Point Oh!

As more and more traditional marketers get involved in social media, you hear more and more about the importance of having the right content strategy.  Usually this involves things like a schedule of Facebook updates and Tweets and other ways of pushing content on fans or followers.  It fits in nicely with the way that many of these same marketers focus on friend collecting (getting “Likes”) either concurrently or before the content phase.  Build your audience and then hammer them with content.  It’s the old reach plus frequency equals retention formula that gave birth to advertising as we know it.

Content is a crucial part of social media marketing, particularly for brands that aren’t inherently social, but there are a few reasons it shouldn’t be your first priority.  The primary reason is that social media – when it has it’s highest impact – isn’t about broadcasting content.  The big wins in social media are when a stakeholder transitions from feeling completely unattached to a brand and then receives that personalized attention, just like they get from their friends organically on the same networks, and is then transformed into an advocate or enthusiast for that brand.  This is almost universally a result of direct engagement rather than effective content marketing.

Does it sound like one of those pie-in-the-sky social media promises that no one really delivers on or can scale to meet the demands of a major brand?  It’s not.

If you look at what the airlines have done with social media, particularly on Twitter, they have provided a peerless level of engagement at times when their stakeholders have been particularly receptive, like being stranded after missing a flight (or restoring a ton of reward miles, like they did with me).  Or when companies like Comcast use social media to help them deal with customer service issues before they blow up (again, like they did with me).  These are situations where a stakeholder can become a vocal detractor but instead become of WOM conduit to a positive customer service message.  And that’s just in the customer service application of the principle.

The biggest criticism of this is that it’s impossible to scale but, with minimal investigation, it proves to be a lazy excuse.  The public affairs division of the US Air Force was pretty early in adopting their engagement methodology, and they have a lot of content to sift through.  The fact is that probably more than 90% of all actionable content can be effectively managed through a decent engagement methodology and the amount of content that doesn’t fit into that funnel can usually be handled by one or two people, even at the Fortune 500 level.

The reason marketers gravitate towards content instead of engagement is because they’re usually monitoring brand mentions or keyword strings without spending a lot of time focusing on what are the most important conversations to monitor.  If you’re a major brand with a lot of consumer exposure, it’s highly unlikely that most of your brand mentions require a response.  Additionally, responses like “Thanks @joeblow for loving our mac and cheese” don’t provide a lot of value and are absolutely worthless to everyone else following your brand.  Much like any kind of online marketing where keywords play a significant role, the trick to success is finding actionable keywords that relate to purchase intent, a customer service issue or some other situation where direct engagement from a brand can have impact.  If this engagement is public, there should be a CTA to take it private or it should have enough universal interest that the other people that are following you might get some value out of it.

That isn’t to say that content isn’t important.  Third party social media platforms are still one of the most effective ways to deliver social content but too often they become content dumps rather than direct engagement channels.  You often hear the phrase “be human” in relation to social media marketing but the biggest challenge in that phrase for brands is actually being a human as opposed to being like a human.  Brands as nebulous entities are out of place on social platforms but the humans representing those brands can have a huge impact on how people interface with them and develop perceptions of what that brand promise really is.  Once that level of engagement is established, your content will be received with more trust and weight.