I look at it in a slightly different way.

While I do agree that influence does impact the relationship between brands and customers, I believe the real currency of the social web is actually content. If content has the power to change world government, it surely has the power to change customer behavior.  And when that content can provide a certain level of value, it’s no longer about customers controlling the brand story. It will be about customer contributing to the brand story. But they need more than just feeling empowered. They must be enabled.

Companies must enable their customers to contribute to the brand story …. {Tweet this}

Enjoy the video. Joe is a super smart guy and a great speaker.

A content organization tells good stories. It believes that content (not just marketing content but value add content) is what drives behavior change with customers, partners and employees. A content organization has the people; processes and technology in place that helps facilitate organizational change that will allow you to:

• Feed the content machine everyday – not once, not twice and not even 3 times a week. Everyday single day.
• Provide content that matters to their stakeholders; that comes from their stakeholders (employees and customers).
• Create content in real-time when the opportunity arises.
• Build converged media models (paid, earned, owned media integration) that translate into brand ubiquity.
• Be agile and pump out content with little to no pushback.

So if any of this sounds good to you, please read on. Here are four considerations to consider that will help you become a content organization.

(1) Start With Your Content Narrative

This is one piece that you cannot skip.  Don’t be like other brands that post random content in Facebook and Twitter ether because their competitors are doing so or it’s the “in” thing to do.  You will have to decide what story you want to tell and how you want to tell it. Your content narrative will consist of several inputs:

• Brand Pillars/Positioning – the brand narrative.
• Non-Business Issues – What are the non-business issues that are important to the brand? (Sustainability, energy efficiency, ending poverty)
• Media perceptions of the brand – what does the media say when they write about the brand? The context, not the sentiment.
• Community perceptions of the brand – how does the community react to your current content? Again, the context not the sentiment.
• Fan Interests – what are your fans interested in when they aren’t talking with you or about you?
• Historical content performance – performance data on what type of content works and what types that don’t work, day parting, content types, etc.
• Search Behavior – what do consumers search for when looking for you’re your products.
• Customer Support Pain Points – what are the support issues that are most concerning to your customers?

The output will help you mold a content narrative that can scale and give birth to content that changes customer behavior – whether it’s selling more products, repositioning a company or helping customers change the way they perceive your brand.

Additionally, a stellar content strategy will also consider content themes and prioritize the types of content to be shared, its frequency and identify which distribution channels are most effective. For example, the below illustration shows 5 content themes all with different distribution frequency percentages; as well as the core channels of content strategy execution. It’s important to note that every brand is different so each of these content themes will be unique.

Once you have your story, you will then have to decide how you want to tell it and who in your organization can help.

(2) Think Internally First

Media companies have people – a lot of people (and I promise that this is my only reference to a media company). They have editors, managing editors, writers, staff writers, freelance writers, paid writers, un-paid writers, contributors and designers.  The good news is that most brands have a lot of people too. They’re called employees and they are most likely wicked smart too.

What’s stopping you from enabling them to create content that delivers value?  I’m not saying that you just open the floodgates and have a content free for all. You’ll have to create a plan, establish processes & workflows, and maybe start small with just 10 or 15 employees. Once you demonstrate a few wins and best practices, you can grow from there. And don’t forget that employees are viewed as trusted and credible sources when people are seeking out information about a product or service.  It makes sense. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.  A few platforms that enable employee advocacy are Expion’s product Social Advocator, Addvocate and GaggleAMP.

(3) Expand Beyond the Firewall

If you have a good product then most likely there are groups of people who already love you.  They have a deep level of emotional equity associated with your brand – the way it makes them feel (Dodge Ram = tough), the value they extract when using your products (Toyota Prius = inexpensive, great mileage and good for the environment) or that fact that they can save the planet and be pretty cool at the same time (Tesla Motors Model S). They are called advocates.  Enabling advocates to help tell your brand story is a huge opportunity and, in fact, there are several platforms available today that can facilitate this – Social Chorus, Influitive, Crowd Tap and the list goes on.

(4) Build The Content Supply Chain

Once you have your narrative down and have your internal teams and customers ready to feed the content engine, you will have to build a supply chain that can facilitate content ideation, asset management, approval workflows and content distribution to the channels you manage – blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This could also include .com publishing and paid media opportunities as well considering the importance of the creative newsroom and converged media modeling.

Content organization or media company? It’s the same thing. The point is that you have to change they way you think as it relates to content strategy, engagement and the way your teams are staffed.  If you don’t think that your brand needs to change then you are still living in the 90s when consumers were less distracted with technology and the Internet.

