The Brainzooming Group

One of the most frequent questions people ask me is, “How do you come up with the creative inspiration for what to blog about five days a week?”

My answer is I pay attention all the time for creative inspiration and start to process experiences through a very specific filter: “How could this interaction, story, factoid, image (or whatever it is) fit as a Brainzooming blog post?”

When you go through life expecting EVERYTHING to provide creative inspiration for what to blog about, you see potential topics EVERYWHERE.

For me, the bigger challenge is finding the time to turn all the creative inspiration into blog content both of us (you and me) would be interested in reading.

I’m not a fast writer, and I’ve gotten even slower through distracting myself while writing and incorporating more SEO-oriented steps than when the Brainzooming blog started. The result is many ideas never make it into completed blog posts, although some will show up even a year or two later. Never underestimate the value of historical creative inspiration!

Brainzooming Creative Inspiration – What to Blog About

Several months ago, I wrote a Brainzooming post detailing the creative inspiration for the previous thirty posts. Some of the points of creative inspiration are the same, but many differ from the previous article on what to blog about:

1. You are inspired by stories and challenges others are sharing on Facebook (Being Thankful for the Blessings in the Challenging Parts of Life)

2. Something already written can be recast and made more helpful than when it was originally written (Current Clients, New Opportunities – Five Ideas to Discover New Growth)

3. You’re trying to motivate yourself to improve on things that bother you about yourself (Distracting Yourself – 19 Ways to Undermine Your Success)

4. There’s a keyword phrase generating favorable blog traffic, and it’s time to add more blog content on the topic (Strategic Thinking Exercises – 6 Characteristics the Best Ones Have)

5. Many intriguing articles on a topic are taking up space in your web browser, and it’s easier to summarize them in a blog post than bookmark the links (10 Articles on Creativity Lovers, Haters, Branding, Insights and Storytelling)

6. You’re trying to solve your own business challenge, and you use a blog post to think through your best options (Combat Client Block – 8 Ways to Beat Client-Specific Creative Block)

7. A sales call surfaces an issue you know others are contending with as well (Social Networking, Personal Relationships & 7 Content Strategy Questions)

8. There’s an opportunity to combine content only tangentially related to your blogging subject with a different angle to make it relevant (Innovation Success – Innovating, Strategy & Pissing Off People)

9. Marking an anniversary by sharing lessons learned (What to Blog About and How – 25 Blogging Lessons from 5 Years and Number 22: 25 Lessons Learned (or Reconfirmed) in Year Three Away from Corporate Life)

10. Creating a compilation of previous articles as a resource for readers and yourself (Project Management Techniques – 21 Articles to Better Manage Projects)

11. There’s an opportunity to link your subject to a current news topic (Political Concession Speeches – Why Are They the Best of the Election Campaign?)

12. A great, frequent guest blogger has written a post (Innovation Success Through Planning, Preparation, and Organization by Woody Bendle and Number 24 Creative Thinking Exercise – SCAMPER around KC by Woody Bendle)

13. It’s possible to turn too much time watching TV into a lesson-oriented blog post (Creative Process – 5 Creative Ideas with a Twist for Product Design)

14. A bizarre situation has been staring you in the face for years, and you finally figure out an angle to turn it into a blog (Brand Experience, Glass Houses, and Naked Shower Guy)

15. A great, new guest blogger has written a post – after you made a request on Twitter (The Top Three Don’ts of Brand Building by Julie Cottineau)

16. A current event provides an opportunity to write something more outrageous than you would ever typically address (Zombies and Vampires – Strategic Perspectives on Their Popularity)

17. In the course of a phone conversation with a potential client, you list out all the items for a blog post (Strategic Planning – 7 Questions for Avoiding Strategic Management Failures)

18. It makes sense to share some behind the scenes info on a social media strategy you use (Social Media – 5 Tips to Sharing an Evergreen Blog Post)

19. You’ve developed a guest post for another blogger you can rewrite into fresh content for your own blog (Brainstorming Tools – Drawing on Big Creative Ideas)

20. A new approach to what you do is still in the creative thinking stage, and you’re interested in getting reactions to it (Strategic Thinking Exercise – Black Swan Events in Your Plan)

21. You share a lesson you don’t particularly like that you’ve had to learn to like and embrace (Creative Inspiration – Creative Ideas from Your Daily Life)

22. See number 9

23. A conference event you attend reveals a real-life factoid serves as a case study (Television Program Ideas – How Many Ideas Per Television Series?)

