According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute: “the biggest challenge for corporate content producers is to actually come up with engaging content all the time”. Due to the overwhelming abundance of content out there and the imminent catching up by competitors or simply better content producers that your company who is giving the first steps, this race can feel daunting.

A great part of content marketing nowadays is a mix of compelling information, entertainment, reach, openness and a big dose of personal touch nurturing that mix you present to your audience.

No one can create 100% engaging content all the time just like no event is 100% satisfactory to everyone; neither is a get-together or any social endeavour. However, your company can take a strategic approach to connect with your target audience and support business goals. Should you aim for perfection? Yes, of course. Even if you know that along the way you will land some nice triumphs,  some average interactions and the occasional hiccup. It’s about following a strategy & also making adjustments but commiting to repetition of the core pillars (more below).

Assuming your team has got the skills to produce good content the key is that, according to the business function they represent, these individuals are fully aware of the goals and possible benefits for their business wing so that their creative process is fully in line with the direction.

Here are some ways in which your team may have the business goals present in their minds (obviously the team needs to be creative enough to avoid the hard-sell):

Sales

Ask collaborators to produce content in line with the different stages of the buying process. A blog post or video, even pictures can cater for stages such as the consideration stage, comparison stage, closing stage, etc. Think how your possible buyers think and make it easy for them to have questions answered even before they ask them. Have a look at this great article over as Social Media B2B covering more about these stages.

Purer Marketing/ Promotion

Remember about entertainment. Even if storytelling is nowadays a buzzword, it is what the community wants and engages with. Ask your content producers to abandon the hammering announcements and build your messages around stories. I am not asking you to create a sitcom (although if you can, people may like it). It’s down to internalising the story as a vehicle. Let me give you an example before I get too abstract: If you are pushing a new product, change in the company, partnership you can present it to the community in a video/ post that actually walks the viewer through how this novelty came into being. For instance, when we opened our London office we created this video in an effort to escape from the typical written announcement.

Publicity

Is your content likely to be picked and shared by authorities & influencers? For instance, is it written/ formatted in such a way that it is easy to be grabbed by an important journalist or blogger who may want to write about it? You cannot artificially generate this interest by others but you can certainly ask your content team to keep best practices in mind and also an eye on the type of content your target influencers are fond of. Then, simply be consistent. Thanks to Ivan Walsh for inspiring this thought.

Customer Service

Even though we are all in the customer services department, senior customer services people in your company should probably take the lead on content production. These experienced people should aim to cater for the different stages in your particular customer services matrix. This could come down things such as tutorials or explaining after-sales processes better.  Why not bring in storytelling to the equation and showcase how you solve specific problems or a client’s success story with your department?  See how Zendesk go about this concept. Ask your content team to also share how you make things better based on complaints (e.g. based on this backlog we have done this and that and rewarded patient clients with X).

Community Building

Caring about the people who relate to your company has always been a business function. We all know that this has been neglected for years and is now changing back to what it should be, with the help of social media and the consumers’ resonance. Ask your collaborators to listen to what the community wants (literally see what key individuals have “liked” “tweeted” or even criticized). Sense what makes them tick and take a leap to try to meet that need. The more you do it, the better you get. The more you serve them, the more room they will give you to actually present brand new inputs that they were not looking for but they like, because they come from you.

Now go and review your content strategy. Is it supporting your business functions? I know for a fact after writing this post that we have a lot to work on here too. Let’s get down to it and if you feel like, leave a quick comment below, we can all do with your great examples and thoughts

Are you proactively working on your company’s reputation online? For those of you that still ask “why should I bother?”, then answer: Is your offline company reputation important?

Last week we received a few calls and a couple of LinkedIn questions about company reputation and visibility (looks like many companies are “on a mission”)

I’m aware that many of you are still thinking, delivering when and how you’re going to use Twitter, Facebook and more importantly a company blog (phenomenal reputation management tools). Also, many of you have to even go through several stakeholders, Legal and other departments to deploy your social media presence. However, today, I’d like to share something that you can launch straight away, a no-brainer, something that shouldn’t require many approvals and also a fundamental way to leverage your company’s visibility and reputation. That’s a LinkedIn company page.

