This week’s tip is for those of you struggling to manage your brand’s social media efforts on a daily basis, and finding that the work is time consuming, and monotonous. The solution is simple, “think campaign.”

In order to see the true benefits from managing your brand’s social media pages is treat it like any other marketing or public relations campaign. Start with research and planning. Learn where your targeted publics are located, and how they are using social media. Use that knowledge to create your plan.

Next, implement your strategy and measure along the way. Follow the strategy you set forth, but don’t be afraid to change directions when needed. Stick to your brand’s voice, but don’t be afraid to change your content strategy if you’re not getting the engagement or reach you’re looking for.

Once you’re into a solid strategy you’ll find that scheduling content in advance becomes easier, and if you’re campaign is done well, you’ll begin engaging with customers in an organized fashion that’s never been possible in the past.

If you’re current social media strategy is to turn on your computer and do a few posts each day, then it’s time to start focusing on developing a plan that looks out more well into your future rather than the next 24 hours.

REVIEW:

1. Research
2. Develop A Plan
3. Implement Your Strategy
4. Stick to Your Brand’s Voice
5. Don’t Be Afraid to Change
6. Measure

It’s now been one month since my sojourn to Austin for South by Southwest Interactive. As I’ve decompressed and looked back on the experience, the importance of content for brands has become even more apparent. As I mentioned before, the most popular panels at SXSWi were all about content. Creating content for brands, journalism for brands, and utilizing online channels to publish and promote that content.

Everywhere I turned at SXSWi I saw evidence of this. Many teams had been deployed for various blogs and sites, the Austin Convention center was constantly crawling with Canon 5Ds, Flip Cameras, iPhones, and other assorted camera gear.

What some people saw as production crews, I saw as modern ENG (electronic news gathering) teams. Raidious is a content company. Owned media is our center, and quality content creation is a key element of that. Many times we deploy ENG teams to gather stories or elements of a content plan.

Wikipedia has a very broad definitely of ENG, but the core is as follows:

“It can mean anything from a lone reporter taking a single camcorder out to get a story, to an entire television crew taking a satellite truck on location to do a live report for a newscast.”

I was most excited to check out NPR’s team at Stubb’s BBQ during SXSW music. The coverage they were providing of the line up on DATE was incredible. Their team featured an entire live production crew, mutliple cameras, live HD switching, social media monitoring and promotion, and on air talent – all being broadcast and interacted with LIVE online.

Raidious has experienced a lot of success in deploying ENG teams for our clients – we’ve produced huge batches of video content to activate trade shows online, and utilitized mobile technology such as iPad to report back on events as they unfold. This can create an incredible synergy of content. This is one of they many ways we help brands shine online.

Creating content without a sound strategy is about as effective as entering into a feather throwing competition. No matter how hard you try and how sure you are you have the right methodology, everyone will still pretty much end up in the same place. Success and failure will be determined by things outside of your control.

Brands no longer simply have websites: they have an online presence. This is an important realization because at every point of that presence there is content. Even if there isn’t a company blog or a Twitter account, someone is probably writing and tweeting about them. Online, content is your product and how effective it is depends on the strategy.

Jeremy Baldwin breaks down a more holistic definition of content strategy into three parts:

• Editorial Strategy (themes and topics),
• Content Strategy (organizing and managing), and
• Content Marketing (drive conversation and engagement).

These require a cohesive group of people with different skill sets to guide and monitor the message at every point of presence. Think of your content as being the narrative of your brand. There must be a cohesive synergy between all platforms including interacting with people on social channels. There must be a consistent story or message being told at every step.

Janet Aronica has a great write-up on tracking metrics analyzing this narrative, as does our own Matt Chandler regarding Social Center. Feedback from these services will help answer the ultimate question of online content: are you giving the audience what they want? This isn’t a yes or no question. The answer must be to what degree is it effective and what can be done to make it better?

