Derek Phillips and I presented a webinar today entitled “A Marketer’s Guide to Thinking and Acting like a Publisher.” In it, we outline the six key elements of great content plus the three phases your company needs to include in their publishing plan.
You might notice that we won’t talk a lot about social. It isn’t because we don’t value social media; we have three experts working with clients in our Chicago office alone. So in this web 2.0 world, why didn’t we focus as much on social?
It reminds me of a recent Joe Pulizzi interview with Jay Baer. During the interview, Jay reminds us that strategy must come first.
“You have to focus on how to ‘be’ social first, and worry about how to ‘do’ social second…If you and your company are worrying specifically about your ‘Facebook strategy’ then you really don’t have a strategy at all…”
I don’t think Jay is saying that you shouldn’t have a Facebook strategy, period, but that you should come up with your overall strategy and then determine how you want to use to distribute your message.
Our webinar focused on a publishing strategy; social can and should be baked into that strategy. But social is more complex than you’d think. As we discussed editorial calendars and governance processes, many organizations have these things in place solely for their social strategies. While I love the commitment around these channels, I think it’s always best integrated.
Content strategy and social media have a lot in common and yet so frequently we’re eons apart within agencies or even handled completely separately through different partners. Our disciplines have worked together to create and maintain world-class content calendars to organize efforts across channels and devices. Additionally, content strategy can frequently employ the quick feedback loop that social offers to improve more long-term work.
As Facebook, Twitter, blogging networks, location-based services and so many other social avenues have gained their legs within the marketing sphere, it only makes sense to cease the hasty content creation and ill-fitted content repurposing so often seen in social spaces. When we’re all working together, the solutions created for clients and the experiences created for users are infinitely more valuable.
The take away idea is that strategy has to lead everything we do. We crafted the webinar to cover a broad subject area and social is an integral part. But a strategy – social or otherwise – must be in place before creating content, monitoring brand equity or any other publishing activity. Because of that, content strategists and social media experts should – and often do – work very closely together.
Social is more than a channel – it is a practice with its own intricacies. Watch for future webinars we’re working on that will focus specifically on some of social hottest topics soon.
If you were not able to attend the webinar, you can view the slides here. And of course, we love hearing your feedback. Please use the comment area to discuss this post or the webinar, itself.
