Fresh back from #sobcon, this is my third post exploring Listly’s purpose. This post focuses on content publishers. For me this has proven the hardest nut to crack. Wish me luck and get your comments ready! Here’s my trio of posts:

Listly’s Purpose:

Help Publishers create Social Space, by cultivating content, community & engagement

Are you unsure why Content, Community & Engagement matter? Try this post – Strategies to Maximize Your Social Space: Power = Content x Community x Engagement. It explains a concept I call “Social Space”. Content, Community and Engagement do not act alone. They work together. They multiply to create you the social space in which to build you business. More space = More growth potential.

Firstly let me share two stats that should stop you in your tracks

• 30% of all published content are List Posts.
• List posts are the most viewed posts on the web

Let’s now explore the traditional “Producer”. Lots of people produce content. So why should brand owners, bloggers, publishers and internet marketeers give a jot about Lists?

Perhaps a better question is “Why aren’t you using Lists as effectively as bloggers?”

Our research show nobody is applying all the best practices of Lists. Best practices are currently dispersed as different publishers experiment.  Sharing that best practice knowledge is part of our mission, but let’s creatively focus on the challenges publishers face today. (Let’s call everyone a publisher for ease). How can social lists and Listly help? Listly makes a simple promise to YOU the publisher: More for Less

More

• More traffic (and more exposure on other blogs/sites)
• More engagement and frictionless collaboration/sharing
• More control and more insight
• More content (for less work)
• More longevity to your content

Less

• Less friction
• Less lurkers (more contributors)
• Less feeding Facebook, Twitter et al (driving traffic away from your site)
• Less not getting found by using the crowd to dominate SEO
• Less content theft/ content misuse

So that all sounds great, but it’s a lot of ideas. Let’s drill and explore how Listly connects the dots.

Listly helps YOU cultivate Content, Community & Engagement…

Content : What we mean by content is changing, but are you? IS your content irresistibly reusable?

LIBERTY = UTILITY: Make your content easier to embed than to copy. Rather than being copied and lost, let your original content bring traffic to your site. Let people embed your content while retaining complete engagement metrics. Lists are the “meat” of 30% of your content. List posts simply wrap your list in a short theme setting intro. Lists are fact rich. So why not encourage other bloggers and publishers to re-use your lists wrapped in their own perspective. With Listly the Social proof/crowd and metrics are shared across any blogs embedding the same list. That’s a huge win for you.

EVERGREEN CONTENT: Engage your audience to help keep your content fresh. You retain control by moderating the crowdsourced content, but essentially you let the crowd shape and refine your core concept on any given post. Nurtured content trumps stagnant content. Why would you want to let your content investment decay over time? So why not let the crowd keep your content interesting for longer if not forever.

NAKED JOURNALISM: Traditional journalism lives on, but there are new ways to write that let you cultivate a more active engaged community. Listly is front and centre in that evolution/revolution. Think naked, un-concluded, vulnerable journalism. Do those three words freak you out? They should. If you don’t get it that should freak you out even more, because that’s how to create irresistible content.

Community: There are many ways to draw people in and make your content theirs.

AUDIENCE: Find & reward your audience. Engage readers inside your posts (not just in the comments). Let them contribute, extend, validate and sort your content. Build community around lists. Become the composer and conductor. Let the audience both play, listen and mashup you original content. Lislty lets you broadcast and amplify your social proof. Nobody enters an empty bar or rushes to post the first comment. Listly helps you solve this problem.

CULTIVATE: Every time people vote, comment or add to a list they leave a little piece of themselves behind. You can cultivate this in the way you write and in how you publish and share your content. We know it comes first and foremost from culture and not lines of code or features. Listly actively cultivates and rewards that mindset in our community. Our community becomes your community, living on your site.

COLLABORATE: Is social sharing the only effective marketing model? We think not. Collaboration and the co-promotion of content is emerging as a new highly scalable model to grow your community and seed your content. The trick is metrics. Learn how to know what is good and bad engagement. Are you benchmarking engagement. We do. And we can do it for you too. We make YOU and YOUR publishing partners measurable. Collaboration succeeds through transparency. See who’s crowd is most engaged. See when, where and how your content is re-used.

Engagement: Engagement has changed from comments to tweets to thumps up. So what’s next?

ENGAGEMENT: So what is engagement? I’m sure you’ve heard of 1:9:90. I hope so. Well it’s changing. Mobile, the “Born Digital” crowd and the Collectors (via  Collection Making tools like Pinterest and Listly) are changing engagement. Here’s a recent video from the BBC that show online participation is as high at 77%. That’s huge shift from the 10% level defined by 1:9:90

At Listly were taking engagement inside the post. We let people vote on items directly inside you post and not just reference them in a comment. We let people add, sort and comment. That type of engagement invests people emotionally. That’s huge. With community sizes of 5k for a single list or blog post, we think you’ll agree that’s really significant. That’s focus. Laser beam focus. We put your brand front and centre.

DESTINATION: Listly challenges the status quo of Social destination sites like Facebook et al. Social Networks are not going away, but do they best serve marketing’s needs? We think not. Today it’s all about them. Listly’s embed model inverts traditional thinking to make you the destination. We deliver more traffic to destination blogs than to Listly. We know it works. Which leads to the multiplier.

MULTIPLIER: Create great content and Listly will amplify and multiply your brand exposure – your words not ours! Your lists exist as SEO rich content on Listly, your blog and your partners blogs. As cliched as it may sound . Lislty is synergy in motion. 1 + 1= 5 or 10. Think content serendipity. Crowd support ensures this white hat SEO strategy scales like a dream. Once we get you this exposure the content and the community help ensure they come back.

What say you? Does this connect? Does this speak to you? Does this matter? Is this important to you as a publisher, a blogger, a brand owner or an internet marketeer?

Nick Kellet (142 Posts)

Nick is co-founder the social curation platform Listly, that combines crowdsourcing, content curation and embedable lists to drive high-level community engagement, live inside your blog posts. Connect with Nick on Twitter · Linkedin, Facebook and G+ and follow his writing via his other guest posts and on his blogs at NickKellet.com and blog.list.ly