One thing that can greatly affect how far content goes is the medium by which it is presented. People can learn the same information in very different ways. If your posts aren’t seeing the traffic you think they deserve, try getting the message out in a different way. Try a short video or podcast, or turn it into a diagram. Don’t tie the message down to a single distribution method; it has to be free to move and grow through different venues.

It is a good sign that the industry as a whole is seeing how much value and time are lost when content is just thrown aimlessly around, hoping that it magically “goes viral,” and have instead embraced sound content strategy as a workflow. The more quality content being produced the better, and the better strategy there is for following and tracking the more people will learn from the bevy of knowledge being produced. This also means that the time for a comprehensive strategy is now, as more brands are implementing these ideas all the time.

I’ll be honest: I sometimes struggle with creating content dedicated to driving sales for business-to-consumer clients. Not that it isn’t fulfilling or that I don’t believe in what I’m putting out there; it’s just that finding the right voice to talk to the customer can be taxing and is particularly difficult when multiple companies are offering the same product.

For example, let’s say I’m writing for a retailer about televisions which the customer could buy from Best Buy, Target, Amazon, Walmart, and so on. It can be hard to create effective content when I’m living between two worlds.

There is one world that is the seller. They have a product or service that needs to be bought or they go out of business. They offer content as a marketing tool to reach a new breed of customer. This customer is doing research for themselves and using online content (reviews, blogs, etc.) to help make informed decisions.

The other world is that of the buyer. The buyer could be at any stage of the customer life cycle when they interact with a blog, a tweet, a status update or a video.

I really started thinking a lot about this when I wrote a recent blog post for Raidious, and I created this diagram:

Click to enlarge

That sweet spot in the middle is what I’m aiming for, producing for a customer that also takes into account the seller’s goals. But compare this to a website that isn’t as focused on driving sales but is instead solely focused on getting hits and being an authoritative voice in their field. Their content diagram would look something like this:

Click to enlarge

It seems like the deck might be stacked in their favor when it comes to creating engaging content. Their success or failure is measured in time, eyes and clicks; mine is measured in time, eyes, clicks and action/dollars. That means my content must be more focused, more engaging and more monitored to create more value because in the end we are asking for more from our customer.

In a fantastic article Are Sales Pitches Dead in the New Buyer Economy?, Tony Zambito writes that buyers are responding to four things that companies are providing online: Networking, Educator Role, Media Integration and Advisory Role. I particularly jumped on this Educator Role statement:

“…companies today must see themselves in the role of educators because buyers are expecting to learn a thing or two. And if they are not learning anything at all, well, you will have no value to them.”

Educating the audience is the key. In other words, focus on telling the buying message. Take an educational voice about the product or service you are marketing and give the buyer information that will drive them to you when they are ready to buy. Call it Brand Journalism if you want, but if you aren’t trying to educate about the brand as well then you are probably not creating content that is going to drive sales–at least not where you want them.

Educational content for brands has to be more than one call to action and a name drop hidden inside block of text that is not successful for the client.

I find myself fighting against the desire to create content like the second diagram but justifying it by throwing in a shout-out for the client as an afterthought. The problem with doing that is the content runs the risk of becoming indistinguishable from other brands selling the same product. I call this the Interchangeable Void; if your information is too generic it becomes relevant to all brands and is much less effective.

Content should be organized by a strategy that revolves around multiple customers at the same time. The customer who is in the early stages of buying is part of an audience that is scattered around multiple sites researching a lot of content from different sources at the same time. Then they begin to narrow their focus to a few sites offering specific and relevant information. Being able to produce content that fits both of these stages greatly increases the effectiveness of it in terms of end sales. If your content is too generic and interchangeable they might be using it solely as information gathering. If you are not educating the customer into the next step, you could simply be helping someone else make the sale.

You have to educate not only the product but your brand as well. What makes your brand so special? What do you offer that no one else does? These are the questions you must answer. Educating and informing across the customer life cycle is the key.