24. See number 12

25. A social media rockstar is pissing and moaning about something that isn’t a problem, and you want to respond in a longer format (Social Media – 19 Content Strategy Ideas from a TV Network)

26. You’re having a conversation with someone who tells you something about what they are doing, and it would be a perfect guest blog post (The Importance of a Passion Project by Alyssa Murfey)

27. Another blogger’s intriguing blog title wasn’t matched by an intriguing post, so you write the post the other blogger should have written (Brainstorming Ideas – 10 Signs You’re Done Brainstorming)

28. You’ve written enough Twitter posts to create a decent compilation (Twitter Topics on @Brainzooming – This Tweet Is for You)

29. You sit through a speech that’s so bad and lacking in beneficial information your only choice is to write about how bad the presentation is (Keynote Presenter Advice – Don’t Do These Things)

30. You’ve had to develop a new skill that your audience can benefit from developing as well (Social Media Content – 7 Ways to Repurpose What You’ve Written)

What creative inspiration does this list suggest about what to blog about for your brand?

- Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining social media ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your social media  strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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For some people, it is a natural move from in real life personal relationships to social networking. Their social networking success can come from an instinctive or learned knack for what and when to share the right amount of personal information to make positive connections without boring people or seeming too self-obsessed.

Others, who take a more cautious approach to their lives and personal relationships, cannot imagine WHAT they could share online about themselves while still maintaining a professional image.

Social Networking by Sharing Kitteh Pictures

I was having this discussion with a cautious business owner recently who has social media presences established for the business, but struggles with what to share to both establish professional expertise and make personal connections via social networking. My point was even in a business-to-business setting, people buy from other people. PERSONAL relationships matter in real life business development, and they also matter when you are engaged in online social networking for business development.

You should have seen the reaction though when I mentioned the strategy behind sharing pictures of our cat Clementine (who a Twitter friend dubbed the “Director of Enthusiasm”) on Facebook.

Within a few questions, we found some topics that definitely have the potential for sharing on social networks. The issue is whether this business owner will become comfortable weaving in a more personal feel to social media content.

7 Content Strategy Questions for Building Personal Relationships

If you are struggling with integrating personal information into your social media sharing, here are seven questions you can ask yourself to identify potential personally oriented topics for social media sharing:

• What do you think, know, and believe?
• What are your favorite sources of compelling news and information online?
• What do business associates and clients know about you personally?
• What do you share about yourself when you meet someone at a networking event?
• What is intriguing about you and your professional and personal interactions?
• What is visually intriguing about your life – both professionally and personally?
• What brands, stores, and places do you talk up to people because you appreciate them?

Certainly, you have answers to these questions. If you are struggling with sharing personal information via social media, the answers to these questions can start to form the basis of your personal content sharing strategy.

Social Networking – When and How Much Personal Information

The next big questions to ask and answer are how soon and how much to share personally?

You have to do what works for you, but if you are reluctant to share personal information online, the answers to these last two questions are “sooner than you think” and “more than you want.”

So now that all the questions are answered, it is time to started sharing and building personal relationships to let people get to know you better in an online professional setting! - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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A blog post about taking a TV network programming approach to shape your social media content strategy led to questions about tips for what content to re-share on your social media sites.

When it comes to the decision to re-share evergreen content (i.e. a less time sensitive blog post), step one is making sure you have a big enough catalog of evergreen content. Depending on how active your content strategy is going to be on social media sites, you could need fifty blog posts or hundreds of blog posts.

If your evergreen social media content is in place, it’s vital to make sure you’re sharing social media content relevant to your audience at the time it is being shared. You can’t just throw content out there on social media sites your audience will view as old, boring, and irrelevant.

5 Tips to Sharing an Evergreen Blog Post

Here are five tips you can use to increase the probability your social media content still feels “fresh” when you re-share it on social media sites:

1. Share what your audience is searching for currently

If people are finding their way to your blog for specific topics and looking at a particular blog post right now, that is a good indication that particular social media content is still valuable. Check Google Analytics for recent active keywords and review the blog posts getting the most attention right now. We use the Jetpack Sitestats plug-in to monitor what blog posts are getting attention on a real-time basis so we can share links to what’s hot from an audience perspective right now.

2. Share what’s in the news right now

Current headlines are another great indicator of evergreen content to share. If a topic is hitting the business or popular news, it’s your opportunity to feature relevant social media content. For example, we published a blog post when Coca-Cola introduced a short-term redesign for the Diet Coke can. When Coca-Cola later announced the Diet Coke redesign was becoming permanent, it was a natural blog post to share again.

3. Share evergreen content related to what you are currently publishing

Suppose you are running a new list blog post on a particular day. As you share the link for the new content throughout day, alternate links to other blog posts related to your new content. For instance, on the day this post publishes, we’ll be tweeting links on community management and the programming like a TV network blog post. By taking a holistic view to your content strategy in this way, you can create a content theme for the day.

