Content for the Social Space

Content for the Social Space: A Small Business Primer

January 16, 2009

by David BurnEditor, AdPulp

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DotWhatever.com

• Many small businesses have spent many thousands of dollars on static, brochureware sites

• But a brand needs more than a place to hang its hat to make it online

• Think of the Internet as a salon. Your company’s site must be that inviting.

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Do It Yourself

• Everyone’s focusing on the “Social” in Social Media, but there’s another story to tell

• Blogger, Twitter, Ning, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc. are all free and easy-to-use platforms for weaving multimedia narratives about topics of interests to a brand’s best customers

• In other words, social media sites provide unbelievable opportunities for you to create and share brand-building content

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Stories Stick

• Our brains are wired to remember stories

• The majority of human history is oral history

• Stories can help the brand connect with customers on a deeper level than even the best ads

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You’re Already DIYing

• You may not be a writer, a geek, or even in marketing or PR, but you already tell people stories about your workplace and the product or service you sell—it’s what we do as humans!

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WOM 2.0

• A strategic content plan developed for the social space can help you harness some of the naturally occurring steam around your brand and use it to propel your communications engine forward

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Shift Happens• Content is the lens to see social

media through, because social media depends totally on your ability to produce and share compelling content

• It’s about producing content that’s worth sharing on the world’s greatest people-powered network, where customers can connect and interact with it and with you

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Conversation Is Key

• The Web made marketing conversational and there’s no turning back now

• If you want to be a conversation leader—and we want our brands to be that—you have to add content

• Conversational Marketing + Original and Consumer-Generated Content in the Social Space = Success

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Blogger

• You can set up a Blogger site in minutes, just visit http://blogger.com and start producing and sharing content to support your firm’s overall objectives, or better yet drill down to the programming level and create a blog for each sub-brand or major initiative

• Google loves freshly blogged content, so the more on topic content you create the better positioned your firm will be in search engines

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Twitter

• Twitter is a place to share very short updates with a group of “followers” that wants to be kept in the loop on various projects, new product offerings or events to attend

• Twitter is also mobile, and it

scales.

• Twitter can be a powerful PR tool for the brand

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MyFaceSpace

• Social networks like MySpace and Facebook are places where you can run highly targeted ads, set up a fan page or better yet, create a widget that performs a valuable function of some sort

• There are big numbers of people here, spending lots of time—it’s important to be on their page, literally

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Flickr & YouTube• A picture is worth a

thousand words

• Tell your brand’s story in still and moving pictures

• Flickr and YouTube are great for lifestyle brands, but also for companies that need to visually show how their product or service works

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Ning

• Ning helps you build a social network around any interest

• With the push of a few buttons, you can launch a robust site with member pages, blogs, a forum, photo galleries, video galleries, events pages and so on

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Social Bookmarking• Tumblr is a great place to build a

visual scrapbook

• Delicious is a text-based bookmarking service

• Both services are similar to blogging, but with an emphasis on others’ content, not your own

• Use of these sites helps your fans and followers read and see what you read and see

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What Content Can Do

• Create more revenue by driving participants to retail, to online merchandise or to an upcoming brand-sponsored event

• Generate increased awareness and word of mouth for the brand offline, and on

• Earn more press mentions

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It’s Worth Your Time

• Telling the brand’s story in these networked environments will help deepen relationships with customers, advocates, the press and with people inside your company

• You can encourage advocates and attract prospects!

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Implementation

• When it works best, Social Media isn’t a departmental function, it’s an attitude about openess and sharing that’s embraced throughout the firm

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Content Is King

• She who has the best content wins!

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[MORE HERE]

• I’d love to hear more about your particular communications challenges and then work with you to provide deeper thinking and a plan of action

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For further consultation…

Contact me at dburn@adpulp.com or call 503-970-3862