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About Martin Couzins
Martin Couzins has worked for a range of leading business titles, from Personnel Today and Travel Weekly to Computer Weekly. The last 10 years have been spent working primarily online, developing communities and generating creative content that users enjoy consuming. Martin has experience of the full editorial lifecycle, from blogging, article writing and editing to commissioning as well as social media management. Martin also has copywriting and user experience skills, management and leadership skills and has launched a range of innovative online projects. He also designs and delivers training, consults on content strategy and speaks at events. He is the founder of learnpatch.com and itsdevelopmental.com
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Time to consider ebooks in your content marketing mix?
November 12, 2013 by Martin Couzins 2 Comments
The book industry is currently going through a similar change to the one that hit music and video. New business models are emerging that could change the game for the reader, author, publisher and book vendor.
Recently, Scribd and Oyster announced that they were launching subscription services for ebooks. A Spotify or Netflix for readers, if you like.
Ebooks have been around for a few years now – the Kindle is six years old – and recent research suggests that sales of ebooks are flat. So, new models could be just the pick me up the industry needs.
The new subscription services serve as a timely reminder of how far ereading has come. And from a publishing perspective, the low barriers to entry have made it possible for anyone – or any organisation – to publish their own books at little cost.
If subscription services take off, we could see a renewed interest in, and appetite for, reading. Surely this is something organisations could capitalize on themselves?
Rather than attempting to go viral in your marketing, why not consider creating a book? It may sound counter intuitive as shorter seems to equate to more popular in our digital world (think Vine), but if your colleagues, clients and potential customers have smartphones or tablets then they can read your book.
A book sounds and feels more authoritative but it does not need to be 300 pages long and be authored by one person. It could even include contributions from your customers. It is interesting to see that Sainsbury's, for example, is experimenting with shorter, and cheaper, ebook formats.
To lift the lid on the process of creating a book, I interviewed David D'Souza, who has just published the book Humane, Resourced, a collection of more than 50 blog posts related to HR and organizational development that have been edited in to a book and is available on Amazon.
Could you explain the project idea and why you wanted it to be an ebook.
The project was an experiment to collate a collection of blogs about HR and business into an actual book. There is so much good blogging material but social media is a curious beast and some of the best work will never be seen as it was published at the wrong time, didn't get shared by the right people. I wanted to create a platform for people to share the work they were most proud of and in a more traditional or permanent way. I'm a firm believer that if you give people 'white space' they will fill it, I wanted to test that theory out. So I sent out a tweet asking for contributors and soon I was receiving offers to write chapters. I've ended up with over 50 authors contributing and the CEO of the CIPD (HR's professional body) writing the foreword.
I wanted it to be an eBook for a number of reasons:
It was a project that I could easily manage from the comfort of my home and would be low cost
A book collated by social media where the aim was to create a traditional bound book would have felt odd. I'm not saying it isn't a nice idea, it just didn't feel like the idea I had
I'd get to learn about new technology
I knew some people would like to link to videos or include pictures and (curiously), clicking through to a link from a piece of paper can be challenging.
Which platform did you use and why? What were the tech considerations i.e. Android over ios?
I decided to go with Pressbooks for a number of reasons. It was free at the time (they have since introduced charging, but it isn't prohibitive), it is based on the WordPress platform – so for those people already blogging it would be familiar if they uploaded their own work – and it seemed simple to use. It also allowed me to export the work in a number of formats, giving me flexibility over what I did next. I could have used a number of platforms to publish directly, but part of the attraction of Pressbooks was the collaborative nature. I could email individual authors passwords and they could then upload their own chapters. This kept the project as 'low touch' as possible for me. I did the odd bits of editing on my Android phone, but by and large most work was done on my PC.
How did you find the process of creating an ebook?
It was a wonderful learning experience. I learnt about new technologies, I learnt more about publishing models and taxation, ISBN numbers and it was a fascinating study in collaboration. I learnt what people will do for free when they are passionate about something. There were things I just hadn't understood fully coming into the project – that you can't simply publish a book on Amazon as 'free', you have to allocate a price. It makes sense when you think about their business model, but it was just something I hadn't fully thought through. It has been a relatively time consuming experience but hugely rewarding. The process mainly involved me stumbling onto solutions to problems through Google, but that is the amazing thing about the technology we are surrounded with. If I had attempted to do this 15 years ago – self publish a book and coordinate 50 authors from around the globe – it would have been an extended exercise in futility. I was able to complete the whole project in four months.
How much did it cost to produce?
One of the wonderful things about this approach is the cost. I have paid £15 to remove a watermark from the pages and that is the only cost. Due to the collaborative nature of the project people have offered their services for free as copywriters and a hugely talented artist/designer called Simon Heath produced the cover for free. The main costs have been time and my wife's patience.
