How To Create (smarter) Editorial Calendars

At the recent Solo PR Summit, I connected with Sarah Evans. You probably know her as PRSarahEvans, owner of Sevans Strategy and Tracky's "Chief Evangelist." She's also the author of [RE]FRAME: Little Inspirations For A Larger Purpose.

Sarah taught attendees a lot about Tracky during this event. She uses the platform for everything -- including to manage Tracky's social media editorial calendar.

No matter how sophisticated the organization, I've only heard of Excel-based calendars being used. And in today's shiny new world, it makes more sense to have this information part of a networked platform instead of a stand alone document. So I asked Sarah to write the following how-to article. -- Kevin Dugan

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If your current social media editorial process is nonexistent or is a cocktail of email, instant messaging, Google Docs, third-party apps and calendars, then this post is about to rock your world.

The open social collaboration team at Tracky designed a social editorial process that meets all the criteria for creating content and it allows for complete customization (and it’s free).

Calendar Requirements

Your social media editorial calendar should be:

• Private and public (when necessary)
• Accessible via browser, mobile and tablet
• A file management system
• A publisher
• Easy to understand
• Able to help you delegate tasks
• Updated daily
• Available to your boss, your team and any outside contributors
• Able to track activity history and serve as an archive

Typically only a project management platform offers most of the above. But if you want to be able to collaborate, share and publish, you’ll need to find an open social collaboration platform. For the sake of this post, we’ll share how this process works with Tracky. However, we encourage you to use the platform that best suits your work style and work environment.

Ready? Let’s go.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• A web browser and internet connection
• Tracky account (www.tracky.com)
• Google Drive account (if you prefer using that versus Microsoft Word)

We keep all of our editorial content in a public relations (PR) group. This group also includes separate tasks for media relations, urgent media queries and anything that falls under the PR umbrella.

The editorial calendar is first broken down by week, then each day of the week. In the “title” of the track it lists the day it will be posted and the headline or general topic. It looks like this:

 

Once a topic is assigned, each day has team members assigned to create the content, deadline and document with the ability to be edited real-time (using Google Docs in this example).

Our team has completely eliminated emails from the mix in our editorial planning and creation process.The discussions, research and feedback all take place within each day’s track. This way we have a stream of conversation versus 10 to 20 back and forth emails with notes, edits and discussions. We can add new contributors to the list at any part of the process without having to “onboard” them by forwarding old emails.

  

Any images, videos or other supplementary content can be shared in the track by including a link in the discussion or dragging and dropping files into the track. A Google Doc is created from within Tracky for every post. It becomes an “attachment” that everyone assigned to the track can access. We collaborate on the actual content from within that document.

If you don’t use Google Docs to create content, you can save versions of documents in the track and they are timestamped. Boom!

But, that’s not all...

Our editorial calendar also includes our visual assets for each piece off content as well as all of our tactics and processes for sharing content online. This information is stored in a “parent track” or the Social Editorial Content umbrella (the weekly breakdowns are actually subtracks). It looks like this:

Because all of our content is organized by week and stored in a PR group, it’s easy to archive and search for older content. It’s also a sustainable model that works well as people leave and join your organization.

Say goodbye to an inefficient process and hello to productivity.

Want a personal walk through? We host regular onboarding sessions for our friends. Just let us know by sending me an email.