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I often work with clients who are overwhelmed by their content, information and digital assets. For many individuals and companies, their content (pictures, text, video, etc) is a mess, a liability and a cost center. It takes focus and effort to turn the content from a liability into an economic asset, but the path is straightforward and very achievable. Your organization will benefit internally and externally, creating a smother-running operation on the inside and promoting your message to the outside. You may even create additional revenue streams once you wrangle all those assets.

This is continuous publishing in a global digital media environment. Control your content before someone else does. Today much of your content is digital. And it has escaped your grasp. Below I'll describe your 10 to-do items. You'll get control of your content, and you'll grow to understand the power and value that content will bring you.

1. Discover. Identify your existing content. What do you have? What format is it in? Perform a content inventory or content audit. Create a content matrix, a spreadsheet of all your pieces and their attributes.

2. Develop your core. Create the essential ingredients of your content. This is often called Single Source, where a team develops base content that is used in multiple locations or formats. Crystallize your message down into the essential ingredients.

3. Prepare for community involvement. Your content will be captured, quoted and manipulated. Plan for it. Make your community plan. It's much like a business plan, but it outlines your philosophy, approach and rules for your audience/social network. This is user-centered content creation: know your audience. Give them a voice. Give them tools like widgets or online forums.

4. Architect your content. Use information architecture theories and approaches. Put your content into categories that make sense. This is often called bucketing. Try doing a card sort. Your community may begin to add categories and tags to your content if you let them. This "folksonomy" approach can be powerful.

5. Create your multi-destinational plan. We are in a cross-platform world. Your content will live on more than the three screens (TV, computer, mobile). Create a delivery method attribute matrix to predict where your content is most likely to land. Remember we are in the age of the globalization of content. Understand translation and localization.

6. Acquire or build your tools. You will most likely need content management tools. Make you build vs. buy decision. Visit the CMS Matrix to get comparison information.

7. Design your content. Separate your content from the way it is presented. Determine the base elements of your visual brand and stick to 'em.

8. Document it. For internal use and the retention of institutional knowledge, please document your content adventures. Develop style guides and knowledge management practices to ensure knowledge transfer to others on your team or others who may follow in the future.

9. Tell your story continuously. Assign, hire or rent full-time staff to constantly add new content. Generate continuous content. Become thought leaders. Quality content and real content win. Don't fill a page with keywords and call it content. Humans and machines can tell what good content is, and they seek it out.

10. Track it. Define your metrics for success and document your benchmarks. Analyze your numbers. Watch them change. Modify your behavior based on results, not assumptions.

Talent Spotlight
Jack Goldenberg is a creative copywriter represented by agent Randi Martin in Aquent's New Jersey office who, since cracking into the industry over 30 years ago, has served as the creative muscle behind such influential product launches as the McDonald's Happy Meal, Cabbage Patch Kids, Pop Rocks candy, and most recently, the signature Barack Obama watch line. Today, Jack is a freelance copywriter who recently finished a two-year gig writing advertising for Bristol Myers Squibb.

I asked Jack a few questions about how he got his start in the creative industry, the stories behind some of the work he is most proud of, and some advice for those of you hoping to follow a similar path.

First of all, I had an African American Cabbage Patch Kid growing up I named Fred. I'm about as white as they come and grew up in Maine...very strange. But I guess I could say he was my first best friend...so thanks for reaching the masses on that one.

You knew a black Cabbage Patch Kid named Fred? I think I knew him. Was he different than all the other Cabbage Patch Kids? Wait a minute, maybe I'm thinking of snowflakes...

Now you've worked on some pretty amazing product launches from the Happy Meal to the aforementioned (and awesome) Cabbage Patch Kids to the Obama Watches. As a staunch Happy Meal supporter myself, can you tell me the story of how this product launch came to be?

The launch of McDonald's first Happy Meal was a long, long time ago. How long? It was back when cell phones had a huge cord and we had to walk 20 miles in the snow just to pick up our e-mail. But I digress.

The Happy Meal name came from a company in St. Louis and the idea for it supposedly came from St. Louis adman Dick Brams in 1977 (also known as the Dark Ages).

The problem was that the Happy Meal wasn't that successful, at first, to warrant making it a national product. I was Creative Director at the Frankel Company - a brilliant company that has been promoting McDonald's for over 30 years.

Since the local sales of Happy Meals were not that strong, Ray Kroc, McDonald's founder, wanted to put the Happy Meal in a bag instead of a box because the money McDonald's would save if they sold millions of Happy Meals was astronomical (I'm no math whiz, but we're talking well over $40.00 here).

