The Science of Success: The Secret to Getting What You Want

"People who love to “geek out” on content sometimes talk about a unified content strategy. Most people who say this are referring to reusing content in multiple channels or touchpoints. I find that content reuse is a valuable tactic, but it alone is not a strategy. I also find that a single content strategy for an enterprise does not make a sense (see the previous tip). However, I do find that a large company benefits from a vision that unifies the content strategies."

"User-Generated Content Your users can represent you well. Through comments and content they contribute to your social networking space. The right potential customers will identify with your current customers. The trick is to facilitate the discussion so that it stays true to your brand and your users."

"People scan until they find the content that is relevant to them. Once they find it, they will read deeply. If they don’t find relevant content, they won’t ever read deeply. So offering relevant content is a huge opportunity to influence people."

"The analysis of your current state can give you a number of “before” benchmarks—such as content effectiveness, content operations maturity level, or even the number of content assets—that set the stage for a compelling before and after story."

"If you don’t know what success looks like, you can’t make it happen. If you all have a different idea in your head of what success is, you’ll actually be sabotaging each other simply because you don’t have a shared vision."

"Your content vision is something meaningful to your organization and your team and something ambitious enough that people will be motivated to put in extra effort to achieve it."

"If I had to pick the top reason businesses fail at content, I’d say it’s because they don’t have an accurate understanding of their content situation to inform their strategy."