The SharePoint Community Needs More Content: How You Can Get Involved – Part 3
Guest Author: Christian Buckley
http://buckleyplanet.net
In this final segment of my series on ways that you can get more involved in the SharePoint community, I’ll focus on ideas for how you can generate content. Why create more content? The community needs to hear your unique perspective, learn from your successes (and failures), and understand your industry best practices. Sure, creating content can be a fabulous way to build up your personal brand and build out your portfolio, but it also adds to the digital library of the collective unconscious.
How can you get involved? Here are some ideas:
- Create a blog.
Catalog your experiences. You never know who you may be helping. As your reputation grows, it’s always great to be able to go back and point to previous posts to share as case studies or to prove out a point about a current problem. The best blogs typically contain a mixture of corporate, subject matter expert, and personal voices within the content. Lean too heavily on the corporate voice, and people will identify you as a marketing vehicle for your company. My advice is a 20/40/40 mixture of corporate/sme/personal. You can check out my blog at http://buckleyplanet.net - Read other blogs, and comment.
As you write to your own blog, follow other leading blogs. Find people who share your area of expertise, who focus on the same vertical, or who live within your community. Cross-link, create link lists/blog rolls, and refer to others in your own posts. Some blogs you might consider are Bill Baer, Joel Oleson, and the SharePoint Product Team blog. - Submit an article to the SharePoint websites and magazines.
Focus on real-world examples and case studies. Write about your own experiences solutions you played a part in creating. Expand on content you created as part of your blogging effort. Remember to cite proper references, but definitely point to other leading content and experts. - Present at a regional event or conference.
Once you have content in hand, you may be interested in presenting that content – possibly with a technical demonstration – at an upcoming event. As with getting an article published, start by creating several detailed abstracts, watch for the call for speakers. Most events lock down their speakers (especially new speakers who do not have extensive presenting experience) well ahead of time so that they can promote their event, so you need to hit this window. Having the right topic is critical, but the larger the event, the more weight the event team will give to prior experience. Start small by presenting at your user group, move up to a SharePoint Saturday, and then move up to the big events. - Write a whitepaper, or provide input to a whitepaper.
As your technical expertise grows, there may be opportunities to share more in-depth experiences around specific solutions, products, and/or services. You may decide to tackle a topic on your own, partner with others within the community, or make yourself available to partner ISVs or SIs who seek to produce content around their solutions. Different than blogs or articles in the technical depth, whitepapers are generally not viewed as marketing pieces (though some are definitely more marketing fluff than others), and are viewed as a resume-worthy technical contribution. - Write an ebook.
For those who are more marketing-savvy, you may want to share a best practice in this usually light and reader-friendly format. As with a whitepaper, these are generally more content-intensive than your longer blog posting or magazine article, but have a more casual tone than the whitepaper. An ebook is a great way to share a process or outline a tool in a brief, entertaining way. Like a whitepaper, an ebook is a great way – with the right content – to establish yourself in the SharePoint community. - Write a book.
This is no small task, but if you have the expertise, a detailed outline, and can make the time – a book is a fantastic way to document and share your experience with the world. Some words of advice: know what content is already out there, and have a different spin or story. Know your readers, and have a compelling reason for them to purchase your book.Once you have your detailed outline and unique value proposition defined, put together a book proposal that includes a summary, your outline, one or two completed chapters (rough drafts), details on your target readers, and a basic marketing overview of how you will promote your book. Send out copies of this package to the various SharePoint publishers, including O’Reilly, Pearson, Wiley, and others, and follow up by phone on a regular basis. More fruitful is a recommendation from an existing author to their publishers. Reach out to your SharePoint community connections.
- Create a page for About.com or Squidoo.
There’s a bit of legwork involved with getting something published on About.com, but the site continues to be a trusted resource for content and expertise – landing somewhere between Wikipedia and the typical user guide. Find the right About.com subject expert, send your proposal or abstract, and provide some compelling content. On the other hand, Squidoo allows anyone to be the expert. Simply sign up, add your content, and start promoting your site. Created by marketing mastermind Seth Godin, Squidoo allows you to make money off of your content through advertising and direct links to sites like Amazon and eBay. It’s not for everyone, but hey – it’s an option. - Create a template, workflow or web part and share it.