There is a content surplus in the market today.  There is an attention deficit among consumers.  Consumers are influential and their lives are unpredictable.  This is making it extremely difficult for brands to reach them with the right messages.

There’s a content surplus & attention deficit among consumers. What is your brand doing to reach them? … {Tweet this}

From a content perspective, brands need to think like media companies, because media companies are content engines. The produce relevant and recent content day in and day out.  The content is omnipresent (meaning it’s everywhere) and internally, media companies are agile – they can get things done quickly and efficiently.

Brands can’t just turn the “media company” button on an expect operations to change overnight.  They must deploy a social business strategy to make this change successful – people, process and technology. The rest of the slides focus on the content operations of becoming a media company. Enjoy.

Remember … you need to move beyond the content marketing buzzword. In order to “do” content marketing effectively, you need a robust content strategy. And in order to give birth to a robust content strategy, you need to change your business … from brand to media company.

The transition from brand to media company requires a social business strategy. {Tweet this}

I found this amazing Slideshare presentation from the Content Marketing Institute that gives a really good overview of 8 technology vendors (a few of whom I know personally) that can help with this transition - InnoBlogs, Compendium, DivvyHQ, InboundWriter, Kapost, Contently, Skyword, and Zerys. Other similar vendor not mentioned in the slides are Cadence9 and Relaborate; as well as social CRM platforms like Sprinklr, Spredfast, Shoutlet, Expion and Hootsuite Enterprise that also have these capabilities plus more.

And, since content curation should also be a part of the content strategy, you should also consider platforms like Newscred, Publish This, Percolate and Curata. And you can’t forget about converged media models where vendors like OneSpot, InPowered, Outbrain and many others play.

And, lastly, since you won’t be able to do all the work yourself, you will need to focus on building advocacy programs (employees and advocates) that can help you feed the content engine day in and out. Vendors in this space are Influitive, Crowd Tap, Zuberance, Fancorps, Extole and Social Chorus.

Enjoy.

I look at social business strategy as an enabler.

I am a marketing guy by trade so many of the challenges I help my clients with are the ones that help them improve the way they communicate externally and internally. Sometimes it’s about operationalizing their content marketing strategy. Other times, it’s about building processes and workflows that can help scale social media globally. And many times, it’s fixing disjointed content and community management practices. All of these problems are solved by deploying a social business strategy.

Social business strategy enables better content, smarter marketing and more effective customer relationships {Tweet this}

The below Slideshare created by Spredfast illustrates my point, specifically on slides 18-20.  Content is a huge pain point for brands today; and not just the challenge of creating content either. Content governance and all of the operational workflows that drive content ideation, creation, approval and distribution are non existent for many brands today. Managing employee’s behavior and engagement is also tough and I am not just talking about social media policies. I look at the challenge the other way around and usually ask how brands are using employees (customers and partners) to help feed the content engine and help tell the brand story.  Again, to do this requires a social business strategy.

And whether or not you agree with me about the buzzword it self, it does makes sense.

There is a content surplus in the market today. We are inundated with content and media every where we go. I forgot what the latest data shows about how many messages we are subjected to daily but it’s a lot and keeps increasing.

There is an attention deficit.  I personally call it CADD (consumer attention deficit disorder) and I have it. I can rarely focus on just one thing. I am all over the place and my daily journey is so dynamic that it makes my behavior hard to predict. Not good news for those marketers trying to reach me.

There is a content surplus and attention deficit. What is your brand doing to stand out? {Tweet this}

This is why companies must focus on telling their brand story consistently and understand the importance of social media usage, mobile penetration and local relevance when telling that story. It’s called converged media and should be a part of your content strategy.  My two friends Adam Helweh and Cory O’Brien have a podcast called the SoLoMoShow so I recommend you give it a listen. I just subscribed to it on iTunes.

Below is an outstanding Slideshare presentation from Simon Kemp from We Are Social.  It’s a year old, but I learned a thing or two. There are 7 case studies that illustrate how some large brands are reaching customers using this irritating buzzword called SoLoMo.

This is how you should start thinking about your content strategy. Visual storytelling is certainly top of mind for marketers today; and with the rise of Instagram, Pinterest, Vine and Facebook’s recent Timeline redesign, it’s even more important today. But telling your brand story is more than just adding an image to each Facebook post or taking advantage of the news cycle and creating real time content like Oreo. The ability to tell visual stories requires a significant amount of planning and collaboration with internal teams (creative, brand, content); which means you need to deploy a social business strategy that delivers this effectively..

Your content strategy should be as easy to articulate as a children’s story book {Tweet this}

I came across this Slideshare presentation by Stefanos Karagos and had to share it. It’s one of the better presentations I have seen lately and illustrates my point exactly. I read through each slide and knew exactly what Karagos was saying as if he were presenting it directly to me.

