Intergration

OK, so following on from my previous 3 posts about getting inspiration for what to write on your own blog, Facebook, Twitter etc. – here’s another couple of example client industries, with another fantastic source of potential ideas.

The 2 clients I’m looking at are a firm of solicitors and a restaurant.

The solicitors firm is a fairly easy one to find content inspiration for, as there are literally loads and loads of news stories everyday relating to legal issues. But outside of the news, there are plenty of other places you can find ideas, such as Wikipedia.

For example, a Wikipedia search for the word “solicitors”, gives a page dedicated to explaining various facets of the profession, including a whole range of links to other relevant pages. It’s this extra linking that can provide most of your ideas, as there are so many other relevant pieces of information available that can be turned into a post or series of posts from your own point of view.

Looking at the restaurant industry, Wikipedia gives us plenty of inspiration regarding such things as the history of restaurants (where you could presumably slot yourself in somewhere along the line), the number of restaurants around the world etc, along with a large range of links to other relevant pages that can provide even more ideas for you to work on.

And then we come to the king of the internet – Google itself. having seen what we can do with Wikipedia, Google News etc, we can translate these ideas into performing a simple Google search in order to find ideas to write about. Obviously a simple keyword phrase such as “restaurants” or “solicitors” will bring up the websites of potential competitors, so I recommend going a bit more in-depth here; and in paticular making use of Google’s “predictive search” facility, which will show you currently popular searches when you type words into the search box.

For instance, the word “restaurants” has plenty of suggestions for what other people are searching for, including such things as “restaurant reservations” – which could inspire a post about top tips for securing a reservation at particular restaurants.

So there’s plenty of methods for finding ideas – especially for those of you who’ve read the book I mentioned in my first post, A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young – and I hope you’ve found some inspiration of your own in theses pages.

Continuing from my post the other day, in the next 2 posts I’m going to look at some other client industries, finding the inspiration from places that aren’t a daily newspaper such as The Times.

First up, Google News, and the industries I’ll be looking at are an online retailer of a specific GPS tracking product for cats or dogs; and a firm operating in the building / house repair market.

This is obviously similar to the newspaper idea, but it’s so much more immediate and has the great advantage of being searchable. For example, a search for “cats” brings up several relevant news stories that could be turned into a post:

1) Apparently it’s National Cat Day (in the US) – fairly obvious how we can utilise this for a blog post.

2) A group of people trying to track down possible cat theives have put together a map of where cats have gone missing from in Ipswich (a story that is almost tailor-made for our product).

3) Also – and this is the kind of thing that happens more frequently than you’d imagine once you’re attuned to it – a couple of weeks ago there was a BBC2 series entitled “Cat Watch”, which followed cats around all day (the cats wearing mini cameras to record their movements). Another fairly obvious association we can make for this product.

Regarding the building trade client, another Google News search (for “damp proofing”) provides the following stories for inspiration:

1) A parent in Sutton Coldfield is concerned by mould in her home which could damage her children – something a damp proof course could fix.

2) A funny story about a bridge with no damp proofing being recounted at the Scottish International Storytelling Festival.

3) And, of course, there are innumerable TV programmes that are based on renovating houses or building a dream home from scratch, such as Grand Designs, Homes Under the Hammer, DIY SOS etc.

So it’s not difficult to see how we can use Google News and TV programmes to provide us with ideas for posts – even short ones including links to the original story for things like Twitter.

In the last post, I suggested I’d be demonstrating the process I use to come up with ideas for blog posts using some clients of mine as examples. I’m not going to point you in the direction of their websites (as most people want their site visitors to believe they are coming up with the blog content for themselves), so what Ill do is give you 3 examples of particular industries that actual clients of mine work in.

Client Industry – Project Management

Possibly one of the easiest industries to find ideas for. Pretty much anything you care to think of to do with business is ripe for making an association with project management – which is what we wish to be doing, so we can come up with a fresh blog (or Facebook / Twitter) post that is triggered by something that at first appears unconnected.

And you’ll almost certainly find that there are more specifically-relevant things you can utilise than you would expect. For instance, my particular client has a speciality within the Agile project management sphere. And last week The Times newspaper had a whole pullout section focusing on Agile practices. OK, this is a fairly extreme example, but I have no doubt I’ll be able to find several things I could use as the basis for an article in today’s newspaper, too, something I shall look at now.

And indeed, having flicked through today’s copy of The Times, there are quite a few things that immediately strike me as providing material for blog posts:

1) In the Business section, there’s a story about the company Innocent Drinks suffering a massive fall in profits, despited a record number of sales. This could easily be turned into a blog posts about having to keep an eye on the bottom line when expanding into different markets, as Innocent are currently doing through their owners, Cocal-Cola.

2) Of course, The Times has a good reputation for its business pages, so there are likely to be quite a few articles of relevance to this particular client on a daily basis, inlcuding another article about the supermarket firm Morrisons having to renege on a price promise it made earlier this year – leading to a possible article about how to handle rising costs such that you don’t end up with egg on your face about things you said previously.

3) But the whole point of the process I adopt is that the inspiration can come from anywhere, with associations being made from seemingly unconnected elements in order to provide the source material. There’s an article in the news section about some doctors being able to earn £100,000 a year just working on the weekends – stimulating a thought process about the best use of time for consumers (patients) as well as providers (doctors), as plenty of people will be keen to see a doctor at the weekend so it appears the market is working quite efficiently in this instance, thus showing a successful project at work.

4) In the letters page, there are arguments for and against the British Summer Time practice of putting the clocks forwards and backwards at different times of the year – again providing potential source material for an article debating the pros and cons from a project management perspective.

Of course, you don’t have to read The Times to find this kind of inspiration. Nor do you have to be working in an industry that lends itself quite so nicely to piggybacking on multiple news stories. So in my next post, I’ll look at a different industry and add in some other sources for getting ideas.