On the technical track, a quick path into the hearts and minds of the SharePoint community is to development something – and then give it away for free (or cheap). It might be something as simple as a unique site template, or as complex as an industry-specific business process management solution. There is a growing list of sites available to share free tools, but you might begin with Codeplex and SharePointReviews.com - Host a webinar.
Take your content, your series of blog content, or your latest SharePoint Saturday presentation and create a version for a webinar. Promote the event to your fellow user group members, to your Twitter followers, and get it listed on one or more of the community calendars. Record the event and make it available on-demand. This is just one more tool for you to promote your expertise, your product or service, or to develop a name for yourself in the SharePoint community.
I like to think that this list – consisting of this and the two previous articles in the series – is a living, breathing action plan for getting involved and staying involved in the SharePoint community. If you have other ideas, we want to hear from you. Let us know what you think. Tell us what has worked, and what has gone down in a blaze of flames.
For a more comprehensive list of ideas on how you can get involved in the community and start building your SharePoint profile, download my free ebook ‘Inside the SharePoint Community: Three Strategies for Building Your Personal Brand.’
Get involved! The community needs you! Share!
Guest Author: Christian Buckley
http://buckleyplanet.net
Christian is Director of Product Evangelism at echoTechnology, an Axceler company, where he is responsible for content, strategy, and evangelism. Prior to echo, Christian was part of the Microsoft Managed Services (MMS) SharePoint team, now known as BPOS-D (Business Productivity Online Services-Dedicated). He has also led product and deployment teams in the creation of product lifecycle management and supply chain-integration solutions for some of the world’s largest manufacturing and telecom companies, and co-authored 3 books on software configuration management and defect tracking. You can find him at http://buckleyplanet.net or on Twitter at @buckleyplanet
- SharePoint Community Events Need You: How You Can Get Involved - Part 1
- The SharePoint Community Needs You To Be Social: How You Can Get Involved - Part 2
- The SharePoint Community Needs More Content: How You Can Get Involved - Part 3
More content is always welcome and necessary – but we just need better ways of finding it again. :) We Google ourselves to death. Well I do anyway. ;-)
If we could just get paid by the query!
Great advice Christian! Thanks for putting this out there for everyone.
- Jay
What we really need is a NEW portal that divides content by Dev, IT Pro, and End User but allows the content to be tagged and searchable across all three, if relevant. This site should be about nothing but SharePoint. If only we had something like that…
Christian i think i heard someone planning exactly what you have just described so not long to wait :-))
Lol, you mean, make it Nothing But SharePoint?? At all? What a good idea….. ;-) There’s a dotcom waiting to happen. :-)
You talkin’ to me? YOU TALKIN’ to ME??
I donno, you have to ask yourself if you’re feelin’ lucky! Well? Are you? Punk? ;-))
Great advice i have tried most but still trying for the “Write a book” but one day when i have time.
After writing 3 in depth modules of training content recently I don’t know if i want to take on writing a book or not :-)
For most people, its really just a matter of getting yourself organized. If you blog regularly, you’re already on your way to a book. Create an abstract, develop it into an outline, chop it up into its logical pieces, and start blogging. Multiple blog postings = an article. Multiple articles = a chapter. Expand and edit the outline as you go. Before you know it, you’re sitting on a manuscript.
Great advice again Christian i have been speaking with Veronique on a joint project so lets see if we can pull it off.
Writing a book can be difficult. I found it to be very rewarding even when I was up at 3 in the morning trying to get the wording just right for a chapter. The hardest part of doing the book for me was just getting started but once the ball was rolling it was a lot easier. Christian’s advice on starting with a blog is spot on. A lot less pressure and it can be an ideal way to guage what topics or style that your audience wants to read.
And their feedback can help you augment your ideas, expand into areas you may not have considered. I suppose you could also use the wiki concept to develop content for a book in this way — but personally, I have found blogging to drive more group/community involvement than wikis because people feel less attached. Either way, getting input from others generally helps drive the creative process.