Are you able to track numbers of readers? How?
We are selling the book, initially, on Kindle, so Amazon will be tracking sales and hopefully writing us the occasional cheque for royalties that will be split between charities chosen by the authors.
Do you have any top tips for others who might want to create an ebook . . .
If I wasn't using such a collaborative approach with multiple authors I would have simply done things directly through Amazon. They really do take you step by step through the process. Publishing a book now only takes about 15 minutes longer than publishing a blog – Amazon even handle tax declarations through their website. The challenge comes with the next step – publicity – and utilising the technology available there to get your message out. I'm lucky, I have 50 people with the same ambition.
5 ways premiership football teams are using social media to get closer to the fans
September 17, 2013 by Martin Couzins 2 Comments
New era, same spirit. The season starts here. Let's do this. #mufc
— Manchester United (@ManUtd) July 10, 2013
On 10 July 2013, Manchester United football club joined Twitter with this tweet. Less than a month later and its Twitter profile is fast approaching 700,000 followers.
These are interesting times for Premiership football clubs. Social media is helping them to get closer to their fan base, a fan base that is both local and global. Arsenal football club have spoken in depth about how they communicate with fans in the light of this local/global challenge. So how are clubs using social media to engage with their fans? Here are five examples:
On Arsenal's recent summer tour of Vietnam, a fan ran (and rode) alongside the team bus for a few miles whilst in Hanoi. You might ask why it took the team so long to get him on board but they did exactly that and signed his shirt, took some pictures of him with the team – and obviously made his day. Arsenal then produced this short film, which has had almost three million views.
It is a great little story created in the moment. Luckily someone on the bus had the foresight to film it.
Instagram provides clubs with an opportunity to share club life in pictures. It is proving popular. Manchester City, for example, has posted 445 pictures and is followed by more than 77,000 people. Some images are liked 10,000 times. Liverpool has more than 150,000 followers. As well as sharing pictures of the players, teams are using Instagram video to capture behind-the-scenes footage of their players. Take, for example, this clip of Sandro Raniere at a pre-season photo shoot at Tottenham.
From Twitter chats with players to pub quizzes, clubs are using Twitter to get conversation going between the club, players and fans. Take, for example, this Twitter chat with Rio Ferdinand #askrio or this Twitter pub quiz at Liverpool
#LFCpubquiz happening at 9.30pm BST tonight – signed shirt on offer.
It's something that the fans, judging by this tweet, really like.
Love this #LFCpubquiz hosted weekly by @LFC. Not sure many football clubs entertain their respective fans on twitter with such quizzes. KIU!
— Haarithan (@AzzurriLFC) August 6, 2013
Manchester City has been testing out player diaries this summer, such as this one from YaYa Toure. Toure shares life on tour and talks about other players, his routine, and so on. The blog posts give glimpses of life at the club and as a professional player.
On 12 July Shahid Khan became the new owner of Fulham football club and the club posted this on Vine.
As with images, clubs are using Vine to give short snippet of news and life at the club.
Premiership teams are putting a lot of effort into using social media to open up how they work and to provide more insights into club life and what it is like to be a professional player. Many of the players are stars in their own right and already have a big social media presence so it makes sense for clubs to tap into fans' desire to find out more about the players.
That said, it is surprising how slow on the uptake these clubs have been to use social media. If you are a fan and you use social media then the future looks bright – teams are embracing the technology and are keen to share club life.
Are you a social media professional that's also a football/soccer fan? What do you make of your club's efforts with social media? Let me know in the comments.
The big 'C' in corporate content and communications
July 9, 2013 by Martin Couzins Leave a Comment
In my last post on content marketing I ended with these comments:
This is the challenge facing organisations looking to create compelling content: how to build sustainable content strategies. To do so, organisations will require a mix of marketing and editorial expertise and processes and an infrastructure to support content production.
And once you have this you can then look at how you can use social tools to leverage the content held within your organisation – to turn your organisation inside out so that it lets the customers in and lets some of the organisational expertise out. But that's the subject for another post . . .
In this post, I want to pick up where that post left off. And to start, I offer you this visual metaphor.
We know that nine-tenths of an iceberg is unseen, leaving only the top tenth visible. Taking this visual metaphor, let's look at organisations and their content and communications. It is much like the iceberg in that those outside of the organisations (and, sadly, many inside them too) get to see what the organisation makes visible. This is done through marketing, corporate communications and PR. And the content and communication usually seen here is defined by one word, the big 'C', and that is control.
This is where the organisation manages what it says to the outside world, how it markets itself and how it develops and manages conversations around its products and services. Anyone who works in any of the departments servicing this part of the comms 'iceberg' will be familiar with the process of sign-offs and policing that comes before a 'campaign' can go live.