I argued with Ray Kroc that they had to keep the Happy Meal in a box, not a bag because a Happy Meal was "an in-home reminder of the need to visit McDonald's." A kid would see the Happy Meal boxes he collected in his room every day and tell his parents, "Mom, Dad, We've just gotta go back to McDonald's. I need three more 'Star Trek, Star Wars or Spongebob' Happy Meals to complete my collection!"

In other words, the Happy Meal was designed to be viral, kid to parent, long before YouTube made its way onto computers and cell phones. Of course, we didn't know about the term "viral," to us it was just "word of mouth."

I then tried to convince McDonald's to use movie merchandising on the first national Happy Meal instead of the generic outer space or circus themes they thought would work. When they didn't believe me, I brought in Dick Wolf, then a a movie producer and currently of Law and Order fame, and Rusty Citron, a former talent agent and currently Founder and President of the Actors Hall of Fame, to speak to Frankel account executives and McDonald's promotion people about how a movie merchandising theme would make the Happy Meal collectible.

The deal was sealed when Coke got the rights to the first Star Trek movie and sub-licensed them to McDonald's.

I don't want to get political here, but I do want a new watch, so can you tell me more about the Obama Watches?

Obama Watches is the most recent project I've worked on. In December 2007, I wore a single Obama watch to a friend's party as a one-man viral campaign supporting Barack Obama. The next day, five friends called or e-mailed me (why they didn't Tweet me, I'll never know!) to ask where they could buy "one of those Obama watches. "

Now, we have 13 different Obama watches, sales in 47 states and 8 foreign countries and three of our Obama watches are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution. I personally gave 5 watches to then-candidate Obama at the request of the Democratic National Committee.

We're going to make a 14th final Obama watch. While it will be a little less serious, it is sure to make dog lovers happy. I don't want to give away what the subject will be, but I will say that you'll be able to buy it at this site - www.firstpuppyoftheunitedstates.com - as soon as it goes live.

I didn't need the Fake Steve Jobs to tell me that blogging won't make you rich (though I'm comfortable). And while I do believe that blogging can help you find work, I understand from this ex-CNN head writer/senior producer that it can just as easily foreclose numerous career options.

Do you have a blog? Has it helped or hurt your job prospects? Even if it hasn't made you rich, is it worth reading by people who don't know you (yet)? Talk to me and I'll tell the world via this incredibly powerful communication platform!

On Tuesday, February 10, be sure to check out "My Comedy Show," the highly anticipated Scrubs episode co-written by Devin O. Mahoney and Aquent copywriting talent, Chris Rego Marquiis!

At least 10 people expressed excitement about the episode here, but if you need more convincing, take a sneak peak.

Recent research revealed that, by and large, our clients do not read our marketing materials. Given that I spend a lot of time writing and editing the aforementioned materials, I was somewhat disheartened.

The good news was that people overwhelming tend to hear about us from someone else. Given that the drum I most frequently beat says that you get jobs primarily through people to people connections, I felt strangely validated.

If no one reads what you write, but through their actions prove it to be on the money, that's good, right?

Cory Doctorow recently published an essay, "Why I Copyfight." His basic point is that sharing knowledge, stories, music, etc. is an essential part of human culture (in this, his arguments echo those of Jonathan Lethem), but that internet technology has made such sharing and copying virtually indistinguishable, and therewith criminalized an ubiquitous and, to a certain degree, essential human behavior. The danger now is, if you enforce the laws, and eliminate copying, then you effectively abolish human culture. (I may be exaggerating the point a little here.)

Reasonable copyright law, he goes on to say, must make a distinction between "good" copying, which is just human, and "bad" copying, which is stealing. Doctorow demonstrates that the former is actually penalized more harshly than the latter by pointing out that the penalties for bootlegging DVDs and hawking them on the street are actually lower than the penalties for making a movie viewable for free on the web.That just doesn't seem right, right?

As writers and designers and otherwise creators of content, do you make this same distinction between copying as just a part of healthy, human cultural exchange and copying as unmitigated rip-off? What about that old truism: Poor artists borrow, great artists steal?

Looks like we're in a recession, my fellow Americans (if you happen to live somewhere else, more power to ya!). Home prices are dropping and foreclosures are up. Over 500,000 private sector jobs have evaporated since November 2007. We're even seeing runs on banks. If you want to know how bad it could get, but also get some reassurance that things aren't as bad as they could be, check out these graphs provided by the New York Times.

Then yesterday, Google shares lost nearly 10% of their value after reporting earnings that disappointed investors. When the public radio show Marketplace reported on this, they made two interesting points:

On the one hand, they emphasized that Google is not a tech company, with Martin Pyykkonen explaining,"At the end of the day, in terms of running the business and how they get paid, it is through advertising." That statement was followed by this comment, "And we all know what happens to ad budgets in a weak economy -- they get cut."

