Whether it’s Facebook updates, blogs, reality television or some other medium, audiences are using digital means to connect with other people or brands. For the most part, we have moved beyond vapid ads filled with falsely happy people and dry fact sheets that offer information, but no story. Audiences want engaging content.
Creating the kind of credible and authentic content that audiences will engage with is something that I covered in recent posts about what a body of content says about your brand and moving from being a publisher to a media outlet.
Your website should be a hub of content.
But once all this engaging content gets created, where should it live? And how will audiences find it?
The place to start is your organization’s website.
For the first years of the Web, sites were mostly static. Mostly that was because updating content on the Web was a laborious and technical process. The birth of blogging software and sites changed that paradigm. No longer did you need to know Dreamweaver or pay for an expensive content management system. The explosion of blogging, and now social media, has been led by simple content management systems and publishing platforms. But the innovation in site updating hasn’t spread to the corporate and organizational side.
Now is the time to leverage the power of your organization’s website to create a storytelling platform that hosts content and serves as the hub and engine for social media content.
With an engaging design and a state-of-the-art content management and publishing system, and by using social media to distribute content and leverage search, your website can deliver deeper engagement than traditional advertising. And you don’t have to pay to have someone else post the content.
Ford’s digital properties are a good example to follow. The automaker created The Ford Story to engage with audiences in a new way during the depths of the industry crisis. Now Ford connects its storytelling platform to its corporate home page (which aims to drive sales) with its media site that provides building-block content for influentials.
Microsoft’s News Center is another good example of leveraging an owned platform.
I’m presenting this week at the AdAge Digital conference with our Microsoft News Center partners on using a digital newsroom to tell a story about a brand. I hope to see you there.
Your Twitter handle needs to be fed. Your Facebook page needs to be fed. Your YouTube channel needs to be fed. Your blog needs to be fed.
Organizations using social media quickly realize that these digital properties are hungry beasts that demand to be fed often with content, or else they get stale and uninteresting. Without fresh, real-time content, social media properties lose their purpose as communications and engagement tools for customers, partners, employees, consumers, etc.
Social media is hungry for content.
Creating content for social media is often done by passionate, early adopters within an organization, usually working outside of the traditional communications departments. In many cases this has been a recipe for initial success (example: Ford’s Scott Monty) because traditional marketing, advertising and public relations haven’t been accustomed to, or adapted for, the real-time needs of social media.
Now that the benefits of leveraging social media are becoming clearer, as evidenced by this recent McKinsey Quarterly research illustrating the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies on the bottom line, more organizations are getting serious about their social media content.
But moving it from the responsibility of a few passionate, tech-savvy individuals to become part of an organization’s communications can be challenging.
Here are three tips for creating a real-time content engine that can feed the social media beasts:
Harness what you have. Whether your organization is a large, multinational, a small nonprofit or the dry cleaner on the corner, it has plenty of content that has been — and is being – published. That can include advertising, white papers, marketing and sales materials, press releases, emails and newsletters, internal communications, photos and videos, coupons; and the list goes on. While some of that content isn’t appropriate for external audiences or social media, most if it can be excerpted for a blog or Facebook post or turned into a tweet.
Employees or members should also be tapped for content. They have expertise and opinions that are relevant. They are also members of your community. A meeting or even a hallway conversation can be turned into something that your audience will find valuable.
To get started on harnessing what you have, do an audit of your existing content, people and content creation processes. Then jump to tip number 3.
Curate and engage with what you like. The content needed to power your social media doesn’t all have to come from you. If you are engaged in your community, the act of “liking” or retweeting can be enough to feed your social media outlets. This shows that you are paying attention and adding value to the topics and discussions relevant to your audience.
To get started on this, make sure you are following and listening to the content being created by your customers, partners, employees, etc. Then develop a process for amplifying the content that is most relevant to your organization.
Copy what the media is doing. I am biased because of my years as a journalist, but I think it’s fair to argue that traditional news media outlets have been leading in social media. Why? Because they develop a great deal of relevant, real-time content. They are harnessing social media by adding another outlet to their sophisticated publishing and curating processes. That might be as simple as hooking up a Twitter account to an existing RSS feed, or it might mean redeploying reporters and editors to listen to social media as a way to find out what news is happening. Social media presents an opportunity to publish your content on an existing platform that has an audience for free. But even if the publishing is free, someone needs to be making decisions about what gets published. Often, that is a trouble spot for organizations because there are either too many or too few people empowered to decide what gets published where. This is another place where media organizations can offer a template for success in social media. They have clear structures and responsibilities about who gets to publish content on their properties.
