Which is why you’ve got to make sure you squeeze every last drop of engaging goodness out of every piece of content you generate. Or, as C.C. and I write in Content Rules, think REIMAGINED, not recycled.

How might that ebook become a series of blog posts? How about interviewing the ebook author for a podcast? How about mining the best questions from a webinar Q&A for a tip sheet you publish on your blog? How might parts of that white paper become an infographic? Or a video infographic? (My friend Tim Washer is a master at this.)

A few weeks ago, I presented an online seminar for Radian6. (Note to conference organizers: Radian6′s David B. Thomas brings something special to the role of moderator.) As part of my presentation — and I mean one SMALL part! — was about how to tell your story: How do you pull the stories out of your own brand or company? To assist, I created a series of prompts for marketers and content creators — almost like writing prompts from my j-school days.

My MarketingProfs colleague Veronica Jarski created this below based on that part of my talk — a so-called “infodoodle” of How to Tell Your Company’s Story. Part doodle, part… well, info!… I love how it’s a reimagined remix of part of my presentation. Take a look and tell me what you think:

Sorry we haven’t been sharing as much around these parts, but it isn’t because Ann and I don’t still love you because we do!!!

We once again want to thank everyone for buying, sharing, reviewing and using Content Rules.

Everywhere we go people are talking about it. Professors keep telling us how they are using it in their classrooms just as much as businesses are thanking us for the advice. I can even now confirm that there are several copies in Ghana where I recently traveled.

But, besides saying thank you, the real reason I wanted to write this post is to let you all know that the paperback edition of Content Rules is now out.

It has been updated and revised and the best part is that it now includes our favorite robot Lugnut (above on the left) as well.

While we wrote the book to stand the test of time, we did want to update numbers and add some details on social photography and mobile. We are excited about it and we hope you are as well.

Have fun!

As some more fuel for the fire we suggest you check out a new site from Google called One Hour Per Second.

If you don’t understand the name, that is the average amount of new video content uploaded to YouTube.

To help you wrap your head around just how much that is, they also created this perfect little fun video.

They surprised everyone with a free copy of the book. Of course I signed all of them.

Here is a highlight video from the event. Talk about reimagining instead of recycling!

And yes I can now confirm that the importance of content crosses borders and language!

I wanted to talk about our themes from Content Rules, but wanted to drive home the point that even with the coolest, most engaging content in the world, it will fail if you don’t use manners and smart business skills to share it with others. To me this is common sense, but in example after example I showed how it obviously isn’t for the brands that are doing it wrong.

I hope you enjoy the video and we’d love your feedback in the comments of course.

Frankenspeak is convoluted text that doesn’t sound like it was spoken by a human, but instead sounds like it was created in a laboratory. Sometimes it reads like someone bolted-on words to create a terrifying string of nonsense (“our mission-critical, scalable, high-performance, unparalleled, game-changing solution”) or bloated bit of buzzwords. Either way, it’s sales-y language and useless marketing hype.

C.C. and I wrote about the words and phrases that we’d like to ban from marketing, sales, corporate communications, business schools, blogs and boardrooms in the book. But since today is a day to celebrate the scary, here’s to Frankenspeak!

Happy Frankenspeak Friday!

He didn’t take the usual route and instead showed the world a perfect example of our rule of Do Something Unexpected.

Thank you for making our day and now if you’ll please excuse me I’ve got some hair metal to listen to.

After what seemed like far to long (it was out of our control), we are happy to say that you can now order it from your favorite audiobook seller.

“Best” part is that instead of some throaty Shakespearean actor reading the book you get to listen to the smooth sounds of both Ann & C.C. reading it.

Here are some links to the stores we know of. If you find others, please let us know.

• Audible
• iTunes
• Amazon
• Best Buy

Each of you has your own unique voice and look at the world. Because of that when you create content it will always have a little bit of you in it and that is what makes it interesting and appealing to others.