4. Share what the crowd is pointing to that’s popular right now

If you have vibrant Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, or other presences on social media sites, you can readily scan them to see what topics people are writing and asking questions about currently. Check especially for topics and content others are re-sharing most frequently in your social media streams. The Google Trends is another option to see what searches are most popular currently. Take advantage of these cues to find comparable topics among your archived social media content to match current interests within your social media circles.

5. Share content that hasn’t been but should be popular

Just as certain TV shows are critically acclaimed but struggle to find an audience because of timing or other factors, the same can be true for a particular blog post. Perhaps an older post on our blog you really believe in didn’t receive the attention you thought it should have when originally published. Take advantage of future opportunities to share the post again and see if it catches on with the audience at a different time.

What other tips do you use to shape your content strategy and decide what evergreen content to share?

If you are sharing archived content from your blog as part of your content strategy, what tips and input do you use to make sure blog posts you’re sharing are relevant right now? Do you take any other steps to freshen evergreen content you share? We’ll put together a follow-on blog post about steps we take to keep even evergreen content fresh.  - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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A social media guru was on Twitter bemoaning the content strategy where people auto tweet links to already published blog posts on social networking sites. He was wondering aloud (as much as one can wonder “aloud” on Twitter) if these people did not have any new ideas to share.

Since I share non-auto tweeted “From the Archives” Brainzooming blog links as part of our social media content strategy, I was intrigued to see how others reacted. For the most part, people challenged the social media guru, saying already-published blog posts can still be quite relevant. They enjoyed both seeing reminders to valuable information they had missed and readership from people checking out their own older blog posts.

To me, this was just another example of a social media guru calling out something he does not do as “wrong” because he “allegedly” does not do it.

A Different Point of View about Your Content Strategy on Social Networking Sites

My philosophy on sharing already published blog posts was shaped by a long ago NBC slogan for its summer reruns: “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you.” Sharing previously published social media content seemed a natural since:

• There are well over thirteen hundred historical, not particularly time-sensitive, blog posts on Brainzooming
• An incredible number of people globally have Internet
• There’s a slightly smaller, but still incredible, number of people who have never been to the Brainzooming blog

Maybe it is also because my dad managed a television station, but beyond the NBC slogan, I have clearly gravitated toward a TV or cable network model for shaping our social media content strategy.

For all the discussion you hear about old models not working in this completely new era of social networking sites, TV networks have been experts in attracting eyeballs through providing compelling content for decades. To a great extent, the content marketing model simply extends a TV network model to other organizations as they become content creators, aggregators, and sharers to build their own audiences.

A TV Network Model for a Social Media Content Strategy

In light of this connection between content marketing and TV network models, think about how each of these TV network programming strategies could shape your organization’s content marketing strategy across social networking sites. To make the connections more apparent, “programs” has been replaced by “content” in the list below. Remember that as you consider how TV networks:

• Offer content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• Feature both their own content and content developed by others
• Run content of varying lengths
• Provide a mix of both current and timeless content
• Program content that interests people
• Stop running content audiences are ignoring
• Do a lot of storytelling
• Offer a mix of new content and popular older content
• Offer exclusive live, as-it-happens content to attract larger audiences
• Have multiple complementary channels offering both some of the same yet also different, more focused and concentrated content
• Syndicate their own content to appear on other channels they don’t own
• Run advertisements for others, themselves, and for public issues (public service announcements)
• Create multiple celebrities / personalities to help attract an audience
• Mix both serious and silly content
• Sometimes counter program directly (i.e. an evening newscast at the same time as other networks) and sometimes completely differently
• Have series you can see once and completely understand
• Have series with running storylines where you have to see what’s before and after to completely understand
• Feature competitions – sports, game shows, reality shows, etc.
• Appeal to both the lowest common denominator and audiences with more sophisticated tastes

How Many of These Are You Applying in Your Social Media Content Strategy?

By my count, The Brainzooming Group is using eleven of these social media content strategy ideas regularly across the Brainzooming blog, Twitter, and Facebook. How many of these nineteen ideas are you incorporating into your social media content strategy? Are there other things you see TV networks do that have a place within your social media efforts? - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Since early 2012, I have been writing a weekly feature on executive business and professional development topics for an executive briefing publisher. Within a daily executive intelligence briefing format focused on global events, the piece I write provides tips and suggestions for more effective strategic leadership.

One benefit of being on the hook to create a weekly, thousand-word article on topics I write and present about all the time is it’s sharpened my skills as I repurpose social media content. There are many reasons to not simply take what I’ve previously written and submit it as an article for the executive intelligence brief. The alternative is to find productive and effective ways to repurpose content that is already written.

