Incentivizing Content Creation

[Anonymous]

Last week at the summit I attend a really great session called “Lean Content Marketing for Lead Generation” led by Dayna Rothman of Marketo. One thing that I took away from the session was that I need to look into what an internal incentive program for content creation looks like for my organization.

I know Dayna had shared some slides on how they do it at Marketo, which was really cool! After talking with some other members of my marketing team, they were intrigued by the idea but had some questions.

So…I am wondering if anyone else has implemented a program like this? Have you had success? What incentives did you put into your program, and how many times did they have to contribute to reach different levels? How was the participation and has the program been sustainable?

We have a highly technical product, so utilizing the in-house expert we have seems like a great idea as long as we can create a program that works.

TGIF!
Taylor

[Josh_Hill13]

I know that Pedowitz Group did this. You might speak with jason Long.

Their model was to pay each person (example only) $100 per post, $5/tweet, etc...if you reached a goal like 4 posts/month, then you got a bonus.

You are right that your internal team is always the best at writing about their product and space...assuming they can write well or you are a superior editor.

I tried to set this up at a tech firm and it failed because 
1. They didn't want to pay incentives
2. You can't make busy people write stuff if they aren't getting paid extra.
3. not part of culture to share with the world.

So I tried to do some interviews with them instead. That should have worked, but it didn't go far.

[Anonymous]

Taylor:

I have done this in other companies. But I have always stayed away from financial incentives. Some ideas we have done is:

• look at user scoring (thumbs up and thumbs down)
• combine it with employee scoring (encourage peers to rate/vote on their coworkers)
• provide non dollar rewards and focus more on gift certifictes to Amazon, restaurants, etc.

Note: Josh is right -- people are busy, so you might want to try his idea of interviewing people and then transcribing it.
 

Something that might help is:

• to give employees a template to work with. I like how Wikihow.com does this
• to pick out the topics and then ask employees to sign up for this topics
• to give employees recognition on the site such as John Smith being your Invoice Expert
•  

Good luck. Let me know if you want to discuss more here

[Adam_Vavrek1]

You might find this article helpful: http://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/featured-editorials/how-to-become-the-content-innovator-in-your-organization/