There are plenty of excuses for why you don’t want to start embracing content, but none of them are good ones.

Just hit publish!

Ann and I were excited to be part of Burlington, Vermont Social Media Breakfast and with a beautiful 3-4 hour drive to get there we thought it would be fun to video the whole thing and make a fun piece of content out of it.

As life often does, schedules change and special props that were suppose to make this trip even cooler never came through, but as with everything we just rolled with it.

I decided that even going solo, I’d still make the video as a good challenge to get better shooting on the road. As you’ll see, the story of the road trip took a strange twist as Mother Nature decided to throw tornados at Massachusetts and directly at my house and family.

Except for the fact that copies of our book did not arrive due to being out of print, the event went off without a hitch and I guess I should mark my calendar to return back in two years to keep the streak alive.

Enjoy.

We are happy to say that both Ann and I have spent quality time at Elephant Music Group recording it with awesome producer Kenny P.

While we don’t have a release date yet, it hopefully will be soon and of course as soon as we know so will you.

I was in the studio today finishing up my re-records for various flubs and other mistakes and thought I’d share some photos so that you could see what it looked like.

I wrote about my OTA experience already, but this morning noticed a quick video we did with the Rural Learning Center hit the web and we wanted to share it with you.

Just a little advice that any business, town or organization could take and start making engaging content today.

Thanks again to Hugh Weber and the entire conference team for putting on such a great event.

I wrote about my Full Sail experience on my own blog, but I wanted to share it here as well because they’ve just posted the recording of my speech and we know that while we’d love to come to every town in the world, that isn’t going to happen.

This way, you at least get a flavor for what a book tour stop might be like. We hope other venues capture them as well so that we can share as many as possible since each time we get in front of an audience it is a bit different.

If curious, the setting was a lecture room with over 150 students, professors and guests in the room. They were also live streaming it, where another 300 or so people were watching and asking questions. Before I knew it two hours had gone by.

Watch, enjoy and then let us know what you think.

“Boring?”

“Dreary?”

“Ho-hum?”

In most cases, you’d be right, I’m afraid. Most companies create promotional videos that are all of those things, plus maybe “mind-numbing” and a “waste of time,” too.

But every once in a while, someone decides to have a little fun. I’ve talked about this before: ExactTarget brought a sense of energy and fun to its Connections 2010 promotional videos, too. And here, FOCR (Friend of Content Rules) DJ Waldow brings more of the same energy to a promotional video we shot for an upcoming webinar C.C. and I are doing in a few weeks with Blue Sky Factory.

If you watch closely, you’ll see that this video has all the hallmarks of a solid promotion.

Short? Yup.
Tie-in to live event? Check.
Call to action? You bet.

But what it lacks is something valuable, too: That deadly boring bit.

What do you think?

If you have not read Unmarketing yet, I can’t recommend it enough. I wrote a review for it when I first read it and still quote him all the time. Every marketing and PR professional needs to read it.

But, before we hung the stockings and popped the champagne, I headed out to Portland, Oregon to give the opening keynote for the Portland State Digital Marketing Conference.

While there a couple of interviews were shot and both of them hit the web today.

Up first was an interview backstage immediately following my keynote. They were filming them with all the speakers and I was still wired from being on stage and that energy carried forward into this.

The second was filmed as a short interview with both myself and Brian David Johnson who is the futurist for Intel, the author of Screen Future and was the conferences closing keynote. I’m still glowing from what he had to say about Content Rules.

We are really looking forward to all the people we are going to meet on the tour and are psyched to hear that so many of you are enjoying and learning from the book.

Special thanks to our friend Ron Ploof, author of Read This First: The Executive’s Guide to New Media–From Blogs to Social Networks for this very cool test of the new Google Goggles technology.

With my first event behind me, the book tour is officially underway for Content Rules and I know that Ann and I couldn’t be more excited about it.

