Sudbury has the highest concentration of households with school-aged children of any town in Massachusetts, which makes for a very family-oriented town, and also puts a lot of focus on the quality of our schools. Each year the town sets a budget and struggles to live within it – like most towns, families, and people I know. When it can’t, the Town Fathers propose an “override,” meaning a right to raise taxes to cover expenses of the town over and above those that were budgeted.

Each year the proponents of this tax use the same slogan for this override: “Support Sudbury!” Each year they say that to maintain our first-class schools, fire, and police, we need to reach into our pockets and give a little more for the team.

Since 1999 the good people of Sudbury have “Supported Sudbury,” and this well-intended philanthropy has led to a series of challenges for the town well documented in this video highlighting some rather daunting facts and figures.

Anyhoo… I’ve had just about enough of this. And I met a like-minded denizen of the town, Bob Haarde, who’d decided to run for Selectman, and do something about it.

I met Bob for dinner at the local hangout, and we talked about how I might be able to help his campaign through the addition of a social marketing program. I offered to help, but told Bob that in the end, the program would succeed or fail not based on my talents, but based on his willingness to contribute substantive content to the channel, and to engage with the people drawn to that content. I agreed to get him started, and he agreed to create and post three pieces of original content to the system in the next 72 hours. This was important since time was short… the election was a week and a half away.

That night at my kitchen table I created and customized accounts for him on Posterous and Twitter, connecting them to each other and to a Facebook Fan Page I created from within Bob’s own Facebook account.  I took the Posterous e-mail and sent it to him, with instructions to publish whatever he wanted to share with voters, described in a casual and personal way, along with whatever anecdotes he cared to share about the journey of a regular guy into his first elective office.

He began to do so, and after he’d added three or four posts I began following our fellow Sudbury-ites on Twitter, and sharing the page with my own local friends on Facebook. By the election this week – 10 days after they launched – we’d amassed 25 Twitter followers and 60 Facebook fans, collectively connected to hundreds more. The Posterous entries were being published to both channels, and being viewed natively between 50 and 100 times.

Bob Haarde is now Sudbury’s newest Selectman. He has the seeds of a coalition to deliver on his campaign promise (“Cut waste, not teachers.”), and a direct and ready channel to the network of local voters that got him elected.

And he won by 36 votes.

The key to this is creating something we call a “content hub.” A content hub is more than just a standalone site or application, it’s both the heart of a distributed network of information, and a destination for those that share the interest it supports.

Rather than explain the theory of a content hub in detail, it’s best to just build a quick-and-dirty one, and use it. Here’s the process I’d recommend to do exactly that:

1. If you don’t have a GMail account, create one, say acme@gmail.com. You’ll need this e-mail for all the logins, might as well use the same one.
2. Associate your logo with that e-mail in Gravatar.com; this will also come in handy later.
3. Create a YouTube account associated with the same Google ID.
4. Create a Flickr account. You may need a Yahoo e-mail account for this. Just create one.
5. Create a Twitter account, and customize the profile page to reflect your brand identity. Add an image, and a short bio line, for God’s sake.
6. Create a Facebook Page. You can do this from your personal Facebook account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one.
7. Create a Posterous account, and activate the Group Profile feature to make it easier for others to post to the account. Connect your YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook pages to Posterous so that any content you send to Posterous bounces into the other accounts automagically.
8. Create a simple listening station in Google Reader. You’ll have access to Google Reader automatically having set up the GMail account above. Lots of smart people have described how to do this; just do what they say. Once you get the basics down, you’ll be able to pull any RSS feed into Reader, which I promise will come in handy at some point.
9. Click the Reader “Settings” at upper right, then the rightmost tab, which is “Send To.” Configure Reader to send content to the destination sites you created above.
10. Use the damn thing.

The “hub” of the system is your new GMail account. If you log into that each morning, you’ll have access to everything you need.

To distribute original content through the system, just use the Posterous account. This is dirt-simple straightforward… You can post everywhere by sending e-mail to post@posterous.com from your GMail address. Send images and they’ll go to Flickr as well. Send video and they’ll post to YouTube automatically, etc. Links to everything you create will appear on your new Posterous blog, and go out to your Twitter followers and Facebook fans, automatically.

