This is part 1 of the Products I Can’t Live Without series.

For about the last six months I’ve been wanting to clean out my Twitter feed and reorganize my lists. I had been following back everyone that follows me, and it had just become too hard to find good content regularly. Twitter is my main source for news and content (I have two computer screens set up at the office – one with TweetDeck up all the time, and the other I use for the rest of my work). And, when I’m not at my desk I’m checking Twitter about every hour during the week. So, not having a steady stream of quality content was driving me a bit crazy.

Over the holidays, I finally had a chance to revamp my Twitter. And, I set up new rules on whom I’ll follow.

I used two standards to set up these rules. The first, Tony Hsieh‘s rules on what to post on Twitter. He uses the anagram  ”ICEE” to remember it.

• Inspire
• Communicate
• Educate
• Entertain

I generally used these rules already for what I post on Twitter, but now I’m using them as a benchmark for whom I follow too. I want people and brands to inspire me, communicate with me, educate and entertain me.

Similarly, I used the AOL’s definition of valuable original content (which I wrote about here and here) as a benchmark for whom to follow. Per AOL,

Unique Content + Quality (trusted, fresh, relevant, authentic) Content = Valued Original Content.

With curation running rampant on the web (note, I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing), I come across many people sharing the same content. I want a steady stream of new (or, unique) content. So, I’m going to start following more people that either write original content and/or are excellent curators of content. In both cases that content has to be highly relevant to my intrinsic interests and their manifestations (social media, technology, entrepreneurship), and the person tweeting the content must be a trusted/authentic source (e.g. a successful VC or entrepreneur, an innovative marketer, a trusted journalist or blogger etc.)

The New Rules

So, here are the new rules for whom I follow:

1. If someone I know or have met follows me, I’ll follow back (friends, colleagues, industry professionals, etc). These are people with whom I’m going to want to communicate
2. I also will follow anyone that I deem will provide me with valuable original content that inspires, educates or entertains me (again, these individuals have to be sharing content that is highly relevant to me and have authenticity in the subject of the content they’re sharing)
3. I will follow/follow back anyone that makes an intelligent remark about or reply to one of my tweets. A simple retweet is not enough, and the individual doesn’t necessarily have to agree with my tweet. S/he just needs to add value to the conversation – to be a valued community member, as I write about here
4. I follow products that I regularly use, and that I’ll want/need updates on

And, that’s it. Four simple rules.

Lists

To help me organize my stream and community, I set up the following lists

• big-fuelers - Big Fuel is a social media agency I used to work for. This is a list of people I worked with there, and helps me keep up with them
• wcg-ers - WCG is the marketing and communications agency I currently work for. Again, this list helps me keep up with my colleagues
• su - Syracuse University is my alma mater, and we have a very tight Twitter community. This is a list of anyone I’m connected to from SU.
• startups - is a list of VCs, entrepreneurs and people I know that work at startups
• marketing - is a list of everyone I know and follow in marketing (note: this list used to be called social media marketing, but really social media is ubiquitous across marketing channels. So, now the list is just called “marketing”
• clients-past-present - is a list of brands I currently work with, or have in the past. It partially serves as a disclosure should I tweet anything about them, but also helps me keep track their activities
• products - is a list of products I use regularly and want/need updates on
• testing - is a list of individuals I’ve decided to follow/follow back, but want to test out their content before I put them in my main “filter” feed
• filter - is my main feed. It’s the only list/feed that I refer to regularly. This is a list of everyone that has passed the follow test and are providing the best content (e.g. I don’t need the brands in the “products” list in my feed all the time; I just want to reference them every once in a while. So, they’re not included in the “filter” list)
• nyc
• la
• san-francisco
• austin
• seattle
• boston
• boulder-co

The location lists are based on cities where I have lived, travel to and/or want to travel to. I’m hoping these lists will help me figure out people that I can connect with when I’m in those cities. Some I’ve met in person, and some I’ve only met through social media. Either way, connecting with them in person when I’m in town will help deepen those relationships.