“Brands cannot sit around for news to happen and then try to build a story around it. They should already have a story!” {Tweet this}

What matters is that that real time content creation or what’s being described as a newsroom for brands should not be the focal point of your content strategy.  It’s sexy, yes. Everyone is talking about it, yes. Every brand should have one, yes. We even build these for clients at Edelman.  But it’s one very small piece of the strategy, that’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.

A content strategy (notice I didn’t say a content marketing strategy) enables and positions a brand to tell a very consistent story across the media landscape. It helps draw parallels between what’s important to customers and what the brand stands for. It enables marketing teams to create more relevant content based on what the brand is comfortable talking about online and what it’s not comfortable talking about. It allows employees, partners and customer service to also participate and be a part of the story too.

A content strategy requires planning – months of planning in some cases.  Before building out the social or content narrative, brands must take into consideration several key inputs before making any assumptions on what they think is relevant, like:

• Brand positioning and voice, obviously
• What issues are important to your brand (i.e. sustainability, politics)
• Media perceptions of the brand.  How do they refer to the brand when they write stories?
• Community perceptions of the brand.  How do they engage? What’s their tone?
• Fan interests. What else is your community interested in when they aren’t taking about your brand or directly to you?
• Historical content performance. What has worked in the past and what has completely failed?
• Search behavior. What do people search for when they are looking for your brand’s products and services?

The output of these 7 ingredients will mold a content strategy that can scale and give birth to content that changes customer behavior – whether it’s selling more products, repositioning a company or helping customers change the way they perceive you as a brand.

A stellar content strategy will also consider a hierarchy of content and prioritize the types of content to be shared, its frequency and identify which distribution channels are most effective.  For example, tier 1 content might be marketing or campaign related and encompass 20% of the overall content strategy.  Tier 2 content might be curating 3rd party industry stories and account for 25%. Highlighting customer stories might take the lead and account for 45% of the content. Tier 3 content could be real-time and take up the remaining 10%.

Real-time content creation makes sense when the opportunity presents itself so having a newsroom with copywriters, creatives and strategists is definitely important. However, brands shouldn’t just sit around and wait for something to happen in the media and then build their story around it. They should already have a story.

Other things to consider when delivering a content strategy are the following:

• Converged Media Models: The integration of paid, owned and earned media. Technology vendors like One Spot and InPowered can help. OneSpot basically takes owned media content (like a status update or a tweet) and turns it into a display ad.  InPowered does something similar but creates ads from earned media from highly trusted experts and influencers. And, you can certainly build your own models/triggers for converting organic Facebook posts into sponsored ones.
• Editorial Roles & Responsibilities: Much like a media company, there are paid writers, contributors, editors, etc. The transformation into a media company will require you to think about who in the organization (and outside, like customers obviously) can fit into a specific role. Perhaps trained employees can assume the role of contributor while the marketing teams can be editors.
• Technology: There is really no use in assigning roles and responsibilities without having technology solution that can build workflows and processes for content planning, ideation, creation, approval, distribution and optimization.  Unfortunately, not one single vendor can do it all. For planning, and ideation check out Kapost, Compendium and Contently.  For content creation, approval and distribution, you can take a look at those already listed plus Sprinklr, Spredfast, Expion and Hootsuite Enterprise (Edelman client) and for real-time optimization, I would take a look at Social Flow.

If you consider all of these initiatives, it’s clear that your 2013 content marketing strategy should be to start thinking and acting more like a media company.

Image: Stockfresh

Content is also the gateway into the social eco-system. It’s how consumers find you, like you and learn to love you. Content could be a press release, 3rd party article about your company, Tweet, blog post, photo on Instagram or a status update. Content is a game changer. But it has to be the right content, at the right time, in the right channel.  It has to be integrated and tell a story. Content marketing cannot be put into a silo and despite what some tell you, SEO should not be your content marketing strategy.

Content is powerful. It’s influential; and if done right, content causes click throughs, RT’s, Likes, Loves, Shares and all that other good stuff. But more importantly it can change behavior. If you work for a large brand, that’s probably what you want. RT’s and Likes are fine for a PowerPoint presentation, but your concern is more aligned with sales, how your customers perceive and talk about your brand and of course how they tell other about their experience with your brand.

Your 2013 content marketing strategy should be a plan that helps evolve your brand into thinking more like a media company.

Take for example the Super Bowl when the lights went out during half time. No one could have anticipated that this was going to happen so planning for it would have been impossible. But there were a few brands that were able to capitalize on creating real time content based on what’s happening NOW.