There was something perfect about the indie theater vibe, complete with set pieces around me on stage. Some speakers would freak at the set up, but I actually thrived in it. Being someone who loves to act and doesn’t get to be on stage nearly enough as I’d like (in the acting sense) I think I might have had a permagrin on my face the whole time.

I’m still digging through the tweets, but it looks like people left inspired, energized and ready to tackle the content beast and that is what I had hoped for.

Thank you to Ernst & Young for sponsoring the event and a special thanks to SMB Ottawa organizers Rob Lane, Ryan Anderson, and Simon Chen for making this event happen. The hospitality (and campfire building skills) of the people in Ottawa really shined through and it is a city I hope to return to again.

Photo Credit: Alexa Clark

At this point if you still need some motivation to push you into buying a copy of Content Rules, we hope that one of these fine posts will help push you over the edge.

Finally a quick favor to ask of you. Once you’ve read the book we’d love you to leave a review for it on Amazon or wherever else you bought a copy. Thank you.

For your reading and listening pleasure:

• Marketing Over Coffee’s Special Interview with C.C. Chapman
• Beyond the Book: Content Gets a Rules Book
• Levite Chronicles: 5 Questions with C.C. Chapman
• Trafcom News Podcast 100: Content Rules!
• Carol Roth: 5 Questions with C.C. Chapman
• Your Blog Voice is Hoarse
• Convince & Convert: Demystify Content Marketing with Content Rules

Thank you again for all the support leading up to what I’m hoping is the start of an amazing week for us and for the book.

If you post anything please be sure to tag it with #ContentRules so that we see it. We are also hoping that you’ll all take pictures with your books and post them to Facebook and everywhere else. We want to see who is buying and reading our little baby.

It’s not that I don’t like to cook -– because I do –- but the wet bread thing (as in French Toast, bread pudding, and Thanksgiving stuffing) turns me off. In other words, it’s a little like asking the deaf guy to bring the music.

So I consult a few of cookbooks, a few websites, the Epicurious iPhone app. But mostly I’m distracted by stuff I’d rather make: The mashed potatoes with olive oil and parsley? Yum. Butternut squash soup with apple and bacon? Now we’re talking….

But still: The stuffing. Sigh. Then I happen upon a useful tool on Fine Cooking that instantly seems the answer to my wet-bread dream: A “create-your-own” bread stuffing interactive recipe maker that allows you to mix and match your favorite ingredients to create your own customized bread stuffing.

Choose a bread base (cornbread, crusty artisan bread, pumpernickel, etc.), drag it into a big yellow mixing bowl, and then and add in 3-5 vegetables (leeks, celery, fennel, maybe?), along with other stuff (chestnuts, dried cherries), meat (bulk sausage, bacon), herbs and liquids (broth? Wine?) and… voila! The tool spits out a custom bread stuffing recipe, with balanced measurements of your chosen ingredients, and the correct ratio of liquid to bread.

“The trick to making a good stuffing is getting the moisture right,” Fine Cooking says. “You don’t want it to be soggy or dry.” Can I get an A-men?!

There’s so much I like about this tool – not just because I was desperate for a stuffing recipe I could get excited about, but also because it aligns so well with the concepts C.C. and I lay out in Content Rules. Here are two of them:

1. Create utility. Most businesses have embraced the notion that, in addition to being in the business selling whatever they sell—be it shovels or security systems—they also need to be producing content as a cornerstone of their marketing, both to engage and educate their would-be customers, and to get noticed by search engines.

But at the same time, producing any old content isn’t enough. Businesses have to produce the right kind of content: web content that is honestly empathetic and seeded with utility for your customers. They have to be “brand butlers” to their customers. Fine Cooking’s bread stuffing tool does just that: It creates a resource for its discerning subscribers who are challenged to create something other than the same ol’, same ol’… but who need a little help with the particulars.