The Result

Since revamping my Twitter stream, I unfollowed about 500 people, so now I’m only following 361 people. I actually went through and looked at every individual’s profile and tweets before deciding whether or not to continue to follow them, and how to list them.

My “filter” list/stream is now on fire. I have a constant stream of quality content – more than I can keep up with really (but, that’s a high class problem and a much better situation than the one I was in before). Also, I’m testing a product called Undrip - a San Francisco-based startup that is attempting to help individuals filter through all the noise in their streams and identify the best content in real-time, or from the last 24 hours or 7 days. I’m hoping this product will increase my efficiency in consuming and curating quality content for my community.

I’ve also lost about 60 or 70 followers. But, considering I un-followed about 500 individuals, that’s not so bad. Plus, it’s about the quality of the community, not the quantity of it. I preach that to clients all the time, and it’s the truth. I’d rather have less, but more engaged individuals following me than more, but less engaged individuals.

In fact, I have 590 Twitter followers, 441 Facebook friends and 391 LinkedIn connections (1,422 total across the three networks on which I’m most active; many of those people are duplicative – i.e. I’m connected with them on more than one of the networks). Klout measures my True Reach (the number of people I influence, both within my immediate network and across their extended networks) at 826 people. That means I’m influencing/engaging with 58%+ of my community at any given time. I’d say that’s pretty good!

My True Reach on Klout

I also noticed that, since revamping my Twitter stream, my Network Impact (which measures the influence of my network) increased about 10 points to a score of 33. So, not only am I now engaging with a higher percentage of my network, but that network is more influential on average!

My Network Impact on Klout

I was already addicted to Twitter. It’s my first source for news and information that I care about, and a way for me to connect with people and share ideas. But now, after the revamp, I’m a happy addict. More than ever, Twitter is a product that I can’t live without (or at least don’t want to). Thumbs up!

Related articles

• 5 Tools to Battle Social Media Content Overload (hubspot.com)
• Top 10 Tips to Tweet your way to 1000′s of Followers (socialmaximizer.com)
• How to use Twitter to market your company (premierlinedirect.co.uk)
• 5 Types of Twitter Account #Fail (themodsocial.com)
• How Twitter Fits Into Your Social Media Strategy (dreamgrow.com)
• 5 Easy Fixes for the Most Common Twitter Faux Pas (hubspot.com)
• Twitter Etiquette (accesscomptech.wordpress.com)

Over the holidays, I finally had a few days to clean out, reorganize and play with new features on some of my favorite products. This gave me some more clarity on how I can, and want, to use these products moving forward to best fit my needs, and I’m already seeing the benefits.

This has inspired me to write a series on products I can’t live without and how I use them.

Here is an initial list of the products, which I’ll likely be tweaking as we go.

• Twitter
• Evernote
• Dropbox
• Path
• WordPress iOS app
• Paper.li
• Kindle iOS app
• Gist
• Nimble

One thing is becoming clear to me: there are just too many great social networks for one person to manage alone (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram… the list goes on). While enthusiasm for social media, mobile and apps is still growing, I wouldn’t be surprised if fatigue starts to set in trying to keep up. Soon, there will be a need for a platform that aggregates your feeds and communications. Some might argue that need already exists. After all, there are plenty of SMMS (social media management system) products out there (e.g. Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Spredfast). But, these were really built for the professional and enterprise in mind. The UX of these products clearly reflects that. I think that there is now a need for a product that aggregates your feeds and communications in a more consumer-friendly experience. I’ll touch on this in more depth in the individual posts.

If you have any thoughts the above listed products or think there are some I should add, please share.

I often get asked, particularly by clients, what the ROI of content and engagement is. What is it going to cost, and what are they going to get out of it? This is always a tricky question to answer, but I’ll attempt to do so at the end of this post. First, some context.

Nothing in life is guaranteed…unless you’ve been working in advertising.

Content in old advertising was pretty simple: shoot a nice, glossy ad, pushing your product/service and then pay CPMs to distribute that content. Advertisers knew exactly how much that ad was going to cost to produce, how much it would cost to distribute and how many people the ad would (potentially) reach (“potentially” because impressions are not synonymous with engagements).