I like point #2 — “Read other blogs, and comment.” This is the easiest advice by far. When I like an article, I contribute a comment. If the author took the time to write something of value to me, they at least deserve a thank you for sharing the info. Far too few people comment these days.
I made the decision recently to move from a consumer to a contributor in the online world. The experience is much more rewarding when you are part of the conversation and not just observing it.
Thousands of people will read the article above, and only a very small number will comment. What a shame, that so many intelligent people keep their thoughts to themselves. Communities grow stronger when knowledge is shared.
And every time you comment, you’re creating yet another link back to your personal website or blog. Inbound links are one of the primary drivers of search engine optimization.
Having said that, don’t just comment — have something to say, of course :-)
Oh I agree Derek, it is far more rewarding to participate. Thanks for the articles Christian. I think it is also important to point out that if you blog that you should be prepared to answer questions that your articles might generate. It may be unrealistic to answer every question, but I think it sends a negative image of your brand to have several dozen unanswered questions attached to your post. There is a level of responsibility that you take on by putting your information out there. Own it, your audience will appreciate your more in the end. I love the audience to leave a comment, I love to read them, and my numbers here show I can’t resist writing them. I think it is common courtesy, you spent your time educating me, I want you to know how much I appreciate it!
Great point, Kerri! (giving you a virtual high five)
The only thing worse than not responding to comments is leaving up the ‘New Design Coming, December 2009′ sign and it’s now November 2010. Responding shows that you are interested in the concepts you write about, not just using your blog as a billboard. The more you interact, the more likely people are to come back (and maybe tell some friends).
Christian,
To some extent, I agree. However, what the community needs more than additional content is additional knowledge.
No, I’m not saying the community is stupid, quite the contrary; there is so much cool stuff going on around on EUSP, blogs, and Twitter, that finding good quality content is a challenge in itself. Add to that the challenge of maintaining that knowledge and content over time, and you’ve got a serious challenge on your hands.
We don’t need 500 blogs telling us the same piece of information. At best, that gives us 500 pieces of information that needs to be updated if the information is no longer correct or adequate.
What we need are sites that can distill and maintain correct and valuable information, that will turn content into knowledge rather than just increase the noise. That is a massive undertaking and requires a team of dedicated researchers who can make sure the information posted is correct, both at the time of posting but also after a period of time.
Then, we’d need a site that will keep at the front of the pack and drive innovation. Yes, we have SharePoint, now how do we use it to create brilliant new solutions. Who maintains the ‘real’ best practices (real, as opposed to those dictated by a design team in Redmond)? Who can offer a clear voice among the thousands of whispers?
I’ve been looking forward to nothingbutsharepoint.com and hope to see that site take such a role in the community.
.b
I understand your point, however — the more controls, restrictions, and rules you apply on a system (or community), the less likely it is that people will use that system.
The downside to the democratization of content is that, as you point out, there are 500 blogs telling us the same information. But that’s also the beauty of this cacophony of information — you can search for and follow the voices that best match your individual perspective. You can use an aggregator (like NBSP) to refine your view, or use the powerful search tools available to find the right content, in real-time or on demand.
There’s a reason AOL ultimately failed in their content model. It’s not because of a failed business merger or a down economy: it’s because of the flaw in their model that people would be happy inside of the matrix. I don’t believe NBSP seeks to be the be-all, end-all for SharePoitn knowledge, but a landing place for the community that is also a springboard for interesting content, people, and events outside of the site.
I say more content, more aggregators, more powerful search tools! The good content will rise to the top, the leaders will identify themselves, and the followers of my blog (all 4 of them) will continue to be entertained by my unique SharePoint perspectives and the photos of me wearing a 3 ft blonde wig.
Great post/points!
You forgot to mention once you start getting involved in the community then it becomes a little addictive…and not to mention time consuming but thats the payback/forward. If you ever have got any value from the SharePoint community (I think everyone has read a blog to get an answer to some curly problem) then it seems only fair to try and give some a little value back.
You are right — it is addictive. And so I suggest a 12 Step program for the community. I’ve outlined the proposed steps here:
http://buckleyplanet.typepad.com/samaritanweb/2010/11/12-steps-program-for-sharepoint-community-addiction.html