300FeetOut ceo takes the panel
July 1, 2014
written by
Greg Ciro Tornincasa
The San Francisco 5th annual PR Summit is one of the premier content marketing and PR thought leadership events in the country. Held at the always amazing US Mint building just a few blocks from 300FeetOut headquarters, this year boasted a variety of speakers from companies like Twitter and Google – as well as our very own CEO, Barbara O. Stephenson. Along with Vanessa Carmones from theMix Agency and Stephanie Losse from Dell, the panel participants spoke about driving conversions with dynamic content strategies, a very popular topic with the mostly startup audience. While each panelist had their own approach to the subject, Barbara’s direction on the topic was to provide advice on how to create strategic content strategies for beginning marketing campaigns.
Content campaigns start out with some brain work – reviewing your business goals, analyzing your industry as a whole, identifying both your existing comp set and your aspirational comp set, and benchmarking all of the channels you’ve found. Next, identify the ones that you want to work with, create user personas if needed, and then set up the measurement systems to evaluate success. That last part is really important, not just only to create the metrics but to put them in writing, in particular if you want to keep your job and make your boss look good. Don’t be sloppy with your reporting! After everyone has agreed to the mechanics, then you need the creation of tone and voice with an elevator pitch so you can clearly state what you want to communicate about your company and how it should sound. Do you want to sound professional and corporate? That’s great for financial companies but not so good if you’re an arbiter of cool. Finally, implement! The panel was relatively short so while the the simplistic 300FeetOut (or up) view of a detailed process was communicated, a solid digital strategy should also include SEO keywords, perhaps some PPC, and most certainly some analytics packages.
The conference was a great success and lots of fun for anyone looking to learn about digital journalism and content strategy. After their duties were done and the conference was over, the team rewarded themselves with a well deserved craft beer from The City Beer Store before heading out to the first studio tour of SF Design Week!