I would have assumed many professionals were on board but turns out only a small percentage of companies are taking advantage of this valuable resource.

Why is a LinkedIn company page so important?

First, answer this: what does your business offer and what are people saying about it? The majority of companies would probably have to spend some good time collecting testimonials here and there to finally deliver… by email? A LinkedIn company page portrays all that powerful information in one shot (one page) and it’s available to anyone in the world that wants to check out how good you are, even while you sleep
LinkedIn is also a strong business network with more than 80 million professionals so the chances that people will visit your personal profile and your company’s, is very likely.

The “Services” tab is one of the hottest additions.  You can load products and services and have your clients leave a recommendation (social proof). In order for this to work, you must proactively ask your customers to endorse your company. If you don’t make it simple for them (provide link), it won’t happen magically.

An opportunity for people to get closer

You can also “Follow” a company on Linekdin. This means that every time there’s a new member in the team, a new opening or people leaving, this information makes it to the LinkedIn news stream and via email reaching hundreds or thousands of business professionals.

3 important bonuses

On the upper right, there’s a useful call-to-action for people that want to learn more and get in touch!
Also, every single tab of your LinkedIn Company page has a spot for you to include a video. This is fabulous since it provides a much deeper taste for your audience. Videos are proven to be super effective tools to educate your community and help them make a decision.

Finally, you avail of free page analytics. All graphics compare your company’s numbers against similar companies.

What’s your experience with LinkedIn pages? Will you set up yours?

While eating there last Sunday, I came up with some ideas on how could the brand take a huge step, using social networks. I also checked their website and, to my surprise, I realised that they are not using social media yet. So, what’s the big deal?

Let’s start first by having a look at their current situation:

• The website looks OK but it’s not integrated with social tools
• They have recently released a cool iPhone app
• Only a few Wagamama restaurants in Australia and New Zealand are trying Twitter
• There’s a Wagamama Facebook page with over 30,000 fans. Believe it or not, that’s abandoned. They only made one post back in March 2008

Here we go with some cool ideas…

The food

You can tell that people have fun when they eat there. Wagamama’s food is at the centre of the story, however, those of you that went to the restaurant will realise that they have sort of an open kitchen where you see all the cooks performing their art.

My first question was: why does this brand not have a YouTube channel? So the idea consists on placing a few flat screens above the kitchen bar and show live all the cool stuff that’s going on in the Woks. Also, I was impressed to see all the videos that customers shoot inside the restaurant!

The staff

There’s no doubt that the cooks and waiting staff are heroes in this play. You have to see the orchestration and great service that these folks deliver. So far they are not being featured but they could make into the YouTube channel and FlickR photo album of the brand in the following way:

• Cooks can present daily of weekly, the “dish of the day” and show how they look to drive more people insane about Asian food.
• Waiters can introduce themselves and feature some team-building activities (I perceive a great team spirit when I’m there)
• Why not having a cook and waiter/tress of the month and feature them like a movie star?
• Cooks can do short videos featuring themselves as well and include the links on the Wagamama Cookbook!

The conversation

There’s a lot going on here that the brand is not capitalising on. It’s very simple to spot great conversation and loads of compliments in platforms such as Twitter and Facebook (Go to their search bars and type the word “Wagamama”). Is it worth as a brand to talk with your audience? You bet.

The Placemats

First thing you see when you sit at the table are this paper place-mats. Also, waiters your them to write down your dish numbers. As you see there’s no signs of social media here so the idea would be to invite their audience to engage and participate. For example they could include all special offers/dishes of the week and include a hashtag to each so people can spread the word about it and later on would be a lot simpler to track it. Hashtags are great to spark conversations. They generate a lot of curiosity sometimes.

