Melbourne Geek night, September 2013
The speaker line ups and topics keep getting better for the Melbourne geek nights and tonight is no expection.
Ophelie Lechat from Flippa talking about "Tackling the scary content marketing beast"
I've been doing some of this myself recently, so it was interesting to hear some more in depth on te topic from a commercial perpective, here’s what I got out of the session:
- Content isn’t just a blog
- Have editorial calendars
- Content strategy and marketing are best friends as the discipline helps attract seo and web traffic, this in turn reduces demand on customer support and partnerships. good for engagement.
- Assess what content you already have. If it's not content it may be existing skills or assets.
- Writing for your site can be empowering for team members
- Don’t be afraid of ghost and hired writers.
- Decide what will you talk about and don't just talk to and about yourself. Identify what others don't do or do badly.
- ebooks of collections of posts are a great marketing idea.
- What to write about - questions that need answering, searches on your site. What conversations are people having elsewhere? If you get stuck, write an outline first.
- Keep your content as short as possible, focus, end with engagement, what do users/readers want?
Steve Sammartino, Serial startup guy talking about “The End of Demographics”
This was an interesting presentation around the modern word of consumer advertsing an dpurchasing, I wasn’t completely convinced by all of what was said, but still.
Some concepts were… Are stats and reporting tired trends, remove the word ‘consumer’ and we are humans. We are no longer exclusively in circles of production and consumption. we can have what we want now (really?). Media doesn’t shape our minds anymore (really?).
It’s not technology anymore, it’s connections. We are now wider spread with disposable technology. Fragmentation is a good thing for choice and new chances and entrants. Frequency has replaced proximity. And to finalise… big data is simpler than it sounds!
Megan Dell from MYOB treating us to a repeat of the talk she did at UX Australia about “Weekly user testing”
- Bring your customers in to watch and test and don’t cancel the habits you create.
- How to recruit potential tester - not email surveys, conventional surveys didn’t work well either as you may not record details that are needed and then it’s too late. A dedicated person (intern) helped as did just doing it yourself, exploiting your existing relationships and just asking people.
- Undertaking tests – Be prepared to travel to clients, get a wide gamut of people and tests, be ready to go for whenever there’s a potential.
- Have a rough plan and how people can add to it. Have a process to handle the process.