How can you create a culture where your employees feel comfortable creating content?

First of all, great discussion! And I must thank Trish for her mention of my post.

I'm going to take a different tack and stick to the question of how to help employees feel comfortable creating content. There are a couple of things I see when working with companies on content marketing strategies and programs. The first is that people are woefully unprepared to be writers. The second is that the way they think about things varies and often they don't think their ideas are worthy of content creation or understand how to turn them into content.

I work with a lot of companies that have corporate editing departments and 300 page style guides. That's intimidating. It also stifles the heck out of content that could be great. Fortunately, I see the controls lifting around less formal content.

This aside, one of the things you can do to help create a culture that inspires content creation is to start embedding it in the culture itself. For example, hosting informal blogging creation discussions over lunch in a conference room for anyone who wants to learn. You could do something like this once a week and rotate around social media topics for those interested.

Maybe post ideas for topics for blog posts on the employee portal and invite people to submit them to earn points toward an Amazon gift card or to be featured in the company magazine or newsletter. Have someone available to provide editorial guidance and make sure they're helpful more so than critical.

And it's not just about writing. Some people love to play with graphics and ideas - why not encourage them to create a slide deck and post it on Slideshare and then embed it in a blog post?

How about video? Does your company have a YouTube! Channel? What about a simple checklist - "10 Things You Need to Succeed at X" Create a fun design around it and use it as a content offer in an email program, post it on a blog, etc.. There are lots of different ways to create content.

Do your employees who participate in social media even know what's available to share? They don't have time to go searching for it. Send them a weekly list of things to post about in different social media channels - complete with links, hashtags, etc. so that it's simple for them to join in.

Finally, everyone will not be a content creator - nor should they be. But there are those who would love to if given the freedom and inspiration to try. Content should not be some mysterious thing that's under the lock and key of the marketing department. But that's often the way it is and we need to change that perception if we're going to create a culture that inspires content creation. And, let's face it - the need for content is not going to diminish any time soon.

Wow, folks have had some great answers on this topic! I love Joe's thoughts around employee training. I would also argue that hiring is a huge part of creating a culture of content. It is vital to value content creation skills in the hiring process regardless of the position. We look for content creators in every department at HubSpot.

The other huge factor in creating a culture is reducing the friction and barriers for employees to create content. Make sure team members know the review and approval process for content. Often the most difficult part of content creation is getting started. Something as simple as a weekly email with possible blog post topics can get the ball rolling and enable folks to contribute to the content creation process.

Creating great content isn't enough.

Is it important to create a culture of content? Absolutely! However, content is only part of formula for success in generating leads and revenue online. Content needs to be promoted, optimized, and analyzed. Content without the amplification of inbound marketing best practices isn't as valuable. As marketers it is our job to maximize the success of our content with inbound marketing best practices to educate our leads. When done correctly content as part of an inbound marketing strategy can improve customer retention rates and shorten sales cycles.

Kipp Bodnar
HubSpot
@KippBodnar

I have nothing but the utmost respect for both Carlos and Joe and you know I mean that... but... I would love to hear from executives on the "sales" side of the house on what they think of this topic.

When you have a number to make should one of the new metrics for measuring success be "content creation"? I say NO. Content distribution that establishes a position as a thought leader.. I say YES.

Ardath Albee does a better job of articulating my position than I do so let me send you to her post... Are B2B Salespeople Thought Leaders? http://marketinginteractions.typepad.com/marketing_interactions/2011/10/are-b...

Sales leaders.. what say you?

Three interesting words in this exchange; culture, sales and content. In a vacuum these words do not seem like they should go together but let's break this down.

1) Culture is the external manifestation of the shared values of a group.
2) Sales is connecting what you have or know with what someone else hopes for.
3) Content is useful information or tools that people find helpful.

So the question of creating a culture of content management for sales to me might need to be re-framed. What parts of the sales culture are already in place that result in content being created and shared? What values always exist in great sales organizations? Since the beginning of time great sales people need to go hang out where their customers hang out and be interesting. What we need to help sales people understand is that their customers are hanging out on-line and they get interested in interesting content....

We are spending more and more time with our sales team helping them learn to authentically prospect in social media. The more they create their online 'brand' and the more time they spend on-line seeing prospects attracted to great 'bait' and reject poorly thought out 'bait' the more they are beginning to become content aggregators. Which is the first step to beginning to actually create content.

Net - I worry less about creating a culture of content; I spend more time trying to help the team understand that content creation is all about being interesting and helping prospects see that you have and know information that helps them with what they hope to achieve. Values they already have....