The location

This is an obvious one, however, Wagamama are not using geolocation either. By embracing Facebook Places (especially now that Facebook are testing Popular Places) and at least Foursquare they could really connect with those checking-in ( real time as well) and why not offer special deals. My idea was to include a screen dedicated to check-ins and see them all coming as a waterfall.

These are some simple ideas that came to my head in a 25-minute lunch. Imagine all the great ideas that Wagamama customers could come up with in general… Huge opportunity for the brand.

What ideas would you add?

09/11/10 Update: It’s nice to see that this blog post took Wagamama’s conversation to the peak of the month

1. The Marketing / Communications Department think that they need to do something about it.
2. During the next product launch they do everything the same.
3. At final stages they start wondering “how can they incorporate social media” to get more exposure.
4. Many of them waste even more time trying to get this “social media thing” approved by Legal or other departments before it can go live.

Does it sound familiar?

Some of you might know by now that this approach will simply not work at all, especially when social media is seen as a pure “advertising platform”.

I was reading yesterday an interview by Jesse Stanchak on social media strategy with Scott Monty (Head of Social Media, Ford Motors). He said:

“We start thinking about product launches and shows like this, that it’s baked in from the beginning. It’s not an afterthought, where you get the rubber stamp, “what are we doing for social media?” kind of thing”

This is one HUGE reason why companies like Ford are very successful spreading the word cleverly in social networks. Without this approach, it doesn’t matter if you have a big budget, your company would be wasting most of it (if not all).

If your business is getting ready to implement social media, make sure of the following:

Be open and patient

Don’t think about the Marketing or Communications Department only. There are more people within the company that will be more than happy to participate and share their creativity and social media ideas.
Also, don’t get discouraged if not everybody cooperates with the idea. One of the biggest obstacles for companies approaching social media are lack of knowledge and company culture.

Act creatively

Besides all the obvious points like having a goal, defined metrics, expectations… have a proper creative round with the team you put together for this project (maybe product launch). You will notice that this step will make a significant difference. Not all the ideas will make but you will nurture a good pipeline.
If anybody says: “I don’t have any good ideas”, answer, “tell me all the bad ones you have then”, as Seth Godin would say.

Think social

What is that same answer you deliver to clients everyday? What is your customers/prospects’ best topic/product? The answers to these questions would represent clearly “something of interest” and could be converted into “hot content“. In other words, if you are delivering that same daily answer to one person at a time by email, only one person at a time can benefit. Versus, you do a quick, creative (could be a screencast) blog post, or video of yourself/team explaining the solution and thousands of people will benefit and what’s best: more people will know that you exist
The majority of companies work very hard everyday to keep private what should be public.

Get found!

Once you incorporate the idea of social media from the very beginning, your team or Department will realise that is a lot simpler to think in terms “making quality pieces of content” (breadcrumbs) to be shared regularly (blog post, video, presentation, pictures, etc). Focus con leaving as many of these. Ensure to be there to talk with the people that will start feeling identified with your brand and content.

What’s your experience? What would you add?

For example,  a few days days ago, singer John Mayer decided to quit his Twitter account, leaving more than 3.7 million followers behind. Why? Apparently, the PR folks decided to use this platform to promote the latest tour only.
So, was this a wrong move? Sure was.

John Mayer carries a brand, like any other company. It doesn’t matter if you have a thousand, 100 thousand or a million followers. These are real people that took the time to connect with your brand, many of them in a deeper way that you could probably know or measure. So, if your boss or the PR team decide to pull the plug on a relevant platform that connects with your audience, you might want to think it again.

We decided to follow the progress of all the comments worldwide with our brand monitoring software. We were very curious to know if people would take it easy or would get very emotional about Mr. Mayer quitting Twitter.

Check out first where the conversations took place:

The other exciting graph to explore was “Sentiment“. Naturally, the majority of mentions have neutral sentiment since it’s just people spreading the word without making comments, necessarily about how they feel. However, when we drilled down to the negative Vs positive comments, we found that most of them were negative:

What kind of negative comments? Here are some.

