At Kindling we use the Kindling application to discuss and evaluate potential product features, to address engineering issues, to develop strategic goals,—we’ve even opened up a Category to our customers so that they can contribute their ideas to the development of the Kindling application. Nice. And we use Kindling to cultivate our brand and develop marketing ideas, including social media content.
Every organization can use Kindling to develop a workflow of ideas for social media which the entire company can participate in. This is how we did it.
Beginning earlier this year one of our key efforts in marketing has been to systematically generate meaningful content that could be useful to people concerned with innovation and tasked with running an innovation program, for which our software is elegantly useful. In this interest I wanted to simplify and make our Twitter content more coherent while providing clear channels for our people to contribute to. I identified 3 hashtags (for these channels) for us to use:
#kindlingapp, about the company and product, including writings about Kindling in relation to innovation best practices;
#kindlingtips, for tips on how to use Kindling, especially in relation to an innovation program, culled from Kindling Academy and our Best Practices guides;
and #kindlingreads.
I was thinking, here at Kindling we all read and talk about interesting things, whether it’s about tech culture, design, innovation, the enterprise, or politics—it would be cool to share some of that with our followers. So I created a Category in our Kindling called “#kindlingreads” and introduced the program with a Post to help clarify goals and fuel interest, inviting everyone in the company to contribute an idea for a tweet.
Ideally each idea would be very short, and reference something especially poignant in the piece—article, blog post, book, or whatever it was we were reading—or offer some pithy take on the piece. Often The Agency—that’s our internal brand and marketing team—tunes, tweaks, or otherwise condenses the idea into 140 characters including the hashtag—a fun puzzle for our team. We do this editing in the form a comment on the idea and then see if the author has anything to add to that. If we feel we got it right, we set the idea state to Approved, queue it up in HubSpot, then set the idea to Scheduled.
Periodically I review what has in fact been published and then use Kindling’s bulk moderation feature to change the state of all ideas that have been published as tweets to Completed, closing the feedback loop for all to see. The act of changing state—and the subsequent news in the Kindling activity feed—has been in itself great internal marketing of the #kindlingreads Category: very often shortly after a state change is posted someone contributes a new idea to #kindlingreads.
I set all this in motion in order to get the content on track, and was pleasantly surprised to see further dialog about the original piece in the idea comments. Sometimes this conversation gives expression to ongoing internal discussion, like the real value of “gamification,” and sometimes the conversation even leads directly to new product feature ideas.
One more thing—I can’t tell you how interesting this has been to me, as moderator of the Category: I get to read new things in different topics and from different sources all the time. Good stuff. Check it out—follow us on Twitter.
Finding relevant content to share on social media can be better done by a group rather than a social media manager acting in isolation. Using Kindling, you can share this work with your team and give everyone a voice in your social media presence.