It was my first presentation in prezi, and I’ll put that up tomorrow.  Can’t say enough about prezi, but I will try – everyone should use it!

Which side of the battle should you be on?

Content isn't just good writing.

First of all, if the king really is dead you have to ask yourself what would possibly replace him.  The most sophisticated answer is that King Content has simply been forced to share his crown.  That’s why I put so much emphasis on the Three Cs of social media marketing – Community, Content, and Contact.  It’s not just about having great content, it’s about how people find it and share it, too.

More than sharing the throne, however, our view of King Content is much broader than it used to be.  There are many things that make up useful and valuable content on any successful blog and as a part of a social media campaign.

Let’s go back in time to when the common view of content was created.

Long ago newspapers devised their successful business strategy.  They separated their content into two groups – what people wanted to read about, called news, and what businesses were willing to pay to have printed, called advertising.  The first type of content drove readership, and more readers meant you could charge more for advertising.  “Media”, as we came to know it, was born.

This model was so powerful it survived the invention of radio and TV, even when replacing news with entertainment.  Simply strike the right balance between the two types of content and it all keeps on.

As durable as this model has been it hasn’t fared well in the internet age.  It’s much harder to link what people want to see and what others will pay to make them see.  More impressive is the fact that some ads are popular content – if you’ve ever sat down with the ads that come in a big packet in the Sunday paper you’ll know how powerful information in the form of ads can be.

There are many kinds of valuable content in any social media strategy that stand between the old division of information into news and ads:

Events – Nothing generates excitement like a big event at your business that can draw people in.  Sometimes it is a nearby event you are riding and sometimes it is one you create.  Examples include a neighborhood festival, a Monday Night Football game, and a holiday like Halloween or Christmas.  Any excuse for a party is something to tweet and post on facebook!

Sales and Specials – If you are offering a special deal for a limited time, your biggest fans and most loyal customers aren’t the only ones who want to know about it.  The more you can use this to get your name out on social media, the more you can use these as loss leaders that generate new loyal customers you never had before.

New Products – If you have something new to offer you have to tell the world!  Social media loves innovative new products because they can be icons that the adventurous want to be the first to say they discovered.  Give those who like being on the “cutting edge” content they want to talk about!

Staff – Your employees are often the face of your business.  A little bit of background on who they are invites potential customers into your community on equal terms.  People like to know that they are dealing with a business that cares and is responsible – which always starts with those who work there.  A smiling face says a lot.

Contests – People like to win something.  Social media generates a lot of buzz around contests as a type of content because they are exciting.  If you have a contests that are tied directly to your facebook or twitter accounts, or as a “comment of the week” you’ll encourage your community to help promote or create your content for you.

There is always a role for more traditional content about your industry, trends, and other things that might sound more like news than ads.  A good balance between all the different kinds of content is essential to a successful strategy.  But even if there isn’t a King Content what you share is central to your social media strategy.  It’s about being informative, authentic, and above all else giving your community what they want.

Content isn’t dead – it’s just grown in scope and possibilities even as it has learned to share what King Content once had to itself.  Learning to use all the kinds of content you can create makes your social media strategy stronger and more successful.

Creating a strategy around all the new tools available to us is a topic that I love to teach people about, preferably as paying clients. It’s not all that hard if you approach it properly. Primarily, it’s like everything else that I write about – connections between people and each other, connections between people and ideas, connections between people and products. In all cases, it focuses on people and the spaces inbetween, gaps that are usually filled by the ability to tell a story. Teaching how to make use of this is a process of empowerment.

We’ve seen a kind of empowerment model change the way businesses operate once before, at the beginning of my career as an engineer. In the 1980s, the manufacturing world was swept by the ideas of W Edward Deming, a visionary in what we now might call “Total Quality Management” or TQM. Before this change, the old system of assigned quality to a distinct “Quality Control” group, a small number of people who managed from the top down accepting or rejecting widgets that were produced by workers whose jobs were narrowly defined as production.

TQM made quality everyone’s job. Any one worker could shut the whole operation down if there was a problem they couldn’t fix because everyone was completely responsible not just for turning out a product, but a quality product. This meant that workers had to be taught a few basic skills, including some elementary statistics, but that challenge proved a lot easier than originally thought. The old QC Department took on a coaching and auditing role that oversaw the development of skills as much as products.

How might this apply to social media? By giving a role in crafting and distributing the sales message to everyone who works in an organization. The tools to do this are all in front of us right now in social media.

