Over the past week, I’ve had the opportunity to have a number of interesting conversations about how to think about and implement a content marketing program.
The catalyst of the discussions was the introduction of the CommunitySherpa marketing service that we announced for the multi-family industry, but the discussions ranged in several instances beyond the simple focus on Sherpa to a more nuanced discussion about how to think about content in a marketing environment.
One focal point centered around the idea of using social media tools to drive a content marketing program. Throughout my career, as I’ve developed assorted interactive content marketing programs, one of the biggest challenges to implementation has been the limits of the technology platforms. The net effect of these platforms was to create content ghettos within a broader site. For instance, when we built a user community around the fly fishing marketplace, our most active feature was comment boards that shared specific information about good places to fish and good guides to use. These were incredibly active components of our web site, but the while the content contributed by the users, and the conversations that they had, were the richest content on our site, the accessibility, sear
chability and interactibility of these comments was severely limited.
The evolution of social media tools creates a tremendous amount of flexibility in how content can be created and consumed. Even within the traditional limits of a blog, you can access tools like Facebook Connect, Disqus’ commenting system, Ligit’s search system, and Twitter widgets (all deployed in this blog) to give equal footing and power to the contributions of the community. By using social media tools to drive a content marketing strategy, a brand is able to give voice to the community in ways that have been heretofore severely limited.
The key then, once a decision has been made to use social media tools to distribute a content marketing strategy, is to develop a content strategy that interacts with and ultimately serves the interests of the community that has coalesced.
I was impressed with the clarity of recent column in TopRankBlog which proposes practical tactics for developing the best kind of content for a social media marketing strategy.
Whether you communicate to your audience via a blog, Twitter or social networking sites like Facebook, the only true way to build relationships with a growing network is to listen, engage and provide content they find valuable.
When developing a social media content strategy, start by asking questions like: “What does my network find valuable?”.
The only real way to get an answer to that question is to ask the community you are part of. And you have to ask in a way that invites participation across a broad spectrum, not in a way that attempts to target a discrete answer. For instance, a survey of your community would ask, “What kind of information would you like to see?,” whereas a invitation to your community would suggest, “Please post things that you think are interesting and believe other would too.”
The tools of social media are designed to limit the filters between the audience, the media, and the content. They are each unique and interchangeable. Invitations have impact. Questions have limits.
To create an effective content strategy, a brand has to invite the interactions. Not contain them.
