Thanks to the crew at Simply Business for this handy reference. It’s also a great example of content marketing ..multiple links all wrapped up in an attractive infographic.. relevant, useful and highly shareable….nice..click on the infographic.
Click image to open interactive version (via Simply Business).
Yes content marketing buzzwords abound and every second blog or newsletter tells you how it important it is. What I wanted to share was the need to develop your promotional strategy through various social channels and networks.
In any given network, brands can invest in digital assets that span five media landscapes:
1. Paid: Digital advertising, banners, adwords, overlays
2. Owned: Created assets, custom content
3. Earned: favourable publicity ,Brand-related conversations and user-generated content
4: Promoted: in-stream or social paid promotions vehicles (e.g. Twitter’s Promoted products and Facebook’s Sponsored Stories)
5. Shared: Open platforms or communities where customers co-create and collaborate with brands.
I’ve always been a fan of Jeremiah Owyang and keenly followed every piece of research that the Altimeter team publish. This keynote presentation to 2000 marketers in SF on how marketers must adopt Converged Media (Paid+Owned+Earned) is timely.
The fabulously relevant content that you are producing for your audience needs a strategy to be seen across the different media landscapes yet this report shows that that 47 percent of companies have yet to launch a converged media campaign. I would bet that figure would be much higher in our APAC marketplace.
Here’s the workflow a company needs to create converged media:
Perform research into what customers have already said, the content that has generated the most interest and even what competitors do.
Develop a communications plan but be sure to include components of what your customers say.
Example – An ad (paid media) for Windows 7 featured pieces of earned media. It showed that 92 percent of students would recommend Windows 7 and had an option to view customer reviews.
Integrate your content. For example, find the best performing social media content and include aspects of that into your other marketing efforts.
Use various parts of your staff—such as experts, product teams and executives—to interact with customers and prospects and turn them into advocates and influencers to spread the word.
Example – The Original Runner Company asked its 2,000 Twitter followers for feedback before launching a new color aisle runner. Ten percent of the five-person company’s followers engaged and selected a hot pink runner.
Take the owned and earned media and make it more visible by using it in paid media. For example, gather quotes from customers and use that in your advertisement.
Example – Sharpie recently let its fans do the copywriting and converged earned and paid media. They retweeted and promoted some of the best writing-related tweets. The campaign helped Sharpie increase its new daily followers sixfold.
Converged media is a cycle that can last an hour or a month depending on your brand. Repeat the process over and over to keep producing new pieces of converged media.
(Note: During each phase of the workflow, brands should monitor and record how well things are working. Repeat what works best and adjust weak areas.)
Click image to open interactive version (via Simply Business).
The weather in Sydney last Saturday was atrocious so I chose to bunker down and work. I was immediately drawn to the unfolding drama in Boston as the second suspect was being tracked down.
I started following @Boston_Police and the hashtag #manhunt along with my normal Twitter stream, where many American tweeps were also following the story.
It wasn’t long before people who lived in the area located the boat in the backyard via the web and published pictures via Twitter. I followed Jeremiah Owyang’s tweet to a web link where you could listen to the real-time conversation via the police scanner. It was surreal… listening to the police talk about the fact that they were being listened to and discussing the need to go off air to another channel.
Given all that could go wrong….would the suspect be taken alive ? are there more explosive devices? ..the tension was palpable…it was an amazing experience to be watching and listening in real time.
Every other news story that day was an anticlimax..it was over and the people of Boston celebrated with a collective sigh of relief.
And it’s not just Twitter, the web is the major news platform. Think about the live streaming from the police scanner.
‘Ustream was created six years ago to help bridge the gap between the physical and virtual live experience, and we take pride in our ability to connect people to the things they value most. We highly value Internet freedom, and we’ve seen impactful citizen journalists utilize our platform throughout the years. Yesterday’s events were quite the validation of how things have quickly evolved — consumers crave instant gratification and social media has given them access and insight unlike ever before.’
For some time the wrong people were being named as Boston terror suspects, complete with photographs and bios.
When the right suspects were eventually identified they were incorrectly linked to a mosque that had nothing to do with them.
The need to wait for official confirmation is paramount. Trial by the media ..be it social or any other kind, should never be an option.
The possible scenarios resulting from mistaken identity and false accusations are too scary to contemplate.