Love the dialogue but would like to draw a line between content and conversation. 140 character streams of consciousness and blog replies are a means to engage in conversation. Content, on the other hand, has meat and provides value to the reader. Two very different things with 2 very different sets of requirements and investments in time. Just MHO.

@mattbertuzzi provided me with this data recently:
• Sales Reps & blogging – based on our 4 years or blogging here is some math (mileage may vary) 1 QUALITY blog post =
+ 2 hours of reading (what are people asking about, what trends can you spot, stepping back & thinking above the noise)
+ 1 hour of writing (open flow for 1st draft, revision process, quotes from other thinkers)
+ .5-1 hour of posting (do my links work, headers, bullets, images to make it visual)
+ .5-1 hour of promoting (help it spread, respond to comments, thanks the spreaders)

So if you buy into this process, one blog post is equal to 4+ hours of non selling time. At the end of the day, what is the ROI for content creation if you are making your number vs. the ROI if you are not.

Great conversation! BTW, if no sales execs jump into this conversation I will be bummed out!

I think one of the biggest things is education and allowance of time. I speak to many clients that are hesitant to engage socially (blog, tweet, Focus, etc.) because they are afraid they may say the wrong thing or are fearful of the many avenues to promote content. I think corporations would do well to have their people trained accordingly.

Secondly, I think providing them the ample time to do so is key. The other big excuse I hear is "I don't have the time with everything else I need to do." Providing the adequate time for employees to engage, create and promote content is key. Expecting them to do so while at home and over the weekend (yes, some will), is not ideal.

These are two things that corporations can do today.

Carlos Hidalgo
@cahidalgo

This is an awesome conversation. Focusing on the sales side, it's clear that sales needs to hang out where their customers are--increasingly that's on the web (though not exclusively). Sales people need to be actively involved -- listening, participating in discussions, engaging online and continuing those conversations offline.

I really like Carlos ideas around "content development." Too often, I've associated that with writing blogs or similar things. Like Trish, I question whether that is a good use of sales people's time or whether they are the best to write these. But Carlos has really expanded my view of what content generation is. Questions posed in a discussion group, thoughtful comments on articles or blogs, thoughtful responses in discussions, tweets are all meaningful pieces content that sales can and should engage in.

Reading everyone’s responses made me hesitant to share my thoughts from a different side of the table.

People are expressing, or wanting to express their creativity more so today than perhaps any time in history. I think there is a wealth of people in every organization that would jump on the opportunity if encouraged in a positive way.

Enlisting a variety of people to spread the workload, add different perspectives, minimizes pressure and writer’s block and expands quantity and media channels. Include marketing, sales, and customer service; yes in the same room! Encouraging regular conversation and brainstorming between these three teams will not only keep content and messaging fresh, vibrant, relevant, and consistent, it will but help align everyone.

Culture is the result of people's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. When culture is developed on a sound social belief system that generates positive attitudes, the results will be the behaviors we are seeking.

All ideas are good ideas. Listening respectfully and showing appreciation for even the worst ideas eliminates the murderers of creativity; fear and alienation. Today’s bad idea might be tomorrow’s solution.

Know thy customer and audience. Creating content through the organizational lens is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Content creators should be encouraged to keep their ears to the ground, not just their fingers to the keys. Personally reaching out to a few individuals in your audience and soliciting opinions will yield valuable feedback that surveys do not deliver.

I work part time for a company which boasts that every person in the company tweets... and they do - willingly. It is a part of the culture of this company to include everyone in everything so that we are all a part of the success of the organization.

We don't just tweet about what salesy stuff, etiher. We tweet about what we're working on, what we are reading, tips for using the product more productively, issues that support are working with, etc.

140 characters by 100 employees = real time content in short bursts.

It's effective.

For what it's worth, here's what Fiberlink shared with me about how it encourages employees to contribute content:

"Early on, we had to get employees into the habit of sharing knowledge and asked them to describe how they solve problems, what information they share with customers, etc.

Using WordPress, we launched the MaaSters Center at the beginning of 2010 in stealth mode. We brainstormed the content we thought would be valuable and recruited employees to write it. We focused on simplicity by being loose with guidelines and aligning with people’s expertise. For a few months, we held weekly meetings to review content assignments. We quickly generated a few hundred pieces of content of 1-3 paragraphs each that we posted in the center. We knew we were successful when we saw that people were posting our content on other sites."

