In his latest book, “Your Brand: The Next Media Company”, Michael Brito, among others looks at the social dimension of content and social content strategy. The people at Edelman, where Michael worked before assuming his new role at WCG, obviously pay a lot of attention to content marketing.
But it’s not just from the PR and social newsroom perspective. Michael also looks at content marketing from the social business viewpoint. Both go hand in hand in an era of überconnection and digital transformation.
In a Slideshare presentation, Michael shares some views. And it all starts with the description of the book: “How Social Business Strategy Enables Better Content, Smarter Marketing And More Effective Customer Relationships“. That’s clear.
The structure of the book shows that it’s not about content marketing as it originally was used in a B2B perspective and I still use it most of the time (for the obvious reason that I’m in B2B marketing and digital business).
Michael’s views revolve more around:
- Planning and execution of social brand and content strategies. The focus is more on the newsroom, converged media models, brand strategy, etc. The brand becomes “a content machine” and, as recently mentioned in the announcement of Cision’s content marketing software and as you can read in our review of Edelman’s entertainment report, PR, branding and converged media play an increasing role here (also check out Altimeter’s research about that converging approach) and most certainly also in PR.
- The social business strategy approach. This is another take but it’s more connected with branding, social and even B2B content marketing than you might think. It’s about people and processes, remember? It ALWAYS is and not just today or in content marketing alone. The social business strategy, whereby collaboration, content audits, content governance models and workflow management, to name a few, are more important. But let’s face it: in the end, social business nowadays still is mostly about collaboration.
Connecting social business, brand and social content strategy: enablement
So, how do you connect those two dimensions: the social brand and social content strategy on one hand and the social business strategy on the other?
While the social brand and social content strategy is mainly about planning and execution as said, the social business strategy is about infrastructure: collaboration (for which you need tools and processes), governance but also technology partnerships, for instance.
The key connection between both levels, however, is enablement. If the social business strategy is not there, the social brand and content strategy can’t work.
Or in simple words: it won’t work if you’re not organized to make it work and your people don’t feel motivated and whatnot to make it work because it’s too hard, boring or whatever. The combination – or should I say integration and collaboration – of it all leads to what Michael Brito calls the ‘Media company transformation’.
The key elements of the media company transformation:
- Content. That’s what the brand does: producing content.
- Relevance. In Michael’s view seen as changing customer behavior.
- Speed (or how recent it is, for which the newsroom and real-time command center approach is important).
- Omnipresence; the content sits everywhere (and the “audiences” can be everywhere although you need to focus on the areas where it matters most first).
- Agility, one of the essential evolutions in digital transformation processes (e.g. fast data).
It’s clear that all these aspects and evolutions fit in the broader transformations of social business and digital transformation in an era where everything (literally) gets connected, from technology, processes, the different parts of the organization’s ecosystem in a collaborative economy, e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.
