Creating rivers of information, helps your company move to more mature stages on a maturity social media model.

Maturity model for a writing and publishing content strategy.

Maturity models are a good help to benchmark the organization against the best practices. There are many maturity models proposed by experts on this topic, this is just another proposal:

• Level 0.- No use of social media, no integration with any other strategy.
• Level 1.- social properties, the company has a Twitter account, a Facebook page, maybe a YouTube channel and probably (not likely) a blog. But there is not a strategy to even publish anything periodically, you visit those channels and the last post is maybe 2 or 3 months old. The just jumped into creating the channels because an innovative employee did it on his own (and maybe even left the company without sharing the passwords). You review the channels and they seem abandoned.
• Level 2.- social messages, there is someone that publishes information regularly, maybe already from the marketing department or probably from the tech support dept but there is not a real content blueprint and no content strategy for creating (and maybe consuming) rivers of information. Feeds to social channels are basic with no apparent order but when you review the channels they do not seem abandoned.
• Level 3.- social publishing, there is a content blueprint, the blog publishes regularly and the Twitter and Facebook accounts do have a responsible person that not only posts but also answers comments. 
• Level 4.- rivers of information, the company has a content blueprint and provides valuable content to a big audience, content distributed and promoted not only on their own channels but supports itself with webinars, videos in a YouTube channel and they main publishing site enjoys incoming links from many referencing sources that send traffic. They have deliberately chosen an organizational model to support the strategy.
• Level 5.- full integration, the content strategy is so well executed that the company becomes an authority on it market, content goes beyond the normal writing and publishing reach and includes guest writers and speakers that are real influencers in the market, includes research documents and research papers. The reach of the company is on the high thousands and sometimes millions.

So, define a strategy for your company and start moving through the different stages of the maturity model and you will see that you gain credibility, position your brand and start getting more potential customers because of your value added to the market.

If you would like to design and implement a write and publish strategy and launch a “rivers of information” initiative, contact Prospect Factory

Carlos Guzman D | WSI Certified  Internet Marketing Consultant.