Strategic Public Relations

How Social Media Fuels Content Marketing -- INFOGRAPHIC

AdAge's article, "Four Areas Agencies Need to Embrace to Stay Relevant" caught my attention. It notes external collaboration is an area agencies need more of to keep up in our industry.

Internal collaboration is equally important--and almost as rare. Industry discussions around social media, public relations and content marketing provide one example. These discussions seem more focused on one discipline claiming ownership of the others than on how they can make something  better by working together.

Stop, Collaborate (& Listen)
Content marketing is certainly the beneficiary of other disciplines--including paid media, search marketing, graphic design, web/app development and social media. The above visual looks at just a handful of ways social media can improve the content marketing process.

The article notes: "Rarely do you have one company that can pull off the kind of multichannel content necessary to reach targeted online and offline audiences."

And when it comes to content marketing, this quote usually applies at the team level too.

Click here to download a larger version of the above infographic.

Can Your Content Capture the Consumers' 8-Second Attention Span?

Did you know the average consumer attention span is only eight seconds? It's no surprise in today's world. But it's alarming when you consider the average goldfish attention span is nine seconds.

It's one of the reasons I was compelled to write a guest post for the Spin Sucks blog.

Four Tips to Help You Create Content in a tl;dr World details how to get your message through this shrinking window of opportunity.

Click here to read more.

5 Content Marketing Tips the TV Series Finale Teaches Us

How I Met Your Mother #HIMYM ended a nine-season run with its series finale earlier this week. And of course, like most series finales, it received mixed reviews.

The critics in this instance are my content marketing colleagues. In fact #HIMYM inspired a broader discussion from which we pulled five lessons content marketers can take from the TV series finale.

Click here to visit Media Is Power for more of this article.

Shareable Media Get Serious About Attracting Millennials

When the Daily Show first aired, Jon Stewart was a comedian hosting a parody show on Comedy Central. Now he's a satirist for a news show that just happens to run on Comedy Central.

While Comedy Central’s Daily Show is an example of niche cable brands expanding programming to attract a bigger audience, it’s part of a more subtle, significant trend.

It’s an early example of non-traditional outlets layering in news for a new, younger segment of viewers. This trend has since moved from cable to online media properties as well.

BuzzFeed Blows Up
BuzzFeed is the most obvious example today, its YouTube partnership with CNN benefits both platforms as BuzzFeed wants more reason for visitors to stay, see and share its content.

Expanding from timely irreverence into serious news content may seem like a disconnect. But it’s looking more like a growing trend.

Vice Media Doubles Down
More recently, Vice Media doubled the size of its news operations. Known for its online and TV programming, the outlet sees millennials as an underserved audience and is investing heavily to keep their attention.

A Long-Term Approach to Audience-Building
As many digital platforms try to find the right mix to boost unique visitors, page views and time on site, we’re seeing some do a better job than others. There is an unfortunate science behind the listicles, slide shows and more visual content some platforms have become known for publishing.

These approaches reward the publisher, not the marketers, providing artificial boosts to metrics. Appealing to a broader audience by expanding content is a much more long-term, sustainable investment.

http://www.blogdash.com/full_profile/?claim_code=515c108c4b63418f7e54354b9bccd736

What's the Key to Social Sharing?

In reverence of the ink-stained ‎Hermann Rorschach, Google is doing it's trademark logo morphing today. New to me is their addition of sharing tools to the homage, allowing you to share their creative effort when you rollover it (as shown in the above screen grab).

Button, Button Who's Got the (Share) Button?
Including the ability to share your content today is comparable to what print-friendly tools were to the web of 10 years ago. It's widespread but it's not second nature to include. And adding sharing tools can be executed artfully (like an inkblot), easily (like blogging platforms that have already added it for you) or poorly (like the multiple car horns Homer Simpson wanted in his concept car).

Thanks to folks like Tumblr, Wordpress and Typepad many content creators don't need to give social sharing a second thought. When they hit publish, they arm readers with the ability to share their content. But the above example, elegant in its simplicity, reminds me that we shouldn't assume our content is properly armed with the right tools.