“Curating” content is even easier. Whatever is in Reader can be sent through the system by clicking the “Send To” button. When you do that a drop-down appears with Twitter, Facebook, and Posterous as options (remember, choosing “Posterous” sends it everywhere). Begin to poke around in the local blogs and start raising your visibility. Leave short comments on others’ blogs to draw traffic to your own, and create the personal connection you need to deliver on the brand promise. (Gravatar is already set up if you followed the above, so wherever you log in to comment on someone else’s blog and use your GMail address, your icon will also appear and give you some exposure.)

You can also access your brand “listening station” in Google Reader. Just click “Reader” at the upper left of Gmail, and you’ll pretty much be able monitor any appearance of the brand online. You should add some influential local bloggers to the feeds there as well, and create folders for whatever else you like to read on the web.

So what happens now?

Start posting. Share the content you find interesting in Reader. Build some relationships. Get to know folks. Help people, and watch them help you back.

If you need something more industrial strength, please give us a call. But for 90% of the businesses out there, the truth is this is enough to get started building the relationships that will help build your business.

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This past Thursday I attended the Massachusetts Conference for Women with the majority of my female coworkers from Holland-Mark. This was the first women’s conference I have ever been to and wasn’t sure what to expect. I was honestly thinking it would be a great place to network, but was also picturing a bunch of boring seminars that would allow for some serious doodling time. For the most part I was wrong about that last statement although some doodling did occur (I just can’t help it). The crowd was huge and slightly overwhelming, you can get a good idea of the size by the picture below, and there were rows of tables behind us!

The Opening Keynote speakers were really engaging, especially Marcus Buckingham (his accent and good looks helped some) and Tory Johnson. They were so great, in fact, that I went to both of their breakout sessions, taking my coworker Liz’s advice that no matter how interesting the titles of the sessions sound, if the person speaking sucks then the whole thing will undoubtedly put you to sleep (not her words, but that’s the idea). She was right because I really enjoyed the first two sessions with Marcus and Torey, and left the third session early because it wasn’t holding my attention at all.

Marcus’s seminar was called “Finding Your Strongest Life” (also the name of his book he is promoting). It’s sort of funny to me that a man is telling women how to be happy, but he made some really interesting and good points. The idea is simple, find moments in your life that invigorate you and pay attention to them, “cradle” them, and make them into something you can do every day. He made the point that happy women don’t multi-task, juggle, or strive for balance, because those goals are all impossible and only means you aren’t paying attention to your tasks 100%. He presented many statistics and facts that made me really think about my own life.

Tory’s seminar was not unlike Marcus’s although it focused a little more on what to do if you lose your job and how to bounce back. She explained that in order to figure out what you really should be doing for a career you need to write down moments of passion or moments where you feel you are “on fire”. Also, you need to be visible; she told her story about when she was fired from her job she sat around her apartment for eight months eating ice cream until she made herself get out and network. She said she had a hard time at first because she would go to events and only talk to her friends, which wasn’t productive at all. She encouraged all of us to meet at least three new people at the event. Although I find walking up to complete strangers hard to do and it’s something I need to work on, this women’s conference was a great place to start.

One comment I have about the seminars I attended is I feel like they catered to women in their late thirties and over. There was a lot of talk about marriage, kids, career changes after being a stay-at-home mom, etc. I absolutely understand that those topics are common for many women, but what about the twenty-somethings who are just getting their career on track? There was one point when Tory asked the audience “who is on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter?”, and MAYBE seven people (including me) raised their hand.

During lunch Suze Orman lectured/screamed at us about money. I find her to be intelligent and obviously knowledgeable in finance, but I honestly had a headache after she was done. I am not one who knows a whole lot about the finance world (definitely have an artist’s brain), and am constantly trying to figure out what I need to be saving for retirement or what I should be putting towards stocks, so I was excited when I got her free book.

