1. Consumers as curators.

Everything is curated now. We view the world through filters – trusted sources like friends or online communities to which we belong. ‘I want to look at topic X through your lens because you are someone I trust.’

It’s almost difficult to pluck examples of curated experiences because they are so deeply woven into the fabric of our daily routines online – everything is curated. If you’re reading this blog post, you most likely subscribe to the blog’s feed (“I want to hear from Dachis Group.”) or you arrived via the recommendation of a friend on Facebook , Twitter, Google+, etc.  (“I am interested in this topic and know that my friend John passes along good information.”).

A strong emerging platform and fun example is Pinterest. Warning: it’s highly addictive and may decrease your productivity during the workday. Pinterest is a highly visual social bookmarking site. Users catalog images of things they love plucked from around the Web in different categories on “trend boards.”

Brands can use Pinterest to identify influencers and advocates. Who is talking about your brand? How are your products being categorized and shared among influencers? And be sure to check out the trend boards on Pinterest. They represent potential engaging and relevant content for you to adopt.

2. Brands as content.

This one is simple. Consumers use your brands to express themselves.

Therefore brands have to provide variety and portability if they want to show up in their customers’ content stream. By allowing people access to the raw material of your brand, they can better identify with your products and amplify your messages.

For example, many consumers “Like” brands on Facebook because they want that particular brand to show up as part of their profile. In a sense, ‘brands as content’ is why social media has been able to become such a force in our everyday lives. Consumers are willing to let brands into their lives for the value received in return, and much of that value has to deal with the simple association between consumer and brand.

3. Brands as curators.

Proper positioning allows brands to apply their expertise, act as smart filters and become the go-to destination on certain topics. This is what we’re all striving for.

Think back to Pinterest. Brands like Nordstrom and HGTV have recognized the power of actually having profiles on Pinterest to curate cool products and ideas relating to their brand identities.

Remember the early days of the web? Users were left to wander down whatever dark alleys of the Internet they stumbled upon (and some of them were dark indeed). The rise of search engines made content discover a more precise practice. Today, content curation allows good content to surface itself to us.

Content curation is a hugely important new consumer mode in the social (and digital) space. Brands have a great opportunity to provide content for curators to use, as well as become curators themselves.

• Determined a process for social issue categorization, resolution, and response;
• Selected a technology that supports the social engagement/publishing platform and integrates with an organization’s eCRM system;
• Trained employees (and not just a community manager moonlighting as a service rep) to service social customer issues.

So much thinking goes into the process, technology, and people who should be involved in the social service function, that often times, once all the logistics have been finalized, many brands forget one of the most critical parts of training – brand voice. It’s unfortunate since most customer service teams are trained to respond from an operational standpoint.

Their main goals? Accuracy and efficiency of response.

Those goals play out just fine in traditional service channels. But, from a marketing perspective, a primary focus on efficiency can (and likely will) compromise some essence of the brand voice – a voice that someone (be that in-house, an agency, or a community manager) probably spent a lot of time defining and perfecting. And, while perfecting the service brand voice is important across all channels, it is of particular importance in social where each brand interaction occurs in a place that hundreds and thousands of fans visit every day.

So, as your company empowers the customer service department to own social service, don’t abandon everything you know in the name of traditional contact center operations.

Take the time to teach contact center representatives what your brand sounds like in social. One company shared that it takes new employees in their in-house agency 6 months to master the brand voice – so, expecting social servicers to just “get it” on day one with no training is unrealistic at best. They need to understand the tone, the brand’s stance on abbreviations, and how the voice may change when responding to sensitive vs. non-sensitive issues.

Remind social servicers that every interaction should be unique. While it certainly helps increase efficiency to have one answer to each question, canned responses are no good in social media. This is of particular importance on Facebook, where every response is posted for all the world to see (whereas in Twitter, users typically stick to their own stream). Ensure that social servicers realize the importance of individual responses. The brand counteracts the goodwill that social service earns it, when users see the exact response they received given to someone else as well.

Until servicers are comfortable with the brand voice, filter responses through a community manager. Don’t assume that servicers will immediately understand the brand voice, even if they are trained on it. Until both parties are comfortable that customer service has a firm handle, filter responses through someone who knows the voice inside and out. It may affect SLA, but will ultimately prevent any awkward responses. Also, it doesn’t hurt to revisit the brand voice training on a regular basis – as new servicers come on board and more tenured servicers move on, it’s important to ensure that the brand voice is not moving on with them.