In other words, things could continue to get tight for people who have jobs related to advertising. Not to put too fine a point on it, this means many of the folks - graphic designers, copywriters, etc. - that we work with and, frankly, us!

On the other hand, things are going OK for companies in the hardware business, like IBM, primarily because they have a lot of long-term service contracts in place that act as a recession buffer.

Bringing it all back home, I think the trick will be for folks who write and design to position themselves and their skills as a necessary, even critical, kind of ongoing service to their clients.

Is this realistic? Can it be done? Are you doing it? Are we?

Image Courtesy of Brent and MariLynn.

I am generally bored by presentations, business, academic, or otherwise. I fidget, I doodle, and my comments or questions tend to fall into the "distracting/sometimes comedic" category. And while I've sat through my share of boring presentations, I will freely admit that I have likewise conducted some of my own. Moreover, I have known the searing pain and embarrassment of consciously doing so.

I've tried to play with the genre in order to liven things up. At academic conferences, I've eschewed the traditional reading approach and spoken ex tempore. In business contexts, I've used Godin-esque PowerPoints featuring provocative images and 5 words or less per slide, and I've even daringly presented without a PowerPointed net.

Still, I have yet to try Pecha Kucha. A Pecha Kucha Night is an event whereat designers present their ideas on design under rather strict limits: Each presenter gets 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. If you do the math, you'll realize that gives each presentation 400 seconds, or a little over six minutes.

The founders of PK Night, Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture, realized that, if you "give a mike to a designer (especially an architect) ... you'll be trapped for hours." At the same time, they wanted to create "a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public." Incipit Pecha Kucha.

I'm loving the concept. Can you imagine a speaker telling you, "Yes, I'd be happy to present at your conference, but I refuse to speak for more than six and a half minutes"?

If that sounds like a dream come true, CALL ME! I would be happy to speak anywhere, on ANY SUBJECT, Pecha-Kucha-style. Even if I'm boring, the light at the end of the tunnel of boredom is coming atcha in twenty 20-second increments. So don't worry. It will be over soon.

Image Courtesy of Sam Takes Photos.

Debbie Weil is a corporate blogging and social media consultant who literally wrote the book on corporate blogging, which she aptly entitled, The Corporate Blogging Book. I had the good fortune of interviewing her the other day on the three "don'ts" of corporate blogging (don't focus on the technology; don't outsource the writing; don't overestimate the amount of work it will require), journalistic standards and blogger credibility, and the revolution in corporate communications.

I invite you to listen in on our conversation. You can do so by clicking on the device pictured below or by clicking on this link here. You may also download the mp3 by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on that link, or check out this and all other Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.

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A few highlights of the podcast can be found at the following time coordinates:

01:43 - How to become an "expert"
03:31 - It's not easy to do a really good corporate blog
08:50 - Top 3 Dont's of Corporate Blogging
11:38 - Think of a blog as a next generation website
15:53 - Manufacturing authenticity
21:38 - A collection of intersecting communities
23:10 - The first step is always to listen
25:05 - You can't start blogging until you're in a different mindset
28:02 - Can you make a career in blogging? (Answer: Probably not)

Image Courtesy of hyku.

I interviewed Debbie Weil yesterday for a podcast on corporate blogging (which I'll be posting tomorrow morning - watch this space!). While doing a bit of research on Debbie, I came across her compilation of the "Best Top Ten Lists" for 2007. What threw me for a time-loop was this list of "Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers" assembled by the fellow who coined the term "blog," Jorn Barger.

Actually, it wasn't the list that threw me so much as seeing Jorn's robot wisdom weblog, which was the first blog I ever read (while sitting in the Aquent office in Osaka, Japan back in 2000). It reminded me once again that a weblog, now commonly called "blog," was originally defined by Mr. Barger as a collection of links documenting someone's travels around the web. The journal-esque form of today's blogs suggests that the genre has drifted somewhat from his original concept, according to which, as he puts it, "...del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com."

In other words, blogging is about the links, not about self-important pontification, snide carping, or insipid personal reflection. (Thank the Heavens that I never indulge in such frivolities on this august and painfully earnest corporate blog!)

So, in the original spirit of bloggery, I present the following links upon which I have recently pointed and/or clicked:

Steven Berlin Johnson on whether or not reading is declining
Heather Hamilton on evaluating career opportunities (spoiler alert: it's not about the money!)
Cheezhead on a cool recruiting site by Microsoft
A cornucopia of fake blogs [PARENTAL ADVISORY: STRONG LANGUAGE]
Recruiting as an "accidental career" and how to make it more than that

How do you like them blog apples?

Image Courtesy of iangbl.