How "Content as a Service" Will Help You Become an Effective Brand Publisher

THE CONTENT MARKETERS’ GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA

sprinklr.com [email protected](917) 933-7800© Sprinklr 2014. All rights reserved.

25

HOW “CONTENT AS A SERVICE” WILL HELP YOUR BRAND BECOME A CONTENT PUBLISHERThe Content as a Service (CaaS) model is meant to address both the external challenges of reaching your target audience; and also the barriers you face internally. The goal of CaaS is to ensure that content is considered a strategic imperative for business today, and making it core to business and marketing operations.

The model is broken down by four separate (yet related) work streams and supported by an operational framework that’s meant to facilitate integration at key touch points.

MICHAEL BRITO @Britopian

Michael Brito is a head of social strategy at WCG, a W2O Company. Prior to WCG, Michael worked as a Senior Vice President of Edelman Digital and also for brands in Silicon Valley like Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, and Intel. A digital marketer by trade, Michael has been building external communities for over 10 years and believes that brands should focus on turning friends, fans, and followers into brand advocates and storytellers.

social narrativedevelopment

social channelstrategy

participatorystorytelling

contentperformance

& analysis

Develop a story that breaks through

the clutter, is relevant to a specific

audience and delivers brand value.

Deliver a global social media channel

strategy based on audience

segmentation and native platform capabilities and

functionality.

Empower, train and mobilize brand

advocates (employee/

customers) to participate and tell

the brand story.

Build an analytics infrastructure that

tracks content through the lifecycle and informs future content creation.

ANALYTICS & RESEARCH

content operational framework

Craft an operational framework that facilitates the evolution into a content organization.



26

SOCIAL NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENTBoth a quantitative and qualitative analysis are needed to craft a story that can break through the clutter and reach new audiences.

Quantitative data includes a deep analysis of your customers’ interest and affinities, social graphics, an in-depth market conversation analysis, search behavior and customer segmentation data.

Qualitative data is studying the various perceptions and general conversations about your brand from various stakeholders (media, analysts, influencers, the community, etc.) purely from a contextual perspective.

The output of this exercise is to establish an editorial architecture from which all future content is created. While there are several ways to do this, the best way to think about storytelling is through three different lenses, whereby the brand:

• is the story (events, campaigns, product/brand focused)

• is a character in a story (customer stories, 3rd party articles, sponsorships)

• comments on a story (lifestyle, real-time/agile content)

From there, you can begin to map out content for your brand’s editorial calendar and align content to specific social and digital channels with some strategic thinking.

SOCIAL CHANNEL STRATEGYBrands struggle with social media because they are using it to amplify and distribute all of their content and tell every story on every channel. This approach dilutes their message and contributes to the content surplus that many people ignore.

A social channel strategy consists of two very important steps. The first requires an in-depth analysis of existing communities/ social channels, a competitive content analysis and an examination of internal resources that manage the content process. This determines what’s working and not working from a content perspective, and the analysis will deliver insight as to what needs to change and which channels need consolidating (i.e. multiple Twitter accounts, etc.). It may even uncover the option of creating new channels.

Rather than measuring content at the social

network level, there is more value measuring content

at the content level.



27

The second step involves strategically aligning content to specific social/digital channels based on the audience segmentation, platform behavior, and documented brand goals.

Social Channel Strategy also involves building converged media models that will integrate brand storytelling across PESO (paid, earned, shared and owned media), and deploying a real-time content engine using analytics, creative, and publishing capabilities.

PARTICIPATORY STORYTELLINGData from the Boston Consulting Group tell us that when it comes to trust and credibility, “people they know”, “consumer opinions online” and “colleagues and friends” rank the highest when people are seeking information about a brand and its products.

Brand storytelling is more than just branded content, native advertising or creative campaigns on Facebook. It also involves mobilizing employees to participate and feed the content engine. And it’s not just employees tweeting or sharing company news in social media. It’s about finding good stories about the brand, its products or employees and using long-form content to tell everyone about it.

This step involves mobilizing and operationalizing a brand’s stakeholders (employees, caregivers, customers, the media, etc.) to “participate” and help tell the brand story through their individual lens.

CONTENT PERFORMANCE & ANALYSISRather than measuring content (status update, press release, blog post, tweet) at the “social network” level, there is more value measuring content at the content level. We score each piece of content that gets published on a 1 – 100 scale. High performing content ranks higher on the scale.

The algorithm uses two variables to determine the score: 1) where that content was published and 2) the engagement level in each platform on which it was published.

Branded storytelling is more than just branded

content... It also involves mobilizing employees to participate and feed the

content engine.



28

We then use that scoring system to optimize future content, where it’s shared and to decide whether or not to push paid dollars behind it in order to improve reach/engagement.

CONTENT OPERATIONAL FRAMEWORKThis is an operational step that spans across each of the four work streams above. It’s a consultative approach that helps our clients structure their teams, assign roles & responsibilities with internal stakeholders and others agency partners, invest in the right technology, and build a scalable content supply chain (the editorial process that facilitates the movement of content from ideation to distribution). Essentially, it’s helping brands build a newsroom organization.

How "Content as a Service" Will Help You Become an Effective Brand Publisher

Marketing

Transcript of How "Content as a Service" Will Help You Become an Effective Brand Publisher