Tag: Content

  • To be a content brand

    I had a bit of an epiphany when I read this superbly written post on Snapchat and the nuances of storytelling. In my last post on the utility of a brand, I had pretty much glossed over ‘delivery’ because it was one part of a larger framework. (and a post that kept getting longer after I began writing!) While determining the larger purpose of the brand and its ‘job’ in a consumer’s life is important, it is also equally necessary to ‘deliver’ this to the consumer in relevant contexts, especially because we live in a world which has not fully learnt to combat  ‘filter failure’. I think ‘content’ strategy has a large role to play in this.

    The corporate narrative, referred to in the last post, is a constant work in progress and I fully agree that over a period of time, it will deliver all the advantages that the post mentions, but I do have a couple of different perspectives on the ‘narrative vs stories’ points in it. One, I think stories contribute to the larger narrative (either by collectively forming one or adding to an existing one) and probably don’t deserve to be separated from it. Two, I believe that stories are the devices which make the corporate narrative relevant to the consumer by adding context. This is even more pertinent because narratives are rarely linear in the way they are consumed now. Even not advertising is content that would influence perceptions.

    The brand narrative

    A brand’s narrative is no longer one that is broadcast to a user base that the brand considers its audience. In fact, thanks to the internet and then social, only a few contexts are now dictated by the brand, the rest of the narrative (in the consumer’s mind) is built by his/her ‘experiences and the best a brand can do is aim for cohesion. The consumer seeks/finds a need that the brand fills in his/her life. This need can be anything along Maslow’s hierarchy, and more. This, I think, is where stories play a crucial part, because the more the stories- from brands or other users – the more contexts a consumer finds to fit the brand into his/her life stream.

    The narrative of a brand in a consumer’s life is fluid, and it is cohesive stories that will define its evolution. It has probably always been so, but the explosion of self publishing has meant that brands have to not just get heard above competitors, but the user’s stream on various platforms too. The fluid narrative also means that the big idea every quarter (or year) is no longer enough. (or necessary, though that is debatable) It takes a ton of stories to build a perception and get a community to interact with the brand. But when they do, there is potential for magic. (ask Ikea) It also, only takes a whiff of controversy for it to be forgotten. This calls for an adaptive, agile methodology and some solid content structures that the brand can use to frame user contexts.

    Surprisingly, there is good news

    The good news is that social platforms do offer a better way to customise delivery according to a user need. That we still use these to broadcast and target according to pre determined audience segments is the beginning of bad news. But at some point when the race to mould the day’s popular social platforms to the existing paradigms of marketing segmentation ends courtesy saturation, hopefully ad tech will move more solidly towards delivering content and experiences that are an answer to the user’s needs. IBM’s trait tattoo based on tweets is a start. Further good news is that thanks to Facebook and Twitter, brands are slowly realising the need to create content that goes beyond broadcast. They are being forced to balance business agendas with the user’s needs.

    But, wait

    The bad news for marketers is that platforms are exploding and each has its own milieu. The content objectives and strategy are essentially different because user contexts change between platforms and even within it according to time. Right now reach trumps relevance thanks to the measurement parameters of an earlier era, but I’m guessing that will change soon as everyone begins to do the same thing on Facebook and Twitter. Further bad news is that marketing is not really structured or resourced for the changed communication scenario.

    Probably the worst news is the mindset and I have seen at least a few fundamental challenges to begin with, in addition to a few myths. One, brands still have the communication baggage of an earlier era. This manifests itself in a campaign based approach, the quest for perfection, the endless approval cycles, and a broadcast flavour to every piece of content, among other things. Two, thanks to Red Bull, everyone wants to get wings and start flying on the first day, as if there is a user waiting to hear the banality that is about to be uttered. It takes months to experiment and get a sense of the fitment of the content’s function (business needs with the objective to inform/entertain/inspire/persuade… the user), its form, (blog posts, tweet, FB post, videos, infographic, polls etc) flavour, (tonality) and frequency (timing) that will appeal to various users in various contexts – what is referred to as the ‘voice of the brand’. The last is the application of measurement parameters that were built for an earlier marketing framework.

