- Who are the key content players and what role will they play?
- How will topics be prioritized?
- What resources are needed to create content? What resources will need to be added?
- How will tasks be tracked to get content out the door?
- What can be done to ensure content gets seen externally and internally?
- How is success measured?
From Nick Johnson, Incite Marketing and Communication
8. I have a lot of time for this global enterprise which recently polled their network of big brand marketers on “The Future of Content”. They asked how much more total potential audience could content reach. They answered this way.
3% not much more
18% more than half
54% less than half
24% not sure
Only 21% of respondents felt they were even approaching audience saturation. There’s still a lot of room to grow.
9. The value of negative comments. Recently, a business owner asked for my recommendation on how to deal with a negative comment they’d experienced. The CEO felt it was completely unfair to his family-run business. The comment was bogus, yet, nonetheless it existed.
If you can help an unhappy customer, you will benefit from the good will generated. Even better, others will see that you took the extra time to care for a slagger who took a swing at you. Chris Krohn, CMO at Restaurant.com, thinks it’s more valuable for your customer to leave a negative comment on social media than to leave no comment at all. He says to cherish every Tweet that says your brand “sux”, because at least now, you have the chance to prove that your brand does not, in fact, “sux”.
10. Leave room for creativity. I like this story from Toni Jones, U-Haul International, not least because of experiences with my own client, Sharon Romank of Affordable Storage Sherwood Park. They are completely different businesses but come from a similar genre: moving and self-storage.
Jones came up with an innovative social media-based campaign for the iconic brand. Her social listening found that, while U-Haul was associated with a high amount of negative sentiment online around the stress of moving, lots of people were taking pictures of themselves posing inside or outside the trucks on moving day. In the case of Affordable Storage Sherwood Park, Romank thought self storage might not be interesting enough to warrant publication of a newsletter.
U-Haul invited their customers to send in pictures of themselves with their trucks. They did –-thousands of them. These pictures were placed among a collage on the trucks themselves, creating another frenzy on social media as people tried to find themselves, then took pictures of themselves with themselves.
In the case of Affordable, the newsletter with stories from renters and ideas about self storage generated a 50% opening rate; typical opening rates that are considered good hover around 16% to 18% . Customers store their precious goods with Affordable and are very keen to stay connected with the company looking after their property long-term. The U-Haul campaign was a roaring success. What was the key, according to Jones? The project let consumers be creative. Nothing crazy, nothing involved. Just the act of staging and taking a picture was enough to inspire connection.
Business owners will become convinced that social enterprise is good for their bottom line when they start to see similar irresistible evidence. It won’t be long.
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Need help with your strategic content? Contact me through LinkedIn or by email: sharon@worldgatemedia.com. You can also pick up more ideas from my website: http://www.worldgatemedia.com
Life-long communications strategist Sharon MacLean owned and published a traditional print magazine over 21 years for business people. She now applies her enhanced knowledge in digital marketing to the needs of her clients and believes in the value of combining the best of both worlds.