Complexity in Social Marketing Content for the Enterprise
I read a recent study that was titled ‘Enterprise Content Management’ because I’ve been thinking about the complexities inherent in the world of social marketing for the corporate and large enterprise and I was hoping they had some insight to the kinds of issues I’ve been seeing – short answer is they did not, at least in this report, and not along the lines I’ve been thinking. They did look at a dozen odd vendors, put them in a 4-quadrant rating and declared who exhibited the best vision and execution around what is defined as Enterprise Content, but they left out what I’m seeing as enterprise ‘social marketing content’ management. In this post I introduce the issues at work and in the next few posts show how to anticipate complexities.
What is happening as social marketing takes hold in the enterprise, is that the need for content expands, often at an exponential rate. What the industry is experiencing is that content development is, or will become a focus of the marketing organization and more resources will be deployed to help create and manage it all. The complexities that arise from a developing and managing content for a national or global social presence can be daunting, but if forewarned is forearmed, being able to predict how the complexities are going to impact the initiative, you get a much higher potential for success.
The demand for content development is pushing up budgets and headcount because it is a process to do the research or source inspiration, draft a post, record a video or a podcast, polish it up a bit and then post it on YouTube, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever. After posting the content, there is a huge selection of tools and technology out there for letting the world know about the post, albeit many require nothing more than permitting one application to notify the other and send over a few bytes. Shifting from one tool to another and then yet another is not necessarily intuitive, but it is manageable for a single person doing social marketing for a single or limited number of brands.
The issues arise when you take on more people and then have to develop a team to handle the job of content creation, posting and notification. CoTweet / Exact Target, HootSuite, TweetDeck and several other posting management systems are taking the initiative to support a team effort, but they are still a few steps short of what is needed. Once a decision is made to increase the volume of content it opens up some challenges in the areas of finding and managing authors, geography, compliance, and media types.
Authors - Think copywriters and editors here. Obviously more people creating content helps with the content demanded by the audience. The content produced might be any one of a number of types though and each author however will have differing skills, a different way of talking about a particular topic and require different tools. This aspect of diversity in the author pool should be embraced.
Geography - When you add multiple locations, as a regional, national or global brand will, the demand for content expands yet again. While ‘www.’ stands for ‘World Wide Web’, much of what we’re seeing as effective social marketing is geographically relevant, mobile content. A local franchisee or partner may want their own voice in social and this voice will have an impact for the brand. Assuming the brand decides to support content from those locals, the need to manage the content so it represents the brand, as well as the local entity adds a layer of complexity.
Compliance - Compliance is relevant regardless whether it is for governmental regulation or branding. If content needs to be reviewed for compliance or adherence to company standards before they are posted, it represents another layer in the complexity model and a delay in providing real-time engagement – a response to a blog post or a tweet 2 days later is as good as not replying at all. Compliance monitoring is becoming a 7×24 task along with marketing.
Media Types - Many of the Social Media Marketing Systems handle one type of content – textual. Social engagement uses much more than just words however. Other types of rich-media content need to fit into the model as well. Video, pictures, images / graphics, audio, and textual content all need to fall under this matrix and need to be managed to fulfill the demand for original and relevant content.
The popular systems in the industry do one thing or another, but nothing supports a broader involvement of the organization in the social marketing model and considers marketing objectives in the process – yet. Additionally, the measurement or metrics many provide are decent early stage KPIs, but most cannot show how the online marketing is meaningfully connected to revenue.
A big part of why I’m writing this though is I am looking for still better social content management system solutions and I want to hear about what you’ve come across. The next post will show how to correlate the complexities and examine some of the solutions.
Leave comments below or email me at Steven@SocialMktConvo.com.
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