Giving It Away

This week we are focusing on distributing and sharing content. The where and the how.

You have a marketing story to tell. You’ve created valuable content. You’ve repurposed it into various formats, and you’ve exercised the foresight to create quality assets that you can repurpose infinitely.

The next step is to take the sage advice of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and “give it away now.” Share your content. Aim for both quantity and quality of placement, but don’t confuse the two.

Posting everywhere is a good idea, the digital equivalent of keeping your fingers crossed. An intelligent and targeted distribution strategy, however, is the fertile soil in which strong relationships with your audience will grow.

Target by publishing and sharing your content on sites whose users have traits that overlap with those of your audience. The greater the overlap, the better the fit. Use analytics tools such as Quantcast to research the demographic spread of sites.

It is equally important to actually get in the trenches and learn how sites and communities are used and populated. You are sharing content, so it makes sense to see how content is consumed in a given environment.

Where to Post?

Post and share everywhere, but remember that what you are aiming for is meaningful engagement. Make sure your content is RSS enabled. Use the ShareThis tool to make it easy for you and others to spread your content.

Don’t depend on merely posting content on your webpage or a microsite. Don’t just make your content shareable – put it in front of communities who use and share content.

This graphic shows the 57 services that can link to FriendFeed, but there are countless other places for document sharing, blogging, bookmarking, lifestreaming, photo sharing, status reporting and video streaming. Forums and discussion sites centered around a theme or topic can also be powerful channels.

Experiment with sites, even those in direct competition with each other. The differences between them will shed light on the capabilities of each and the personalities of the user communities.

YouTube is populated by everybody. Vimeo has a bit more emphasis on creativity and has more filtering. Experimentation and studying demographics and how they relate to your content can aid your strategic sharing.

Customize

Once you get a feel for these sites, tailor your repurposed content even further to meet the needs and expectations of the community. Put a new introduction or title screen on a video. Change the title on a written piece to encourage your audience to act.

This is where your creative chops come in handy as you work to spur your audience into action. Help people to click through to your content.

Takeaway

Share your content thoughtfully and get it out there.

Questions

Where do you like to share content? Have you had success tailoring your content to an audience?

About the author

Jim Cosco -

Jim Cosco founded Tippingpoint Labs in 2002 in an effort to pursue the creation and distribution of high-quality content for the purposes of marketing and advertising. Jim’s experience as an executive producer, producer, director, and writer for television programming ranging from local public affairs and national news to reality television, enables him to create compelling stories designed to trigger powerful, emotional responses from his audience. No matter the medium, Jim’s passion for story-telling remains the common thread in all of his projects and is always the founding principle in driving his team to deliver high-quality, relevant content at every turn.

Jim relies heavily on his journalistic routes to create transparent, honest, and open content that helps build trust and nurtures meaningful brand relationships over the long term.

Since the early nineties Jim has devised and executed projects for clients like MTV, Fox News Channel, ABC, Putnam Investments, and Tufts University.  He has directed television shows and independent features, written screenplays and television treatments, and created content for marketing campaigns and product launches.