Last week we profiled an interesting startup on one of our sites, Iddictive.com – and although the company is a privately run enterprise it’s a perfect demonstration of exactly the kind of content that businesses could,  and should, be producing online.

Founded by a couple of freelance ski journalists, SnowCarbon.co.uk encourages ski lovers to swap air travel for the greener option of rail travel – cutting carbon emissions ‘by up to 90%’ in the process.

“We’ve selected 30 of the best ski resorts that are convenient to reach by train from the UK. Click on the name of a resort to see a brief summary of the resort and sample train journey, plus a journey map and details of the carbon benefits of travelling by train.

Click on “Resort review” and you’ll find an independent review over 4 pages written by one of our team of leading ski journalists. To find journey details, times, tips and fares, click on the green button, “Journey details and prices”.

By bringing together useful reviews, simplifying the search and booking process and delivering a strong eco-friendly message, Snow Carbon provides the both kind of content that skiers want and the kind of content that is likely to encourage them to travel by train.

While taking nothing away from Snow Carbon itself, this is the kind of detailed, well-crafted, content-driven site that train companies and tour operators should be creating themselves – or incorporating into their existing sites.

Eurostar goes someway towards that with their Ski Train section but it lacks the depth, passion and enthusiasm that Snow Carbon offers.

In short, smart businesses need to start thinking like journalists just as much as freelance journalists need to start thinking like businesses. And if there are any smart ski companies out their, they should be speaking to the Snow Carbon guys before someone else does.

We’ve all been there. You’re at an event, ready to be informed and enthralled by the upcoming speaker – only to spend the next half hour checking email on your iPhone or flipping through the conference brochure to see what time lunch is at.

The next time it happens to you, spend a few minutes thinking how the presentation might be improved and you’ll learn a lot about what makes great content – whether that’s public speaking, blog posts, ebooks or podcasts.

Your Content Shouldn’t Be About You

The worst kind of conference speakers are the ones that talk incessantly about themselves. You know the type, they spend half their time talking through their resumes or telling rubbish anecdotes and ‘in jokes’ designed for their buddies in the third row.

It doesn’t matter what format we’re talking about, people don’t really care about you. They care about themselves. In content terms, that means they want to know how something will apply to them, be motivated to change their businesses or daily lives and take away ideas, tips, strategies and techniques that they can use themselves.

By all means use your own experiences to illustrate your points or add a little personality and humour, but the focus of your content must be on delivering something useful, informative or simply entertaining to your audience.

Start by asking: ‘what do my audience want to know’ or ‘what information would make their lives / jobs easier’?

You Should Share Something of Value

Bad speakers talk in generalisations and cliches. They tell you things you already know and try to pass off well-worn ideas as unique wisdom. Good speakers have the ability to both paint the big picture and get down to the detail.

Just like a speaking engagement, producing content in any format is an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise and knowledge of your industry. This means tangible, detailed ideas that people can take away and use; combined with an understanding of the bigger picture and what’s happening in your industry.

And if your topic is all ‘big idea’ use examples and metaphors to make these ideas concrete.

You Need to Bring Your Content to Life

Sometimes a speaker can have interesting content but they deliver it in such a boring way that you struggle to keep your eyes open long enough to take it all in. The same can be true of any kind of content – from white-papers to video to blog posts.

Great speakers learn to use images, body language, multi-media presentations and, most importantly, enthusiasm to help bring their topics to life. How can you do the same with your content?

You Should Tailor Your Message to Your Audience

Bad speakers drag out the same presentations  and tired jokes every time they speak. This might save them some time, but it certainly shows.

Great speakers know how to adapt their presentations for particular audiences. Some may need more detail, others less. Some may be experienced in an industry, others might be relative newbies. Some audiences might be technical, or business savvy, or interested in investing, or potential customers and clients, or …..

Knowing your audience is half the battle, adapting your content to give them what they want is the other half.

You Know Bad Content When You See It

It’s pretty easy to spot a bad conference speech when you hear it. There are no boos or heckles, but there aren’t very many questions or discussions after the fact either.

Great speakers create interest and while you may never set foot on a conference stage, you canout the same ideas to use in your own written, video or audio content.

Make it great and they’ll be clamouring for more.

Pic: Flickr Creative Commons [1]

Creating great web video

NewFangled are a web design company. More particularly they “help advertising agencies build better websites for the clients”.

Either way, there are LOTS of web design companies out there – and most of them work in more or less the same way. The same is true in a lot of industries – which means companies need to find interesting ways of showing how they are different.

While many might resort to the standard, cliched sales pitch, NewFangled have latched onto a real point of difference (how they work and communicate with clients) and then made that point tangible through the use of short videos and screencasts.

Grayscreen Prototyping video by Newfangled Web Factory.

The video here gives you a look at their prototype process and makes convincing case for why it’s a better approach – and hence why you should use them.

Even if you don’t watch the entire video (although it’s interesting enough in itself) you’ll get a sense of how giving away this information accomplishes a few goals:

• It creates a clear point of difference
• It demonstrates their expertise
• It shows NewFangled as an open and responsive organisation
• It paints a picture of what working with them would be like

These same keys can be seem through the NewFangled website in other videos, onsite text, blogs etc…

How Can You Use This in Your Business?

So what do your prospects want to know when they visit your site? There’s every chance that it’s as simple as knowing what you do and how you do it (and the price). Using short video pieces can be a great way of communicating this info quickly and distinctively.

We’ve already started work on our own videos and hope to begin offering video-based content development early next year. If this is something that might interest you, please get in touch.

Image: Flickr Creative Commons

Last month the chief exec of Which?, the publishing company that provides impartial product and service reviews via its magazine and website, suggested that the company might launch a range of own-brand products and services.

And there’s a definite logic here. Consumers trust the opinion of Which? and an own-brand move would likely pay dividends.

That said, there’s also the risk that consumers would feel that the company’s famous impartiality may be compromised by the addition of their own products (the strapline on their site reads: “No advertising, no bias, no hidden agenda”).

Publishers Are Already Doing This

In reality this idea isn’t anything particularly new. Plenty of publishers, online and off, use joint ventures and own-branded products and services as revenue generators.

A few quick examples from today’s reading materials:

• The Guardian has an extensive reader offers site, an own-brand price comparison site, a holiday offers site and Guardian Soulmates, a dating site for Guardian readers.
• As I mentioned in a recent post here, The Mirror Group run their own bingo website.
• Monocle magazine have gone so far as to open a series of bricks-and-mortar  shops stocking high-end products developed in conjunction with boutique brands. [I wrote a recent review of Monocle's business model here]

Retailers Becoming Publishers

So what if you already have a product or service that you want to promote?

In a roundabout way, what Which? et al do is exactly what content marketing is about – building trust and profile by publishing high-quality content, which can then be leveraged into product and service sales.

By producing lots of great content that people want to consume Which?, The Mirror, The Guardian and Monocle create trust and attract traffic (eyeballs / prospects / customers). They can then turn that trust and traffic into product and service sales.

And retailers and services providers can use exactly the same strategy for themselves – in reverse.

By creating great content that demonstrates your expertise, builds trust and attracts interest, you can effectively grow your own audience for your products and services.

Content marketing is the process of producing useful, informative content to help attract and retain customers and position your business as a trusted resource.

The important point here is ‘useful, informative content’ – i.e. not dressed up sales literature. The content that you create (in whatever format) should be interesting, educational, helpful or entertaining in its own right.

And ‘in its own right’ means without you.

So here’s the acid test: if you can remove all reference to you and your business, and the content you’ve created is still useful, you win.

If not, it’s sales literature. (And having both is fine – just don’t mix them up.)