This is an interesting article about curating content and some of the common mistakes that we make in sharing information with our networks.

I liked the first 4. In the 5th, the author seems to contradict herself. In the beginning of the paragraph she talks about spending time to do a quality job on curation (taking other people's content and adding your insight, observation, thoughts based on your experience and how it's relevant to your specific audience).

A couple of paragraphs latter she talks about using some of these new tools that everyone is rushing to try on that "automate" content curation. It seems like a contradiction.

You can fully automate 1out of the 3 elements of content curation. - the distribution of your content. You can partially automate the first step - finding the content. The middle part is where you've got to invest a few minutes on a human-personal level writing epic insights.

You can automate finding the content - that's Step 1. One of my favorite platforms is scoop.it - the flexibility and ease of this tool is outstanding and very intuitive to use. They have both a free and professional paid version. However, it still takes a human touch to go through the hundreds of articles to pick the one or two that might really be impactful for your network. I spend 1-2 hours a week using tools like google alerts, sccop.it, the LinkedIn publishing platform of influencers, and feedly to identify potential curated content worthy of sharing.

Step 2 is the writing of your insights, thoughts, observations. This is where you are going to promise me you will not be boring. Once you get good at - it should take about 5-10 minutes per curated piece of content to add your outrageous and compelling wisdom. This CANNOT be automated. This is the piece no one wants to spend time on. It takes time.

I'll share an example: It takes me 45-60 minutes to write a 450-600 word blog article. I can curate a piece of content like I am doing here in 5-10 minutes. Again, Sccop.it provides a great platform for you to ad your individualized thought-leadership. I try to publish 5 curated pieces of content for every original blog post (or slideshare or youtube video or podcast).

Finally, Step 3 is the distribution of your curated content and insights into your various social media networks. This step is probably the one that lends itself most easily to automation. My preferred approach is to use Scoop.it integrated with Bufferapp to schedule my curated content at appropriate intervals and times with different social networks. This process requires about 10 seconds of your time after writing - once you've set the initial parameters.

There you have it - the proper blend of human touch with automation to create a powerful communication vehicle with your network to engage, stimulate, interact, and encourage folks to raise their hands to learn more about you and your business/service/products.

Barry Deutsch

Social Media Coach to Vistage and TEC Chairs

Are you reading our dedicated Chair blog to learn how to create an abundance of CEO referrals?

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/vistagechairs

Join the Discussion With Me On Google Plus

Here's an excellent description and example of using content curation to nurture your prospects for your Vistage or TEC Group. I really liked the comment:

"Remember, the primary goal of nurturing is to keep in touch with the potential buyer. As long as you are hyper-relevant, you are accomplishing the primary goal of maintaining interest. A nurture interaction doesn’t need to be about a whitepaper. It doesn’t need to be a detailed blog post.  In fact, it doesn’t even to be about something you wrote! Often, the best nurturing is going to be about interesting, relevant content that other people wrote."

I am doing what he talks about in the article with you. This is highly relevant information that some of you might find useful in nurturing your leads that are not ready to sign up immediately.

These prospects/leads may still be early in the buying/decision process and need additional information touching pain points to move forward.

Do you take what you gathered in previous conversations about their pain points and then share relevant information every few weeks on those specific issues they've told you that they care about?

As a Chair, you're sitting on a mountain of rich content from speakers, the Executive Street Blog, and articles in the library - not to mention your own examples of member success within your group. Do you leverage this wealth of information to nurture your prospects on a regular, systematic basis?

Do you automate this process or are you doing it in an excel spreadsheet? It doesn't matter, the key is getting started.

Call or email me if you would like to get a jump start on nurturing your prospects through their decision making to join your group.

Barry Deutsch

Social Media Coach to Vistage and TEC Chairs

Are you reading our dedicated Chair blog to learn how to create an abundance of CEO referrals?

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/vistagechairs

Join the Discussion With Me On Google Plus

The author of this article talks about the idea of using curated content (stuff others have written vs. your original content). This is a powerful approach to communicating valuable information to your network, and signficantly reduces the time it takes to generate shareable content.

I particularly liked the embedded slideshare deck in this article about  "finding and sharing content without a single original thought".

Just remember the key to sharing valuable content with your network is about putting your unique spin, insight, commentary with the article so that it gives context and meaning to your network for the needs they have.

