Social Media - The Story of the Three Little Pigs

The Story So Far

We have all grown up with the famous story of the three little pigs (although I like the alternative 3 little wolfs variation as well). The moral of the story is obvious people who work hard, work smart, save money, think ahead, and help other people, will come out on top.

In marketing you wouldn't recommend a business to build their marketing solely on social media - it is just not good advice. Social media is just one part of the marketing mix.

Likewise the idea of solely being digital is not right for every business, it is important to recognise and use offline marketing (if it fits to your target customers). Again as a stand alone focus it will deliver results but be limited. Like the 3 little pigs using the right materials are vital to a solid marketing strategy.

Jeff Bullas wrote a good piece Social Media Marketing’s Biggest Myth that quite rightly argues the need to focus on being relevant and informative:

"The reality is that “social media” is based on self-interest. People on social sites are looking for materials which are useful to them.

Content defines the value to your customer - why people will either ignore it or share it. Content strategy is then a defining part of any online strategy. Here is a great presentation that drums home the importance of content for online marketing.

Content Strategy: The Future of Marketing

Mixing the Bricks and Mortar and Working Together

So if we return to the three little pigs story - our marketing should consist of mixing our marketing to produce a solid foundation and the people we invite to help us are our customers; because if they help you (and more importantly want to) you may develop a community.

We can't cover everything so I have focused on email - some people see email as an enemy of social media i.e. email vs. social media. The truth is, done well they should compliment each other (but it also depends on market/customers...).

Email Facts

• 72% of companies rate email as 'excellent' or 'good' for return on investment (EConsultancy)


• Email adoption high but lacking in best practice - the relevance, context and targetting (download pdf - Forrester) also support by MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report (download here)

Email is getting Social

• 6 Smart & Effective Email Marketing Tactics (Mashable)


• 7 Steps to Improve Your Email Marketing (Practical Commerce)


• Integrating the Facebook like Button into Mailchimp campaigns (Mailchimp)

Both Constant Contact and ExactTarget acquired businesses in the social arena, namely, NutshellMail and CoTweet. Why - well they recognise the value of social data and are looking to use this to build more precise targeting methods based on social data.

Putting the Story back into Marketing

So what is the role of social media within the marketing mix? Again this is big subject but here are a few reasons why it is an important part of any business now:

• people trust people (Source Nielsen) and therefore we look for what are friends or others say about brands/products and services


• brand communities can provide an ongoing development of a relationship with brand as opposed to a start stop approach (see blog post by Olivier Blanchard)


• brands can understand (and quickly) what their customers are saying - a dynamic feedback loop providing ways to improve your product or service


• researching customers (you can understand their online/offline behaviours and refine your marketing and provide value to them (this comes back then, to your content strategy)


• using tools to linkin with Facebooks open graph you can use the data to understand your 'followers'


• it is where you customers are spending their time online and hence where you can help them e.g. customer service

This is by no means an exhaustive list, it just meant to illustrate the opportunities and relevance of being social. In todays world we want the human connection as well. We can never underestimate the power of the human story, the connection we feel with it and the emotions that they evoke. Look at some of the highest ranked video's onYouTube and you will understand what I mean. When done well, social media builds as the brands facilitate the story of others as well as solving problems, communicating relevant messages and adding value it can also tell the stories of its people.

Content - Do You Know How to Add Value?

Efficient with Knowledge


“The greatest challenge of the 21st century will be managing the productivity of the knowledge worker.” asserted Peter Drucker, the father of modern management.

Whether you are a business owner or a community manager, you will recognise the need to efficient with information. We are all constrained by time and that is our most valuable asset. But being part of the knowledge economy means we need to find, aggregate, filter, select curate and often publish high quality information relevant to our work or interest. We will strive to personalise it and make it relevant to our interests. This is both a personal and business issue and for Enterprises it is estimated that between 16% - 25% of knowledge workers time is spent searching for the relevant information.




Why you need to be a curator?

First it is important to understand the differences between aggregators, curators and indexers. Being an authority and expert in your field establishes a trust and builds your reputation with your customers. By becoming a source for other you build on-going relationship with customers, which in itself helps generate word of mouth marketing and drives important traffic to your site. By harvesting important content from the sea of information and sorting, filtering and producing contextually relevant material you are adding value.

Developing Quality Content

Many of us have tried RSS feeds and "thematic" or "topic-based aggregation" utilizing a selective number of quality sources of published content on specific topics. But TechMeMe and social sites like Digg whilst helpful are still aggregators. The solution to the ever-expanding cacophony of consumer content lies in using the intermediate layer of human filters and the use of ‘smart’ systems (algorithms based on preferences).