As brand marketers, it’s important to balance the brand voice we’ve worked so carefully to craft with the nature of other business functions that may also be participating. Do your social servicers speak brand?

I had never heard of parkour – while I’m sure there are some American traceurs and traceuses (male and female parkour practitioners), I guess in the U.S., Sports Center is more focused on tennis, football and baseball.  In other words, this is not mainstream U.S. sports fare.  After watching one short video, I was intrigued to find out more about this beautiful sport and art.  “Parkour is an international discipline, sport and hobby that is best described as the art of forward motion in spite of obstacles, or to put it simply: the art of movement,” according to How Stuff Works. Wikipedia calls parkour “a method of movement focused on moving around obstacles with speed and efficiency.”

In our industry, we talk to brands about how to do business in a more social way, changing how they market to consumers as well as how they digest, communicate and disseminate information internally.  It becomes clearer with each passing day that resistance to these changes will leave your business behind.  Change is hard. People inside of brands and companies naturally resist it.  But in order to catapult our businesses forward, we must not resist these changes.  We’ve got to roll with the punches, try to not fear the new and unknown.  Traceurs go places they’ve never been before, like Doyle to Mardin, Turkey, and immerse themselves in the landscape all in an attempt to move forward in a fast, efficient and unpredictable way.  Doyle speaks about how he approaches a new landscape: “I have to pretend that I’ve already done it like ten times.” He uses mental strength to convince himself that all is OK, that he knows he can make the jumps and handle the unexpected by telling himself, “it’s alright…I’ve already done this” even when the fact is that he has never seen this particular landscape before.  Doyle’s mental strength is inspiring, and we can take a lesson from it when figuring out how to approach unfamiliar techniques and ever-changing landscapes in social business.

“Parkour’s chief aim is never to move backward but instead to overcome obstacles fluidly, with strength, originality and speed, ” states the How Stuff Works article.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could use those words to describe our forays into the new technologies and techniques of social business? Always move forward. Overcome obstacles fluidly, with strength, originality and speed.  Let’s do it.

Special thanks to Barney Loehnis for turning me on to this incredible Red Bull video via his weekly aggregation of interesting digital / social media articles and creative work from Asia-Pacific.  Find more of his aggregated articles and stories at www.asiadigitalmap.com.

When it comes to social media, content and platform usually find themselves lumped together in the earned media category. This leads to confusion during the activation planning process, limiting strategic options for brands. It’s easy to believe that customers are inevitably in control if anything on a social media platform is considered earned media.

A better approach for brands lies in separating platform strategy and content planning. Platforms evolve constantly, whether technology evolution, user behavior, or regulation change. Content should take advantage of platform context while supporting business objectives. Every platform has earned, paid, and owned opportunities:

• Television: media coverage (earned), advertising/advertorial (paid), niche networks (owned)
• Word-of-mouth: brand advocacy (earned), BzzAgents (paid), employee ambassadors (owned)
• Social media: posts/tweets/likes (earned), social ads (paid), sponsored communities (owned)

When content and platform are considered separately, social media begins to break down similar to a molecule under a microscope. In fact, under close investigation it starts to look a lot like a combination of digital media + traditional content models, catalyzed by current cultural trends.

Life might be a highway, but we all have a destination in mind. When we search for something beyond a convenient fact or a particular URL, we’re actually on a hunt for content. It’s you versus the Internet—you want your information, the Internet wants to extract as much revenue as possible from you by getting your eyeballs on all sorts of ads. While that’s not inherently bad, this model overlooks the fact that at some point, questions need answers. You can only click through sites for so long before you just stop trying to find what you need.

Here’s an example culled from my experience working with a major computer manufacturer that illustrates the problem. You’re an IT manager at a large multinational business. You need to inject new life into your data storage framework, because your company’s already outgrown their current storage capacity. This will entail a purchase of millions of dollars, and you haven’t really kept up with the latest and greatest in the storage industry. You go to the manufacturer’s site, find the storage home page…and then all you can find is a bunch of product information and a constant insistence to buy now. Well, that’s not helpful.

You’re not going to spend millions of dollars just off a few specs on a website. But the manufacturer believes wholeheartedly that its audience has the attention span of a Chihuahua on crystal meth. Everything is shallow, in three-word bullet points, and even the datasheets are just content sound bites and feeds and speeds. The potential client moves on to a competitor who can educate as well as sell.

To revisit our metaphor, you’re digging and digging into that rabbit hole, and all you’re coming up with is dirt. There’s no bottom. There’s no destination, no prize, no goldmine of information at the end. Some customers might be okay with short bullet points, but others want much more before opening their wallets. One size doesn’t fit all content consumption needs! Who knew?