The Wild Web

Today’s content is a different beast. A good content strategy incorporates paid media, owned media, relationship media and SEO to generate earned media. None are mutually exclusive. And, the emphasis is on the engagement, not the impression.

Social Media

Notice I didn’t even mention social media in there? That’s because social media is ubiquitous across the aforementioned forms of media. Social media is a channel for paid media (e.g. Facebook Ads and Stories, Twitter’s Promoted Trends and Tweets, to name a few of the biggies). It’s a channel for owned media (e.g. Facebook Pages, Google+ Brand Pages, YouTube Channels, Tumblr accounts, Twitter accounts – these are all places to build an owned community). Social media is a channel for relationship media – my term for modern day PR (you can now identify who the top influencers for your brand are; many, if not all, will have a social media presence). Leverage these three media well, coordinated with a strong content strategy, and social media helps facilitate scaled earned media. But, please do not mistake social media as a siloed form of media.

The Brand’s Predicament

Now coordinating these media and solidifying one unified content and engagement strategy is difficult – particularly for Fortune 500 brands with large marketing budgets. That’s because each medium is often handled by a different agency or group. Paid media is handled by media agencies. The content for paid media is produced by the creative agencies. Relationship media is handled by PR agencies. You have a new breed of social media agencies doing some pieces of each (paid, owned and relationship media), while the PR, creative and media agencies are all fighting each other and the social media agencies for a piece of the social media pie. No wonder brands are confused.

Building A Newsroom

To help solve this issue, I’d like to see brands build something akin to a newsroom. This would be a cross-divisional/agency team focused on content and engagement strategy. They would work together to

• Identify the key existing and target audiences (i.e. consumers) for the brand;
• Identify what content is valuable to each of those audiences at different stages of the purchase funnel;
• Identify where (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, TV, news outlets, etc.) and how (video, pictures, text, slides, etc.) audiences like to consume that content;
• Identify who the brands’ top influencers are; and,
• Then, assign team members and agencies to produce the appropriate content and distribute it through the appropriate channels (i.e. execute on the plan)

For more detail on the above bullets, see my posts “Content As A Platform” and “Building A Content Platform”.

Calculating the ROI of Content and Engagement Strategy

Now, I believe that social media and mobile technologies have empowered brands (large and small) to

• Access more specific data about their audiences;
• Produce and distribute a higher volume of content that is more valuable to their audiences, and do so more efficiently; and,
• Build deeper, longer lasting relationships with their audiences

With this in mind, I’d like to see brands and agencies use the following as a benchmark for calculating ROI

1. calculate the average Customer Lifetime Value (= revenue x time [per month/per year])
2. calculate Allowable Cost Per Sale (i.e. the amount your willing to spend to acquire a sale – e.g. 10% x CLV)

(Note: Jamie Turner does a great job describing Customer Lifetime Value and Allowable Cost Per Sale in this post)

With a successful content and engagement strategy, average Customer Lifetime Value should increase over time, while average Cost Per Sale should decrease over time.

I’d like to place emphasis on the words “over time”. While you can certainly run one-off social media campaigns, content and engagement are long-term initiatives that involve constantly listening, learning and iterating. You won’t see ROI tomorrow, or maybe even six months from now. Anyone that has ever started a blog and tried to build an audience/community around it will confirm that. But, I think a year in, you should probably start to see these effects starting to take place.

Are any of you building a newsroom in your organization? How are you calculating ROI for your content and engagement efforts? Would love to know.

Related articles

• Google+ Pages: Real-Time Platforms for Connected Brands (greatfinds.icrossing.com)
• The Content Strategy Burger [Infographic] (socialmediaexplorer.com)
• Infographic: The Content Strategy Burger (aht.seriouseats.com)
• How to Design a Content Marketing Strategy in 3 Simple Steps (e1evation.com)
• 7 Tips for Stellar Social Media Community Management (hubspot.com)
• How does an effective website content strategy benefit a business? (marketing.yell.com)
• A Deep Dive Into GetSatisfaction’s Content Strategy (contently.com)
• 5 Trends That Will Shape Small Business in 2012 (ducttapemarketing.com)
• Measuring Social Media ROI: 3 Things to Consider (socialmaximizer.com)
• Building a Content Platform (reciprocitytheory.com)
• Why Every Agency Needs an Earned Media Director (adage.com)
• How Can Startups Leverage Social Media? (currentindiaaffairs.wordpress.com)

Yesterday, I discussed content as a platform. Today, I’m going to provide tips for building your content platform.

