Recently came across a tweet from Chris Brogan referencing a post on Shannon Paul’s Blog on how to take your marketing content from available to sharable to social. I’ve referenced Shannon’s 5 ways here:
Five ways to encourage online sharing of your content:
1. Allow the URL of the image to be copied and pasted in addition to making smaller sized images available for download, too. Sure, magazine publishers will appreciate the large, high-resolution files available for download, but nobody posting online will appreciate such large files.
2. Video and audio clips should also be embeddable. Don’t make me go to your website every time I want to watch your video. Let me post your video where I want.
3. Continue to e-mail text versions of press releases when it makes sense to do so, but have an extension of your website dedicated to sharing content that includes SEO versions of your press releases.
4. With each item you post in your shared content space, include ShareThis or AddThis buttons to encourage direct posting of your content to social networks like Facebook and Friendfeed, and social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg.
5. In addition to posting current content, also share company background information, executive bios, logos, video and audio clips, images and external links to relevant information.
The words “available to sharable to social” are very poignant. In a web world you must think about making your content available for people to syndicate and share. It’s not enough to make the content sharable or downloadable but to reduce the friction and make the content embeddable and inherently sharable.
On the blog Web Ink Now David Meerman Scott makes reference to Neighborhood America’s online media room as a great example of making content available. They go a long way to making the content sharable but I would have liked to see them go one step further, and make the content more shareable by making the actual HTML code available for embedding the content in other venues such as blogs.
In any event kudos to a Neighborhood America for a job well done. In our recent ebook launch we actually make available a logo-icon with embeddable html code available to anyone who would like to embed our ebook in their blogs.
In catching up with some former SAP colleagues they informed me of a recent initiative where they make the content sharable via buttons that bring up several logos of various book marking sites like Digg etc. This has increased the # of inbound links tenfold, and improved their SEO rankings thus enabling a more efficient allocation of pay per click spend. So as an old school marketer I look for the selfish self interest and I have found it.
Remember you must reduce the friction surrounding for your publishable content in this day and age. Doing so can not only increase your syndication of message, but also nets a positive return for your marketing efforts in enhanced SEO and reduced pay per click spend. Nuff Said.