This is a sample post from my Field Guide to Social Marketing.

One of the things that I’ve been recommending to my marketing clients, and one of the things that I did for Marketing Ninja today, is to have a brainstorming session where you determine what you’re going to write about and what you’re going to say to your readers in the long run.

There are a number of ways of doing this, but I think the easiest way to get organized is to use a Mind Map.

I’ve written about using Mind Maps before in the context of project organization.

Why Would I Want to Use a Mind Map?

A Mind Map is just one tool for organizing your business’ online message; there are a lot of options available, but I find that mind maps are better because:

• They are easier to read than bulleted lists;
• They are better for brain storming;
• They are much more interesting than bullets if you have to present your blogging ideas in a PowerPoint presentation;
• They are much more spatially efficient since you can branch out your ideas horizontally (lists grow mostly vertically;) and
• Mind Maps let you see what you’re thinking; bulleted lists don’t convey the same ideas with the clarity that a mind map has.

In addition, with a really good diagramming tool, you can actually build a mind map faster than you can outline it. I consult for SmartDraw so I use SmartDraw 2008.

How Do I Use A Mind Map To Organize My Company’s Online Message?

Let me show you what I did for Marketing Ninja.

Step 1. Start with a Few Initial “Big Topics”

I picked what I consider to be the three core areas that I write about:

• Social Media for Business;
• Trends in Social Media; and
• Social Media Technology.

Notice that I highlighted Social Media Technology with a different color; this is primarily because my blogging activity in that area is declining and I am moving more towards the marketing/social media focus.

Step 2. Refine Each “Big Topic” with a few Specific “Areas of Interest”

So I took my original list and expanded on each node with a few increasingly specified sub-topics; here’s what my Mind Map would look like in outline format:

• Social Media for Business
  • Blogging for Business
  • Field Guide to Social Marketing
  • Reference Guides
• Trends in Social Media
  • Etiquette
  • Niche Portals v. Digg
  • YHOO v. MSFT
  • GOOG v. MSFT
• Social Media Technology
  • ASP.NET
  • Design
  • Web 2.0
  • DBMS

See how I have much more space to get my information across when I have a Mind Map? Now we’re going to take it one step further.

Step 3. Refine, Add More Subtopics, Then Repeat

This chart is obviously too large to be read on the relatively narrow viewing pane of this blog, so you can see a full sized version of this image here. A bulleted list with this much content would be virtually unreadable, but a Mind Map is relatively manageable.

Basically all you do is you keep iterating through subtopics until you have covered the full set of possible topics. At that point you now have a Mind Map artifact that you can refer to when you want to write a new post but aren’t sure what direction to use.

Step 4. When Publishing New Content, Refer Back to the Mind Map

Does your content stay within the range of topics that you brainstormed using your Mind Map? If not then you may want to refine your idea until it does, your perhaps reevaluate the topics you explored during your brainstorming session.

Another possibility: do you need something to write about? Refer back to the mind map; after all, that’s where you can see your ideas whenever you’re suffering from writer’s block.

Getting your content’s messages organized is crucial to having a successful blogging campaign, and a mind map is a pretty good starting point for coming up with ideas and presenting them in a manner that is easy to communicate.

Downloads:

Marketing Ninja Full Mind Map [SmartDraw 2008 Format, Editable]

Marketing Ninja Full Mind Map [PDF Format, Read-Only]

Technorati Tags: Field Guide to Social Marketing,Mind Mapping

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