To get started, develop a newsroom structure in your organization, either by adding new roles or redeploying existing resources, to handle your social media publishing. This kind of structure can take much of the pain out of content creation and publishing, allowing content to come out of your organization that is credible, authentic and true to your brand.
Is your organization ready to take these steps to advance its business and communications goals?
Image courtesy possumgirl2 via Flickr.
As former media buyer, it wasn’t a huge shock to learn that the 159-year-old New York Times is betting the newsroom on whether or not readers are willing to pay to read it online.
Advertising, it would seem, no longer makes the world go round.
No, this won’t be a PR vs. advertising post, declaring a universal winner because one of the most globally noted newspaper decided to stop at a losing game. Marketing done well incorporates both strategies. (Sorry, I digress). People want direct access to the real-time news they want, and, apparently, consumers are fine with paying for it. According to The Times, more than 20,000 consumer survey responses confirmed pricing of “100 product combinations priced as low as $5 and as high as $40 a month.” Advertising as primary source of revenue stream appears in most cases to be a broken model. Consumers are voting with their wallets, signaling that they are tired of the signal-to-noise ratio while just trying to get to news they want. It’s not clear from this post if ads will be a part of the pay model or not, but I would think anyone paying for content deserves clutter-free news. 
As media specialists, this shift represents a huge opportunity to engage with the “true audience” that might develop from a successful pay model. I welcome the narrow focus on defining true influence. Then again, influence is an ever-moving target and variable that can be highly personalized – actually, there’s room for a whole separate post for the subject of influence alone. A recent post from Olaf Kowalik, vice president of product management and development at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide (WE), highlights some of WE’s tools used to identify and amplify influence to see who is making impact for clients and how they communicate within their community, as well how deep those relationships are and advise on how best to spread conversation. The Ripple Effect and Social Graph are a few of many offerings from WE’s Influence Toolkit. Oliver Blanchard has also done a good job detailing why “Influence is not a Jedi mind trick.”
What really happens if you lose a percentage of the audience due to the new model? Are they outliers who maybe weren’t paying attention to start with? Does it follow that you gain a refined audience of engaged listeners? Does this new core audience represent a more “accurate” circulation figure? Potentially, at least, a new industry standard could be born, shifting the thinking around the “norm.” Is bigger really better? Ideally, under this new model, one can target those who are actively listening and are therefore more likely to take action.
Will advertising go away completely under the pay model? If so, will that shift have any impact on how The New York Times covers companies, the economy and even politics? Investing in and being a part of how quality content is generated is what we get paid to develop, analyze and promote.
There are several current examples of other types of pay models doing fairly well:
- Traditional cable companies are seeing market share eaten upby pay-TV and by the likes of both Hulu and Netflix – especially among the younger demographics.
- Streaming on mobile devices is the latest channel to emerge and challenge the traditional ad-supported model of television. According to USA Today, 2011 NCAA men’s basketball tourney rating hits 11-year high. According to CBS/Turner, “Visits to its live streaming game coverage online and to mobile devices is up 47% this year, which is partly driven by coverage being available free to mobile devices for the first time.”
What are some other great pay models that you personally or professionally subscribe to? Would love to hear why you feel they are worth it. Do you believe that The New York Times can find success by asking readers to pay for content?
Edits by Julie (Arterburn) Evensen.
Images by Mike Bailey-Gates.
You search. I search. We all search.
With more than 16 billion search queries per month in the U.S. alone, online search has become the dominant channel for consumers to discover information and make decisions (source: comScore).
- 67% of U.S. adults who research online before making a purchase decision use search engines as a research tool
- 7 out of 10 people initiate their Internet experience with a search
- 77% of U.S. Internet users conduct at least one search per day, with 38% conducting 4 or more searches per day
But online search now goes beyond the traditional platforms of Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google. Alongside the 500 million Facebook users, consumers are finding new ways to discover content across a wide array of social sites as well. According to a 2010 report by Citi Investment, Facebook now has a 2.7 percent share of the search market, leading AOL, a proof point in the shift in behavior.
