Leslie Bradshaw is the President and co-founder of JESS3, a creative interactive agency specializing in social media and data visualization. Her content creation platforms of choice are SlideShare and TwitPic.
How many times a week do you see brands use Twitter and Facebook in their marketing efforts? These days it seems as though it’s almost a harder exercise to name companies not linking to either or both in their promotions. However, I’d like to argue that the sole dependency on Twitter and Facebook alone is, at best, creating a chance to build relationships and a “2.0″ CRM, and, at worst, allowing organizations to successfully build TV stations with audiences without producing any programming. In a lot of cases, content and related strategy – what is going to be created, by whom, when and distributed where – is missing.
Sure, brands like CNN and the New York Times have obvious content strategies – they are in the business of content. Videos, photos, blogs, articles, essays. That’s what they do. They even have deep benches of mini-content creators in their reporters and producers (CNN’s Twitter lists and the New York Times’ Muckrack.com prove it in a big way).
But somehow, most brands still fall short of truly maximizing and optimizing two of the greatest promises of social media:
1. Democratizing and distributing the role of communications across the entire company. I cringe when I hear that there are still companies, in mid-2010, that are making social media the job of one person in PR / marketing at best, the intern, at worst.
2. Tapping into the power to create and publish. While most companies have the social networking / relationship building and the sharing on lock down, their content creation strategy is still pretty fuzzy.
The solution: modeling your organization after the media-by-trade companies like CNN and the New York Times in their approach to content, an editorial calendar and empowering their staff. I have a few handy tools to offer: along with our client Eloqua, JESS3 has recently released two resources: The Content Grid (a blueprint for how to market and engage on the social web) and the Social Media Playbook (aka “Everything Your Company Needs to Know to Succeed on the Social Web”). They’ve been released under a Creative Commons license, so please download, adapt, adopt and remix as you wish. This is their first “v1.0″ carnations, so feedback is not only welcome, but will be what drives v2.0 in the months to come.