To paraphrase  Content Rule #6: Share or solve; don’t shill. Good content doesn’t try to sell. Rather, it creates value by positioning you as a reliable and valuable source of vendor-agnostic information. Your content shares a resource, solves a problem, helps your customers do their jobs better, improves their lives, or makes them smarter, wittier, better-looking, taller, better networked, cooler, more enlightened, and with better backhands, tighter asses, and cuter kids, and moister (but not wet) stuffing.

In other words, it’s high value to your customers, in whatever way resonates best with them.

2. Have a point of view. Fine Cooking doesn’t just lay out the fundamentals of Thanksgiving stuffing without editorializing, because its readers want to know its take. The people who read the magazine consider themselves competent and inspired cooks, and they want to know the why and not just the how. So I like how Fine Cooking’s writer (Jennifer Armentrout) has a point of view and perspective:

“In my opinion, stuffing baked outside the bird (also called dressing) is the way to go: your turkey cooks faster and more evenly, your stuffing gets nice crisp edges, and you don’t have to worry about undercooking.”

Plenty of people who read Jennifer’s reasoning might disagree, but at least you know where she stands on this issue. Jennifer might have just said, “Cook it inside the bird or outside; add more liquid if you cook it outside the bird.” But the actual name of an actual person with an actual point of view does more to humanize the Fine Cooking brand than bland commentary without editorializing ever could.

* * *

So what can you take away?

Like Adagio Tea’s Tea Timer, which helps tea aficionados brew a perfect cup, or Virgin Atlantic’s Taxi 2, which connects those who want to share a cab, the Create Your Own bread stuffing tool — one of several Create Your Own tools published by Fine Cooking — presents an incredibly useful and relevant piece of content, matched to both the needs of your customers and the business’s objectives. Oh, and it meets another official Content Rule: It’s FUN!

What else can organizations take away from Fine Cooking’s Recipe Makers? Here’s my take: A little inspiration.

Here’s the bottom line: Are you helping and supporting your customers in their goals, or just selling to them?

Today, Ann and I had the chance to sit down with Shel and discuss the book. You can listen to it online or download the MP3 to listen to later.

Then, moments ago we got notified of the first other copy in the wild from our friend (and fellow Wiley author) Steve Garfield.

We had no idea that anyone else would be getting early copies like this so it was VERY cool to see. Especially from someone like Steve.

When you get a copy of the book, we encourage you to take photos of it and wherever you post them tag them with #ContentRules and letting us know about them.

As always Steve, thank you for the support.

On November 3rd, I got together with Junta42′s Joe Pulizzi at OpenView Labs to talk about content marketing and content marketing strategy for a new project Joe is working on.

I know it was November 3rd, because (as it happens) it was my birthday, and after all my haranguing Joe for pony for weeks (“Buy me a pony! Buy me a pony!”), he actually came through, delivering a compact little four-legged plastic bit of My Little Pony horsiness. Her name is Scootaloo. You can see her photograph alongside this text.

OpenView’s studio space, overlooking Fort Point Channel, is both stunning and inspiring. With its sound booths, video studio, radio talk-show setup, and audio equipment that is so sensitive I swear it could capture the sound of hair growing, the OpenView space is a kind of Nirvana for content creators like us. And so after we finished up Joe’s project, we spontaneously recorded an unplanned, unscripted podcast to get Joe’s thoughts on content, marketing, and to answer the question: Can any company benefit from a content marketing strategy? Even a really silly, simple one? Even a ridiculous one? Like… say…. Scootaloo?

If content marketing had a superhero, it would be Joe Pulizzi. He’s been championing the power of content longer than anyone, and his 2009 book Get Content, Get Customers (McGraw-Hill) is a kind of field guide to the idea of content marketing, and perhaps the best book you should read before you read Content Rules. He’s also a prolific blogger, passionate speaker, and hard-working entrepreneur and publisher. It sounds like piling on to say he’s also a warm and personable soul… but there you go.

