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With the first in the series, Recycling: A Mid-Summers Night’s Writers Block (aka Strategic Planning) – 1 of 3 out of the way, I have continued to sift through content and metrics to see what was of interest and what wasn’t. Sorta a Win-Loss analysis for content.
Analyzing Context and Content
There are lot’s of things to look at – content and links which was the main focus of my effort until a couple of days ago was actual posts – keywords, visitors and page views. The main reason I started a comment review was to understand what conversations were where from a content perspective, since a recent comment from Marty Thompson was on a boring event post, which I wouldn’t have thought would get a comment.
Prior to Marty‘s comment a couple of days ago I wouldn’t have thought about reviewing comments. Spinning through the comments ended up being a fun as part of the work so far, some really good feedback from a bunch of people including, but not limited to, the following:
Looking at conversations and content proved to be not just fun, but informative. Not sure I have any conclusions, at least I have some data points, like the Duomo post which caused a conversation in real life today, a question on Facebook and a comment from Tessa – another cool person you should read. The other thing I’ve found thanks to auditing comments is that there is a significant variety of content over the past two years – like random content.
Random Content Rules!
Maybe not, but oddly enough random posts are among the top post here. The best example of random content is still my first thanksgiving post which gets a good deal of random traffic on terms like “Funny things to be Thankful For“, most of these people appear to load at 1 other page – I think. My biggest bounce page is on Geographic Topics for blogging, none of the topics which I think anyone posted on, but it does garner the most amount of spam comments for some reason. The remaining top 5 terms in search are:
- bob’s ichthyosaur – I think this is just the uniqueness of the phrase, very interesting and entertaining book.
- how to calculate gross margin – really just an attempt to see how search and blogs worked.
- where jobs grow on jobbies – A YouTube video clip from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
While the top five keyword pages here are randoms, Product Management and Marketing is creeping up with both PM & Social Media and Brands in the top 10. It’s movement of product management content and brand into the search terms which is nice to see, since this one the strategic roadmap theme over the last year – focus more.
Corner Cases: Content of Interest
After looking at all the content, nearly 500 posts, I find that the content I like writing is not always the most interesting to others and the comments, page views and links prove this out. While the data recommends otherwise, music and setlists are still going to be randoming into the blog, plus leadership and career oriented content since these are things I like and have appeared to be sustainable. Here are examples of some leadership and career posts:
- Top 10 Tips for Dealing with the Fact you will never leave your Job
- Bloom’s Taxonomy and Corporate Growth
- Chris Brogan’s take on Marketing being about corporate culture changes
- Leadership and Team Work at Burning Man
Net-Net
Blogging for the past two years has been an interesting meander and after reviewing the convesations I have a significantly different view on what is valuable and what is not. I really think everyone with a blog should invest some time looking at the progress, content and conversations over time and put a plan in place based on what you learned.
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- Win-Loss Mistakes
- Image via Wikipedia
Getting to be those lazy days of summer – ok, not really. I’m in the process of packing up the house, coordinating all work and trying to find out how to get ready to be in Europe for the last half of August and into Sept. No shortage of things to do in real life, so I thought it might be better to work on my focus here with a little research on what people are reading and not reading around here.
Ultimately it’s just looking at some content, stats and alike…. I’ve more or less made it an annual process to review the site, understand where it has been and what the trajectory looks like going forward – Strategic Planning more or less.
The Methodology
The process is fairly straight forward – review the content, identify content themes of personal interest and write, more acurately extend certain concepts. The planning activity for me is psuedo-rigorous with a bunch of reading and thinking – no presentations to give, but a bunch of thinking and mindmapping. The metrics and content themes are more or less directional and just make me understand a little more.
A Content Analysis
Over time the content and focused has changed, but there are two key areas of sustained interest for me, Branding & Product Management, which is where Spatially Relevant is listed by Alltop. So as exercise I set out to find out where and when did these themes started @ Spatially Relevant. So I’m kicking off my market research for the 2010 strategic plan with a revisionist history on these two tags.
First Post on Each Tag
Product Management: First Post on Product Management was a slideshare preso on Product, which I can’t seem load, but more or less within the first thirty days of start.
Branding: Brand first appeared with an almost an incoherent post on pricing and promotion. So the first 90 days of spinning up the blog.
Other Posts Over Time
- Brand as the Differentiator – Altschuler wrote this.
- What does a Product Manager do? – How is that different than a Project Manager?
- Target Markets and Segmentation – Brand and product targeting via content.
- Brogan on Marketing: Cultural change focused insights.
After reviewing the initial content here, I saw that it had a happy little randomness about it – sorta all lifestream like and stuff. The site seems to be going back that way a little, last year I declared less fluff and more value as part of the strategic plan, not sure how that worked out in retrospect, but it was fun.
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So while I was unable to make the sound work, these 24 crowded little slides provide a well rounded baseline for use around one’s organization, at least without the audio. Fairly easy to digest regardless of ones familiarity with product marketing. Product Marketing and Management requirements definitely vary by organization. Product Marketing, Management, Program management and Project Management in technology companies can be a little more blurred.
