This Social Media Thing

If you haven’t given much attention to managing your digital identity and ensuring that it is populated with information that is relevant to your organisational or brand story – the chances are that you will have what could be called a ‘default identity’. This is the identity that represents that ‘natural’ level of conversation about you. Chances are, provided nothing drastic has happened to your organisation recently, this won’t be especially negative, nor will it be particularly positive, neither will it yet be hugely extensive and it probably won’t highlight those aspects of your organisation that you would want to highlight – given the choice. One way of looking at this is that your identity is fertile territory – which can be colonised relatively easily. Of course anyone can choose to be the colonisers and anything that first appears will have a high level of visibility and discoverability. It is therefore in your interests to be the pioneers here and start to ensure that the prime real estate, the most easily searchable and discoverable, is populated by your content which either reflects your story or leads back to your organisation.

One of the big shifts of social media is going to be the move from buying media (distribution) to making media. The winners are not going to be those who create the most noise by buying the most media space, but those who create the most relevant content that will draw attention to themselves. I call it a digital bait strategy. Relevant here means niche, rather than mass, and authentic rather than highly polished and artificial. I.e. it is the opposite of a TV ad.

The most important thing to understand about this is that your website is no longer where it is at when it comes to digital content. A video that lives in YouTube is for more discoverable than a video that is locked into your website. Websites are much more about launching information into the social media space and, once out there, the individual bits of digital content can go to work finding an audience – especially if supported by some basic techniques to aid in their discovery by the audiences and networks you wish to target. (Creating digital discovery is essentially the new PR). For every bit of information that you think is potentially relevant to your stakeholders your motto should be “get it a good link (i.e. a URL that is search engine friendly, such as those produced by blog posts), get it tagged, get it up there and get it working for you”.

Starting to produce discoverable content is not difficult. There is probably a lot of existing information you have which could be re-purposed and placed into the new digital channels helping to build your digital footprint but also acting as digital bait, helping people discover your organisation or brand. Likewise, there are probably some relatively low budget steps you could take to develop content specifically for digital placement. Every organisation should have a YouTube channel – even if the only video you have on it is a shot of your office, factory, shop or showroom with a graphic overlaid which describes your business. It will cost zero to do this – except about an hour of time – but with suitable tags applied it is effective digital bait that is out there helping people discover your organisation.

Perhaps the most effective first step is to use a blogging platform to create a content hub. There has been a lot of talk about corporate blogging and blogs in general and starting a blog is often promoted as being ‘the thing you need to do to join the conversation’. A far better way to look at blogs is focus on the software that lies behind them. A blogging platform is simply a publishing tool that has all the necessary social media bells and whistles built into it – such as RSS feeds, tags, page titles that are search engine friendly, the ability to generate response and feedback and that are very easy to add to and update. You can use it as a platform to make your content more discoverable – effectively a socialised on-line newsroom and if all it contains, in the first instance, is your press releases, supported by links to some basic video and visual material distributed via YouTube, it will already be a far more effective tool in creating discovery than a news area imprisoned within your corporate site, or even the corporate site itself.

Come and talk to me if you want more information about creating content hubs.