Author Archives: DJ Francis
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 isn’t just about audits or aligning with information architecture. Directly supporting copywriters is a primary goal of content strategy as well. It falls to content analysts to distill insights and create an appropriate plan (based on business objectives, user needs, etc) – a plan that gives your copywriter enough to succeed.
Without content strategy, you create an unjustified delay; your copywriter is forced to research, analyze and strategize before they even start crafting the language that will entice your customers to convert. It’s unfair to your copywriter and is poor stewardship of your client’s resources.
After all, content strategy at the start of a project makes the creative process run faster and more efficiently, thus saving money for your client. Like information architecture and planning, content strategy work done up front will ensure that the best possible creative is produced…and that the entire project aligns with the given business objectives.
I’m reading Bogusky and Windsor’s Baked In and, while frequently meh, the book does sport some wisdom. The crux in my opinion is this:
“[A] brand’s products and marketing not only tell the same story but also have a deep connection to culture and the flexibility to be extraordinary.”
This got me thinking about how brands have existed throughout time, active within a culture. Particularly, one of my favorite: Budweiser.
[Disclosure: Budweiser is a client. In 2010, I completed quite a bit of content strategy for their website redesign and even dug around for a few days in their St. Louis archives.]
What can we learn from brands like Budweiser; brands that have been cultural landmarks for over a century? And what can these classic brands portend for the future?
Early Days
From roughly the industrial revolution through, say, the 1950s, brands offered consistency. They communicated to consumers that this product would be the same each and every time; they stressed dependability.
As Budweiser gained in popularity with this new light lager, imitators tried to encroach on their territory. Adolphus Busch fought this infringement – very much protecting his good name against these inferior products.
The Budweiser brand stressed consistency in these early days, but prohibition ended consumers’ ability to remain loyal. And a funny thing happened – American beer drinkers got used to the sweeter taste of illegally-produced “bathtub” beer.
This is a positive blog and I don’t take cheap shots. But when I find a book so disjointed and frankly unusable, I have to mention it.
A lot of people love Brian Solis and I’m sure he’s a good guy (this isn’t personal). But that makes his book from earlier this year, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultive, and Measure Success in the New Web (whew!), all the more disappointing.
Engage reads like a few reheated blog posts tied together with twine and gum. Here are a few reasons I don’t recommend it:
– We’ve heard it all before: I could insulate a house with each book that’s been written as a social media primer. Solis offers only rote, near-impossibly-simplistic suggestions in the intro, manifesto, social media 101, 201, 202, 203, 203… Well, there’s a lot you’ve heard before.
– We’ve heard it all again. And again: Repetition is useful if ideas build on each other. Solis has few (if any) ideas that build on each other. (Just skip part 3 altogether.)
– Shotgun, not sniper rifle: This is the most untargeted book I have read on marketing. There’s no real audience. This book includes reams of information to the n00b and expert alike, but in such close proximity as to be confusing to both groups. Solis doesn’t identify a target and hit it; he loads up with buckshot and prays to hit anything.
You don’t want to present an adequate content audit. You don’t want a sorta decent audit presentation.
But a content audit is a funny beast. It’s an amazingly in-depth analysis of content – everything published on a particular website, usually. We’re talking hundreds or thousands of pages. Pages that have often been overlooked for quite awhile. And now it’s your time to present the results and insights from this detailed analysis.
You worked hard on this content audit and you obviously care a lot. But there are some critical, often-overlooked tips that can mean the difference between an engaged audience and one that needs woken up at the end of your audit presentation.
Here are 7 proven ways to ensure your content audit presentation kicks serious tuckus.
- “Perfect” means it’s all about THEM. Know thy audience. Ensure that every word, paragraph, and idea is framed in a way that particular audience understands. Make each slide highly relevant to your audit †and make certain that it supports the story you are weaving with this report. Every element of your perfect presentation should be unique to the audience in front of you.
- Never, ever, ever, ever present just a spreadsheet. Content strategists tend to live in spreadsheets; they allow us to analyze loads of complex data. But most people donít care about that – they are interested in the insights you found. If you called a travel agent to book your dream vacation, you do not need a schematic of the airplane. Get them to the beach already.
Charlene Li, formerly of Forrester Research and co-author of Groundswell, does with Open Leadership what so few authors would find possible: making a convincing argument regarding a real and very powerful movement in the zeitgeist, despite it being inherently fuzzy to understand and difficult to prove.
What Li does with her latest book is prove that open leadership is quite frequently incumbent upon ethical marketers working in a social media-friendly business world.
While difficult to measure, Li never loses sight of the effectiveness of open leadership. From Li:
“In actuality, the activities taking place on [social sites] are inherently highly measurable, but we have not yet established a body of accepted knowledge and experience about the value of these activities versus the costs and risks of achieving those benefits.” (page 77)
And it’s the value of these activities that make up the meatiest parts of Li’s book.