Every day, people are sifting through a massive amount of information on the Web and exploring news, videos, images and other information on new platforms. It’s becoming more and more important to broaden your reach and target audiences to accurately connect and engage with your target audience on the platforms where they are spending their time.
Where to Start
Online advertising has become instrumental to moving the branding needle, as it allows businesses to connect with audiences in a very targeted and cost-effective way to increase visibility and route audiences to a given Web page. The opportunity for ROI is huge, making it a smart communications tactic for PR professionals to use in support of a news announcement or event. There are a variety of advertising tactics to choose from, depending on the chosen hub. Below you’ll find a link to a deck created by Waggener Edstrom’s WE Studio D team that outlines these advertising options so that you’re armed to work these tactics into your own communications plans.
Strategies covered include these:
- Facebook
- YouTube
- Digg
- Twitter
- StumbleUpon
- Bing
- Yahoo!
- Google
Click on the image below to view the entire presentaion.
PR, as an industry, is not known for being a group of early adopters. Social media has been a bit of an exception. While the entire industry may not have adopted social media early on, many of social media’s early evangelists came from the field of PR. The argument is that there was an obvious benefit in the way PR approaches working with influencers and building relationships and building online communities and working with online influencers. It hasn’t been a seamless relationship but what relationships are seamless?
There’s a new revolution happening in conjunction with social media and that’s the rise of mobile. Mobile and social go hand in hand (no pun intended) but how marketers approach each couldn’t be more different.
Social media has been incredibly disruptive for marketers because no one is really sure where it belongs. Does the PR team drive it? Customer support? What about the digital team? There is no right answer here but you rarely here advertising brought into the conversation. Not that they don’t belong, they just haven’t done much yet. Although that is changing and thanks to the Old Spice guy we’ll see a lot more changes.
But now mobile is causing the same kind of disruption in marketing orgs and I hear similar battles going on. Does mobile marketing belong in advertising? Digital marketing? Interactive? But you don’t hear any mention of the relation-based groups like PR or customer support.
The easy answer is that one’s an approach (social media/PR) and one’s more of a platform (mobile/advertising).
I think that this is a mistake and PR people will soon be playing catch up to advertising if they don’t find a way to leverage mobile beyond just the social media applications.
Twitter and Foursquare do not a mobile strategy make.
Photo credit By bfishadow
A piece by Teressa Iezzi and Ann-Christine Diaz worth reading in today’s AdAge covers how traits of digital communications are rubbing off on all disciplines of marketing. The anchor quote of the article really spoke to me:
The best companies have harnessed the digital mindset and taken the shareable, ongoing, interactive, participatory nature of digital and created brand experiences that matter to people where they ought to — in their real, everyday lives.
I feel this really is the cornerstone of how we at WE Studio D think about our jobs. People often ask me if the “D” in Studio D stands for “digital,” and I tell them that while we work primarily in digital communications, we’ve kept the D purposely vague: digital, design, development, data, demand creation, dialogue, etc.
I think this blurriness of the lines between the marketing disciplines is a good thing, allowing ideas and creativity to bleed out of a model built on distribution and toward a model built on participation. The article mentions Nike Plus and Fiat Eco Drive as “arguably the most compelling brand ideas of the last decade” and how, although they started online, they were successful because they manifested themselves in reality in ways that actually mattered in peo
ple’s real lives.
Pepsi’s new cross media campaign “Refresh” is a great example of this — not positioning itself as a digital campaign per se, but as a campaign that wants to be part of its customers’ lives and to create opportunities for customers to do something important to them. From the article:
Pepsi and TBWA/Chiat/Day’s Refresh Project funds ideas that would make the real world a better place. Rob Schwartz, chief creative officer, TBWA/Chiat/Day, L.A., said that with Refresh, the agency “didn’t set out to create a ‘digital idea.’ We set out to make our brand idea — Refresh — an action. … It’s a brand idea that lets you take action to do some good in your world, your neighborhood, your street.”
We need more of this — integrated comms grounded in driving action, creating opportunities to DO stuff.