If you are producing any amount of content across multiple channels (whether within one company or for multiple organizations), being very effective and efficient at being able to repurpose content is a valuable skill to develop.

7 Ways to Repurpose Your Social Media Content

Consider these seven techniques to repurpose your social media content for sharing within new channels, with different audiences, or at alternative times.

1. Consolidate a list post

We have all written list posts with more items than were required. After further reflection on these long list posts, you will like find ways to consolidate a few (maybe many) of the items on the list. So, consolidate away and write about new and fewer combined items on your revised list.

2. Ungroup and expand a topic

Pick one topic inside a multi-topic blog post. Pull the topic out from the remainder of the social media content and start writing in greater depth about it. Unshackled from having to account for the broader number and variety of topics in the original post, you can focus your exploration to create dramatically different content.

3. Reorder or regroup content

Take social media content you have already written and re-arrange its current flow into something new. This could include a different order for content to incorporate into the new piece or you can take specific sections in the original piece and integrate them as new topic sections.

4. Use headings from the original content to launch your rewrite

If your pre-existing social media content includes specific section headers, use the section headers from the earlier piece and begin writing from scratch about topics related to the previously used sections.

5. Integrate current news with the content

Look for a current news story or up-to-date issues you can integrate into pre-existing social media content to freshen it up dramatically. This type of repurpose technique provides a new introduction for your older social media content or can suggest new points of emphasis given the current environment.

6. Write two versions from different angles

When you write an article there are often multiple angles you could pursue. Start writing from a similar set-up but write in two different directions. Writing  two different pieces on the same topic but covering different aspects with different levels of depth is an ideal way to generate multiple pieces of new content at the same time.

7. Mix and match to create new content

If you already have considerable amounts of social media content on one or more topics, it is possible to create new content through pulling ideas from multiple older blog posts. You can put the extracted content together in new ways to make different points or uncover new ideas.

How are you trying to repurpose social media content?

What ways are you finding to repurpose social media content and generate additional content in an extremely time-efficient manner? - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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A recent article titled “Are We All Braggarts Now?” by Elizabeth Bernstein in the Wall Street Journal immediately caught my eye. Bernstein surveys the phenomenon of how social media sharing trips up humility and creates pressure (real or imagined) for people to play up their personal accomplishments and those of their families.

Think of it as “social media bragging.”

We’re all familiar with bragging blog posts and status updates where Facebook friends and Twitter followers are ostensibly sharing what they’re doing currently (or just did or are just about to do). It’s clear many times these social networking updates about personal accomplishments are a thinly veiled blurb whose real message is, “Look how special I AM and consider how special YOU AREN’T.”

At one point I was saving online bragging examples from Facebook friends and Twitter followers as examples for a blog post on the bad ways to use social media. I never wrote the blog post because of my struggle with sharing the actual social media status updates as examples and calling out individual people for online bragging. While I know plenty of people who wouldn’t hesitate to make a negative example of someone on social media, it’s not an approach I’d want to follow. My previous compromise was running a Dilbert comic strip on social media bragging and humility juxtaposed with a saying from Proverbs: Don’t brag about yourself let others praise you (Proverbs 27:2).

To get the point across about how to better use social media for sharing personal accomplishments with humility in the “Are We All Braggarts Now?” Wall Street Journal article, Elizabeth Bernstein shared a sidebar listing five ideas for how to “Shine without Being a Braggart.” From my reading, though, her examples would STILL sound like online bragging if they showed up from Facebook friends or Twitter followers in my social media streams.

7 Ways to Share Accomplishments Online with Humility

Instead of pointing out online bragging offenders, here are 7 lessons from Facebook friends and Twitter followers  who share personal accomplishments without online bragging and are clearly tempering the instincts we apparently all have to derive pleasure from talking about ourselves.

1. Consider every good thing that happens to you as a blessing, i.e., you weren’t completely responsible for the good thing that happened to you, so don’t take all the credit.

2. Approach your personal accomplishments with a sense of sincere appreciation not a sense of entitlement.

3. Be self-deprecating. Poke fun at yourself in areas where people tend to assume/think/know you have strengths and talents.

4. Make sure you’re online sharing reflects a balanced view of your life:

• For every incredible vacation or trip photo, share something mundane from your daily life.
• For every windfall you are celebrating, share a moment of challenge, concern, or self-doubt you’ve faced.
• For every personal or family accomplishment you trumpet, share when things didn’t work out as you expected – and that’s not, “Instead of winning the $200 million Powerball, I only won $600,000 : ( ”

5. Share and Like many more great experiences from other people than great blurbs you share about yourself.

6. Congratulate others; don’t self-congratulate yourself. Even if you think you’re self-congratulating with humility, chances are you’re not.

