Content Creation, Done Well

I have many different hats that I wear in my current position as the Social Media Community Manager at RadioShack, but the biggest one is probably that of content creator. I’m responsible for the content that gets published via our social channels, including The Shack Blog, as well as our Twitter and Facebook accounts. With so many other brands/sites dominating the tech landscape, it’s vital that the content I create is unique and fresh, which is much more difficult than you would think.

That’s probably why this post from AndroidAndMe really stood out to me. It’s called ‘TouchPad mod: a wall-mounted Twitter stream. Come join us!. The HP TouchPad is a webOS-based tablet that suffered an unfortunately short life-span. HP essentially EOL’d it after a mere 6 weeks on the market. The price plummeted, and enterprising individuals began buying them as quickly as they could. There are a few projects to erase the webOS platform from the device, and instead get it to run Google’s Android platform.

None of that is really pertinent to this post, though. The impressive thing is that AndroidAndMe.com were able to take something that’s quite buzzworthy lately (the HP TouchPad) that has no connection to their core audience (it doesn’t run Android) and create a useful, entertaining post from it. I read the whole thing, and was really interested in how they accomplished this.

Even better, they integrated social media directly into the post. If you read the whole post, you’ll notice that there is a Tweet box in the middle with a pre-populated message allowing you to participate in the whole project (while tweeting all your friends about AndroidAndMe’s Twitter account, conveniently). It’s just plain brilliant.

They also integrated Ustream.tv to live-stream the whole thing, so you can participate on-the-fly and in the moment.

And all this around a discontinued product that’s not even directly related to their core readership. Brilliant. As you create content, the bar has been raised to take virtually any topic and make it interesting to your readership while also giving them plenty of ways to engage with and share your content with their friends.