The 90-9-1 Rule

The 90-9-1 Rule is more of a benchmark, but it states that 1% of the online population is highly participatory (producing original content), 9% participates some of the time (usually curating content – taking an action with the content from the 1% such as commenting, sharing, reposting etc.) and 90% “lurk and learn” or do not participate (they consume the content, but they don’t take an action with it).

It stands to reason then that the 1% are the most influential people on the web, followed by the 9%. But, what about those that produce original content AND curate? They reach influence at scale.

Some brand publishers are already doing this; I touched briefly on the subject in my post, “The Valuation of Content”. The Huffington Post sets the bar with a mix of original content from its editorial staff, curated content where they write two paragraphs and link to another publisher’s content and content from third party bloggers. But, this alone, isn’t enough. They have treated content as a platform, using a social layer to encourage their audience to participate.

Optimization for Participation

One quick look at The Huffington Post homepage, and you can see they’re serving up, not just the latest content, but the most popular, the most discussed, “Hot on Facebook” and “Hot on Twitter”. Dive into an article, and you’ll find it’s easy to comment on posts and share the content through social media.

What does this mean? The Huffington Post are experts at getting their audience to participate, and effectively making content go viral. Their content gets engaged with, curated and broadly syndicated by its own audience because The Huffington Post makes it easy for their audience to find great content and engage/curate/syndicate.

How Can Brands Build a Content Platform?

Ten Tips for Building a Content Platform

1. Don’t be a used car salesman (i.e. a good content strategy focuses on building a relationship and trust with the audience)
2. Identify what kind of content your target audience finds valuable
   • Is there a reoccurring complaint about your product/service? Offer up a piece of content that helps them troubleshoot the problem.
   • Are they looking for guidance regarding a topic in which you’re company has domain expertise? Offer up content that can help them (e.g. tips for managing personal finances, a guide to eco-friendly living, considerations when selecting a safe car for your teenager, etc.).
3. In what format do they like to consume that content (e.g. video, text, photos, slide presentations)?
4. Where do they like to consume that content (e.g. YouTube, blogs, Instagram, Slideshare, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)?
5. Select a product/platform on which to build your hub (WordPress, Facebook, Google)
6. Add a social layer (commenting and sharing functionality), if it doesn’t already exist. A great tool to incorporate here is Disqus, which is a comments community, serving as the comments engine for over 1MM sites and has almost 60MM users.
7. Produce original content that meets your audience’s needs.
8. Curate content that adds value to your original content and to your audience
9. Engage with your audience, as they comment and share on your content
10. Listen and improve

The image below represents the type and amount of content you should produce against the 90-9-1 rule. In the end, you want to product content that instigates your audience to take an action, including creating more content for you. As a brand, you likely won’t be able to produce enough good content yourself, in-house. And, it’s not your job to either. But, if you use content as a platform for your advocates to create more content about your brand, then you’re reaching scale both in volume of content and syndication of your content.

Related articles

• AOL Buys The Huffington Post (sixestate.com)
• Content As A Platform (reciprocitytheory.com)
• A Case for Social TV (reciprocitytheory.com)
• Unpaid Bloggers Uprising: The AOL / Huffington Post Lawsuit (sixestate.com)
• The Valuation of Content (reciprocitytheory.com)
• Top Eight Reasons B2B Marketers Use Content Curation (e1evation.com)
• 3 Ways Content “Curation” Can Boost Content “Creation” (logicamp.wordpress.com)
• Top Eight Reasons B2B Marketers Use Content Curation (mktg2bizexecs.wordpress.com)
• A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation (hubspot.com)

Most advertisers see content as a product – something they can produce and release to an audience without third party iteration. Advertisers often pay six to seven figures to produce that content. And, in traditional media, that’s OK because you can pay for X number of impressions (i.e. X number of people that might have seen your content) to validate the high cost of production.