    (via)

    However, all of this is part of the evolution, and given that the learning curve gets steeper by the day, brands will have no other choice but to catch up. The flip side is to be irrelevant, and no brand can afford it.

    until next time, discontentment

    P.S. function, form, flavour, frequency make 4 Fs. One more for F5. (refresh)

  • Social v2.0.1.3

    I really avoid writing “trends for 20xx”, but towards the end of last year, I jotted down a few things for an article. Same thoughts, but I expanded a bit.

    Barring a game changing phenomenon that further complicates the already shifting landscape, these are the 3 areas where I see the needle shifting more than others, in 2013.

    1. Content is (also) Advertising: Branded content will continue to rise as the worlds of publishing and commerce collide. Brands will invest (talent, money, time) more in content creation and curation. Also, paid media (traditional and social) will be used to promote owned media (blogs/twitter/FB page content etc) and we’ll continue to wonder how much was earned by publishers in supposedly earned media! By ‘advertising’, I don’t just mean the traditional marketing communication kind, but one that brings out more of the character of the brand/organisation itself. Hopefully this will be the first step towards a larger culture of authenticity, values, and transparency. Something like McDonald’s “Our food. Your questions” would fit the bill.

    2. Social Orientation: Social is media, social is CRM, social is enterprise collaboration, and many other things which we haven’t even begun to explore. Silo based approaches for social will evolve into socializing business strategy itself – a horizontal approach (and team) that looks at business objectives more clearly, and encompasses everything from CRM to ORM and beyond. These teams will also be equipped to handle everything from new social platforms to how social integrates/manifests on more advanced devices to technologies from AR to Big Data. Not all of this would happen in a jiffy, and there would be challenges aplenty – right from setting objectives to harnessing various skill sets to getting buy-ins from various verticals that social would interact with and affect. Social Business is most likely this year’s gamification in terms of buzz and random usage, but while that sorts itself, businesses would at least need to start seeing social as a strategy, one that can actually provide competitive advantage.

    3. Brand Voice: Speaking of competitive advantage, brands will figure out that they need to craft a voice and tonality that can resonate on social platforms as well. Many of the large brands we see now have grown up on media that never talked back, and hence adopt a  traditional media approach to communication on social as well – swinging between being apathetic and being servile. An identity and voice that can withstand the rigours of increasing conversations across platforms needs to start getting built. There might be multiple renditions of the voice as well – adapted to contexts, audiences, intent and so on, and brands will thus need to learn cohesion in narratives. A new approach to storytelling that spans media, understands popular culture and involves consumers better is the brand imperative.

    Update: Very heartening when people I respect – Dina, Gautam Ghosh, Prem think all of this makes sense! Mighty pleased and grinning away! 🙂

    until next time, #makeittrend 😉

  • Create and curate

    Yay! Instagram launched web profiles, and mine, as you can see, is dominated by food! Which meant that I was completely blown by what Zomato did with the Instagram API at Zomato.xxx. If you haven’t seen it yet, now would be a good time. Try to have a full meal before you take a look. One of the bugs in this version is that it makes people hungry. I don’t see them fixing that bug soon! 😉

    It’s not really an original thought, since I’ve seen at least one fashion brand use hashtags on  Instagram and Twitter to generate photos, but that doesn’t really take away anything, since the execution is extremely good.

    I wrote about the reemergence of branded content last week. One way is to create your own content, the scalability of which is debatable, unless that is one of the organisation’s core competency and priority. The other way is curation. Like I have mentioned on the blog before, curation is a great way for brands to engage with content producers and at the same time, provide  great content to those who consume it. It’s not really creation vs curation, but more of their respective share in the strategy.

    On the execution front, crowdsourcing works best if you make it as easy as possible for the for the content producer. In Zomato’s case, adding a #zomato to the food snaps I load on Instagram is hardly a task. The simpler the task is, and the more it is an add-on behaviour than a new one, the lesser the need for incentive. The cooler it is, the more people would want to be a part of it. It distributes itself.

