Labcast: 3 Tips for CEOs on Social Media Marketing

This week’s guest podcaster is Joe Pulizzi, senior advisor to OpenView and founder of Junta42 and the Content Marketing Institute.  In his podcast, Joe details three tips for expansion stage CEOs: determining your objective, determining your message and figuring out your content strategy.  This is a great listen for those senior managers diving into the world of content marketing and social media.

Episode 25: 3 Tips for CEOs on Social Media Marketing

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Corey O’Loughlin: This is Labcast, insights and ideas for the expansion-stage senior manager, hosted by OpenView Labs.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Labcast. As always, I’m your host, Corey, and today we’re lucky to have a guest podcast from Joe Pulizzi, Senior Advisor to OpenView and founder of Junta42 and the Content Marketing Institute. Joe’s podcast details the three steps CEOs need to take in order to launch their social media marketing initiative. We hope you enjoy it.

Joe Pulizzi: Hello, this is Joe Pulizzi with the Content Marketing Institute on behalf of OpenView Labs. What I want to talk about are three key steps that CEOs need to think about when they get into or try to
advance their social media efforts.

The first step is really figuring out what your overall objective is. Is your objective investor relations? Is it
customer retention and engagement of some kind? Is it lead generation? Is it for personal branding efforts? Are you trying to take your career to the next level?

You really have to think about what your overall goals are first before you start to do anything at all with social media. Otherwise, you’re just focusing on tools, and you’re probably not sure what the measurement of your overall program should be and what the right measurements should be in the first place.

The second thing is once that you have your goals figured out and you understand what you’re trying to do, not only for yourself but for your company, is to figure out what your message is. What is your story? In other words, what do you stand for? What are you bringing to the table that’s going to take your users?

Think of it from this perspective. Think of it if you were a trade magazine. What are you trying to do for your readers? What’s going to take them to the next level? It’s really important to figure out your content mission here. When you think about doing that, think about what your niche should be. When you think about a niche, you want to start to consider what the pain points of your target audience are. What are the pain points of your customers? What’s keeping them up at night?

That’s really what’s going to take your personal brand as well as your company to the next level. If you really figure out, boy, you know what, what are they struggling with that you can be a real solutions  provider for? What can you really be the trusted expert in?

When it comes down to it, you want to get it small enough and figure out a small enough niche where somebody will look at you and they’ll go online and they’ll start looking at your social media outlets and say, “Wow, this guy or this gal, they are the leading expert in their industry because of X, Y, Z.”

Now what is that X, Y, Z? That gets us to the third point, and that’s all about the creation of consistent, valuable, and relevant content online that you can leverage through your social media outlets. The best way to think about this is to think about what is the center of your content marketing plan? Or what is going to be that hub, that ultimate magnet that’s going to, that you want to drive people to?

In a lot of cases for CEOs, it’s the blog. Blogs are just tools, but it’s a very effective tool for you to use as your publishing platform. The same as a media company would do. If you’re going to go ahead and say, yes, the blog is going to be the center of my overall content marketing, personal branding effort, as part of your social media process, then you say, “Okay, well, what goes along with that?”

If you’re going to blog, you should be blogging at least twice a week. If you’re going to do one, you’ve got to do it on a consistent basis. Most CEOs fall down because they’re not consistent with their content. I see waves of content coming from CEOs, but then they stop. They don’t keep it up. You’ve got to be consistent. Pick a frequency that you can actually commit to and keep to.

Then what are all the other things that are going to take you to the next level? Blogs are great because then you can distribute that through your Facebook presence, through your Twitter presence, on through LinkedIn, all the while driving back through your blog.

What other things do you need to think about? Is video an important part of this? Maybe it’s video casts or podcasts, something from an audio standpoint that you can integrate with your blog and drive people to your online presence, delivering upon your goals.

Think about a content package is very important in this as well. From a content package standpoint, could it be an e-book? I think all CEOs should actually have a print book of talking about that niche that you’re really solving your customer’s pain points.

I would just make sure that you follow those three steps. Again, the first step is, what are your goals? The second step is, what is your content mission and what do you stand for? Then once you get that figured out, then you really have to create the content machine or content factory and over and over again, you’re creating this consistent content that talks specifically with your pain points.

Once again, this is Joe Pulizzi, and thanks for listening.

Corey: Thanks again for joining us, we really hope you enjoyed it.

Lis­ten to more pod­casts from the Open­View Labs team.