But, if you want to capture earned media through social media (there’s a distinction between the two, which I explain here), then you must think of content as a platform. A platform is a technology platform upon which additional technology (such as applications) can be built. Your iPhone or iPad or Android are built on platformed OS (operating systems), upon which third parties can build applications (or “apps”). Both Apple and Android have robust app ecosystems that are much of the draw for buying their products in the first place.

Any social media technology company worth its salt is platformed. Facebook is a platform, which enabled the unprecedented growth of a little gaming company called Zynga. Twitter is a platform. Companies like TwitPic and TweetDeck (now acquired by Twitter) were built on Twitter’s platform. YouTube is a platform – quite literally for content.

Why build a platform? Because Steve Jobs only comes once in a lifetime, if that often. Steve Jobs had an uncanny ability to predict what the consumer would want in the future and be the first to offer it to them. He built products people didn’t know they wanted. But, most people aren’t Steve Jobs.

The companies that build platforms understand that there is power in the crowd. Opening up your platform through APIs, enables the company to harness the passion and power of third parties to build upon and improve your technology. Steve Yegge explains this brilliantly here.

Content shares the same DNA. There are few people/companies/teams that can produce create content. Even in Hollywood, content created by the most premium content producers and powerful distributors doesn’t always make it. We see it every weekend at the box office and every fall and spring when TV networks release new shows. This is even more apparent with the top print and digital publishers that are competing for pageviews, video views and engagement. And, these are all content producers that produce with the audience in mind. Advertisers, on the other hand, produce with the brand in mind.  With content, as with platforms, the power is in the crowd.

The ease content creation and distribution on the social web has empowered individuals to rival even the most respected premium publishers. The mid-long tail of content publishers is vast as well. And, even the just the socially active individual has a network (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) through which to create, engage with and syndicate content.

Treating content as a platform through which you can instigate participation, conversation, engagement, curation (i.e. the creation and syndication of more content) will enable publishers to reach scale

Tomorrow, I’ll discuss the 90-9-1 rule and offer up 10 tips for building a content platform.

Related articles

• A Case for Social TV (reciprocitytheory.com)
• 8 Tips for Leveraging Platforms for Marketing [@InboundNow #37] (hubspot.com)
• Socialtype™ Launches Gaming Player Acquisition and Rewards Platform across Social Networks (prnewswire.com)
• Occupy Wall Street Provides Showcase for the Best Free Citizen Journalism Tools (savings.com)
• Become a Content King with Ideas from the Ultimate Content Creator (creativeconsiderations.wordpress.com)
• Indian Government Pressure Facebook, Google, Twitter to Censor Content (searchenginewatch.com)

The valuation of content is a subject that has been at the forefront of my mind lately.

In the movie business, we used to anticipate the value of content (movies) we were interested in financing and producing by looking at “comps” (or comparables). These were movies of the same genre and budget range as the movie we were considering financing that were released in the previous ten years. We averaged out their budgets, domestic and international box office revenue, and TV syndication revenues in order to determine the potential value of that movie throughout a twenty-year life cycle. This also helped us determine the value of our fund’s movie library and, ultimately, the value of the company.

TV networks and publishers, I imagine, have similar modeling systems but that include assumptions for subscriptions and advertising revenue. I also imagine that the more content that that a company produces, the more difficult it is to valuate the individual piece of content vs. a library of content. For example, how difficult would it be for The New York Times to valuate a single article when it’s churning out tons of content every day. Context also matters. For example: news is real-time, so how valuable is news content a week, a day, even an hour after the news has broken?

Add the commoditization of content – spear-headed by low production costs, and the democratization of distribution (anyone can now produce and distribute content through today’s social web) and the rise of aggregation (publisher’s like The Huffington Post and Business Insider often offer two paragraphs and a link referring to another publisher’s content as a piece of new content) – and we now produce as much information/content in two days as was produced from the dawn of civilization through 2003.

