Mediameme

Just got back from a great summer road trip with my family. It was quick, memorable and fun. As we drove home, the parallels between planning an outstanding road trip and creating a successful social media program are very striking. Here’s an easy to remember approach:

Where Are We Headed?
Select a place that everyone is excited about and make sure everyone is on board.  If the social media program is designed for inspiring facebook fans of the brand, but it’s not a unanimous decision, keep talking. One dissenter can lead to indifference or worse, impatience, when things go wrong.

Take your Time
In addition to the major destination, plan lots of pit stops leveraging influential long-tail communities to pick up new fans and meet enthusiasts. The pit stops should be based on the insights derived from a listening platform but also peppered with opportunities to connect with brandividuals — brand influencers who are well-connected via social media. It’s also helpful to take bathroom breaks once in awhile and check your online research with people in real life at the rest stop.

Make sure your plan is flexible enough to accommodate new insights without torturing your team or brand fans.  A road trip and social media are both as much about the experience as getting to the destination. If your priority is getting there quickly, be prepared to spend lots of money.

Do Your Homework

Just as  your car needs to be serviced and running well, so does your social media team. If  your plan rests on a popular site, already be woven into their social community so when you reach out to their sales folks, you can focus on your destination instead of spray and pray (spray your messages all over the map and pray it all works).

Be sure to keep all the members of your team — not just those on the same payroll as you — on the same page via collaboration tools. Check in with the team regularly — at least daily.  Just like you would secure your home before the trip, have a scenario planning meeting or two with folks who are responsible for the product or service at the heart of your program. If you’re uncertain about what may happen when the program launches or some of the places you may find your content being posted, familiarize yourself with the horror stories, including how the brand or company recovered.

Pack Smart
Pack with your brain, and your heart. Most brand managers and marketers are tempted to throw everything ‘out there’, but that only creates more noise and confusion. Less is more.  Don’t force your brand fans to sit between a cooler and a tent — let them pack the proverbial car through content they love to create. Remember — you’re the driver and navigator.

Bring Music, Video, Games and More
Don’t forget the entertainment!  Stop ‘selling’ and start entertaining with games, video, and music. Let the community create a ‘road trip’ soundtrack or movie for your brand.

Road trips, like social media programs, are a lot of fun when they’re rockin’, but they are also a lot of detail-oriented, roll-up-your-sleeves, “thinking and doing” kinds of hard work.With big payoffs for people and the companies they work for.  Instead of telling a travel agent (agency) to ‘book the flight and a car’, travelers do the heavy lifting themselves. The road trippers have to participate in social media communities to understand how they work and know what kinds of sites and tools are better for which kinds of tasks. There’s much more upfront planning time and people needed.

The payoff?

1. Social media programs cost a lot less hard cash in total (than paid media programs, for example, when a new product is launched),

2. The company gains access to and education from a variety of people with different skills and life experiences

3. Cross-functional employees get to know each other and customers a lot better.

4. Deeper loyalty from brandvocates

And just like a real road trip: those involved in the social media program share the memories and experience of the adventure together. Forever.

Flickr Credits: chartno3; Usonian; mahalie; Torri 479; eyetwist

Remember the party game “Telephone”, where a simple phrase is whispered from ear to ear around a circle of friends? The payoff is when the final phrase is uttered out loud by the last person and it is completely transformed.

Content flows online the same way.

No longer constrained to the artificial restrictions of a web site, or even the browser (mobile), content is ‘the story’ that is being passed from blog post to comment to tweet. Content takes on a new reality from its passage across the web. From a marketing and brand perspective, the challenge for content strategy in a social and semantic world (aka web 3.0) is to ensure the key messaging content is still accurate and complete as it evolves.

Before going much further, let me clarify what content strategy means for the social and semantic web. Content strategy is a 40,000 foot strategic overview of content, aligning content, its purpose, creation, publication, and use with the overall business strategy and marketing objectives of an enterprise. Developing a content strategy means it must be resilient against the web reality that the content will be adopted, mixed, mashed and recreated in a post-modern lovefest by enthusiasts and enemies, influencers and newbies. Additionally, there is the hyper-connectivity of users plus the immediacy and velocity of conversation so:

a. Inconsistencies or gaps between the message and the supporting content, or user experience will be called out
b. Gaps filled by users aggregating and adding to existing content
c. Online perceptions of brands, products, or services are created that are a new reality from the user’s perspective

This is complicated by the increasingly interactive nature of the web making not only the content but where, when and how its accessed, organized and read, viewed or listened to, important elements to consider.