Content, and our roles in creating it, are more broadly defined than ever before. We need to do more than simply confirm our content can be shared, we need to work with the design and development folks to make it work more intuitively acrosss platforms.

An Art & Science Mix
This requires us to balance the aesthetic and the utility behind the content environment you're creating. Google nails this combination in the above example. But in other examples, it makes more sense to add "the F" and "the T" icons to your template -- in clear view of the reader -- and call it a day.

This also means you need to make sure its not confused with your social contact icons. Pro Tip: move those from the header to the footer. And don't forget it's a balance. Tools like ShareThis are more powerful and much more aesthetically smart. But adding even one click to the sharing process can impact the level of engagement your content creates.

So while the increased importance of sharing tools may lead us to believe it's a box we've checked off...and this discussion is a waste of time...I disagree. If we could compare the analytics around Google's logo projects, before and after sharing, I'm betting it would it prove out my simple observation.

The Six Ingredients for Snackable Content

Can you define snackable content?

Many marketers asked the same question will use the infamous quote: “I know it when I see it.”

This is because the definition of snackable content lacks clearly defined parameters. This can give the term a subjective meaning. Even I’ll define it here in simple terms.

“Content is snackable when it is designed
for simple and flexible audience consumption.”

The content’s overall design makes it easier to consume, the audience more likely to consume it and it extends from the story and includes how the content is transmitted and shared.

As many as six different factors can make content snackable. And while all six aren’t required for content to be considered snacakable, they are all part of the broader content experience.

For more of this article, click here to visit Media is Power.

Samsung Content Marketing Campaign Takes "New" Approach

Samsung teamed up with Foursquare to create “Time Machine,” a co-branded microsite that turns a consumer’s Foursquare history into content. Users can watch their history unfold in real time, get recommendations on “the next big thing” to visit and share their history in infographic form.

While the approach is familiar, the campaign is new and different in at least three ways.

For the rest of this article, visit Media Is Power.

Brand's Annual Report Published via Instagram

"Story drives the form. Form does not drive the story."

A local journalist instilled this mantra in me recently. And it would appear this mantra is being applied to annual reports.

Over the last decade, annual reports have gone from dry as toast financial documents to become a brand's "secret weapon" (vs. bread and butter /rimshot). Take this example from Warby Parker -- which provides an interactive, behind the scenes look at "how it all goes down" at the popular online eyewear brand.

Rather than having the production, or typical annual report format, drive its creation, The Calgary Zoo chose Instagram to serve up its year in review and to help reinforce its story.

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 Now before you go out and start snapping pics of your existing annual report and posting them to Instagram, here's why it works for the zoo.

• Telling a Visual Story: The Zoo already had a very visual story to tell. Instagram helped amplify this fact. They didn't try and reverse engineer the annual report into square photos for Instagram.
• Creating Snack-Sized & Healthy Content: Each page became a destination for the Zoo...helping them reinforce important points and distribute the annual report more easily online. 
• Supporting a Broader Plan: This execution is part of a broader plan for the Zoo as it relates not only to it's marketing efforts, but also to it's annual report...and its role in these broader efforts.
• Reinforcing the Brand: The Zoo does a great job of using visuals to reinforce the experience visitors have at the Zoo as well as the broader platforms the Zoo supports, including protecting penguins for example. The point is, while there are many snack-sized messages, all of the pictures come together to support a common theme - the Calgary Zoo.

It is a great use of Instagram, a great idea for the Calgary Zoo and an important reminder to us that the restrictions of a platform can increase our creativity and not simply limit it.

Could LinkedIn Contacts Become LinkedIn Social CRM?

LinkedIn's new Contacts app is designed to help users stay in touch with important business contacts and build contacts with others.

According to Mashable: "LinkedIn Contacts integrates into your email, mobile address book and calendar to create a one stop shop of sorts for all of your contacts that is accessible from the web and an app."

