Which risk is bigger -- communicating, or not communicating?

I was one of 100 people to attend the presentation of the findings from Edelman's 2012 Trust Barometer survey yesterday. This annual global survey takes the pulse of trust in business, institutions, and industries. It was a conversation between Richard Edelman, CEO, and my longtime contact David Armano, who's now Edelman's Executive VP of Digital Innovation.

This year's survey saw drops in trust of the "big boys" -- government officials and CEOs paramount among them.

My takeaways:

• Consumers trust companies that listen to them. This means empowering average employees to share the message and listen, not just senior management.
• Corporate reputation and brand reputation are now intimately linked.
• Younger employees often drive change in organizations, showing their companies how to listen and educating them about digital literacy. 
• Media is more trusted than ever -- both "big" media and social media.
• CEOs: to foster trust, be a real person, tell stories about people. Transparency is key, and give yourself and your employees permission to fail. Why doesn't this happen now? The Edelman folks posited that the higher an employees are within an organization, the more lawyers get involved. At that point, they need to ask themselves a question: Which poses a bigger risk -- communicating, or not communicating?

In my book, and I think the trust survey agrees, it's better to communicate honestly.

To learn more, see the stream of Tweets from this event and similar ones held in other cities across the globe.

(It was also a great event -- wonderful space, good food, and lots of folks to connect/reconnect with. Thanks to Social Media Club for arranging and promoting it!)

Content Strategy for Pinterest

As Pinterest has gotten more media attention over the past several weeks, I've been getting more followers. That's great news for me, but I'd like to put out a handful of do's and don'ts about using it effectively and joining the community.

1. DO decide who you are on Pinterest. Are you getting married, promoting your real estate business, collecting cool things for yourself? That can certainly evolve, but it's a good idea to start somewhere.
   
2. DO start your Pinterest experience by pinning some things -- pictures from newsletters, blogs, websites, or your computer...infographics, photos, recipe images, aspirations, etc. I've found the "Pin it" browser plugin to be really helpful.
   
3. DO explore who's on Pinterest and see what they do and how they use it.
   
4. DON'T follow people before you have some boards set up. I follow people because I like their taste and feel that I can relate to what they put up. If you haven't put anything up, I don't know whether to follow you or not.
   
5. DO add your own comments to things you repin. Your voice is a great asset to you on Pinterest!
   
6. DO comment on what others pin -- also a great way to lead other curious folks to your page. (Another reason to have boards set up and populated -- to inspire people who visit your page to follow you!)

Do you have any others?

The two faces of content strategy

I had a really interesting conversation last week with Tim Frick, owner of Chicago web design firm Mightybyes, about content strategy. Tim had a great perspective about content strategy that really resonated with me, that there are actually two faces of content strategy:

1. The strategic, outward-looking face
   This aspect focuses on what content will help customers, members, and other target audiences of an organization meet their needs and, in doing so, enable an organization achieve its business goals. This involves understanding users and the organization, knowing the terms people use and the channels they frequent, and thinking strategically about online channels. Search engine optimization and analytics are part of this, as are the strategies for using social media. This face of content strategy has become known as content marketing. In fact, there's a content marketing retreat going on as I write this post.
2. The UX, inward-looking face
   This piece involves identifying the specific behaviors of various types of content, determining the fields in the content management system, documenting the dynamic content that will surface for public and logged-in users of a site, creating a metadata strategy, and forming the content buckets that shape the information architecture for the site.

Together, these comprise true content strategy. Both are necessary. We need to identify the details in order for the organization's intellectual property -- what the content is about -- shine. (For more on that, see my previous post.) And we need to spend the time thinking through the details about how the strategy will actually get realized and built, or the content won't have the opportunity to do what it needs to do.

Sometimes, we're talking about one when we mean the other, and sometimes we forget that both need to exist. Is it one person who creates both faces for a website? Is it only content strategists who do this work? The answer depends on the size of the effort, the degree of change needed, and whether it's an internal team or external agency doing the work.

(There's also a huge third piece to content strategy, which is organizational change and workflow -- look for another post on that topic soon.)

I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this topic!