‘ The fact is that surveillance cameras helped the FBI solve this complicated crime and allowed the city of Boston to live in peace’
As the drama was unfolding on Twitter it became painfully obvious just who had automated their tweets and wasn’t paying attention. Don’t get me wrong I start most mornings with a review of my ‘information stream’ and I’ll schedule tweets for the day via Hootsuite…difference is that I remain tuned to what’s happening throughout the day.
If a crisis is breaking, especially in your own country, you should guess that it will dominate the conversation and so be sure adjust your social media management accordingly.
Don’t try and sell anyone, anything, in the middle of a crisis…seems obvious.
Yet again I’m gobsmacked by the American attitude towards gun ownership. What are 26 and 19 year old students doing with an ‘arsenal’ of automatic weapons? This comes right on the back of the recent Senate decision …what will it take ?
‘The US Senate blocked bipartisan legislation aimed at tightening restrictions on the sale of firearms, a huge defeat for President Barack Obama and a rejection of personal pleas by families of the victims of last winter’s mass elementary school shooting in Connecticut.’
Obama accused the powerful gun lobby in the United States of “willfully”lying in order to doom the measure.’
To add some satire to this otherwise bleak story, if you haven’t already done so.. watch Daily Show contributor John Oliver’s trip Down Under.
…. IMHO the best thing John Howard ever did! (vid link)
Well it’s always nice when a report comes out that aligns with the advice that you’ve been giving to clients.
‘Although Twitter is currently the number one B2B social platform, respondents expect to see Google+ treble its relevance, from only nine per cent to 29 per cent within 12 months, placing the site just behind Facebook.
B2B marketers also expect to see a shift away from the popular social platforms, towards more content focused networks, over the next 12 months.
The report revealed that while the usefulness of leading platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn, are set to decline, Google+ and content focused platforms such as Pinterest and SlideShare is set to grow.’
Yes, Pinterest is growing though it has an 80% female skew and whilst Twitter and LinkedIn might decline they will remain powerful platforms. My own guess is that Facebook will be impacted the most …for all the reasons I’ve outlined before…privacy concerns, constant and confusing change and data ownership. Where is your audience active?
Remember..engaging your community in the space that you control has never been more important.
1. It’s the website that you own.
2. It’s your domain name.
3. It’s your content that you’ve developed for your audience.
4. It’s the relationships you build in the discussion forum that you moderate on your site
5. It’s the data you collect about your community that you treat with respect
For an overview of the full report download the B2B Marketing Social Media Benchmarking Report 2013 key findings document.
Guess who’s coming to dinner? I don’t think so.
If you haven’t thought about your audience and worked out how you will engage them with content that resonates you will most likely fail….persona development is a must.
How many courses? Blog post, whitepaper, infographic, video, webinar ?
Have you done an audit of your own pantry?
The amount of content that you might already have can be surprising…maybe you can re-purpose that case history or whitepaper,or find some historical information worth sharing.
If the cupboard is bare…remember the quality factor…a crappy meal is as memorable as a great one… though for entirely different reasons of course.
Can you handle the content kitchen alone or do you need help?
Do you have employees or other stakeholders who can contribute? Do you need to outsource?
If you are flying solo who will taste-test your content before you present it ?
4. What will make the chef happy?
What do reactions do you want from your guests?
How will you define success?
Rave reviews..Downloads..Sign ups…Follows….Shares….Clicks ?
You have to engage a process so that the next meal will be even better.
I remember when Google launched Knowledge Graph back in May 2012. Some of my clients (well one in particular) were dismissive and believed that their offshore SEO deal ( read..key word stuffing and dodgy back links) was the way to go.
Oh my, how times have changed….some sobering stats:
Semantic search and the Knowledge Graph were also code for Google’s war on the old black hat SEO brigade.
That’s no secret.
Google rel=”author” was launched towards the end of 2011 and it’s been fascinating to watch it grow in importance as part of the Knowledge Graph strategy.
It really is time to rethink your SEO strategy and develop a Google strategy. Google authorship tags have become an essential tool for anyone who wants to get noticed/increase their SERP’s
Building a strong, credible and Google authenticated social profile will impact your ranking and visibility on the net.