And if something happened that was not planned the organisation usually has a crisis comms plan in place to manage its response.
Much of this comms activity will be measured and there will be attempts to put a return on investment against some of it.
This is pretty much how organisational comms work and have worked.
In terms of the overall value of the business, however, there is a whopping 90% of content that remains hidden. This tends to be where the knowledge, history and culture of the organisation sits. This is also where there is risk. Traditionally, this is seen through a risk lens.
Leaks from staff are the stuff of social media policies and headlines proclaiming that organisations have banned colleagues using Facebook due to the sharing of inappropriate material. And then there are the very real concerns around the inappropriate sharing of confidential information.
Organisations are very good at managing risk – they have processes, policies and procedures to support this.
Back to the iceberg metaphor briefly. Organisations also tend to be pyramid shaped in terms of organisational design. That means hierarchies, which helps explain why the public-facing content and communications are managed from the top. There is perceived to be less risk in communications coming from that part of the business. A director of corporate comms and public affairs will be working very closely with the senior management team.
But what of the employees involved in the 90%? These are subject matter experts, product experts – the people who have knowledge and skills that make the organisation the success it is. And it is these people who hold the keys to far more compelling content. They understand the market place, the trends, the technology – the types of information the company's supply chain, customers and potential customers might find very useful.
So, how to get at it? The UK government is trying to open up some of its departments so that stakeholders can see more of what is being worked on. This is happening through departmental blogs.
The Department for International Development has a range of bloggers who share their ideas and work. As the site says, "This blog is a place for staff from the Department for International Development to share their personal experiences of helping to eliminate poverty across the developing world."
The Department of Health and Foreign and Commonwealth Office are taking a similar approach.
These initiatives are relatively new but they show how colleagues' knowledge and expertise can be shared beyond the walls of the organisation.
This can have tangible benefits. I'm working with a music charity on its social media strategy and as a part of this work one of the team started using Twitter to share his work around music technology. One of the aims of using Twitter was to bridge the music making community with the technology hacking community.
Through Twitter he was able to connect with people across both communities and to run a technology hack event which would never have included some really good hackers had he not connected with them on Twitter. You can read more about that here.
These are just a couple of examples of how organisations are turning themselves inside out in order to show what they know. It is still early days but, as we can see from the hack day, there are tangible benefits to come from opening up and sharing what the business knows.
Clearly there are challenges to moving away from a controlled approach to content and communications towards a more open approach in which colleagues are supported and encouraged to have a voice, and to create, connect and share what they know.
But if you believe in showing your value as an organisation, this will be the way forward.
[Picture credit: Vicbuster]
Content marketing: what's really changed for marketing?
June 18, 2013 by Martin Couzins Leave a Comment
Organizing for Content: Models to Incorporate Content Strategy and Content Marketing in the Enterprise from Altimeter Group Network on SlideShare
Never slow to adopt the new shiny, the marketing industry has grabbed digital content by the horns and it made it its own. It has also given it a name too – content marketing – which helps with the hype.
Anyone or any business that has something to sell has forever used content to help sell it – whether that's a script for telesales conversations, direct marketing copy or homepage content.
However, with technology enabling us to create and share content like never before the digital marketing industry has rightly cottoned on to the opportunity of creating compelling content to engage customers and potential customers.
Altimeter, a research consultancy, has just published a report on content marketing (see slide deck above). It interviewed 70 organisations to establish how they are using content in their marketing strategies. The top priority for external social strategies for the year ahead is content marketing (57%), followed by developing ongoing engagement with customers (50%), listen/learn from customers (41%), customer support through social channels, influencer/ambassador programme (27%) and website integration (25%).
So what's the aim of creating this content? Is it fundamentally doing the same job as it always has done or is there more to it?
My time spent working across an editorial team and a marketing team provided me with some useful insights into how the two disciplines approach content. The marketing approach was very focused on lead generation and nurturing users who had – in some way – 'engaged' with the content. Once a user had clicked on a link to download a whitepaper, for example, their details were fed into the CRM and lead nurturing system. From that point on they were 'nurtured' in a variety of ways.
What stood out in this process was the campaign approach to creating and sharing content. Each campaign had clear customer acquisition goals. This approach is for all intents and purposes a 21st century version of age-old sales and marketing techniques – create interest and demand for your product and services by developing useful and relevant content.
Another approach to content marketing is born out of the need to be found in search. Google wants to reward original and good – as voted by readers – content. You only have to look at recent algorithm updates to see this. So, create original, good quality content on a regular basis and watch the traffic increase.
Well, that's exactly what UK SEO agency Essential Marketer has been doing. The agency has doubled traffic to its site by simply running daily articles and sharing it across all social channels.
