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.

3 Lessons Brands Can Learn From Facebook Manipulating Consumers

Facebook  research has found that the emotions of others on your news feed can affect your mood. The social network did not inform users their news feeds were being manipulated as part of this study. And users are expressing outrage over the study's ethics.

Should Facebook have done things differently? Are the outraged consumers justified in their ire? To borrow a famous, and vague, Facebook relationship status: "it's complicated." But this news does hold lessons for brands.

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

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.

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.

Vine's Foes, & Most Fans, Are Missing the Point

Less than 10 days after it's debut, news about the Vine app is a lot like Super Bowl pre-game commentary. We've got so-called experts everywhere weighing in on who will win and who will lose. Whether you like Vine, hate it or couldn't care less whether it thrives or withers, I'm willing to bet you're missing the point of this app.

It's not about a shiny new social toy. It's not about the increasing popularity of snack-sized content, social video or the recent resurgence of the gif.

It's all about Twitter.

Twitter Tool First, Video Platform Second
Vine extends Twitter's utility, giving users another reason to make the 140-character platform their social destination of choice. That's a big deal for Twitter, making it a more desirable ad platform for brands. Some suggest that Vine is as important to Twitter as YouTube was to Google.

And I'm willing to bet that a Venn diagram of Twitter and Vine users would show most of Vine's circle overlapping with Twitter's (much larger) circle. Vine's generated a lot of conversation on Twitter over the last seven days, racking up more than 26,000 mentions each day.

One reason Vine's generating buzz and is a top download on iTunes is because Twitter owns the app and promoted Vine on it's blog. Social video isn't a new concept. But Twitter's promotion was the rough equivalent of the Oprah Book Club, driving more downloads, more quickly, than the app could have achieved on its own. Brands as varied as Gap, CNN, Jo-Ann Stores and others are already playing with Vine's stop-action video snippets.

Controversy = Sign of Success
Unfortunately, pornography was being posted on Vine seemingly hours after the launch. Vine responded quickly, after a brief stumble. But I'm wondering if such an early attempt to exploit the platform is more a sign of its potential than of its potential issues. Either way, you can assume the app will be tweaked on an ongoing basis to deal with its issues.

Bottom Line?
Despite my opinion of Vine, the decision to tap this  shiny new app for your marketing efforts comes down to a few simple questions:

• Is your audience using Vine?
• Is your audience using Twitter?
• Does Vine allow you to reach them more effectively?

If Vine, or another other shiny new tool, doesn't help a brand more effectively connect with consumers? It's just noise.


 Related Articles
Vine's Potential & Problems - Nieman Journalism Labs' take on Vine's news impact.
Seven Places to Watch Videos on Vine, Even if You Don't Have the App - FastCompany points to several sites that have already sprung up to serve up Vine content on the web.
Vine: The New Twitter or Chatroulette? Salon walks through the pros and cons of the app, including its connection to the popular gif movement.

Instagram vs. Vine .gif via Laughing Squid

Tips for Brands on Instagram

Instagram changed its terms of service earlier this week, unleashing a vocal and fast-emerging online protest. For brands, the “Instadrama” raises a more important question. As brands and their loyal consumers become invested in free online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, what should brands do as these platforms evolve into a business? How brands react to things like a "controversial" terms of service change can have broader implications, including how consumers perceive the brand.

Rules of Disengagement?
Much like the “rules of engagement” many social media teams craft when it comes to responding to negative comments online, perhaps brands should consider “rules of platform disengagement.” At a minimum, the following tips should help prevent any rash decisions and, more importantly, it can help ensure a brand’s investment in a platform is not lost.

For more of this article, visit Media Is Power.

3 Tips to Pwn Storify

Storify’s new site design makes it easier to find relevant content on the site. As part of the more cosmetic changes to the site, Storify also became the latest social platform to add landscape header photos to its users’ profiles.

The changes might also be designed to make Storify less of a distribution tool and more of a destination platform. A quick review of active users shows that few have updated their profiles to capitalize on the new header design. It’s a telling sign that more Storify users tap the social curation tool through content management platforms instead of through the site

I've been playing with Storify to curate content for posts. It's a great tool -- one I'll bet you're either not using, or not using to its full potential. Regardless of your Storify-savvy, here are three tips to help you pwn Storify.

1) Curate Cross-Platform Content
Storify is used by most to capture Twitter conversations. The ability to pull in tweets on a certain topic, before they vanish from Twitter’s short-term memory, to select and then organize the best ones into a story is certainly an example of where Storify shines.

But Storify allows you to pull in content from several platforms including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr. You can also pull in direct URLs to easily add content. In an age of distributed storytelling, the need to pull in content from across multiple platforms is important.

One example of using Storify to contain a fast-emerging, distributed story is the #SignalPG Storify I built. It’s based on the Signal event held at Procter & Gamble earlier this year. Storify made it simple to curate content from Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to give a brief event overview of the event.

2) Get Creative With Curation (like Moleskine, Lego & MIT)
And while Storify is typically used to capture temporary moments, like Twitter chats or events, it can be used for projects with longer timelines as well. For a recent product launch, Moleskine tapped Storify to create an online clip book. In addition to news, the brand captured consumer conversation for an even more potent compilation of buzz emanating from the co-branded product launch.

The ability to organize all of the conversation, add context and then embed it anywhere reminds us of Storify’s utility. Creativity is the only limitation as to where and how it can be used. This behind the scenes tour of MIT’s Media Lab. Is a great example of using Storify to give your audience access to something they can’t get elsewhere. And you’re not limited to one platform in doing so.

3) Become a Power User
This post assumes most users start and stop their use of Storify with Twitter chats. But there are a variety of ways to get more out of the site.

• Plug-In: Using Storify as a browser plug-in is not just more convenient and efficient, it makes for a much smoother embed, including eliminating duplicate titles between your blog post and the curated story.
• Research: If you’re using Storify just to curate and distribute your own content, keep in mind a variety of brands and media outlets use it. The end result is an untapped platform for informal research on a variety of topics.
• Miscellany: From tapping into each story’s analytics to clicking “View All” on a user’s profile to see all of their stories, there are a few basic steps worth remembering. More basic steps are included in "Getting Started.” This story is automatically generated for every profile and worth walking through. And while you’re at it, if you have a profile on the site, update your header photo!

Other Brands Crushing It On Storify
We’ve seen a broad variety of brands demonstrating how Storify can help content marketing efforts. Here are a few that stand out in addition to the ones highlighted above.

• Vanderbilt: The Vanderbilt news room curates tweets and Instagram pics into a weekly buzz roundup to engage students and other university fans while creating promotional content.
• General Electric: In addition to covering its own news stories, it uses Storify to get more long-term use out of its more evergreen event content.
• Smashing Pumpkins: In addition to increasing fan engagement with Twitter Chats, the socially active band memorializes the content with Storify and even used Storify to leverage a fan photo challenge for their latest album release.

If you’re curating content and not using Storify, it’s a free tool worth checking out. As the above shows, it’s becoming a go to for brands, journalists and content marketers.