Every now and then Raidious will offer little tips and advice that will help make a powerful impact on your social media campaign. Today’s social media tip is centered around your brand’s voice.

“Voice”  is the key word here. Before you go jumping on Twitter and Facebook, posting content left and right, you need to consider exactly how you want your brand to sound to your audience. This is key to being able to create real and valuable engagements with your customers.

Remember when you’re creating content for your pages that you are speaking for the brand, and not yourself. Once you’ve got that down, your followers will be more interested in interacting with the brand they know and appreciate.

Social Center

There are many different perspectives on social media marketing. Everyone has a unique strategy, or theory when it comes to communicating your brand message online. We at Raidious are no different.

Raidious broke social media into three main categories that describe exactly what you need to be doing for a successful social media campaign.

#1. Content

At Raidious we believe that content is king regardless of the platform. Content is anything you post on your pages in order to interact with your customers. This could be a Facebook post, a tweet, photo, video, link, etc.

Developing the content strategy that works best for your brand takes time, and it requires plenty of listening. In order to know what your followers want you to talk about, you must first listen to them. Create content, and then track it using tools like Social Center. If no one is interacting with your content then try something else.

#2. Monitoring

Monitoring means listening. Put simply as possible, it’s listening to the internet. Create search terms and monitor them for mentions of your brand. This includes blogs, social, forums, news sites, etc. Any time your brand is mentioned on the internet, you should know about it.This is how you find out what is being said about your brand, whether positive or negative, in order to know how to manage your online presence.

#3. Moderation

Moderating could also be called Monitoring Plus. The whole point of social media is the ability to interact with your constituents. You create a piece of content with the goal of getting your followers to comment, like, retweet, and reply. Your ability to continue the conversation is key, so post responses to comments and thank your supporters for retweeting and being great advocates for your brand.

If you’re only doing one of these processes for your brand, then your social campaign needs some tweaking. Remember, social media is social. Engage in the conversation to create advocates.

When it comes to content strategy, you’ve heard them all before. You know, the “lines,” the “buzzwords,” that kind of stuff related to us social media nerds.

Examples?  “Content is King,” “You must be ‘engaging’ your customers,” blah, blah, blah.  As a matter of fact, I’m sure I’ve used lines like this before in my presentation of new media marketing and search engine optimization.

But the reality is that content isn’t king, and who really writes the rules of engagement anyway?

Raidious is a content builder, strategy creator–all things online in one stop. But we’ll get to that in another post. For this one, I want to focus on making … creating.

What’s really so important about creating new stuff for your brand anyway? (Great question!)

There are hundreds of thousands of brands out there. I don’t have a percentage, but I think it’s safe to guess that probably ¾ of them have websites. I mean I’ve seen hundreds of websites…some good, some bad, and some downright ugly.

Just because you have a website, doesn’t mean it’s going to get you what you want (and what you want–or should want–is brand loyalty and sales … just in case you were wondering).

A static site is not going to get that for you. What I mean by static site is one that gives you a whole lot of information. One that sells, sells, sells! But most importantly, one that never changes.  Like, “Here’s our site that we created two years ago. It’s had the exact same thing on it for two years!”

I’m not a huge SEO (search engine optimization) girl. I understand it enough to work with it, but I just don’t know the crazy google-ish science behind it.

What I do know, is that a strategy that prioritizes creating new, helpful, clear, and understandable content on a regular basis not only helps with SEO, but also helps your clients and customers.

So, yes, content creation is certainly important, but just as important as regularity. So, get out there and make, create, dominate.

If you’re in marketing, odds are good that this week’s issue of Ad Age is sitting on your desk, in your briefcase, or in your mailbox. It’s the annual Digital Issue, a special (and  widely-read) edition of Ad Age, focusing exclusively on the fast-moving world we live in every day, known as interactive / digital / web / online marketing.

Raidious put a special message in this year’s Ad Age Digital Issue: just a little reminder for all you CMOs, VPs of Marketing, Social Media Managers, eMarketing Managers, and other digital marketing junkies. Turn to page six please. Then contact us!

