I learned about propinquity at the Solo PR Summit.
Okay, to be fair, the concept isn’t new–but I would have been hard-pressed to define the word itself. Propinquity means nearness, but it’s really about the relationship between proximity and relationships. Or, as Tom Martin put it:
See me. Know me. Like me. Hire me.
This lies at the heart of a good content strategy.
In a session entitled Painless Prospecting, Martin talked about strategies for becoming and staying top of mind with potential buyers of your products and services. One element of that is designing your Web site to funnel prospects where you want them to go. (That’s a topic for a different post.) Another element: having lots of quality content to educate people and to showcase your smarts.
You need to create cornerstones and cobblestones.
Martin pointed out that most content creators focus on cobblestones–blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other “one off” pieces to feed the content machine. But if you start with a “cornerstone” big idea instead, you can then chunk it into blog posts, videos, presentations, podcasts, and the like to feed your content needs. Then you can go back and reverse engineer the “cobblestones” into a white paper, an ebook and/or a conference presentation.
I love “duh” moments.
My content strategy has always included some cornerstones because I plotted the strategy a long way back: business column, then blog, then early social media use. The column provided evergreen content for the blog, and the blog provided an anchor for my early forays into social media. But as the demands for new content grew (and the business of running a business interrupted), it became easier to just focus on cobblestones. Now it’s time to get back to cornerstones, and my brain is already working on a couple of ideas.
Your turn: Are you creating cobblestones or cornerstones?
Photo by Bri Weldon (Flickr).
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Daria
Thanks so much for sharing the cobblestones idea with your readers. As a smaller agency, where I am the primary content creator (like you), it does get mighty hard to produce all the necessary content.
But, as we discussed in Atlanta at the SoloPR Summit, if you can make yourself follow a disciplined approach — wow does it surely become much easier!
Hope to see you again soon.
@TomMartin
tom martin recently posted..Painlessly Prospecting For Customers
Hi Tom,
Ah, the “disciplined” piece–I’m working on it. Your session truly rocked because it helped me as I’ve been trying to sort through my own content and organizational challenges.
Thank you for sharing your approach.
Hi Daria,
I have been planning to do that for quite a while on my site for the new plugin. Creating great content is really a good strategy and so are the tips
. As Tom said disciplined approach is better. I have been disciplined at working on the plugin , may be I need to be same with content generation.
Best regards,
Ashvini recently posted..Is it a good idea to completely ban work from home?
Hi Ashvini,
Maybe we are (all) looking at this the wrong way. Most people think content creation is the hard part. We’ve already got that nailed, so bringing a little added rigor to that process shouldn’t really be that difficult. Right?