Oreo Cookie, the recent media sweetheart tweeted the below. What’s interesting about this is Tweet is that it’s relevant, recent and still seems to drive brand messaging.

At Edelman, we call this the Creative Newsroom and we have deployed this for several clients.  Of course, not all real time events and occurrences might be relevant to a given brand so it’s important to ensure that there are levels of editorial standards in place that will help determine what the brand is comfortable talking about and what they aren’t.

What most don’t really think about is how something like the Creative Newsroom is actually deployed.  It’s not like you can just turn on a button and BAM, it’s done. It requires a significant amount of planning, creative and content resources, and potential headcount; not to mention a high degree of trust from the executives and brand managers.

The Creative Newsroom is only one portion of a media company strategy.  Other factors to include are the following:

• Converged Media Models: The integration of paid, owned and earned media. Technology vendors like One Spot and InPowered can help. OneSpot basically takes owned media content (like a status update or a tweet) and turns it into a display ad.  InPowered does something similar but creates ads from earned media from highly trusted experts and influencers. And, you can certainly build your own models/triggers for converting organic Facebook posts into sponsored ones.
• Editorial Roles & Responsibilities: Much like a media company, there are paid writers, contributors, editors, etc. The transformation into a media company will require you to think about who in the organization (and outside, like customers obviously) can fit into a specific role. Perhaps trained employees can assume the role of contributor while the marketing teams can be editors.
• Content Strategy: Not a content marketing strategy. A content strategy will help establish a social narrative and take into consideration brand positioning/messaging, 3rd party research that illustrates how the media perceives and writes about the brand, an analysis of how your current community perceives and talks about the brand and lastly an in depth look at how consumers search for your brand, product and services. A content strategy will also bucket certain pieces of content. For example, these buckets can include content related to the brand, the industry and then Creative Newsroom content; and then determine the frequency of how often content from each bucket is shared.
• Technology: There is really no use in assigning roles and responsibilities without having technology solution that can build workflows and processes for content planning, ideation, creation, approval, distribution and optimization.  Unfortunately, not one single vendor can do it all. For planning, and ideation check out Kapost, Compendium and Contently.  For content creation, approval and distribution, you can take a look at those already listed plus Sprinklr, Spredfast, Expion and Hootsuite Enterprise (Edelman client) and for real-time optimization, I would take a look at Social Flow.

There is still a lot more required in becoming a media company. Change management, culture, leadership and a social business strategy that can drive everything forward will be necessary.

I am going to be talking a lot about this at the upcoming Kapost Content Marketing Bootcamp in San Francisco. It’s free to attend so what are you waiting for?

I start off talking about the emergence of command centers in the marketplace, mentioning the early adopters like Dell and Gatorade who were one of the first brands to launch and publicize their command centers.

I then discuss how companies are beginning to realize the importance of deploying command centers given much of the hype at the CES show.

I use the formal definition by Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group and then add that command centers don’t necessarily have to be in one physical space; but that they can also live and operate within a virtual environment.

I then discuss why a command center is important for business today. Much of us already know this but it’s worth repeating anyway:

• Listening, obviously
• Engagement, obviously
• Building community – here I discussed Facebook’s Graph Search and the need for brands to continue to grow their communities. The more fans you have, the wider your audience. The wider your audience, the more likely your brand will come up as a connected page in Graph Search
• Advocacy – basically turning friends, fans and followers into lovers of the brand
• Content – using real time listening to create real time content based on the day’s new cycle and “what’s trending” right now
• Product Innovation – I mention Dell and Starbucks
• Document psychographics and demographics of the community, reporting, etc.
• Customer support

The next part of the webinar, I give several industry examples of command centers in action:

• Oregon Ducks
• Cisco Systems
• The 2012 Republican National Committee in Tampa Bay
• The American Red Cross
• Clemson University
• Hootsuite’s 2012 Presidential Election Tracker

I point out that several verticals are beginning to adopt command centers, notably the tech, education, and government sectors.

I then get into the Command Center Framework and discuss the importance of having a set strategy taking into consideration the goals & objectives and dashboard and technology requirements. I used the Social Business Framework to illustrate the need to consider People, Process and Platforms for command center deployment. This included building the right team, creating a social business center of excellence, create processes for crisis management and customer support workflows.

I close off this section talking about real time content creation and give a few examples of a few stellar brands who are killing it with their content – notably the Oreo and AMC Theaters exchange last year.

I conclude the webinar giving very tactical advice on how to build a command center using a 5 step process for deployment – discovery, planning, measurement, implementation and kaizen (or constant improvement).

Here are the Social Business Command Center Slides on Slideshare if you are interested.