Over the past week an Australian KFC commercial showing a white Australian cricket fan in the midst of black West Indies fans handing out fried chicken caused a lot of uproar.
The controversy started when the commercial was (illegally, I might add) uploaded to YouTube. The negative reaction it received in the US surprised many people around the world, as outside of the US, people are not too familiar with US stereotypes (and why should they?). Americans saw the ad as racist since it depicts a white person handing out fried chicken to black people, because he tried to make himself feel more comfortable. An African American eating fried chicken is a very common stereotype in the US (but US only).
Before anything, let me ask you this: Do you really think that Australian producers of an Australian commercial for the Australian market would implement a US stereotype that nobody in Australia knows about to make fun of African Americans?
The US public criticized the commercial with such force that KFC decided to stop airing it in Australia, but by doing that another stereotype is being fed. The US is seen as a bully by many countries around the world and getting a company to pull the plug on a commercial that was not even meant to be shown in the US feeds exactly that stereotype.
There are many things we can learn from this: First of all, with today’s technologies nothing stays local or regional anymore, but is accessible worldwide. We learned that the hard way when it comes to airplanes and contagious diseases. With services such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., videos, information and opinions can reach even the furthest corners of the planet, but does that really mean that content, no matter for what region it was created, has to go through a worldwide cultural audit, because somehow, somewhere, someone could take it the wrong way? Think about the added costs for even the smallest projects. The commercial has not received any negative feedback in Australia and I am sure it would have been changed to fit within our cultural guidelines, if there had been a plan to air it in the US as well.
US commercials use stereotypes all the time, Germans in Lederhosen, comes to mind, so why ridiculing a foreign commercial that wasn’t even meant to stereotype or even insult? Or do you hear of any uproar in India, because US commercials show that hamburgers are made from cows?
People just try to read too much into it. Political correctness and cultural audit is a good thing, but in this case goes too far (and that comes from a guy that enforces cultural audits on a daily basis). Sometimes it is really just what it is, a fan within a group of fans of the opposite team trying to enjoy the game. In this commercial the team colors are important not the color of people.
Pepsi to Skip Super Bowl Ads in Favor of $20M Social Media Campaign
For the first time in 23 years, Pepsi will not have any ads in the Super Bowl. Instead, the company will be spending $20 million on a social media campaign it’s calling The Pepsi Refresh Project.Such a large move is noteworthy for any company, however Pepsi’s symbiotic relationship with the Super Bowl makes this shift to new media that much more seismic.
The Pepsi Refresh Project
Rather than spending money on a Super Bowl ad, Pepsi will launch the Pepsi Refresh Project on January 13, 2010. At that time, users can submit their ideas to Pepsi for ways to refresh their communities, making the world a better place
This reemphasizes some of the huge shifts we’ve seen in 2009 and highlights even bigger changes coming in 2010. The media landscape over the past several years has shifted and there is a whole new class of non-traditional and digital influentials who have blurred that line between media, enthusiast, consumer and customer.
Disciplines are in an old land grab right now for ownership of social media. That fight just got turned up to 11. Ad agencies and traditional media will be doing their best to make advertising look and act more like social media. As such, the necessary outreach and content PR provides the “new influentials” has shifted. Some PR agencies have done a good job evolving media relations to include branded and unbranded bloggers and to create rich media building block to help them tell their stories in richer and more engaged ways.
Each Marketing discipline has value to add and it’s important that PR pros don’t let themselves get pushed out. Here are a few things to keep top of mind as we continue to redefine what PR means in the social age:
- Stake your claim: PR’s heritage of storytelling, experience in influence and our understanding of nuance is more appropriate for social influentials than the advertising and digital agencies who are usually driven by reach and CPM.
- Be the connector: PR can be that connective tissue that holds the messaging together between all the marketing disciplines and helps campaigns and initiatives work more effectively and efficiently.
- Plan for social and media influentials simultaneously: If we de-prioritize or bolt on social comms it sends the message that it’s not a core competency of ours and we don’t view it as critical.
- Get there early: PR’s perspective is crucial to creating solid creative and strategic plans. But when we get integrated into the all-up campaign strategy late we miss the opportunity to pitch these ideas because the duties have already been assigned.
