PR, Social Media and Content: Talk Different. Got It?
I presented a few thoughts on PR, Social Media and Content to a bunch of folks from banks, retail and the public sector last week… and thought it might be a good idea to share the slides. It was an interesting session because the response from the room helped to refine some of our recent thinking and learnings here at C&M.
Much of what we’re doing is evolving, but quite a lot remains the same. As our name suggests we think that content is key. In fact 99% of what we do revolves around good old fashioned ideas of content marketing. The difference is that we’re trying to help our clients to do (better) content with a small ‘c’, not a capital ‘C.’
This may sound trivial but it’s not. We work hard to dissuade folks from building another microsite, and we like to encourage them to sit in front of a browser (and a bunch of Google tools) rather than in all day creative brainstorm sessions.
Fact is, Marketing (capital ‘M’) isn’t very comfortable with Social. This is because Social isn’t really Media at all. Twitter, Facebook & Co are just a set of tools that help people to quickly publish opinions, stories and interactions on a free (as in ‘free beer’) basis. They don’t lend themselves well to display advertising principles.
In other words, we spend lots of time helping folks to stop doing Marketing and start doing some talking.
Now this isn’t rocket science, but it does require a slightly different approach. We suggest firms get out of ‘Deliverables’ mode (capital ‘D’) and into story/conversation mode. In the process, like them to get happy with talking directly to customers/partners/prospects/etc. In fact this is a prerequisite (think Twitter).
This in itself is a different discipline to Marketing or Press Relations. It’s a communications effort… which may (or may not) be owned solely by marketing people. I won’t dive into marketing integration issues here, but it’s worth noting that as a day-to-day comms discipline, Social doesn’t really work as an exercise in approval processes, creative reviews and grandstand launches. Like a dog, it’s for life – not just Xmas. Besides, when was the last time a sales or support call required an upward approval cycle at your firm?
Here’s a nice (Ad Age) quote I found to illustrate the theme. It’s from Rick Web (great name : ) of The Barbarian Group: “Marketers need to abandon the time-limited campaign online and start to think of it as a constant application of a rigorous discipline. They should think of their marketing the same way that Facebook puts out a new feature every two weeks, tweaks it, changes it, and re-releases it…”
I’ll buy that. We need to stop polishing things and start getting into the trenches if this stuff is going to work properly.
A different (non-technical) analogy is the architect. Creativity isn’t solely based on the deliverable. What makes something fly or die has a lot to do with the environment (or space) that gets created. I think a lot of our work would be better if we forgot the gongs and started focusing more on how to facilitate our comms and content…. What tends to make stuff stick isn’t down to the ‘wow’ factor in the first instance. Values like ‘usefulness,’ ‘share-ability’ and ‘free-ness’ tend to be a lot more important. Foursquare’s a good example of this in practice. Not a game-changing creative idea – just something that integrates itself really well with the way we’re already using the web (Twitter meets iPhone meets Facebook).
Another observation is that we’re all totally sick of being sold Nescafe-like creative sagas. Microsoft’s Windows 7 party video is a classic in this respect – Social gone wrong (or radically right in terms of distribution, for all the wrong reasons).
The funny thing is that brands don’t need their display ads to be defaced if they want to communicate. They just need to rewire the way they approach their content and (unlike Microsoft) stop talking at people. Twitter’s already here. So is Facebook and all the rest. We don’t have to build new things if we don’t want to, and we don’t need to ham it up quite so much …We can choose to employ tools that already exist and use them to talk different. Got it?
Anyways, here’s the slides (PR, Social Media and Content Isn’t Media)
And here’s a neat little PDF we made on how to re-think a content strategy (PR, Social Media – Re-Wired).
C&M Social Media Content Strategy Map
Do tell me what you think….
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Robin Grant, We Are Social
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Oscar Del Santo
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