Here’s an overview from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam Team in an interview with Brady Forrest, Technical Evangelist at O’Reilly Media about annotating the web, search, rel=”author”, HTML5 markup and fitness gadgetry.
Google needs to complete a circuit of verified trust between it and an author’s published content.
For you to participate in this program, you need to have two things:
Here’s a handy and definitive ‘how to’ from Search Engine Land and be sure to bookmark and visit the Google Webmaster Tools page for any updates.
A Mumbrella article caught my attention this week and for me it highlighted what I see as the battle for digital ‘ownership’ between AD agencies and PR companies.
‘The chief marketing officer of CommBank has warned the public relations industry that it is going to blow the opportunity of seizing control of the agenda from other parts of the communications world.
“Any CMO worth their salt is willing to pour heaps and heaps of dollars into PR and PR programs because they are super effective and super efficient,” he said.
“(But) I think that the biggest threat facing the PR industry is that it doesn’t get off its arse and seize this point in time you have right now.”
“This is a really unique opportunity for PR about once every ten years, you had it at the start of the internet and you blew that one and you’re going to blow this one as well at the current rate of performance.”
“You have to seize the creative agenda and place the emphasis on creative and strategy and forget silly words like ‘reputation management’ and things that don’t mean anything to CMOs.”
“This is about building brands and selling products so walk through the door and say I’ve got a better way to build brands and sell products and it’s called PR and this is what it looks like.”
Adage named Edelman one of the best agencies of the decade….
‘Whether it’s through the use of traditional PR tactics or the development and implementation of digital, blogger and social-media programs, the agency continually breaks new ground in the world of communications and has redefined the role PR agencies are playing in the marketing mix.’
Digital adoption and social media have been the game changers that have required pr and advertising agencies to get with the program or face irrelevance.
As a consultant who doesn’t have to feed a large overhead, I can afford to be objective.
My point is that it doesn’t matter what ‘discipline’ you’ve come from.
‘A sound digital strategy is based on:
1. identifying the opportunities and/or challenges in a business where online assets can provide a solution;
2. identifying the unmet needs and goals of the customers that most closely align with those key business opportunities and/or challenges
3. developing a vision around how the online assets will fulfill those business and customer needs, goals, opportunities and challenges
4. prioritizing a set of online initiatives which can deliver on this vision
Within each of these stages, a number of techniques and analyses may be employed.’
In this dynamic environment no specific discipline can really claim ownership of this process…it’s simply about how well you deliver to meet your clients business objectives.
The firm Monaghan Helms, InkHouse Media + Marketing, released an infographic a couple of days ago that compares PR then versus PR now. It’s a bit of fun, take a look:
I don’t really change my web habits that much over the weekend and I’m happy to be (mostly) always connected. I even have a totally waterproof case for my iPhone so I can take it out paddling in the ocean as a safety precaution (and maybe for a couple of instagrams.)
This Google infographic illustrates just how entrenched mobile devices have become in Australia in an amazingly short time span.
“We’re checking the weather on our phones before we’re even out of bed on Saturday morning.
Then we get chores out of the way: online banking, and booking travel.
Early Saturday afternoons are dedicated to sport on our smartphones just as in our regular lives, and as our stomachs rumble in the evenings, we get out our smartphone to search for restaurants and make bookings.
The late afternoon Sunday shopping expedition on foot is preceded by a mobile search spree for hot deals, and there’s a new Sunday night ritual in Australia; checking our social media profiles from the comfort of the sofa or bed.’
A recent Google study conducted with IPSOS Media CT shows that:
I love what Google Analytics does (for free) and I love the way they understand that it’s smart business to keep advertising out of their social stream at Google+.
And here’s another Google thing I love which is also a free offering for the common good!
In recent months we’ve seen hacking attempts on Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Evernote, the ABC,The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal as well as many financial institutions and governments.
Yesterday Google launched its new “Help for Hacked Sites” series to teach webmasters how to avoid getting hacked in the first place – and how to recover their sites if it happens.
The first part of the series is geared toward relatively non-technical users, while the later part is aimed at users who can read code and are comfortable with using terminal commands.
To avoid ever needing this resource yourself, please implement a security and maintenance plan for your site if you haven’t already.
Steve MacAlpine - constant learner. Always sharing things that I find interesting about the brand and digital space.
