Sometimes the hardest part of crafting content is deciding what to write about and determining what the audience will interact with most. Sometimes it feels as though it’s a shot in the dark.

What if I told you there was a new software-as-a-service product coming out that will measure not only the channel success, but the topic success and much more? How great would it be to have an algorithm that told you and your content team which topic would be most successful to write about and when you should write about it?

Launching very soon, Rundown is a new content cloud for professional content teams that can do this and much more.

 

RundownOpen

 

The Rundown platform offers content teams a single place to see everything – comments, pitches, tasks, published and scheduled content, analytics and more – as it happens. The Assignment Desk in Rundown lets everyone on the team pitch stories, so you can collaborate in real-time and quickly convert pitches to stories and make assignments based on skills and availability. Rundown even provides everything you need to optimize your content marketing operation, including the time, effort, and costs associated with creating content.

LessWorkMoreFlowRundown is so specific that after using it for a few months, The software will tell you the best kind of post to write to make the biggest impact. It can literally tell you that you need to write a post about:

  • A certain topic
  • On a certain day
  • At a certain time
  • In a certain format
  • Through a certain channel
  • By a certain author
  • And edited by a certain staffer.

Rundown will break down how many hours your team spends working on a piece in comparison to how much action the post receives and therefor how much money you are spending to pay your talent per hit on your content. Before you write a piece, you will tag all of the different content subjects that this piece pertains to. The system will track how those content items do and will tell you how successful you are based on the different topics.

Rundown keeps track of your content team, what they are doing, and what they are best at. For each piece that you begin to work on, the software will tell you who would be best suited for each stage of the process. Rundown takes into account, their availability, how many other projects they have on their plates, subject matter expertise, how well they have done in the past on this type of story, if they worked on pitching the story, channel success, and much more. The algorithm will suggest the best person for the task, but will also include the scores of the rest of the team for this role, in case you decide to switch it up.

On another note, the average post that is read online takes 7 minutes to read according to medium.com. However, each post usually takes a content team hours from research, writing, editing, creating images, approval and publishing. At larger organizations, the content may go through many hands before the readers see the finished product. You do not want your readers to see the messy work behind the polished piece. That is, until now. Rundown makes the process behind the written art a much smoother, cleaner process.

Rundown also includes a variety of calendar functions. You set deadlines for each stage of the creation process and each person responsible for a task gets an email to accept the task as well as reminder alerts as the process moves forward. As soon as the research is completed, the writer will get an update to begin writing and so on. From an organizational standpoint, Rundown has the potential to really streamline the content process.

 

RundownAgile

 

What’s next for Rundown?

Everything about Rundown just screams customization. While the algorithm was created for newsrooms and content-driven teams, the co-founders say that it’s possible for the technology to morph into custom software for an event planning company or a sales workforce to use.

Rundown is currently seeking customers and investors. Right now it’s just the dynamic duo of Taulbee Jackson, co-founder and CEO, and Justin Bolles, co-founder and COO, bootstrapping the startup through to their first paying customers. Justin does all of the programming himself. The pair are constantly trying to better the product and would love to hear from you.

Take their 2015 Content Production Survey – they will be releasing the full report in the fall for free, for anyone who participates. Here is a link:http://rundownapp.com/content-production-research-survey/.