“Interacting directly with an automated news engine makes it clear that the human+algorithm combo can curate news far more effectively that the individual human or algorithmic parts.” - Gabe Rivera - Techmeme.

There are many tools to help now but it is how you add value that will separate you from your competition.

Some useful 'aggrefilters'

Clearly we need to be more efficient with tiemly and relevant information and part of this is the ability to quickly assess it as it comes to us. Whilst current tools do not have the 'smart' or learning capability yet, they are some useful tools to try. As curation becomes more important, new solutions are emerging all the time. It is worth exploring which suits your needs best. Often this will be determined by how each tool pulls through information and from what sources e.g. friends vs. blogs.

1. Scoop.It



Scoop.it offers users the opportunity to “be the curator of your favorite topic”  by collecting useful and insightful information among from social media streams. You can then publish it to people sharing the same interest. You can setup up topics as themes and then update them as new content is discovered. Content can be added via a bookmarklet or using a post button on the topic page. You can publish to Facebook and Twitter.

2. POSTPOST


PostPost resembles the mobile app Pulse and the iPad app Flipboard but the main difference is that , PostPost is a browser based application. PostPost imports links, videos and photos in real time from your Facebook friends and produces a newspaper display that can easily be adjusted as needed.

3. Paper.Li

Paper.li you can create up to 10 newspapers based on links shared by your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Each newspaper can be distributed via Facebook or Twitter. Paperli is easy to use and provides a nice recap of daily or weekly content. One great way to use Paper.li is to use it along with Listerous which enables you to find a list on almost any subject you can think of. You can take any one of those lists and create a newspaper out of it in Paper.li

4. Flipboard

You can browse photos from your Flickr streams, stories from Google Reader as well as content shared by your Facebook and Twitter friends, all in Flipboard‘s magazine-style format. You can also post Facebook status updates, tweets and photos from anywhere within the app and easily share favorite content across networks (e.g., share a favorite tweet to Facebook and vice versa).

Other sites worth looking at:

The Tweeted Times

The Tweeted Times (formerly known as The Twitter Times) is a real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account. The Tweeted Times aggregates news in your Twitter stream and ranks them by popularity among your friends.

Pinyadda (in beta testing)

Using Pinyadda you have a customizable way of developing a newsfeed. Users can follow a person, topic, or website, and comment on and share news stories with the Pinyadda community as well as their own social network.

Spotery

Unlike many others Spotery uses people to edit and filter its top news stories. Spotery is is good at integrating content curation with social news. Visitors to the site can follow the selected news stories, or the follow the live stream of submitted links.

Storify

Storify uses existing content from across the internet and gives you the ability to drag and drop elements into storylines. Tweets, photos and videos can be searched on multiple social networks. You can also order the elements and also add text to give context to readers.

How to use the information - your daily or weekly

When thinking about your market and customer it is vital to get to understand the issues and problems that they face with their business. By listening and focusing on topics that concern them you can start to set out solutions that can help them: save time, be more effective, market themselves better, do more for less, help them with market information...

A solution focused approach will separate you from your competitors. Focus on topics and subjects that you can easily research and provide some insight on to help your customers; conduct a survey of customers and produce your own market report. You may also find out topics within your market that are relevant, 'hot' and worthy of your effort. In producing a blog or free reports to attract customers.

Good curated content often saves people time and demonstrates your understanding and/or opinion on a subject. Don't foget to make it your own and add your thoughts and ideas.

If you don't have the time then look for an agency that can help you. Often it costs less than you imagine and you can really make a difference in your own time if you recognise that you don't have the time or resources to produce consistent levels of high quality content.

If you are focusing on your improving you Blog or looking for ways to add value to content, we have for you:

1. Build a story and invite others to contribute to your ideas. These may be new thoughts around a change in your market, technology or subject. By expressing some ideas, supporting them with some links and content and then asking for input you will develop conversations.


2. Add and use a mix of media to bring a subject to life. Mix rich media like video's illustrations, infographics...


3. By developing a case around an opinion, thought or subject you can add links, references, resources and then provide a framework to help people understand sometimes complex ideas and see the bigger picture.


4. Produce some daily news or weekly summary of things that you have found interesting, topical, illuminating or new and controversial. Mediocrity rarely achieves much so sometimes you need to take a stand or have an angle.


5. Ask for feedback and find out what people like.

Are you building your story or the story of your customers?

In the spirit of looking for feedback we would like your thoughts on where you think the world of curation, news and content is heading - join in and let us know your thoughts.