    In a traditional media dominated era, more money was spent on distribution than creation. Now content is marketing and with owned platforms, and earned and ‘sponsored’ media on social platforms, the costs of distribution have fallen. There’s a lot being written about content strategy for brands from a creation perspective, but the costs of distribution fall even further in curation because content creators would want to show off their work. The hope is that brands will spend at least a part of the money they’re saving, into creating platforms, processes, tools etc that make it easy for the user to create and share ‘branded’ content.

    until next time, co-curation is for later 🙂

  • Brands and Plus points

    Considering that I tweeted this sometime back, and found this a great read, this post is not on the pros-cons/ how to use Google Plus or on the lines of 'why I am getting out of Facebook and hopping into bed with Google Plus'. These are just thoughts based on a query I asked on and about the platform a couple of days back.

    The context: I observed that, on my Plus stream ( I have 'circled' about 150 people), a few people were sharing the same content they did on Twitter and LinkedIn, presented the same way as well. I could understand why they would use these as distribution networks because it is difficult to accurately predict who catches what in busy streams. But what did surprise me was this content being shared as 'Public' on Google Plus, when it is very easy to create circles of people with common interest and share accordingly. (using earlier interactions on other networks or even what they share on Plus) And so I asked

    Predictably, the most insightful comment came from generic propecia online no prescription 1

    twitter.com/#!/misentropy” target=”_blank”>Iqbal, who nailed it with “we are used to the environment defining the limits of who we share with – rather than having the ability to choose and consciously picking one set of people over another, every time we have something to say.” In this context, I remembered an excellent post by JP Rangaswami on the subject of filters, publishers and subscribers. While I agree with his summation that “We can only fix filter failure by providing subscribers with better filters, by providing publishers with tools that allow subscribers to filter better“, I did feel that in the interim, till the environment (/infrastructure) is able to deliver this at least to a certain degree of satisfaction (it's a dynamic scenario, not likely to be completely perfect), publishers (us) should filter our output too.

    All of this led me to a comparison of this scenario to that of brands as publishers. Thanks to traditional media platforms, brands had an environment which to a large extent defined the what/who/where/how of marketing communication. Few brands have been able to cope with the explosion of platforms and the freedom, choices and protocols that come with it. As consumers become filters and learn selective broadcast, exploring and navigating the platforms might be a good idea for brands, but it might be a better idea to (also) invest in a content-communication infrastructure which can be customised to meet both the dynamics – the brand's messaging needs and the consumer's sharing habits. (in the brand's context)

    until next time, helpless to help+ 🙂

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  • Brands and Curation

    Content and the need for brands to get into the space of creating it has been a subject discussed here several times. So, when I read about MTV's tumblr voyage, (via) I thought it would serve as a good handle to revisit the subject.

    I thought the choice was platform was in itself a great step. Tumblr, for now, seems completely clued in on how networks, sharing and community work and as MTV notes, is focused on web culture, which can be seen in the way they have designed the service. It also explains why there's nothing new about everyone from media companies to fashion brands hopping on to it.

    Brands as storytellers is also nothing new though new and interesting stories are hard to come by. That's where a crowd can help. Mostly, when brands say they've tried crowdsourcing, it means asking for a caption or a photo or a video that has something to do with their current campaign. There are exceptions like IdeaStorm, Dewmocracy, My Starbuc

    ks Idea etc but that's a small list in the large set of attempts.

    What I liked about MTV's approach was that it is not asking for anything specific. It is establishing a culture of conversation around its domain and with its trademark edgy approach (F*ck yeah!) – internally and externally, making it comfortable for a community to develop. Once that happens generating interesting stories (content) will slowly stop being a constraint. Brands can then chose to play curator, aiding discovery, surfacing interesting ideas, starting a line of thought, and streamlining conversations. And when it feels there's sufficient excitement, scale these up to a larger audience via other distribution channels. Right now, the reverse is how it works – a “come one, come all and quickly contribute to our newly launched endeavour” shout out on traditional media, instead of an organic approach.

    On a different track, this doesn't mean that if the crowd generates everything the agencies will be defunct. On the contrary, and in addition to the implementation, the agencies are probably best suited to play the role of meta curators, moving beyond one way advertising platforms and processes, and using their understanding of the brand to explore new platforms and communication protocols being developed, so that they can advise the brand on every frontier that comes up.

    until next time, tumble along

    Update: Just read that Tumblr hosts more blogs than WordPress now. (via)

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