Is this a Content Moment?

Have you noticed how much content drives conversation in Social Media today? Take a quick scan of your Twitter stream or Facebook wall and you'll likely notice that the vast majority of tweets and post contain a link to content -- be that video, photo or even written (in the form of an article or post).

So it would seem that one important piece of training for any company or brand team that is charged with managing a brand/company's social media program is content creation training. Now it is easy enough to show someone how to use a digital camera or a Flip cam, teach them about using Photoshop or Final Cut, and show them how to upload to blogs, Flickr, etc. But what is harder and I think quite often overlooked is the softer side of content creation...the part that really drives success -- identifying content moments.

What is a content moment? To me it is a moment in time or a few moments strung together (think video here) that are interesting, compelling or say something about your company/brand. It is true content that someone would find interesting. Ideally it also moves you closer to some marketing goal too.

So if you're a brand manager, social media consultant or maybe the head social media person at a corporation, a few questions you might consider or discuss:

1. Are some folks just wired to recognize content moments or is it a skill that can be taught? If it is an inherent skillset, then do you need to factor this into your hiring process? And do you just factor it into the hiring of a Social Media Strategist or the hiring process for the entire company?
2. Can you standardize a definition of content moment? This could be huge if you're truly trying to wire social media into an entire organizational culture. Seems like it would be really hard to train everyone (even in small classes) in larger organizations like Fortune 500 companies.
3. Can you create some kind of guideline document or reference document that helps employees throughout the organization recognize when they are in or viewing a content moment? Guess this kind of flows out of #2, but it is important no? Training has a way of fading into the past, while guideline docs or some kind of ongoing reinforcement program tend to help institutionalize common practices.

I think that last one is huge don't you? It's hard for one person or even a small team to be everywhere and see everything. But if you could find a way to program an entire organization to look for, capture and communicate content moments, what would that mean for the power of your social media program? 

If you want to see what I'm talking about first hand, head over to MyMardiGrasExperience (shameless plug) where we're trying to string a lot of content moments together to tell the Mardi Gras story. Then let me know what you think about the whole idea of content moments and how we did finding and sharing them.

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