McNayr Media

On Creating a New Breed of Content

On the heels of the all the Mad Men twittering business of a few months back, I created a new web site called HistoricalTweets.com.

The simple concept was to capture the twitter messages of historical figures, and in doing so, create a funny and compelling new type of content.

Together with Alan Beard of Wave Strategies, we wanted to combine a hot new technology (Twitter) with the boring old history books to showcase how content can create a new conversation (and hopefully generate some laughs along the way).

Some messages are benign, some are lame puns, some push the envelope, and some will likely offend. But the goal was to create something of interest out of something common — history and pop culture.

The Early results: in three weeks, after 20 posts, with nothing more than a Twitter account, and submissions to both Digg and StumbleUpon, the site has generated 2400 unique visitors and 12,000 page views. Not bad for little to no marketing work.

As the site grows in interest, we will enact a more active marketing campaign, but, so far, this content experiment has yielded great results.

Do you have “common content?” Every organization has its own, boring content — history, milestones, stories, and more. How can you use this content to your advantage in an engaging way?

You can subscribe to Historical Tweets by Twitter, RSS Feed, or Daily Digest Email.