For more on how Fiberlink uses content marketing, see the full interview: http://technologymarketers.com/OnTargetMarketing/how-fiberlink-uses-content-m...

I'm going to assume you've figured out the ROI and want your employees to create content.

For this post, I'm going to use the word "writing" to mean content creation. That's most likely what you're going to do. Writing is choosing words - whether it's on paper, in blogs or in speech. My goal is to help you encourage your employees to express themselves in different media.

First, you shouldn't make anyone write unless they really want to do it. The resistance will show.

But if you want to encourage your people to write, have them publish internally. Create a company e-mail newsletter that is written by a different employee each week. Don't worry about the platform. Just compose an email and hit send to coworkers. Get them comfortable publishing for a safe audience.

Give feedback. Nothing is more encouraging than someone saying, "I liked what you wrote today." Proper constructive criticism will help them improve without demoralizing them.

Manage expectations. Your employees should know that they aren't expected to create perfect prose. There's a "good enough" standard when it comes to grammar that should be in effect. If you object to that, stop reading and give up your content creation plans. Otherwise you're going to create expectations that will intimidate your employees and discourage them from writing.

Transition willing and enthusiastic employees to writing publicly. Supervise, encourage and correct when needed.

The feedback is a bit more tricky than usual. Writing is personal. There's ego here that doesn't always show up in work. It's hard to criticize writing without the writer taking it personally. Managers will need their best feedback skills.

Help them improve. Give them access to writing classes and writing coaches. Encourage them to join Toastmasters. Public speaking is content creation. The help they get there will improve their confidence and writing. (There's not that much difference between writing a blog post and giving a speech.)

I'm sensitive to the time needed to do this well. Careful ghostwriting can achieve your goals without being dishonest. And it frees up your people to do the work they're good at doing.

I'm curious to read what other people have done to encourage writing at their companies.

Trish: The feeling is mutual, truly. In our workshop, Leslie and I insisted that as much as we'd *like* to see reps creating content, if it's not something they are comfortable with / able to do, then an alternative is to share the content others create. In fact, "creating" is only part of the art. Curating, sharing and cheering are all, to varying degrees, also essential. Especially for sales pros who, as you say, have a different imperative. Great point. -Joe

Trish: I share Joe's sentiment and mutual respect. Agree that sales needs to be focused on hitting the number, but also believe there engagement pre and top end of the funnel can help them do this. Does this include content creation? In some instances yes, but content creation can be accomplished in 140 characters, on sites like this and by quick replies to blogs. I believe that now more than ever it is crucial for sales to shape dialogue and engage their customers and buyers with content.

Carlos Hidalgo
@cahidalgo

Trish:

The stats you list are great. Are these from Bridge Group research or other studies?

As far as content vs. conversation - I believe good content spurs conversation and can be delivered in quick, short spurts (in some instances and when off-set by meatier content).

Enjoying the dialogue here and see a roundtable coming up on this topic.

Gary, I love this line of yours "Content creators should be encouraged to keep their ears to the ground, not just their fingers to the keys."

So here is a question for you. We have all invested in creating the content in this dialogue. Where are the sales execs and their opinions? We are spending time here but is our audience? If not, what are we doing this for again and do we really want to encourage our sales teams to do same?

Just asking....

Trish, "Where are the sales execs and where should salespeople spend their time" are the trillion dollar questions.

Content creation, media placement, and online interactions are different components. Combining sales, marketing, and customer service people in a content development team brings a potent variety of skills and talents together for better results.

Marketing are the media placement experts, but analytics alone are not enough. Salespeople should be asking where the execs they speak with where they are going for content and what they like and dislike.

Customer intelligence culled by sales from their customers and prospects combined with analytics provides a bigger, better picture of the best places for sales to engage.

This is an excellent discussion, and to echo a common theme throughout the posts, I believe that Leadership is a core ingredient in fostering an environment where employees feel comfortable creating and sharing content. The key word here is "feel". Therefore, leaders within organizations should understand and apply effective ways of responding to content suggestions, ideas, criticisms, and the like. Leaders in organizations can be just about anyone who carries influence and power either by way of position title or by way of what is known as referent influence. It is without question that people are going to share content ideas that either don't align well with the business strategy, are out of scope, or are flat out incorrect. When those things happen, the way in which leaders respond is imperative. When someone in a position of influence, authority, power (irrespective of official job title) inappropriately or ineffectively rejects or disregards a person's content suggestions, that will very likely be the last time that person shares ideas for content, along with others who happen to observe. There is an appropriate and effective way to respond to all ideas for content, and then there is an inappropriate and ineffective way to respond. When content created and shared is simply not the best (for lack of a better choice of words), respond to that person by acknowledging receipt of the content, expressing gratitude for taking the time and effort to create it and share it, and giving feedback on what could make the content better, or where the content might work better (perhaps on some other project, or in future). Responding with "that's completely wrong" or "That will never work" is a good way to erode the dynamic of healthy collaboration amongst a team where knowledge/content creation and knowledge/content sharing are paramount to an organization's success and ability to create sustainable and unmatched competitive advantages . Looking at this from a different perspective, giving credit where credit is due is also important. When someone in a position of influence/authority does not appropriately acknowledge content creation/sharing, and especially if that individual assumes all of the credit himself/herself for someone else's efforts, that will also tear down healthy collaboration dynamics.

