8. What is a “Digital Ecosystem,” Anyway? Then: .com large center with traditional media pushing back to center: PR, Direct, Sales, Advertising, Events, Promotions Now: .com weighted the same as other channels, in almost a tag=cloud-like presentation. Use the following as labels for the “clouds,” with many cross-linkages: Conversation Social computing Microcasting Syndication News media Websites Apps E-mail Search Advertising PR Direct Sales Promotions Other offline media
13. We Are All Media Companies MarcommPublisher Brand-focused message Actionable information Positioning Engagement One-way Two-way Passive absorption Active contribution Come to me Go to them
23. Inventing new markets Deluxe Deluxe.com Small Biz Blog Community Site Facebook Twitter Site Assessment
24. Rebranding Through Distributed Content (Ecumen) Ecumen.com Show before pic + ecosystem map Introduce audience info / biz objectives AMY: WE WILL DESIGN THIS SLIDE Ecumen.org (B2C) Changing Aging Blog (B2C) Location Sites (B2C) Ecumen At Home YouTube (B2C) Site Assessment
26. Resources (FINAL LIST TO COME) “Content Strategy for the Web,” by Kristina Halvorson Junta42.com Google Keyword Tool Resource/web 2 to come McKinsey preso on new customer purchasing cycle
30. The Right Tools Listening: Google Alerts Radian6 / SM2 Visible Creating and Publishing: Azul 7 Site and Social Media Manager Multi-social-platform clients (Hootsuite, Tweetdeck) Video distributors (TubeMogul) PitchEngine Managing and Measuring: CMS Compete.com / Alexa.com Omniture Google Analytics
Editor's Notes
Thank you to Emily Steffel - and everyone at the IABC for inviting me to give this presentation on Managing Your Digital Footprint for the first webinar of the tech series fall season. We appreciate your help in getting this set up as well as your advise finding a topic of interest to the IABC community.
I’m Lisa Helminiak, one of the founders of a company called Azul 7. We are a branding and digital agency in Minneapolis that helps clients meaningful and profitable interactions with their customers. I’m just one member of a great team of strategists, content experts and designers that collaborate to help our clients thrive. A special thanks to Emily McAuliffe, one of our colleagues who helped put together today’s presentation.
Today’s agenda and objectives: Distributedtouchpoint & content strategy is a huge – and hot – topic. No common prescriptionsYour communications objectives are unique, and your online-media strategy should be, too. ARE some themes, concepts, and tools surrounding online content distribution. That’s what we want to introduce to you today. Our goal is to cover some of the key opportunities and issues, and set you up to assess your own situation and begin creating a game plan for better content distribution. We’re not going to tell youhow to define a strategy or content for your specificaudience how to integrate your online and offline channelsTwitter or Facebook is the right media for your brand. What we ARE going to cover is: How emergingdigital touch points and distribution channels have completely changed how we think about content how you share it both inside your company and out, how it affects your interactions with your customers, prospects, and other audiences.
Google InstantTwitter – interface to allow Video + imagesYouTube LiveFacebook is NOT Building a phone
[like to break this into three slides:1 just You.com2Multiple You.com3 Cloud with You in there]THIS is your digital footprint: then and now. Think of these as distribution platforms: ways of getting the word out. The old model was much more contained. You had your own media – your website at the center, your direct marketing, your events, etc. – and you delivered things to other media for them to share with your customers and prospects. Today, your website may be the LEAST dynamic content channel you manage. And those third-party media groups? They’re still part of the mix, along with entirely new channels for going direct to customer. It’s not just media that you own, that you control – it’s now comprised of media that other people own and produce. And the paths are much less defined than they once were. Your goal is no longer to prioritze driving traffic back to your own website. Instead, it’s meeting customers on their turf, in their terms. Channels include: Conversation (blogs, forums)Social computing (tags, wikis, social media) Microcasting (pod/web, video) Syndication (RSS) News media Websites (.com, microsites) Apps E-mail Search (SEO/SEM) Digital ad media Offline media: events, print, collateral, direct, radio, TV, out of home
This is the is you within the larger eco-system of the internet
This is the universe as your users see it.
One of the reasons companies hesitate to move toward a distributed-content approach is the visual you just saw: it can feel overwhelming – which leads to inertia. But establishing a distributed-content strategy is important: It’s what your customers expect. It’s essential to creating visibility. It’s essential to creating BRAND. And the best part: it’s all measurable. The first step: understanding the new landscape, and how it impacts the role of and approach to communications strategy.
