization.
Trader Joe’s is a specialty grocery store, popular across the United States. Their brand is eccentric, fun, and showcases unique food products and ingredients from around the world to encourage their customers to try new things. Founder, Joe Coulombe, started the business to bring interesting, hard to find products to local communities. Today, Trader Joe’s still follows this mission. With innovative products like Cauliflower Gnocchi and their infamous Cookie Butter, Trader Joe’s fulfills customer’s needs for affordable, diverse, and healthy eating.
Recently, the City of Calabasas, California released a Request for Proposals in an effort to get started with their website redesign project. While the City’s intentions are good, they made no indication of prioritizing a content strategy that would help them to keep pushing out useful, organized information out to the public.
The City of Calabasas in California recently released a request for proposals (RFP) seeking guidance for its website redesign and content overhaul. Through this extensive project, the city hopes to launch a streamlined, easy to navigate website that can be readily managed by non-technical staff. The City of Calabasas states that their current website was redesigned in 2009 and is in dire need of a refresh – and after trying to navigate it myself, I strongly agree. To hone my skills and practice some of my recent learnings, I’ve created a content report in response to the City’s RFP. My content report for the City of Calabasas includes a core page matrix, sitemap, and wireframes for some of the high-visibility pages. These three devices will ultimately help to organize and prioritize content while taking into account the front-end design and user experience.
In this era of digital consumption, pieces of information are being catapulted across the Internet at speeds that defy traditional methods of sharing. Word of mouth, newspapers, and even television have succumbed to mighty online sharing avenues like social media, websites, and apps. Within seconds, information can be published and shared all across the globe – reaching huge, diverse audiences that digest content in a variety of ways. Some audiences are serial sharers that click “retweet” or “share to timeline” without even batting an eye. Other audiences are keen, silent absorbers that thoroughly investigate content that grabs their attention. Whichever audience you may fall into, one thing rings true – it is becoming harder and harder to decipher what is real, honest content and what is faked.
Want to know what these three things have in common? Keep reading!
This past week, I took a look at the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) in order to develop a strategic framework for their content that took into account their business goals, audiences, and current external-facing content. To ascertain a better understanding of what the RBGE’s goals were, I referenced this evaluation conducted by Bernard Marr. As the RBGE rolls up into the Scottish Government’s purview, the organization was tasked to promote 3 business goals:
The other day at work I opened an email containing a marked-up PDF from our legal department. The requests for edits were easy except for one that said “insert FBS on all.” FBS? What the heck was that? I turned to my colleague, who had many more years of experience – and lots of interaction with our legal department – for guidance but even she was at a loss. After a few minutes of futile googling and guessing, a quick call to legal dispelled the mystery around the acronym for “Fair Balance Statement.” The point I am trying to make is that something that may be super obvious in one industry might not be as apparent to those outside of it, or those who are working with a new team. As we have discussed previously, content (and its importance) has recently shot up in the past decade, and because of this, there are still some misunderstandings about areas involving content. In today’s post, I’d like to help clarify some of the most important areas of content and their functions. We will be covering: content strategy, content marketing, and content creation.
To enhance my understanding of content, I conducted a miniature content analysis on an up-and-coming wealth advisory business, EmberHouse. Out of the many websites featured on Awwwards, this one caught my eye because it was unique. During my undergraduate studies, in my Identity class, I had to design a company’s brand off of a fictitious brief. Unluckily for me, I got a wealth advisory/management business to design for. To execute this project, I did a lot of research into the area and saw how many financial and wealth organizations executed their appearance and content. From my perspective, the industry seemed to favor fairly basic and bland (e.i. typically corporate), making it dull to look at and difficult to relate to. This is where EmberHouse makes their departure.
After concluding my studies and research about deep work, I have made peace with the fact that my life is inundated with content literally every second I walk out the door or peruse the web. Each piece of content I am exposed to has a very specific motive behind it, hoping that people like me will click around and choose to spend money. Marketing for any product or service has become cutthroat as companies battle to gain attention from distracted and saturated internet users. In an effort to differentiate themselves, companies have taken to content strategy to formulate decisive pillars and action items in order to make lead conversions. Some businesses do a great job of it, while others are still trying to get a hang of how to create, curate, and manage content. At the end of one of my previous blog posts, I invited readers to take a look at the content they consume and interact with. In this post, I am going to practice what I preach. To touch upon a variety of subjects, I am going to break down my relationship with content into three sections: what I create, what I consume, and what I attract. Sounds like a fun time, right? Let’s get into it.
Alex Piwtoratsky. 