Mediameme

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.

Maslow is dead. Long live Gramsci. Oh, he’s dead too. In the literal sense. But he’s going to become a lot more well-known thanks to a new President Obama and savvy marketers searching for social media models.

Who? Antonio Gramsci, a Socialist – Marxist scholar who proposed that capitalism maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically through a hegemonic culture.

A What? Hegemony means that a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class, that everyday practices and shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination.

In a hegemonic culture, according to Gramsci, the values of the bourgeoisie become the defacto values of the society. For example, in last century the rise of traditional media in America has been dominated by college-educated liberal arts majors whose perspective of life is very different than, say the working class (in Gramsci’s Marxist terms). Yet, his theory goes that the working-class will define their own values, ignoring the bourgeoisie thus evolving American society into a consensus culture where the murky middle reigns.

Nowhere is the murky middle more evident than during elections. Obama won the clear majority of electoral votes (364) yet he only managed slightly more than half the popular vote (53%). Or, his brand did not convince 46% of Americans. We arrived at a consensus, driven by the aforementioned traditional media rather than voting for someone who we individually felt represented us.

Maslow’s sharp focus on individual needs worked for the ‘me’ generation of 20th century Americans who, for the most part, had grown up in a world where their basic needs (food, water, shelter) had been met but their ‘self-esteem’ needs of belonging, recognition and appreciation could be manipulated by marketers and exploited by HR departments.

Gramsci’s philosophy works better than Maslow for understanding the intrinsic motivations for the Millenial Generation, formerly known as Gen Y. Community-minded, they love to collaborate and are using social media to blur the boundaries between work and play.  With 80 million Millenials out there, most with Twitter accounts, Facebook, Flickr, iphones and IM, they are (re)creating our culture, political legacy and values.

Every week, I get asked some variation of the question, “HOW do I get started building a social media strategy”. So here is my recipe that I’m happy to share.

To get started, building a social media strategy requires focused thinking sustained over a few days. Not the multi-tasking mayhem that most managers find their daily lives to be, but the kind of focused thinking done in preparation for a major test or when writing a thesis.

Instead of looking for the proverbial silver bullet, block off a few hours for the entire week. Start on a Monday, spend 3 hours alone in a closed door conference room. Immerse yourself in facts and data. Study the market. 2 hours on Tuesday. Study your competitors. 3 hours on Wednesday. Study your customers — both loyal and one-hit wonders to see what might be the difference between them. 4 hours on Thursday to see where they are online and what conversations they are having. And invest 4 hours on Friday to focus your thinking and organize your buckets of findings into hypotheses.

Here is a list of 10 checkpoints to keep the social media strategy development process focused:

1. Keep your objectives tight and reasonable. Don’t try to solve overpopulation when all you need is to neuter your dog. Just talk with likely users and help them to understand how your product or service fits into their life. And DON’T talk to me about demographics. If you are truly embedded within a community (because that’s what social media is), I can guarantee you that the group has not organized around some arbitrary labeling (w:25-54) or income or geography. It’s more likely to be lifestyle-oriented or significant moments in life.

2. Make the social media strategy EASY (because you’ve done all the thinking work, remember). Sharp and succinct like a short story. One of my favorite (CEO) clients used to challenge me with the opening line: I’ve got a new 30 days. What can you help me do to make a difference to my business? That litmus test gets you to clarity very quickly. Same thing with social media strategy. One page, tops.

3. Create the perfect storm between prioritizing what your customers want with your product / service, picking the top 10 places where your customers socialize (check the incoming pages to your web site for some guidance as to where they might be found), and setting the metrics goals for communication.

4. Clearly state your business objective. What do you want customers to DO? Are you looking for prospects or for regular users to put one more item into their cart or make one more trip to your store. And don’t say both because the more you dilute your social media strategy, the less effective it will be. Singular focus and discipline will produce spectacular results.

5. Get engaged with your customers and target audience. Birds of a feather flock together. Learn from them what they want and build a better product or service.

6. Be trustworthy. Approach communities with honesty and respect. Underpromise and overdeliver rather 6han the other way round. Answer the eternal question: why should anyone believe you?

7. Go extreme. Being distinctive is more important than ever when you are engaging within social communities. Read Purple Cow by Seth Godin. Pick out what is important to customers and make it unique.

8. Fail to plan = plan to fail. One of my favorite phrases of all time (it works better with 9 year old girls than 43 year old husbands, BTW). Be first, but more importantly, be the best. Socialmedialand is filled with ‘firsts’ who failed to plan and improve upon their initial business model. Friendster should have been Facebook. Yahoo is imploding while Google is cloud computing.

9. Don’t change your strategy. I cannot emphasize this point enough. Basically — let it ride. In any change bell-curve, people start off excited but then quickly get scared (especially if there is any kind of setback like lowered sales) and want to go back to ‘the old way’. Don’t do it. Declining sales have less to do with the fact you moved your media investment from traditional to social media and probably much more to do with a fickle audience or a new competitor.

10. Review, rinse, repeat. Socialize your product and strategy so frequently that people can lampoon you. The community will LOL with you (not at you) and as long as you can enjoy the fun, your company will benefit (as will your personal reputation).

Remember: strategy is only half the picture. Implementation is the other half which I will address in an upcoming post.

What ARE they teaching kids these days?

I thought I’d start with the education parents pay the most cash for their offspring to attend: Ivy League schools.  Harvard Law School has an ‘ever-evolving’ course called The Web Difference with the key themes: socialization of knowledge, economics of peer production, web as medium, morality, citizenship and democracy. Any course that includes required reading from Courtney Love, Hobbes and Shakespearean Sonnets on Wikipedia is worth taking a look at their syllabus which, in this case, is a blog.

Brown offers a digital Art course with a great summary line: What would Andy Warhol’s Facebook page look like? What would John Cage have done with an iPod? The course is production-oriented, examining art and digital technology. Judging by their recent Curator project, these young people are ones to watch as future thought leaders and artists.

UC Berkeley is offering a well-designed sociology class on virtual communities being taught by Howard Rheingold (who, for the Boomers in the house is the equivalent of a 20th Century American Literature being taught by Ernest Hemingway). The course is designed for active learning. The students are required to blog, comment and post on a secured wiki in addition to reading the theories and engage in discussion.

My degree is in film & media studies, so I wanted to see how much the curriculum has evolved with web 2.0. Another Ca-school, The University of San Francisco has an honors-level seminar called Digital Literacy being facilitated by David Silver, who is half of the partnership behind The September Project, a grass-roots initiative designed to interconnect libraries around the world. Aside from Silver’s blog format that is very user-friendly, I liked that he required a Flickr Pro account as part of the course resources. It made me realize how much value is generated from a Flickr Pro account versus buying <another useless> textbook that will be out-of-date the minute it is published.

Universities are the ultimate curators of knowledge.  Fascinating to contemplate what effect this will have on the workplace as these graduates flood the market in the coming years.  More to come on this important series.

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