PadroLaboyNot specific channels any longer. It’s not about PR, Customer Service, Mar Comm, Corporate Communication. We are organized around functional areas, and each has its traditional channels. The new model is more about engagement. And the attributes of digital media environments. Four primary environments
Making sense of this means a major shift in how you consider your role as a communicator and marketer. The evolution we all need to make is to shift from thinking and planning like a marcomm organization to thinking and planning like apublishing organization.Your Communications need to thought of as part of your product and services offering because to your customers they are one and the sameWhat does that mean? Before: You established and CONTROLLED the message. You pushed it out. Now: You participate in the message. You no longer CONTROL it. Before: You talked about your brand. Now: You deliver actionable information: content that helps your audiences learn something or solve a problem. Before: You worked hard to reel everyone back to your home base: your brand’s .com. Now: You go where they are. Your .com is a backstop – a point of validation – in a much larger, broader, wider conversation taking place with and without you. We are going to meet them on their terms. Publsihers are in the business of creating useful information that people WANT to absorb. This is your opportunity. And we now have an incredible array of media through which to publish that content.
There is a practice called “service journalism.” I like to call it “service marketing.” And you have an incredible array of media today to publish your content. This is the fundamental shift in terms of in terms of channel and touchpoint strategy in today’s publishing model: Today, your strategy is to SERVE. Content is the best way to do it. It’s Distributed Content’s Big Moment.Your communications and customer touchpoints are becoming in your customers’ minds and extension of your product or service
So let’s line up the channels we looked at earlier with the four hallmarks of content environments today. Your mission is to create and contribute to customer-focused content in each channel – regardless of whether or not you “own” that channel. Set your content free! Communications EtiquetteD’amico (example)
From the Funnel to the LoopThe outcome of this new channel strategy: An entirely new look at your customers’ decision process, and the role of content in that process. We all know the funnel – you start with a bunch of brands, and winnow them down through a consideration and evaluation process until, ultimately, you make a purchase. McKinsey and Co. did a study of 20,000 consumers last year in which they discovered the decision process today is quite different from the “sales funnel” we all grew up with. Sept 09
Now, the array of content channels we all are exposed to every day means the funnel has morphed into a continuous loop. Begins with awareness of brands through social and traditional media. Your typical brand communications. A trigger event prompts the consumer to decide to make a purchase or research a product. Now, however, the consider set no longer shrinks as in the funnel model. Today, the buyer seeks out content through an active evaluation process, using social and informational media – and the consider set actually GROWS. After a purchase, brands need to keep consumers engaged – to turn passive consumers (or those who would repeat the entire process and be open to other brands when it’s time to repurchase) into active loyalists. In this landscape, it’s pretty clear that traditional content – create your message, jam it into the “awareness” end of the funnel, and keep refining it and refining it through the process to the decision point, no longer works. Instead, today’s content strategy means creating complementary content,
New way to look at environment means that we need to measure things differently. The stuff available to measure has changed.Examples: Next slide
Conversion: Too many people focus conversion exclusively on buying behavior such as signups or purchases. to active leads or purchase. In today’s communications-as-publishing POV, you have the opportunity to redefine conversion. It can – and should – be much more than a purchase. Instead, think of conversion as any step you want people to take within your digital-media footprint. It might be: First a download that leads to a request for information a search for a coupon/deal and then a purchase. Each of you will need to craft your strategy and then watch behavior to refine the paths through your loop rather than a simple funnel.You can see the advantages to this approach: It gives you a measurable KPI, key performance indicator, in every channel.
Workflow: still siloed; need to be better connectedBrief: (will distribute a comp. )Cross function teams - diagram
Need to pull together list.
Hand Outs1-Worksheet for Assessment2-Keyword strategy outline (for all messages)
Audience: The fundamentals still apply! Who is your audience? Where do they spend their time – both physically and online? What key problems/issues do they face every day? What kinds of devices do they use to find information that can help them solve those problems? What is their decision process? Keywords: Do you have a centralized company list of preferred keywords? If yes, are you using them across all of your current content points? (Yes, including Tweets?) If not, start building one now. Consistent language in your customers’ voice is important to establishing a constant, visible presence across the fractured media landscape. Listen and respond: Distributed content, as we talked about earlier, means you no longer have control of your messages in every channel, at every time. But you DO have the ability to respond, to engage in dialogue. Are you ready to listen, to hold back, to jump in transparently when the time is right? Operational readiness: So many communications teams are still very siloed. Do you have existing processes, tools, and team alignments that will ensure every team is able to take advantage of the content you’re creating and distributing, and that you’re not putting out conflicting messages?
LOGO SLIDEIt can feel completely daunting. It’s hard enough to keep press releases flowing and web content updated, right? There are tools out there that can make managing content distribution achievable – not overwhelming.
