Social Media B2B

When talking about social media the word “content” is constantly thrown around because it is at the center of all forms of content. The Internet is filled with blog posts that tout content as king. Content is king, but what is it is not worth your time to create it.

For many B2B executives and professional service business their hourly rate is hundreds to thousands of dollars an hour. Is a blog post worth a thousand dollars to a lawyer? This is an issue many business are faced with currently. How do I participate in social media when I have already maxed out my time and my time is valuable?

Expediting Content Creation For Social Media

Option 1:

For the sake of an example let’s use a blog as the type of media that is being created and we will use a merger and acquisitions lawyer as the example author of the blog. In this example the B2B lawyer would have an extremely high hourly rate and very little free time. What does the lawyer have? Money.

Step 1: The lawyer buys a pocket video camera such as a Flip Camera or Kodak Zi8.

Step 2: Then he schedules one hour of his time each month.

Step 3: During this hour he records himself blogging. He says post titles and then talks as if he were writing a blog post. Without having to type and account for typos he can likely get a month or an least a couple weeks of blog posts recorded in the hour long video.

Step 4: Then he pays to have the video transcribed and the blog posts separated.

Step 5: Finally someone in his office can help format and add any needed images or media and publish on the web.

This method saves the blogger time while still letting him blog in his own words and helps him communicate in his own tone.

Option 2:

Option number one in this post is all about saving time. Option number two is the opposite approach. If you make your money by billing hourly you are limited in the money you can make by the number of hours you can work. The only way to make more money is to increase your hourly rate, OR add revenue that isn’t tied to hours.

Let us take the lawyer from our first example. He has very specific knowledge and expertise, which is valuable to businesses in certain situations. However, it is also likely that some of those businesses cannot afford his hourly rate. The solution is for the lawyer to offer paid content in the form of documents, guides, tip sheets, etc. All of these materials only have to be created once and then can be sold thousands of times, unlike the lawyers time.

This approach creates a direct stream of revenue that can be tied to blogging so the lawyer can make a determination how to best manage his time to maximize revenue.

Workflow Tied To Business Objectives

While both of these ideas can work together or a part, they may not be right for everyone. The larger issue here is that with little time and significant money at stake workflows have to be created to make time investment equal to the value of the content being produced.

How do you solve the problem of creating content when time is tight?

Kipp Bodnar is publisher of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Kipp on Twitter @kippbodnar.