Overall I really enjoyed attending the conference. I felt rejuvenated and inspired, feeling as if I could really do anything my heart desired as long as I am doing something I love to do. I know I wouldn’t have attended this conference if it wasn’t for the support of Holland-Mark. Whenever an opportunity arises where we can learn or experience something new, Holland-Mark encourages us to participate and I am thankful for being able to attend an event like this one.

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Posted via email from miketrap posterous

Posted via email from holland-mark posterous

Part of the challenge in maintaining an effective social media presence is creating worthwhile content, day in and day out. We call this “feeding the beast,” and it can be a bear.

To make it easier we’re always looking for new ways to spread the burden, to make it easier for more folks in the organization to contribute. We’ve been talking with clients about using Posterous in this application, and figured we’d taste the dogfood before we served it up.

Anyhoo… we’ve sent a group of folks in the agency an e-mail address they can use to post whatever they want to our social media accounts, easy breezy.

Let’s see what happens.

Posted via email from holland-mark posterous

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We talk about our approach to social marketing being “rooted in brand, and powered by content.” We’ll cover the front half in an upcoming post. The back half is our take on The Great Truism of social marketing… that today, you are what you publish.

Content Strategy

We believe success in social marketing starts with a content strategy, which boils down to a clear-eyed definition of exactly what kind of content is at the intersection of:

• what your target audience is looking for online, and
• what you are uniquely willing and/or able to provide.

What does that mean? It means if you’re a magic marker brand, don’t blog about the 10 Reasons Your Marker Is Better than Brand X. Create a showcase for people who use your product to make cool things. If you make plastic stuff in every conceivable configuration, don’t tweet your press releases. Create a blog about how people can take control of household chaos and get organized. If you’re a late-night taco truck, don’t do a YouTube series on Korean cooking. Tell hungry, drunk people where you’re at through a medium they can access easily.

It ain’t rocket surgery, people.

Feeding The Beast

The real challenge with this approach is that when you commit to a content strategy like the above, you actually need to produce content aligned with that strategy. Knowing that once you start, you have to “feed the beast” — day-in-and-day-out — actually keeps some smart marketing folks out of social media altogether.

That’s a shame, because once you get into the rhythm of it, contributing something worthwhile to the conversation about a problem your product solves (which in the vast majority of cases is ground zero of the intersection defined above) rarely turns out to be anywhere near as hard as you think it’s going to be.

Three simple strategies can ease the burden dramatically…

1. Balance Your Content Portfolio

“Content” means more than white papers and blog posts. Long-form content like that is important and great, but no sane person with a day job would sign up to produce enough of it to sustain a consistent social marketing effort over time. Content can also be links to on-topic information you come across in your travels online. It can be cameraphone shots of your white board doodles, posted into a Flickr account. If you’re a restaurant, it can be a cheap-and-dirty video of your best waiter explaining today’s specials. It can even be “rapport” content, the stuff that gets produced automatically in the ongoing give-and-take among people who share a common interest on the web. All those things are like Hamburger Helper for the long-form stuff. And if you haven’t had it in a while, Hamburger Helper is pretty good. People like it.

2. Integrate Your Content Capture

The fact is most businesses throw off 80% of the content they need just by being. The problem is they don’t know how to easily capture it — in meatspace or on the web — and make sure it finds its way into the proper social media pipe. Getting people across the organization to spot, capture, and deliver on-strategy content into a centrally managed social program is hard, simply because it’s a change in behavior. But you can make it easier by being smart about what you ask of people. Have a contest to get the ball rolling. Use the inbound e-mail interfaces most posting sites make available now, or even a one-stop-shop posting system like Posterous. Teach people about RSS, and get them onto a reader that makes it easy for them to build a feed of relevant links (in Google Reader, for example, just clicking the “share” button creates this.) And stay on them… it’s going to take time, but with a steady stream of reminders and some recognition for the folks who deliver the goods, it will happen.

3. Maximize Your Content Distribution

Finally, get the most out of every piece of content you publish. The key to this is setting up a system that links your social networks together in the right way, what I think of as getting the “Plumbing” right.

That’s a biggie, and the subject of my next post. Why not subscribe now, so you don’t miss it?

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