The center of any good social media strategy is the community, the people that define the business. It goes without saying that the team of employees who make up a company are at the core of that community, especially in industries that involve retail or service. Any successful message will involve them heavily, meaning that transparency from employee to customer is very important. Once you have employees writing blog entries telling the world who they are, what they do, and why they love it you have the core of a community that reaches out to customers rather than tell them what they should buy.

That’s when social media becomes effective. That’s empowerment.

It may seem strange to compare the future of social media marketing to TQM, but they have always been closely aligned. When the auto industry started adopting the new quality systems, one of the first outward signs were commercials such as Ford’s “Quality is Job One” that featured line workers telling the teevee world what made them proud to be part of the new organization. We could see in the recent downturn how a generation of such changes helped Ford when they were the only car company to say, “No, thank you, we’re OK” when bailout money was offered. Quality was job one, but telling the world about that quality was a close second. With new tools and a new focus, any company can do exactly the same thing.

That doesn’t mean that the traditional advertising systems will go away. What it does mean is that, much like the old QC department, advertising will move towards a process of strategic focus, skill development, and monitoring how effectively the message is getting out. The old days of telling people what to buy will be over.

I call this approach “Total Marketing” in a nod to Demming, but I’m sure that as it develops a better handle will come along. For now, this is what I teach my clients. Yes, it means that your employees in all functions have to learn a little bit about how it all works, but the skills of telling a story and social media are not all that hard. It’s not only empowering, it’s invigorating. And it’s a lot more interesting to dive in and do it than discussing a bewildering array of details.

Online business has relied on search engine optimization (SEO) since the arrival of the internet.  This is a way of making sure that a website can be found by customers using search engines like google.  It has long been the best way to reach people that are looking for your business and are in a buying mood, so it cannot be over-stressed as an important starting point.

But for today’s customers, SEO alone is simply not enough.  Social networks are the connections people have with each other, not just with products.  A good business has to develop a tight community.  That takes a strategic approach, which is what a consulting social media manager should provide.  A good strategy is one that the small business can implement easily once they have all the tools and skills they need to make it work.

Successful social networks have three major components:
• Contact, or how people find the network
• Content, or something that they like enough to stay a while, and
• Community, where they build relationships with other people like them.
Together, these are the “Three Cs” of a successful social media strategy.

SEO still matters because it a powerful point of Contact for customers who are looking for products, ideas, and other people like them.  The best SEO is never a substitute for good Content, however, so there has to be something more than just a list of keywords that catches a search engine like google.  That skill is still very important.

Building Community around the Content is where a successful social network manager comes into the picture.  There are many tools available to build Community, and many choices that can be made based on the people and products that are involved.  It may make sense to build the Community on twitter or facebook, for example, which are excellent tools.  A business may choose to develop Community on its own blog, especially if Content is very important.  There may even be an existing Community that it is best to just tap into as a contributor or expert, rather than build a new one.

These choices are not difficult, but they do require some skill to navigate.  That’s where a social network manager, as a consultant,  comes into the picture.  There are many social media sites that have their own quirks and advantages.  Knowing their way around facebook or how to time twitter “tweets” are some of the skills that take time to develop.

The most important part of any social media campaign for a business is having a strategy in place.  The “Three Cs” work best when they work together with a consistent message and image.  Without a careful plan that takes into account the relative strength of websites like facebook and twitter, many people often let their tactics create the strategy, rather than the other way around.  That’s always a mistake!

Getting it to work well is more than just a matter of message, however.  The goal is to “close the loop” and have your online Community reach out to friends of theirs as a new point of Contact.   That’s when an online social network really begins to grow and blossom into a highly successful presence on the web.

A good social network manager has the knowledge and skills to understand the relationship between the “Three Cs” and create an online Community effectively.  It’s not a substitute for SEO, but a powerful addition to it.  It’s how you turn one-time customers into loyal fans who rely on your business in their daily lives.  Hiring a social network manager who can do set this up and be a successful coach is the best thing a small business can do on the web today.

Empowerment: Social media works best when everyone is comfortable with it.  To the extent there is a technology or knowledge divide, we all lose out.

Small Business and Nonprofits: Large organizations can simply hire someone to do this “online stuff”.  But smaller organizations can find the most benefit in small media.

Most of my discussions here will be about these topics in order to highlight how the permanent pages in the menus work for smaller organizations.  I expect to keep learning and finding new things to say all the time.  If nothing else, I can use this blog to answer frequently asked questions.

Welcome to my new venture!  Please let me know what’s on your mind.  I promise to answer all questions here for everyone to see.  Thanks!