We think of the practice of ‘content activation.’ That means using the right content in the right way to drive the right action. I know, a lot of ‘rights’ in that sentence. And, of course, ‘right’ is a purely subjective measure. But it’s more than just content marketing. It’s a more comprehensive planning model from defining the right narratives for a brand all the way through optimizing the content you did create against a goal.
Content activation suggests purpose. We are, at the end of the day, all trying to drive some type of behavior from people. We are designing complete systems for brands and partners are key. There is clearly a lot of interesting investment out there in companies that offer some value to brands as publishers (see chart from Venturebeat and StrategyEye).
I wanted to highlight three that have some strong value depending on what you need to get done.
NewsCred
Sourcing quality content is a chore. While we all believe there is a ton of terrific content available across the Web, if you are a brand who wants to apply content to driving thought leadership, discoverability, lead generation via great content, you need great content. NewsCred’s strength is sourcing (and licensing) millions of articles from the likes of the New York Times all the way to China Economic Review and the Financial Times. Quality stuff.
When to use them:
If you have proved the value of content marketing to your brand and business goals to leadership and want to deploy high quality articles on a relevant topic for your brand and customers, NewsCred would be a great partner to source that quality.
If you are a financial services company with strong B2B business, you might have a purpose to building a stream of terrific finance content on risk management. That might be your play to deliver more value to your business customers, maintain high discoverability in Google and even enable a sales force or group of agents to build direct relationships with business customers.
Take a look:
NewsCred offers content across 9 verticals including FinanceWire.
Check out AIG’s CyberEdge ipad app which delivers the latest content on data security powered by NewsCred
Percolate
Percolate wants to be the default end-to-end platform for brands committed to content marketing. They have a process at the front end that relates a bit to Facebook Publishing Garage or our own Story Development Workshop geared towards finding out what the brand out to be talking about. James Gross, founder, frames it as building the interest graph for a brand. We call it establishing the story platform. Public relations veterans call it a message platform. Clearly these are not all the same thing yet they all do start to define what is that native topical territory for a brand.
Here’s how James Gross, founder puts it:
“Percolate is helping solve the most fundamental question brands have in social: What should I talk about? The system takes away the blank boxes of software by recommending relevant content for the brand to create.”
They provide a software platform to then follow those ideas and topics all the way through content creation, publishing and analytics. They have a deal with Getty Images and have the library as well as an image editor available right there to keep the Community/Content Director in the groove.
When to use them:
If you don’t have a communications or brand leader adept at defining what the brand can mean and what it’s core narratives out to be, Percolate can provide a starting point. When you want to add operational efficiency to your content marketing to trim down publishing times, Percolate may the right platform.
Take a look:
Take a glance at their Case Studies page. It’s not much more than screen grabs but it is suggestive.
Check out the MasterCard Future of Payments Stream inside their newsroom (“Engagement Bureau”). Not sure they have the display quite figured out but you will see Percolate in action.
Skyword
Like most of the technology partners in this space, Skyword is not strictly technology. Yes, they talk about ‘platform’ and complete solutions. Still one of their key strengths is in managing a network of writers (and a growing number of visual content creators). If you want to solicit content from a growing network of qualified writers and manage the process of content submission, Skyword can be pretty helpful. It’s kind of like Visual.ly in that regard. The curated network of content creators is their secret sauce.
When to use them:
Once you feel confident that content marketing – the creation and publishing of content to drive people to some behavior – is valuable, Skyword can help scale your efforts by providing a source for great content.
Take a look:
Check out their page “for Brands” with its downloadable pdf
Check out this case study from IBM Midmarket which outlines the benefits of the content creator network
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