Content Takeaways from SXSW 2012

First #heweb11, now SXSW. Austin does it again.

I recently returned from the annual SXSW Interactive festival, which brought 25,000 nerds of various stripes to Austin, Texas, for a week of learning and networking (and breakfast tacos). There were several highlights, but two things pleased me in particular: the strength of the panels on content-related topics and the significant number of higher education professionals in attendance. The great thing about SXSW is that, if you’re interested in content, [...]

Some New Ways to Meet Content

A present

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost been a year since we launched Meet Content. In that time, we’ve covered a wide array of topics — everything from inline links to infographics — and have had many enlightening and inspiring conversations with you about how we can keep making content better. To that end, we’d like to share a few new offerings from Meet Content that we hope will extend [...]

Creating a Social Media Style Guide

Signpost in a field

Style guides are essential partners in the creation of effective content. They help ensure consistency of tone, voice, brand, spelling and grammar, giving our content credibility and value. Rick provided a great breakdown of the elements of editorial style for the web last August. But what about social media? Since we can’t erect an editorial process around every individual tweet, status, comment or response, it is critical to have a [...]

Build Community Around Photo Content with Instagram

Instagram logo

After years of loyal Blackberry usage, I finally bought an iPhone in early September. But it took me a few months to come around to what millions of iPhone users had been obsessing about for months: Instagram, the photo editing and sharing app. Once I decided to go all in, I realized what the buzz was all about—Instagram’s real potential for engaging, community-driven content. In talking with Higher Ed Live’s [...]

Social Media Guides for Content Creation

YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Google

What do Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube have in common? While they are often essential to our content strategy, none of these third-party social media platforms are completely intuitive. They all have little-known functionality, power user tricks and an unceasing tide of new features that, if we’re in the know, can help us more effectively achieve our communications goals. The good news is, we can get a lot of insight [...]