How can we update the revenue model, so that today’s publishers and brands can appropriately price content? The answer, I imagine, will be through social curation. I’m going to investigate this further.

I’m not a marketer. Yet, my last two jobs have been in marketing. Why?

The last year I was in the film business I thought a lot about my intrinsic motivations and purpose, and how those manifest themselves in business and into a career. What aspects of previous jobs did I like / dislike? For example

• I like high volume, high stress work environments. If a workplace is too slow, I get anxious and antsy and start working on side projects to keep myself busy. I need to feel productive
• I have self-diagnosed A.D.D., so, to stay interested, I need either (1) one project that is progressing quickly and needs all of my attention, or (2) several projects that require less personal attention, but sum up to a high volume of work in aggregate. That said, I generally like having my hands in several different projects at a time
• I love to mentor – maybe because I didn’t get a lot of direction when I was growing up
• Also worth noting, while I like mentoring (or consulting) people (e.g. students, clients, team members, etc.), I don’t like holding people’s hands. This is because I believe time is my most valuable asset and I can’t stand when people waste my time. I expect people to be at least as passionate and resourceful as me. Otherwise, I don’t want them in the room
• I like being in a position where I can influence the strategy/direction of a business

I have many more of these, but I’ll stop here. When I mapped these qualities against a growing interest in technology and social media and how they were affecting the way we communicate and consume content, I concluded that I wanted to start my own company and eventually move into venture capital to fund and mentor other entrepreneurs.  That’s when I started thinking about social TV.

“I will prepare, and one day my chance will come” — Abraham Lincoln

I started preparing – thinking about how the internet, mobile and social media were affecting content consumption and how to disrupt mainstream Hollywood. So, when opportunity presented itself and I was introduced to Avi Savar (Founder of Big Fuel) I was prepared. I connected with their Content to Commerce business model, helping brands connect with their customers through content, and the idea of helping them scale their business. And, so I was hired. And, I accepted because the job fit within the parameters of my purpose.

Six months later, when Big Fuel‘s growth leveled out, and I moved more into an account management role than a corporate development role, and my workload decreased, I got the startup bug again.

I got to work planning two new companies – one being a location-based network and the other a social business consultancy.

Again, opportunity came knocking, and again, I was prepared. I was introduced to WCG, which was building out its company much the way I was mapping out my social business consultancy. Had I not been working on my own company, and had developed my own point of view on the nature of the marketing and communications industry and how social media fits into it, I may not have gotten an offer.

I wasn’t looking for a job; I was ready to start my own company. But, the fact that WCG was building business very similar to what I wanted to build, and the fact that everyone I met at the company was smart and passionate, convinced me it was worth taking a shot on them. It never hurts to align yourself with good people and strong leaders, and I was impressed by Bob Pearson, Jim Weiss and the rest of the team. So, now I’m at WCG.

My last two jobs have been in marketing. Why?

Because technology, content and social media (three interests that fit within my purpose) are disrupting the marketing and communications industry. Brands and agencies need people that can help them navigate the new wild west, and I can fill that role. But, I don’t consider myself a marketer. I consider myself an entrepreneur-in-the-making.

As Tim Cook said, “We rarely control the timing of opportunities, but we can control the preparation”.

So, I will continue to prepare. And, I hope you will too. Find your purpose and prepare. Opportunity will come.

Addendum

On a side note, you don’t have to jump from company to company to find roles that fit within your purpose. Please take the time to read this short post by Steven Tomlinson, Professor at Acton MBA in Entrepreneurship, where he speaks about tweaking your existing job to make it more satisfying.

And, if you haven’t seen Professor Tomlinson’s TEDxAustin speech, I urge you to watch the video below now.

I work in Manhattan and live in Jersey.  So, when Hurricane Irene decided to stop by, we booked it to Albany where my wife’s family lives. Good thing too because our street and basement flooded. Luckily that’s all. Many people were more severely affected.

My father-in-law, with whom we were staying, lost power. And, while he has a backup generator, it didn’t power up the WiFi at his house. So, to get work done, I went to the local Starbucks to use theirs. I checked in, as seen below…

Digital is the New Broadcast