Conclusion

When using platforms to communicate / engage with your audience, you’ll discover pretty soon that it’s not about the tool any more but about the people that communicate with you. If you treat any of these social networks as “disposable marketing / PR initiatives” to satisfy metrics, you’ll be incredibly missing the point.
Think it this way: If you have a direct phone line that your audience uses every day to talk to you, share their thoughts, feedback, give you business, etc… Why would you get rid of it?

A few years ago, Coca Cola received a call from Facebook saying that a page with the name of their brand had over 1 million fans. Many PR departments would have said: “It’s not official, we didn’t authorise it, shut it down”. What did they do? They took over the page and immediately joined all those folks that chose that specific platform to communicate with them.

Would you ever think about quitting Twitter or any other social network? Any exceptions? Share your comments below!

Best
Fred

The following are two recent examples that immediately sparked in my head a cool bunch of social media ideas for business:

Formal Menswear

Two weeks ago, I was looking for a nice suit for my wedding. Since I did not have a strong refference about where to go, I googled a few good spots to visit. First thing I realised is  how bad all the websites in this trade where. It took me a bit but finally got a nice deal. Over there, the manager told me that they had a lot of their suits & tuxes over at a trade event that day…

Here’re three ideas on how to make your formal menswear business different (and better):

1. The LIVE experience:  That day, the shop and the stand over at the trade show where very busy. Get two webcams and broadcast LIVE what’s going on in both places! Anyone coming in the shop will know that your company is “busy” doing business at an important event (They may even go there to see more!). Over at the trade show, then can see that your shop is “real”.
2. Build an offline database: Provide the option for people walking in the shop to leave their details (email, Twitter, Facebook) to stay in touch, share great offers and build your online community almost effortless! With this strategy, you’ll realise that a big percentage of your online community are people that have visited your shop already! That is priceless.
3. How do I look? After trying different suits, do we remember how all of them looked?  The simplest way to go about that is to take a few pictures (anyone has a digital camera these days!) and share them later with the prospect/customer. Even further: with the customer’s authorisation, you could share those pics (LIVE would be more interesting) and ask your community which one looked better. This task, could be easily done immediately with a multimedia mobile, uploading content instantly. Many companies struggle to come up with good content. This would take a bit of time (or almost no time from a mobile) and you would be pumping fresh, engaging content everyday to Twitter and your Facebook page!
   You can also go the pro-way with Nedap machines in your store to share how you look

The barber shop

I recently got a voucher for an old style, hot towel shave. Besides mentioning the obvious: it was fantastic!! I walked out of the shop thinking… “there’re so many simple things that could be done”.

Here’re four ideas on how to make your barber shop different (and better):

1. Build an offline database: Same as the previous example, collect email, Twitter and/or Facebook contacat details. Again, this is one of the easiest ways to strongly develop your community.
2. How do I look? Why not taking  “before” and “after” photos? and sending then by email/twitter/Facebook  with a nice template to your customers? I guarantee you, you’ll get a smile/laugh out of them and very likely, they’ll share it with their friends, colleagues and family. More people than now, will know your barber shop Also, if you take these pics with a multimedia mobile, the effort is almost “zero” and with your customer’s permission, you can share those before/after pics on social networks. I bet you’ll spark some conversations…
3. Making the slow day, a BIG day: In every shop, there’s a slow day during the week. Here’s the idea: Choose a good topic. A very simple, attractive and interesting one… those that you have with customers while you cut their hair!! Then, invite someone that could really add value to that topic and then, record a 30 minute chat with your customer (with permission of course) while cutting the hair. If you want to video-record it, even better!!! (people can get a taste also of what your shop looks like) You will be creating a series of weekly podcasts “…at the barber”.  Not only this approach will make your business unique, it also holds a cool story that could be interesting for great PR!
4. Share the experience: If your barber shop is already different by offering hot towel shaves for instance, how can you share this story so more people come by or folks like me, feel curious and go for a treat?
   Use the email database and your community on Twitter and Facebook to share pics of your shop in action! Again, with customers’ permission, get those before/after pics up there, share the series of weekly podcast and invite your customers to bring a photo or video camera,  in case they want to keep a record of the luxurious treat You will come accross these people…. Have a look

In the following weeks we’ll create a Wiki with social media marketing ideas by business category in which all you can share yours!! Stand by.

