Yesterday I wrote a quick blog post on my personal blog called, “Keeping Social Media Going.” The basic idea was “we are all set up on Social Media, now what?” It’s a fear of many companies and something that is continually on my mind. How do we as marketers stay relevant on social media while continuing to communicate our brand message on a consistent basis without overwhelming? There is an art to walking this thin line.

The answer… create a content strategy with two components:

A Backbone Message – This is the overall brand message that we want to continually communicate to our consumers. This will become the starting point for all messaging and content throughout our social programs. This could become the “big idea” that draws consumers to engage with our company.

Campaign Specific Messaging – To keep our company relevant and exciting and to create multi-touch engagements throughout a given year, we need to create campaign specific messaging. While creating our social strategies for the year, we will need to identify these different campaigns. These could be product launches, community involvement, marketing campaigns, etc. These campaigns will likely become the big ideas that continually engage consumers. During the engagement, the consumers will then be exposed to the backbone messaging, allowing us to communicate our brand correctly during each engagement.

This combination of backbone and campaign specific messaging is vital for any social success. Too much of one or the other will sway the consumer in the wrong direction. Too much Backbone Messaging, the consumer will feel “marketed too,” which they don’t like. Too much Campaign Specific Messaging, the consumer won’t fully understand the brand message and our marketing objectives won’t be achieved.

Here’s some bullet points that I outlined in the Keeping Social Media Going post from yesterday to help with other strategies to stay relevant and engaging:

• Keep responding and answering fans, followers, friends
• Continue to share content of affinity organizations and information relevant to your brand message
• Cultivate relationships with your most loyal followers and your loudest influencers
• Build mini conversational campaigns around company milestones or important company dates
• Continue to scan the ecosystem for opportunities, discussion topics, etc.

What are your thoughts? How do you stay relevant to your consumers?

Photo courtesy of Flickr – Paul Garland

Last week I had a quick conversation on Twitter that started off with one of my random brain droppings… But the 3 sentence conversation really made me think about what is needed to be successful in social media. The tweets go like this:

Me: What does “social media” mean anymore… Isn’t it just simply using technology to communicate?

@vabike: Bike advocates’ problem isn’t web and social media skills, it’s laziness & lack of inclination to communicate

Me: @vabike I would imagine a lot of communities are like that. Then it comes down to relevant content to spark the interest to communicate.

I wanted to call out the response from @vabike… It’s not the skills but the laziness and lack of inclination to communicate. Simply tweeting or posting a Facebook message doesn’t equal communication or conversation. So the question becomes, what would give consumers, (in this case, bike advocates) the inclination to communicate with what your brand is saying online? The short answer… Relevant and entertaining content.

Insights

Scanning the interwebs for information and conversation is a crucial first step in creating this elusive relevant and entertaining content. Understanding what is being said, where its being said, who’s saying it, and how it’s said will give you context as to what is relevant to your consumer base as well as the channels used. Continually managing and monitoring the ecosystem will give you a real time updates on the sentiment shifts in the market.

Test

Knowing what information is important, relevant, exciting, educating, and entertaining for your consumer base will give you the knowledge to create engaging content and entertaining interactions. To further define the engagement level of content, we need to test messaging and content strategies, monitor the engagement, and track what happens. Getting a global view of the engagement levels of differing content provides concrete information in how to engage online and how to give your consumers inclination to communicate back.

Adapt

As with anything you monitor, test, and track we need to have the ability to adapt. The world in social media is in such an infancy stage, growing at the pace of nothing we’ve ever seen, so we have to adapt to whatever this behemoth turns into. We have to be nimble to market values and sentiments. We have to continually monitor our ecosystem and account for changes as well as our strategies.

In social media, content is king. With the amount of information available to our consumers, we have the task given to us to, not only differentiate in our product/service offerings, but also differentiate in what content we deliver, how we deliver it, and how we interact with consumers once they engage. Following the aforementioned steps will give you the foundation for success in this crazy social world.

Photo courtesy of Flickr – neonihil

We used to have an understanding. The audience would consume media and marketers would use this as a platform to deliver advertising through well-established formats, such as 30-second commercials, full-page print ads and more recently online banner ads.

The issue is that the nature of content is changing.

It is becoming more portable. This has meant that we now have more control over when, where and how they consume media.

It is fantastic in that consumers now have more choice and control over their media behavior; however, with each of these new formats the relationship between advertising and content becomes more diluted.

Examples include:
* Watching TV shows online, through TiVo, and/or through the Slingbox
* Reading news via a RSS reader, such as iGoogle
* Listening to radio online at Pandora or through podcasts on iTunes

Jonathan Handel, a digital media lawyer, does a good job of outlining what he believes to be the reason for content’s devaluation.

The fourth point he makes is that, “…most new media business models are ad-supported rather than pay per view or subscription. If there’s no cost to the user, why should consumers see the content as valuable, and if some content is free, why not all of it? True, ads impose a cost in the form of user attention, but many online ads are easily ignored, and, today, even television advertisements can be skipped using TiVo.”

I believe that over time this shift will have an ever-increasing impact on all media, not only changing the nature of how people consume media, but also changing the nature of why people create media.

Already many people who create content do not do so as a means to generate ad revenue. Those at the forefront of this movement include musicians who make more money from selling tickets to concerts than from selling albums. The media becomes a platform not to serve advertising, but to start a more engaging relationship that provides value beyond ad dollars.

This will also mean that advertisers have to find other methods to connect with consumers that go beyond the standard ad formats. Instead of working to insert their message in other’s content they will work to create their own content that is relevant to their brand and for consumers.

There are lots of great examples out there. One that stands out is inthemotherhood.com from Suave and Sprint. It delivers on the brand messaging while being entertaining.

This should be a call to all marketers to begin to look at how we can connect to consumers by being part of the conversation and not just as the ones who subsidize it.

Image Credit: quinn.anya