- Start thinking like an integrated communications marketer: Media relations + direct to customer + content strategy + social engagement. Don’t let marketing deposition or define PR as just media relations.
- Think about the end-to-end journey: We will increasingly be asked to defend our ROI. What are we measuring and what are the stepping stones that get our audience from awareness through consideration to action?
- Own the process: Who is better positioned to own the relationship with the Public than PR? No one. But if we don’t step up and own the process then PR will be relegated to an afterthought.
This was a collaboratively written post by Tac Anderson and Nathan Misner
Matt Whiting, Senior Account Executive, WE Studio D
By its very nature, change is unsettling. When out of our comfort zones, we as a species react through a range of emotions and behaviors. While no one can predict the extent of the range of such reactions to any set of circumstances, there are a few guiding principles that reemerge time and time again.
Campaigns that tap into our psychological wiring are well aware of the effectiveness of doing so, and such strategic plans ensure that the messages of these communications resonate with the audience.
One recent example that brilliantly taps into the human desire for predictability and a sense of control is the simplicity campaign by The Sun, the daily newspaper from the U.K. and Ireland, on its 40th anniversary.
The ad cleverly usurps the look and feel of Apple’s “There’s an App for That” iPhone ads and uses it to bring the paper to the top of the public’s mind.
What makes this campaign even more effective is its timing. With more and more people attempting to regain control of their own time (remember, this is the year that the New Oxford American Dictionary named “unfriend” as the word of the year), the desire to cut at least some of the cords connects directly with the audience in a humorous way.
Lest you think the folks who run The Sun are expecting their readers to fully embrace the medium that’s been around since the days of Gutenberg, they are also heavily investing in digital and, yes, do have an app for that.
Heather Snow, Account Director, WE Studio D
The Adobe Omniture acquisition announcement earlier this week kicked off a flurry of discussion amongst our team to the tune of “is metrics the new creative?” Certainly it’s looking that way, between the communications cataclysm reshaping our industry and the “econopocalypse” driving marketers to focus ever more keenly on trimming the fluff and driving hard ROI.
Against this backdrop, it’s interesting to note P&G’s latest ROI-driving model. For some time there’s been discussion around moving to performance-based compensation models. P&G, together with Coca-cola, has been leading the charge in this direction with the announcement that its creative agencies would no longer be compensated based on billable hours, but instead on the effectiveness of the work. Though uncomfortable for the agency world, as change often is, there is an undeniable logic to a performance-driven model.
Now P&G is taking a similar tack with its media partners, pushing for a cost per engagement model. P&G is not the first to focus on engagement over impressions; last year Volkswagen ran a campaign with Times Online in which the publisher was paid based on views and downloads of video, podcasts and other brand materials. And for sure engagement is a whole lot more meaningful than impressions. But…
I think we’re rather missing the point here.
As the saying goes, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For advertisers, paid influence is the nail, for communicators, earned influence is the nail. But let’s not be hammers. Let’s look at the big picture for a moment.
The reason that brands are not seeing the results — which I think we’d all agree is ultimately about driving influence through to action, regardless of vehicle — is not because media doesn’t have the audience reach, and not because the creative isn’t compelling, and not even because we aren’t measuring correctly. It’s because maybe, just maybe, your customers just aren’t that into you.
Precisely because online media is so measureable, it becomes painfully obvious when audiences are ignoring you. And also when they are displeased with you.
What brands need to flourish in a social media-empowered universe is not going to be solved by a change in media strategy, nor in creative strategy, but rather a change that has to happen at the brand’s very essence. It’s about your product. It’s about what you stand for. It’s about how you regard your customers, and interact with them. It’s about your leadership, and your organizational structure. Just ask Whole Foods. Who, I might add, actually uses social media really well.
Ultimately, brands must make their customers care by offering them something compelling to engage with — whether in the form of a cause they believe in passionately, or zippy content that makes them chuckle. But it can’t be false. To be false is to be either irrelevant or derided. Because social media is the great B.S.-detector-amplifier. We all have one deep down, social media empowers us to shout it out.
So in summary, I’d say no, it’s not metrics, but rather authenticity that is the new creative. Metrics is important too. But authenticity is the new make-or-break. And it can’t be bought for a $300M media spend, even if your agency and media partners are 100% ROI accountable.