To simplify this approach, here are the key questions marketers, strategists, planners and the like may find useful when developing a comprehensive content strategy:

1. Why communicate at all? What is the risk:reward?
2. What are the goals and objectives of:
   1. The enterprise, how can the content strategy help achieve them?
   2. For the content strategy itself?
3. What does real success for each of the above look like?
4. How is success measured?
5. What content already exists?
   • Where are there gaps
   • What content must be created?
   • Will fans create it?
6. What are the desired outcomes of creating and distributing this content?
7. Who are the uber-influencers to carry and serve the content?
   • Where are they?
   • How best to connect them with content?

These musings are most definitely a work-in-progress. What else would you add to consider when developing a content strategy for the internet as it continues to evolve beyond the browser?

We are in the early days of a revolution being played out in pixels across the digital landscape. A hundred years ago, social revolutions spawned global avant-garde art direction, namely Cubism, which in turn inspired many of the major art movements of the 20th Century: Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, Constructivism, and others.

Today’s information architects, content strategists, designers, developers are the artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers of yesteryear. Historians will one day regard social media | web 2.0 as a pivot point in the evolution of our information society, much as Cubism emerged as a lynchpin between the classical aesthetic begun in the Renaissance era and the Modernism of the 20th Century. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.

Dutch artist and professor Wil Uitgeest wrote in Aardschok – Bliksemflits, that the art movements of the 20th century were no longer about painting as a window to re-create a temporal reality but instead, these movements reflected macro changes in our collective consciousness as well as our actual, individual experience. Cubism, in particular, shifted perspective from the external to the internal, where artistic expression became individual self-identification viewed through a collective prism.

In web 1.0, the non-technical users were observers, visiting sites and slowly learning the vernacular of the digital medium. Gradually, the discipline of information architecture (I/A) emerged as a way of organizing web sites based on principles derived from library science, design and architecture. Like a Renaissance painter, the information architect wanted to make their ‘picture’ (web site) easily viewed by their community of relatively unsophisticated users who, in turn, could easily understand the content. As the medium matured, content strategy emerged as a compliment to the information architect so the I/A could focus on the structure and design of the more robust site experience, leaving the strategist to populate the framework with appropriate content for the user.

There is a strong parallel to be drawn between classical art forms pre-20th century and web 1.0. Just as Cubism played a critical role in the evolution of art history, I believe we can look to Cubism and its many progeny for cues on evolving the digital medium beyond the web site towards the promise of the semantic web. Instead of a single perspective (e.g. the ‘brand web site’) with limited demands, web 2.0 challenges the very definition of content strategy and information architecture to manage multiple, simultaneous perspectives against a human discourse in real-time.

With a robust content strategy distributed through disciplined and carefully constructed forms of I/A, like the Cubist painting: fractured yet cohesive, an individualized 2.0 experience can be developed and guided through rhetoric and content, freed from the framework limitations of a traditional web site.

Just getting through all the fantastic content generated by TED. If you are not familiar with TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), you will want to add them to your Delicious. They have Talks and Conferences featuring the movers and shakers of the TED world. This presentation by Larry Lessig, the “founding father” of creative commons and Stanford Professor (School of Law) is a great example of a good idea, well told. His approach to presentation is worth studying. My three comments (to mimic his approach):

1. Brilliant historical examples strategically support his POV that creative freedom and marketplace competition has always been changed by the advent of technology. The Internet (and soon Mobile) is just another rung in the technology ladder.

2. Hilarious remixes from YouTube illustrate his point that consumer-generated content is made by amateurs, and is not amateurish.

3. An entire generation is coming of age who are comfortable with creating their own content. Even if older generations are not. Criminalizing content serves no one. And in many ways we are all ‘living in this weird time — this Age of Prohibitions, where in many areas of our life (many people) are living life against the law”.

Scroll to the bottom of the page to watch the video.