In the meantime, what do you think about the above ideas? What would you include?

Best,

Fred

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We’d like to share with you an overview of our 2010 social media strategy. It’s a good opportunity to help you start with your own plan, give you some ideas or at least point you in the right direction
We are absolutely open to suggestions so remember to leave your comment at the end of the post!!

Blogging

Focus: Build authority / Expand community /  Increase US & UK readership / spark conversations / *Networking / Improve search engine rankings

* This year we’ll choose to read and comment on 10 blogs: 5 will be to follow trends and stay up to date, the other 5 will be strictly for business networking.

Blog topics (Tip: Define categories first)

Reviews, Video tips, Internet marketing, Social media

Blog’s ideas sandbox:

Ask on LinkedIn Q&A, Read other blogs (listen)/ reblog, Reviews (books, events, apps, etc), Web trends/ Search / video tips

Characteristics

• Frequency: Twice a week
• Posts must offer value
• Must include images and/or video
• Time allocated per post (research, writing, marketing) = 2 to 3 hours

Blog post Marketing

• Include relevant trackbacks in the post
• Send tweets throughout the week to promote the content
• Bookmark: delicious.com, bookmarks.yahoo.com, stumbleupon.com
• Submit post to: Bizsugar.com, Digg.com and Reddit.com
• Send post only to relevant LinkedIn groups and “follow” articles (this way you’ll be notified if someone makes a comment so you can follow up)
• Submit blog feed to 5/10 RSS news feeds weekly

Video & Photo content

Photos will be uploaded to FlickR and Facebook (automatic to Twitter).
Videos will be uploaded to You Tube / Tube Mogul, then Facebook (automatic to Twitter).

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

Facebook

Focus: Share engaging photo and video content / Build authority / Expand community /  Increase US & UK fans/ multiply interactions / Networking / Company-Industry communications

Building the community

• Friend relevant contacts from Twitter and LinkedIn (profile)
• Pump good photo and video content
• Listen: reply to any question or comment ASAP. Keep the conversation
• Interact: Make comments / “like” status updates
• Facebook ads campaign: targeted to people in marketing and communications

Time allocated: 4 to 6 hours weekly

Twitter

Focus: Share helpful-engaging links / Listen to random and selected conversations / Build authority / Expand US & UK community/ increase conversations / Networking / Company-Industry communications

Building the community

• Follow contacts from LinkedIn
• Follow back relevant contacts
• Follow people especially traditional marketing and communications
• Proactively do Q&A
• Chit-chat
• Share GOOD stuff! try to always include a link to good content

Time allocated: 6 to 8 hours weekly

LinkedIn

Focus: Share helpful-engaging status updates / Build authority / Expand US & UK network/ increase group interactions / Business networking / Company-Industry communications / Increase business opportunities

Building the community

• Follow contacts also on Twitter
• Join US/UK strategic groups
• Send blog posts only to relevant groups and “follow” the article.
• Read groups’ digest and engage in relevant threads.
• LinkedIn Q&A: offer value answering selected questions. Ask industry questions also.
• Keep personal/business information and LinkedIn apps on profile up to date.

Time allocated: 6 to 8 hours weekly

Email Marketing

Focus: Share helpful-engaging content/ Build authority / Expand US & UK awareness/ increase business opportunities / Company-Industry communications / webinars main promotional tool

• Platform: Mailchimp
• Grow email database using website, webinars and offline networking.
• Segment database!!! (don’t send every single person the same information!)
• Newsletter will contain three topics: best blog post/s, Great tips or social media case study and invitation to monthly webinar
• Frequency: Once a month

Time allocated: 5 to 10 hours monthly (depending on the campaign)

Have you found the strategy useful? Go ahead, and share below what worked for you last year or how can this strategy be improved!!

Best,

Fred

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