Thanks for visiting our new site – we have spent the last few weeks on a redesign, courtesy of our very own Brian Conradt. We changed things up a bit from our old site, because a lot of our users were telling us they had visited the site, but still were not sure exactly what we did.

It’s understandable – we are a very different company than most marketers are used to seeing. Most advertising agencies, PR firms, and digital agencies talk a lot about technology oriented stuff like email marketing, integrated campaigns, specific platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the buzzword of the century (so far) – Social Media.

We don’t use that language because we don’t think or operate like those kinds of companies. We are a content company. We take a content-centric approach to all of those tactics. If you think about it, it’s all content. Email marketing is successful not because of the technology, but because of the content. Social media is all content (what would Twitter be without the tweets?). Websites are just places to put content. Every analytics measurement you make in online marketing is a measurement of the success of the content. Technology doesn’t integrate with offline campaigns – the content does.

So why is everybody else so focused on all the technology?

It’s glamorous. It’s sexy. It’s the new-new thing. I totally understand – everyone at Raidious has a pretty high geek factor. We love this stuff, too. But none of it works without content.

With that in mind, we built a company to solve the right problem – the problem of how to create, manage, and distribute content online for brands in a platform-agnostic manner. What happens when you invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in something like MySpace, and then Facebook comes along? If you have a MySpace strategy, you’re screwed. If you have a content strategy, congratulations – you just got a brand new platform to publish your content! When your online strategy is a content-centric strategy, technology can just evolve all over the place, and it won’t matter – because no matter what the new-new thing  is or what it becomes, it will be driven by content.

We also look at social media as a content problem (which it is). We are purpose-built not just to publish content, but to monitor and moderate the dialog around it – to leverage content that other people are producing about your brand. Most importantly, we developed a culture of optimization – we measure and optimize your content to deliver ever-increasing ROI. The longer we work with you, the better your results get.

The big question is . . .  how? How do we make the content? How do we manage the dialog? How are we so different?

The answers are all here – and if you can’t find what you’re looking for, email me, and I will be happy to help. Enjoy the new site, and be sure to let us know your thoughts in the comments section!

In a study released by the Participatory Marketing Network and Pace University’s Lubin School of Business’ IDM Lab they found that Generation-Y likes social networks, but still prefers e-mail and text-messaging to communicate.

The study evaluated time spent and the communication preferences of Gen-Y consumers using e-mail, social networks,  texting, visiting (non-social-net) websites, talking on the phone, reading a magazine and watching television. Most notably, 26% of people surveyed said they wouldn’t give up e-mail or text-messaging if they could only use one of the above tools for one week. And only 9% said they wouldn’t be able to give up social networks for a week.

Chart About Generation Y's Preferences

I don’t think it is any surprise that Gen-Yer’s need their e-mail and texts (an average of 740+ sent each month), but what is interesting is when you go further in the study. The research found that the average Gen-Yer spends 33 hours a month on social networks compared to 31 hours on their e-mail. I think this highlights that social networks aren’t competing so much against communication tools as they are competing with media consumption, which means that brands need the content to compete.

Why should marketers care? Why not just plug your online budget into e-mail campaigns and mobile promos?

The study actually evaluated the interest Gen-Y has with mobile marketing promos and the interest is rather low. 59% of people studied had no interest in receiving mobile promotions.

Generation Y Interest in Mobile Promotions

Marketers get so caught up in the buzzwords of the day: Twitter, E-mail, Facebook, Corporate Blog, etc. And they think we need to be on there; we need to be doing this; but what marketers really need to do is evaluate their consumer. Go where they are and use what they are using.

If your product or service is geared to Generation-Y, then I would propose a broad mix for your online strategy. Each product and service strategy will be different because of what they offer, so I am not going to propose a specific mixture. But, mark my words, marketers that find a balance in online presence and a concrete content strategy will reap the rewards of this generation.