LinkedIn has rolled out a steady stream of design, social and content enhancements over the last six months as it aims to increase the engagement across its business platform. And this new app will certainly increase the odds that you'll be connected to your entire contact database on LinkedIn.

Community + Content x Contacts = Social CRM?
To its credit, LinkedIn has never been a walled garden; you can export  your contact information. And with email plugins for Outlook and GMail as well as apps like Cardmunch, it's been simple to benefit from LinkedIn data across other platforms.

LinkedIn's recent focus on community, content and contacts shows it's trying to reverse the flow of data outside the site and give users more reasons to spend time on LinkedIn. And if you look at all of the LinkedIn enhancements in aggregate, it starts to look as if we're being given a mix of tools used for "extraction, transfer and loading" of data into a customer relationship marketing (CRM) platform.

Consider if LinkedIn continued enhancing the platform and, within the next 12 months, it started offering a basic and paid level of CRM functionality to its more than 200 million members.

1) User Base: It's user base would increase and it would encourage all users to invest more time in the platform.

2) Social Business: Whether or not you consider LinkedIn a niche platform due to its business focus, by expanding its focus on contacts into CRM it becomes THE business platform and much tougher to displace.

3) Monetization: In addition to the revenue from its paid CRM services, the advertising potential would be significant. Consider a utility like email - it's open all day. Turning LinkedIn into a CRM utility would increase user exposure to advertising.

Personal CRM
There's a distinct delta between a CRM platform and the functionality that LinkedIn currently provides. But it's not so significant that it prevents the social platform from becoming a CRM platform with more than 200 million potential users on its first day of launch.

LinkedIn CRM wouldn't seemingly be able to disrupt large companies' use of enterprise-wide CRM packages, but it could usher in the trend of personal CRM. Like any idea, it's fraught with potential and peril. But it's safe to say we've only just begun to see the impact of LinkedIn's steady stream of innovations, acquisitions and enhancements.  

 

 

Who Should Own Content Marketing In Your Organization?

Read enough industry opinion on content marketing, and you can start to determine each author’s professional background. If their point of view is focused on:

• Interactive: the author tends to be in digital marketing or may work with a digital agency;
• Creative: a traditional marketer might be chief storyteller, perhaps working with a creative agency;
• Editorial: the expert could come from public relations or might work with a PR agency;
• Media: someone with paid media background, who takes a media-neutral approach to building an audience or may be working with a digital agency.

Read Between the Lines
If I’d written this article just a few years ago, you could easily tell my roots are in public relations. By their name alone, my two personal blogs would confirm this assumption.

But over the last 10 years, my focus became more broadly focused in marketing. And in the last five years, I’ve witnessed content morph into a clear mix of editorial, design and development. My last four years at a media agency have further evolved my point of view.

Marketing’s True North
This experience has taught me that the focus should always be on the audience – regardless of your background. While this isn’t an epiphany or a deep thought, it’s critical to remind ourselves of this timeless rule. It tends to fade into the background when the marketing industry, inevitably, debates who in an organization should own a new practice area.

Content marketing can’t live anywhere in the building, but it does take a variety of stakeholders and skill sets to make it work. Regardless of where content marketing lives in your building, make sure the team has the skill sets needed for each phase of content marketing.

• Plan: The planning phase requires strategists with an a deep understanding of the brand and its audience as well as an appreciation of content and media.
• Publish: Publishing requires a mix of editorial, design and creative that taps technology to distribute and share the content as relevant.
• Promote: All content needs help being found. In addition to paid media expertise, analytics, search marketing and social media mindsets are required.
• Optimize: The key to sustainable success is constant, informed iteration of the entire process and the platform. A team capable of drawing insights from analytics and relevant search data is critical.

Story or Science?
Each member on a content marketing team, based on their background, will focus on the left- or right-brain aspects of content marketing. That’s understandable. The point is simply to make sure you’ve got the right mix of team skills and that the focus is, first and foremost, on the audience.

And if anyone asks who should own content marketing? The answer is: the audience.