Recently, I’ve been talking to some marketing professionals, and asking them about how they are tackling social media. As you could probably guess, there have been as many different answers as there have been interviews. For those who are tackling the efforts internally, there seems to be one question that a lot of them are asking: how in the world did we become a content publisher?
Being social online isn’t just about responding to Tweets, or building a community on Facebook. It’s about establishing trust and creating value-based relationships. To develop this trust, companies are developing information for their audiences that is crafted around creating this trust, and a little less about explicitly creating a sale.
In doing so, marketers are realizing that the content they create is not your typical, cut-and-dried direct mail message with clearly stated calls-to-action. They are finding that they are creating satellite messages which revolve around their core value proposition. For instance, credit card companies may not focus exclusively on the benefits of their card, but may also provide content around financial responsibility and credit management. By providing help, guidance and direction without delivering a sales “punch line,” they start to develop a trust relationship with their audience. PR departments have done this for decades, and social platforms are allowing for a deeper exploration of this relationship.
The question is: How much content do I need to produce, and who is responsible for it?
Marketers aren’t exactly content publishers in a traditional sense. Typically, their messaging has focused on the top of the sales funnel (Awareness & Engagement) and delivered short, punchy messages with a sales- or leads-specific grand finale. They will need to expand their capabilities in content generation to develop deeper trust relationships with their markets, and do so in a way that is transparent and genuine. This, of course, puts greater pressure on marketing staff and blurs the lines between PR and other corporate communications roles.
As organizations get more serious about social, they will realize that departmental interdependencies and partnerships will be key to success. Marketers and other social media stakeholders should look to collaborate with internal and external resources to explore new content opportunities. Blended, consistent messaging will be critically important. For companies leaping into the social space, they need to be prepared to do more than just revisit their value models. They need to be willing to scrutinize the organization as a whole, and determine if it is truly prepared to be social.