Econsultancy's series of reviews of how brands are using content across social channels also provides some useful insights. Not surprisingly, a common finding is that brands are using social channels to share campaign content and provide customer service. Here are some of the brands they have looked at:
How Sony uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+
How Microsoft uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+
How ASOS uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+
How Tesco uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+
How Walmart uses Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Google+
How Nike uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+
Despite the hype and relative newness of content marketing the way content is used remains pretty much the same. Now that may all be well and good, but is it enough? This point was well made by Justin Pearse, head of innovation at marketing services agency Bite, in a recent Guardian article. Pearse argues that there is a danger companies will start to produce poor quality content to continue to feed growing consumer demand.
We're facing a content deluge online in 2013. The interruptive advertising model of old is fast dying out as digital media gives always-on consumers the ability to take control of their relationships with brands. Content is being seen, often correctly, as one way to help build these relationships.
The very real danger is that this leads to an outpouring of poor quality, unfocused content produced purely to satisfy the algorithmic demands of SEO or social media.
Which brings me back to my time sitting across an editorial team and a marketing team. Whilst the marketing team focused on building campaigns to drive the business, who was producing the relevant, timely, quality content? Who was providing the insight to help create the most engaging content? The editorial team.
And why was the editorial team so important in the content marketing equation? Because their sole focus was on creating and developing the most useful, interesting, entertaining and relevant content for their readers day in, day out. It was the editorial team that researched the readers, developed relationships with the readers and had the reader at the centre of all they did.
This approach is hard to sustain if your focus is on campaigns. Will there ever be enough campaigns to support with content? Or will the need to provide ongoing relevant and timely content (campaign or no campaign) just lead to a deterioration in quality, as Pearse suggests?
Image Courtesy of Meridith Atwater for opensource.com on flickr
What is the future of RSS
March 21, 2013 by Martin Couzins 2 Comments
In my last post I looked at why, when faced with information overload, we need to be focused on the tools to filter that information rather than holding our hands up in despair at there being too much information.
Fast forward four weeks and we hear that one of those filtering tools – Google Reader – is being shut down on 1 July this year.
On the Google Reader blog (http://googlereader.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/powering-down-google-reader.html), Google says it is closing the service down for two reasons:
"There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we're pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience."
The news was met with howls of disapproval from fans of the service, of which I am one. I'm not going to lament its passing here but the news tells us something about the tools we use to find and filter information:
1. The developers of filtering tools can shut them down just as easily as they set them up. We – as users – are very much in 'their' hands
2. Using RSS readers is a niche activity – as a journalist I need to stay informed so have a need to use the tool.
3. There is no defacto tool for searching and filtering multiple web sources.
Many times I have explained my use of RSS readers to peers, clients and even friends and family only to be met with a blank face. Anecdotally it certainly seems to me that using an RSS reader is a niche activity.
That does not take away its importance however. I have hundreds of content sources currently feeding into my RSS reader. At a glance I can see what's happening in the areas I follow – be it content marketing, news or UX – and from there I can share links.
My RSS reader is where I find things out – direct from the source of information. This is quite different to the Twitter firehose, which although enables me to do the same thing comes with additional noise which requires more work to filter.
For example, 500 feeds in an RSS reader only get updated when new content is published. Those very same 500 people on Twitter might be averaging 20 tweets a day and yet only publish new content once every two or three days. You get the idea of how much more there is to filter . . .
This point is well made by content strategist Adam Tinworth, who says:
"Twitter is where I go to find out what's happening. My RSS reader is where I go to become informed."
So what's the future? Well, for me it is to find myself a new RSS reader. There are no end of lists of replacements so finding an alternative to Google Reader won't be a problem.
But I am already comfortable using the technology. What about all of our friends, family, colleagues and customers who are not? Coming back to the scale of information on the web, the issue comes down to the skills – digital literacies, if you like – that will be required to find, filter and share information and data that is relevant to those in our networks and communities.
The people, the information, the data we need to learn, to perform better, to do better business is all out there in some shape or form. The challenge is to be able to find it and use it.
A final thought. What of the technology itself, what is the future of RSS? It is work in progress, a point well made by Joe Moreno (http://blog.joemoreno.com/2013/03/RSS-Future.html):
What seems obvious to me is that RSS will not go away; instead, it will (and already is) being built upon. In the near future, it will no longer be a consumer facing technology anymore than DOS or a Unix shell is today, but RSS will be the glue to tie together publisher and consumer. Could you seriously see a completely different feed standard being developed from scratch in the near future? Baby steps to stand on the shoulders of giants.
If like me, you are search for a new RSS reader, then here are 40 alternatives (http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62356-40-alternatives-to-google-reader?utm_medium=feeds&utm_source=blog) to whet your appetite.