It also reinforces your thought leadership, expertise, and value you provide.

Sharing great content is NOT about posting links to articles - this is known as link spam - it's easy but worthless.

Are you leveraging tools like scoop.it to find great content and share that with your network. A key element of taking this approach is to pepper the curated content with original content of your own.

I use a 4/5:1 ratio. One original piece of content for every 4 or 5 curated pieces. The time difference is enormous. It takes me about 10 minutes to curate an article by finding, reading, summarizing, and drawing insights, and then publish to the proper social media sites or networks.

To produce original content like a 350-500 word blog article, it might take 45-60 minutes. To produce a slide deck of 20-25 slides, narrate it for about 3 minutes,  create a video from it, write a blog article around it, and then post the slidedeck to slideshare, the audio to iTunes, and the Video to both iTunes and YouTube could be a 4-5 hour project.

It's easy to fall into the habit of only curating content as your content marketing strategy - don't fall victim to this -resist it! Sprinkle in some of your own original content to show deep insights and value.

If you have questions about creating a specific weekly strategy around communicating with CEO prospects in your network, shoot me a note, and I'll show you how easy this strategy is to reinforce your visibility, thought leadership, expertise, and value.

Chairs

Barry Deutsch

Social Media Coach to Vistage and TEC Chairs

Are you reading our dedicated Chair blog to learn how to create an abundance of CEO referrals?

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/vistagechairs

Being a news source of repeating the news in sharing articles from business publications like Fortune, Forbes, Inc. is boring - your network gets those articles from 27 different sources.

They are looking for YOU to provide a compelling story so that they can raise their hand and say: I would like to learn more about how you might help me.

Much of what I see from Vistage/TEC chairs, speakers, members, and trusted advisors posted on social networks is boring, mundane, and a complete turn-off - it leads to zero engagement and interaction from their networks. It serves no purpose and is a complete waste of time. Your network skips over your article or blog post or shared item without a second glance.

Take a hint from our popular hiring program when we talk about recruiting top talent by making the advertisement different from allowing a job description to masquerade as an ad. Make a Compelling Statement - why would someone want to leave their current job to come to your organization?

In the case of attracting CEOs, why would they want to engage with you? Share your stories of success! How have you helped others? Why is there such a reluctance to share these rich, wonderful, compelling stories - and keep relying on the boring, mundane, regurgitation of news stories.

Be bold, take a stance, be controversial, be contrary, be compelling! No one on social networks is interested in BORING.

Send me your next article or blog posting and I'll share with you some techniques to make your network jump at the chance to interact with you.

Barry Deutsch

Social Media Coach to Vistage and TEC Chairs

Are you reading our dedicated Chair blog to learn how to create an abundance of CEO referrals?

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/vistagechairs

Join the Discussion With Me On Google Plus

Jay Baer is one of the icons in marketing using the web - particularly with social media and content marketing. I liked this post he put up shattering many of the myths we have about using content to find, engage, and nurture relationships in our network.

Here's one of the biggest myths I see in working with Chairs:

"2013 data from the Pew Internet project finds 72% of American adults who are online use social networking sites. (note: 85% of American adults are online). Even among Americans 65 years old and better, 43% of them use social. To further put this into context, about 70% of American households had satellite or cable television, circa 2011. So, is it possible that YOUR customers aren’t using social? Conceivably, yes. But even if they aren’t yet using social for business, chances are they are using social in some capacity."

Many Vistage and TEC chairs have told me that they don't think using content marketing (sending articles/blog posts/other useful content to potential CEOs for their group is not an effective strategy since CEOs are NOT active on the web searching for information and on social networks).

Maybe 2-3 years ago you could make this claim, but today it's more of a justification/rationalization NOT to do the work required to establish your credibility, PR, awareness, thought leadership, and expertise.

Leveraging content in my own business with CEOs has resulted in a significant boost in referral marketing, leads, and actual business.

What's holding you back as a Chair from engaging with local CEOs through sharing valuable content? Remember, more than anyone else in B2B services at the CEO level - you're sitting on a goldmine of potential valuable content.

Barry Deutsch

Social Media Coach to Vistage and TEC Chairs

Are you reading our dedicated Chair blog to learn how to create an abundance of CEO referrals?

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/vistagechairs

Join the Discussion With Me On Google Plus