7. Before you share your update about what’s going on with you, re-read it and think about if whether you’d perceive the same update as online bragging if it came from a loved one? How about from a casual friend?

Are you put off by social media bragging or are you unphased by it?

Do you have some egregious examples of bragging on social media you’d like to share courtesy of Facebook friends or Twitter followers? Or maybe suggestions of people who seem to apply these lessons (or others) to share personal accomplishments with humility? - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Seeing painful examples this week featuring social media completely devoid of real brand personality means it’s time to create a simple social media personality audit.

Social media content with no brand personality?

Example 1: The Financial Institution

There’s a TV advertisement running in Kansas City for a financial institution’s new blog targeted at women. The TV advertisement features five women in a kitchen, supposedly talking and sharing in a very “it’s just us girls” way. Apparently by “just us girls” though the financial institution means “in a very stilted, formal, artificial, and awkward” way.

When you check out the financial institution blog, the “stilted, formal, etc.” sentiment carries throughout its site. The five women in the ad obviously represent five personas for the blog. But instead of depicting real people, the five women are characters with phony descriptive names tied to each persona’s life stage and some variation of the financial institution’s signature color.

Let’s just say the dearth of activity on the financial institution blog suggests nobody feels like hanging out in the virtual kitchen to talk and share with these phony personalities.

Example 2: The Vet Clinic

Then yesterday, after visiting our vet to pick up the cats, the vet clinic popped up on Facebook with a status update about a new blog post. I clicked the link and scanned the last three vet clinic blog posts. All three blog posts were about products to keep away from your pet. Helpful information, without a doubt. But the information appeared (based on the blog design information) to be generated by a company specializing in on-hold call systems. As a result, the vet clinic blog posts had the personality one would typically associate with an on-hold call.

This is in stark contrast, however, to a very friendly and warm vet clinic where vets, techs, and other staff have shown us tremendous support as one cat faded and get genuinely excited and have a special nickname for our other cat when she visits the cat clinic.

10 Question Social Media Content Personality Audit

These two social media examples so devoid of brand personality sent me looking for definitions of individual personality and brand personality to spur my creative thinking.

Based on the words suggested in the Wikipedia entries and our experience with good and bad social media content, here are 10 questions the financial institution, the vet clinic, or your brand can ask to see whether you are putting enough personality into social media.

Apply this 10 question social media personality audit to see how any social media content from a brand does. Give two points for every “Yes” answer and no points for every “No” answer:

• Is there an overriding emotion this social media content suggests?
• Would you know the attitude employees of this brand embody from its social media content?
• Are the behaviors your people display when they go above and beyond to help customers clearly suggested?
• When you see this content, does it appear as if it could be shared in a genuine conversation or letter exchange with someone who knows you?
• Is there a level of familiarity suggested that customers or potential customers would expect when they dealt with your employees in person?
• Does this social media content have a spark of imagination and spirit?
• Will the information shared via social media pass the “straight face” test?
• Does the tone and delivery of the social media content treat the reader with clear respect?
• Will a reader walk away from this social media content enriched both intellectually and emotionally?
• Would people legitimately want to spend more time with the person delivering this social media content?

Let’s see how you did!

Grading the Social Media Content Personality Audit

Here’s how to score a brand on the social media personality audit:

• 18 or Greater: “A” – You are delivering personality throughout your social media content
• 16:  “B” – You’re showing more personality than most are in social media
• 12 – 14: “C” – Social media content you produce might reflect aspects of your brand personality, but it could easily be missed
• Less than 12: “Fail” – Your social media content probably has drab stock photos (even for what should be employee images), copy that should be on your website and not your blog, and status updates that read like short-form press releases

Who is doing it right?

If you want to see a local brand that has really impressed me of late by oozing its brand personality in social media content, check out the Kansas City store, STUFF on Facebook. It’s located on my favorite creative block in Kansas City, and in the face of a lot of generic retail social media content, STUFF shows you can showcase your brand personality in an imaginative way every day.

Oh, BTW, there is a caveat

Most of the creative questions, strategic thinking exercises, and innovation-inducing tools shared on the Brainzooming blog spring from real-life organizational situations and have been tried and tested.

This social media audit hasn’t, at least in this form. It’s all stuff I fully believe and espouse, but this attempt to share it in a new way isn’t client tested. Because of that, I’d love to see you apply it, and let us know if you think it’s appropriately categorizing the good and bad of social media content you see. - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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