Metafluence

Content trails - Determining the syndication path for your content

I’ve been consulting with Jive Software for the past couple of months now developing a program for leveraging their blog, JiveTalks, which is why my posting here has been a little sparse as of late. A big issue we’re working through is content production. There are questions about editorial calendars, who should be the authors, the publishing workflow, and more.

It quickly became clear that content production was not a blog issue, it was a company issue. One of the issues that emerged was the publication journey that content must go through. For example, some of the ideas I would come up with as blog post fodder felt more important than simply posting them on the blog. Some ideas were meaty enough that they warranted deep analysis in the form of a whitepaper. From there we talked about the fact that it’s better to do a whitepaper press and analyst tour before offering it for download on our site, say as a link in a post on the blog.

For me, it was a big realization that an editorial calendar for a blog is not enough coordination for businesses with multi-authored company blogs—especially if they have other content distribution channels. Jive also needed a syndication path for their content, something we’ve been referring to as the content trail.

Here’s the list of questions we used to determine the trail content would follow once it passes our firewall:

• How in-depth is it? Does a piece of content make sense as a single post, or does it need to be a mini-series? Is it beyond a mini-series and in-depth enough to be a report or whitepaper?
• Where does it make sense to start? Should we offer the content to an analyst, reporter, or blogger first?
• Where does self-distribution make sense? Should we start a thread in our external forum, or make it a blog post? Can we do both and which comes first?
• After we publish it in our blog, can we submit it for syndication on article submission sites?

Asking these questions leads us to think strategically about the content trails that extend from our publishing efforts. How do you determine the syndication path for your content?