DO provide a channel for those who feel comfortable creating content, or express a desire to. (See implementation below)

DON'T waste your time trying to create a culture where your employees feel comfortable creating content.

Before implementing, define content. IE: tweets/conversations is not value added content in respect to they are less profitable content. Articles, steady blogs, videos, training material and online tools (especially mobile apps) is more profitable content, because their viewer value is higher so result in a greater ROI for you.

Implementation: Have at least one 'Chief Editor' all content is channeled through. If you find you have more value added content as defined above coming in than your current Chief Editor(s) can handle, then consider outsourcing additional editors to assist chief (with today's economy). If amount of content profits is great enough, you may consider hiring full time, but like with any company growth, you should wait until revenue (demand) justify it. To grow employee involvement share the wealth (revenue) in a creative and product way. If employee involvement does not grow and is never great enough to justify the cost, outsource content creation, which will mean limited implementation of marketing via online content. Accepting that your company is not suitable for this marketing approach. Not all will be.

Example: If you have 5 employees and none of them know what cut n paste means. :)
Creative incentive's example: Who wants a free HD video camera? Bring back the camera at the end of a time period with a lot of valuable content we can use on our youtube channel, the employee gets to keep camera. Same for photo with a digital camera. If they don't produce, no hard fillings, the cameras get passed on to the next volunteer. :)

Another example of thinking out of the box when it comes to content creation. We created a free on-line assessment tool. Where we enter quizzes related to our training material, and any user or other company can create their own quizzes. (nothing fancy, but the world really likes using it because it is totally free, you don't even have to register if you don't want to.:) Then we paid one of our employees to start it out with a bunch of quizzes/assessments. Our partners created a few, and the public creates a few now and them. So the value added content just keeps growing. (along with traffic and sales:)

So think out of the box as to what exactly "Content" is, and have your employees do the same. And most importantly, reward them accordingly. I watched a Toyota Kiezen program being implemented about 20+ years ago in a company. The employees became disgruntled employees because they came up with ideas that save the company millions and got paid $10 for their Kiezen (idea). so the last piece of advice is very important. (Even though I don't see mention of reward in a discussion about creating a culture of employees creating new content (product) outside the normal scope of their job duties. :) Remember maintaining an online presence (tweet/blog) is not as profitable as creating on-line value added content and are necessarily the same.

In order to make your employees feel comfortable creating content your company culture should be supportive and team oriented.

Carl makes a great point, that employees should have a an outline of what is expected if they begin to write on behalf of the company.

This is not an easy task to accomplish, and if you don't have the proper people in place, and the proper management you are better off hiring a copywriter.

Great discussion here, especially contributions from Ardath Albee, Carla Bosteder, Joe Chernov, Carl Natale and Alex Shootman (for those of you coming to this topic late, like me.)

While training, modeling, and constructive feedback are all important/necessary, I think Ardath's advice on giving people different ways to express themselves (besides writing a document) is most practical.

Now that I am outside the analyst world, I am surprised by the lack of creative, functional writing expertise I see among the marketing ranks -- let alone sales, support and other customer-facing functions. Getting people to generate content means making them better at their writing craft and creating the time and incentives to practice it.

In today's fast-paced business world, I don't see that happening. My advice is to hire a few ex-journalists to pump out the content and set the bar higher for the rest of your marketing - and non-marketing -- folks to jump over. Competition breeds cultural change faster than anything.

Aaron Shapiro defines key attributes for attracting great talent that applies to creative environments in this Fast Company article.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1779120/embargo-1027-why-digital-talent-doesn-t-wa...

My recommendation would be to http://www.gorowe.com - where your employees are not treated as "employed" or "ees"... but are provided the opportunity to get results and benefit from them.