Listen in while Joe and I riff on content, storytelling, and Scootaloo’s very own My Little Content Marketing Strategy.

Listen the the podcast here.

Show notes:

• Joe Pulizzi answers C.C. Chapman’s question, “Content Is ______.”
• The best kind of content converts pixels and sound to something meaningful that drives behavior and action.
• Does your brand have to tell a story? Umm, yes.
• The key to brand storytelling isn’t about telling fairytales or fables; it’s about telling a true story well.
• Ann Handley shares the rest reason she loves her birthday quite as much as she does.
• Where might you start building a content strategy for a plastic pony?
• What can My Little Pony learn from Lego, Club Penguin, and iCarly?

Big thanks to OpenView Labs for hosting us, and a special shout to producer Corey O’Loughlin.

So when Ann and I wanted some photographs of the two of us together I wanted to be sure to choose a photograph that I knew would be able to capture our unique personalities and I knew that my talented friend Derek Wilmot would be perfect for the assignment. He is known around New England as a top notch event and portrait photographer and I’ve been lucky enough to get to know him over the past few years and love his work.

These pictures were taken to use in promotions for our book tour, in newspaper and magazine articles and by you to help spread the word about the book. If you do use them in any way, you must be sure to credit Derek and link to his site at http://www.derekwilmot.com.

As we talk about at length in the book, giving proper credit for any content you use is not only the legally right thing to do, but it is a common courtesy that you should never forget. Thanks for the great photography work as always Derek!

Of course, now the real question remains. Which one is your favorite?

The session description reads:

In a world of 140s, shrinking screens, and ‘after-the-jump’ readers, how do we make books people want? Are books just ‘content’ in a dead format? Does tweeting, posting, and IM’ing make for better or worse writers? What 5 things should every author being doing to get published? This session is for publishers, and authors who still want to make money on books. It can be done. Come learn how.

In addition to myself, the panel also included other great speakers from both sides of the author and publisher equation including Hadji Williams, Ellen Gerstein, Justin Branch and Susan T Spencer.

The team from Wiley (our publisher) filmed and assembled this highlight reel of what I had to share with the audience and now we can share it with you.

I’m really hoping someone captured the whole panel to share because I think a lot of great resources and information for aspiring authors was shared by all.

It was a blast to do an we hope to do a lot more of them in the coming weeks as we ramp up to and then release the book.

Listen to it online or download the MP3 so that you can take it with you. Either way we hope you enjoy hearing a bit about how the book came to be and the proper way to say the title.

But, we were excited to be part of her Behind the Grammar podcast and to talk a bit our decision to not give away lots of free copies of the book while marketing and what we decided to do instead.

Did we make the right decision? What do you think? We’d love to hear your opinion.

While attending Blogworld Expo last week I carried around my video camera asking friends and strangers to complete the sentence “Content is ____”. I had a blast sitting down this morning and pulling out some of the nuggets to share with everyone. It was fascinating how many different directions people went with their answers.

You might see some familiar faces in the video like Scott Monty, Todd Defren, Maggie Fox, Steve Hall, Jenny Cisney, Ewan Spence and Steve Garfield. Thanks to everyone who allowed me to film them. I ended up with so many great answers I couldn’t fit them all into the video.

Now, if I asked YOU the question how would you answer? What is content to you and how do you describe it? In the comments answer the question: Content Is _____

Update 11/19 - Adding links to content that people in the video are creating. If I forget someone, please let me know and I’ll add them.

• http://www.averagebetty.com
• http://foodieslive.com
• http://www.adrants.com
• http://tpnrock.com
• http://jennifercisney.1000words.kodak.com
• http://thecampdirector.com
• http://jeremyvaught.com
• http://jessicarmurray.com
• http://socialmediagroup.com/category/blog/
• http://www.scottmonty.com
• http://www.stevegarfield.com
• http://www.pr-squared.com
• http://fororchestra.com