5 ways to use pop culture to generate great content

“Create great content! Create great content!”

These three words can sound like a battle cry in a foreign language to a person just starting out in the blogosphere or social media world.

What do these words mean? It’s simple. If you consistently “create great content” for your readers and online communities, then fame, fortune and power follow! Yes!

But wait. How do I actually do the “create” part of this phrase? Turns out that “create great content” is much easier said (over and over again) than actually done.

To me, the only two common characteristics of all “great content” are originality and timeliness. But how to accomplish these two things every time you share something online?

One way is to use popular culture to generate ideas for your blog, your Facebook page, your tweets and wherever else you share stuff online.

5 ways you can use pop culture to generate great content

1) Get out of your own head and look around. Visit other blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Listen. What are others posting about? What is on everyone’s mind? What’s driving everyone crazy or making them insane with happiness? We need to stop the mile-a-minute idea cycle within our minds and take in our environment once in a while – the ideas are there waiting to be found.

2) Check LinkedIn Today or the Pulse app on your phone every morning or when you sit down to figure out what to post. LinkedIn Today is a personalized “newspaper” that cherry-picks headlines based on companies, industries and news sources you follow on LinkedIn. Pulse takes your favorite news websites and transforms them into a “colorful and interactive mosaic” that is easy to skim. What is the biggest news story of the day or the week and how can you make it relevant to your readers? Your personal Facebook news feed can also be helpful in discovering the top news of the day.

3) Find the most popular book right now, read it and blog about it, tying it to your industry. What book is on everyone’s Kindle? What’s on the New York Times best-seller list? I haven’t read the book yet, but I plan on writing a killer post with the working title 10 Ways Social Media Marketing is like The Hunger Games.

4) Create content about a popular TV show or genre. Chances are you watch Mad Men, or The New Girl, or America’s Got Talent. Guess what – the rest of the world does to! How can you tie themes from a recent episode, or an entire season, to your posts? A good example of this is a blog post from Warming Glow entitled Dogs That Look Like Mad Men Characters.(Makes you want to click on it, doesn’t it?) One of my favorite SlideShare presentations about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (my all-time favorite TV show) and Facebook marketing.

5) Use music. Think of a song that seems to be everywhere or an artist that is getting a lot of press. Create a name-dropping blog post like this one – 5 Ways Social Media Marketing Should Be Like Lady Gaga. Get inspired by what you listen to, even if it’s not in the Billboard 100. What do the instruments, the band members and the lyrics mean to you? How can you tie that to your work, your industry and a potentially stimulating post?

Try to tie popular culture into content you generate over the next few days and see if it gets a higher rate of engagement than your usual posts. Let me know how you do.

How do you use popular culture to get inspired? Is there anything I missed? Please add your Comments and thoughts in the section below. Thanks for reading!