Starting one week from today on December 8th, I will be launching a new Twitter chat called #ContentCircus! #ContentCircus will be focused on three areas:
- Content Creation
- Content Strategy
- Content Execution
#ContentCircus will be every Tuesday night at 7pm Central. We will have a topic related to each of these three areas every month, and the last Tuesday of every month will be OPEN MIC, just like we had with #Blogchat!
Helping companies improve their content strategies and creation efforts is the work I love. I love teaching companies how to create content that resonates with customers, while also achieving desired business outcomes. And while I will always be partial to content created on blogs, content in 2020 takes on so many forms across so many tools and platforms. I think there’s an opportunity to create a robust Twitter chat with content as a focus that can benefit both content creators as well as the companies that hire and work with them.
So why not just bring back #Blogchat?
I started #Blogchat on a whim in 2009 as a way to better catalog a Twitter conversation around a blogging question I asked on Twitter. It quickly grew into one of the first chats on Twitter. It WAS the first Twitter chat to monetize with a sponsor, and ended up being live at events like South By Southwest, Content Marketing World and Blogworld and New Media Expo. Companies such as Dell, Adobe, Club Med, Pilot Pen and others have sponsored #Blogchat. Every important thought leader in the blogging and digital space co-hosted #Blogchat during it’s 10-year run and at its height, #Blogchat was generating 25 Million impressions in one hour on Sunday nights!
#Blogchat soon took on a life of its own, and was a wonderful way to connect with new and emerging bloggers, and give them valuable guidance on how to improve their craft. You sense the ‘but’ is coming, right? But…my clients weren’t individual bloggers. So over time, the audience for #Blogchat and my desired audience began to become fractured. But I loved doing #Blogchat so much, and I felt an obligation to give back and do all I could to help bloggers become better bloggers. But over time, #Blogchat began to become a big time sink and other than sponsorships, I really could get enough money back from it to justify the time I needed to spend with the chat to continue its success.
So in 2019 I finally decided to end #Blogchat. But I didn’t end my love of Twitter chats. I still believe that chats are the best source of value on Twitter. And I always had in the back of my mind maybe I could bring #Blogchat back, at least for a one-shot.
Then one day it hit me: Why not do a Twitter chat focused on content? Boom! That would allow me to cover a topic that’s more in line with my desired client base and which would let me better promote my business services. Additionally, we could cover content creation using tools other than just blogs. So since the topic would be more closely aligned with my business, I could justify spending more time with the chat, to help it grow and be more valuable to as many content creators as possible.
What will be the focus of #ContentCircus?
The topics for #ContentCircus will all fall into 3 buckets; Content Strategy, Content Creation and Content Execution. In most months, we will have 4 Tuesdays, so 4 topics. We will pick one topic from each of these buckets, and the 4th topic will be OPEN MIC, held on the last Tuesday of the month. OPEN MIC is something I started with #Blogchat. During OPEN MIC there is no set topic, everyone can discuss anything they want related to content. It’s a great chance for anyone to ask questions on content topics that we haven’t yet touched on.
We will also be focusing on these buckets as they relate to content tools and platforms as well. For instance, we might talk about how to create more engagement on Twitter one month, and how to take better photos for Instagram the next month.
Over time, as the community grows, we will bring in co-hosts who are subject matter experts. One of the things I loved about seeing the #Blogchat community grow was that it gave me the opportunity to bring in popular thought leaders who could not only offer valuable insights to the #Blogchat community, but the exposure from co-hosting #Blogchat was also great for the co-hosts. A true wn-win.
And yes, we will have sponsors for #ContentCircus. Lining up sponsors honestly is not a concern at this point, that will take care of itself later on. As with #Blogchat, any sponsorships with #ContentCircus will be structured so they add value to the community, and aren’t a distraction.
So I’m excited about #ContentCircus and I’m looking forward to creating another community that can help others become better content creators. See you next Tuesday at 7pm Central on Twitter!