So when you’re thinking of engagement strategies, remember the rabbit hole:

• A sound engagement strategy must include a wide range of professionally produced content, from quick info bites to meaty meals.
• Your audience will need different information at different parts of the discovery or consideration process.
• Whether you’re talking to internal or external audiences, there needs to be some payoff to inquiries. Your internal or external stakeholder needs to actually find enough substance to act upon the information in a rational manner.
• Don’t sell your audience short. The ten-second-sound-bite has its place, but don’t assume your audience is incurious or intellectually incapable. Allow them the freedom to access content on their own levels.

Roughly bazillions of pixels (that’s a technical term) have been expended debating the value of content in the online world. Whole companies have built their business models on providing shallow, quick bits of content specifically engineered to garner maximum search engine hits. If that’s really all it takes to get customers and make money, then these endeavors should be unqualified successes. There’s just one problem—they’re not. Content farms are coming under fire from Google, bloggers, SEO experts, news outlets, and consumers for tricking their way into the top ten listings. They’ve even spawned a humor site.

Content farms keep their ears to the ground and write quick, cheap content to capitalize on popular trends. So if you search for “why is Mubarek so terrible?” you end up with a page that says, essentially, “Mubarek is terrible because he’s a bad man and oppresses the Egyptian people.” You click on the link, the farm gets your ad revenue, and some contract writer gets almost nothing for “writing” the “article.” What do you get? Not a thing. You don’t get any new knowledge, you don’t get any real insight—you just fuel a company’s profit engine. You got lost down the rabbit hole.

Now let’s think about it a slightly different way. What if you aren’t embarking on journey of discovery about the pressing political issues of our times? What if you’re just looking to learn about a new technology, to see if it’s something you want to invest in? Take 3D TVs for an example. You’ve gone to the big box store to look them over, and you’re pretty sure that you like HiTek (yeah, I just totally made that up) TV models the best. But should you even spend so much money on an unproven technology? What kind of information are you trying to access about 3D television?

A quick Google search might show some technical review sites, a few content farm articles with titles like “Why 3D TV?” which is pretty much what you typed into the search box, and an article from HiTek itself titled “The Pros and Cons of 3D TV.” You might be thinking “sure, right, HiTek will totally be honest about this,” but you click anyway. To your shock and surprise, you get a meaty, 1800 word article! Like a drowning woman, you drink in actual information: how does 3D TV work? How does HiTek incorporate that technology? How do the glasses work? Will you ever NOT need the glasses? What are the limitations of 3D TV? Is it contraindicated for anyone? Holy cow! You read that content, and you’re an expert!

As a result of that article, you decide that since you suffer from migraines and motion sickness 3D isn’t for you. Oh noes, HiTek marketing fail! Or is it? You’re impressed that HiTek offered you such an unbiased, non-brand-centric article on the topic. They actually care about you, and educating you on technology! They’re not trying to convince you to buy something that’s not right for you! How often does that happen? So rarely that, in fact, when you decide a couple months later to upgrade to an LED TV from your old 720p LCD model, you don’t even think twice—you go to HiTek and buy from them. You followed that rabbit hole all the way down to Wonderland!

Content, once more, wins the day. But how do you structure an engagement model to take advantage of its versatility and power? Stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow to find out.

In all these situations, which will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked at the social media collision point between audiences and organisations, very little of value is extracted from what can be a costly exercise, primarily because most “social platforms” have been built to pull in audiences and allow moderators to police user activity.

Whilst there is still a place for such propositions, particularly where calls to action can be closely aligned to the editorial or other content that is of value to the owners of that proposition, in many instances it makes sense to move away from moderation towards curation.

A simple enough idea, in practice curation of external and social content has been relatively difficult for media brands and other organisations to put themselves at the centre of the flow of information and content around them. That, at least, was my experience at the BBC where, for more than seven years, I (and others) tried to come up with a solution to this problem, culminating in the well received but ultimately unsustainable, at least within the (non)budgetary confines in which it existed, BBC Manchester Blog.

A few months ago, one of our technology partners, eVectors, introduced me to a tool they’d created which, with the right editorial strategy wrapped around it, can make the job of finding, curating, editorialising and socialising content far more efficient – and interesting – than I’ve seen before.

So, with our friends Paolo and Cristian at eVectors, Nick, myself and several others here at Headshift created a demonstration which we call ClimatePulse. As we say on the site:

“Climate Pulse tracks a wide range of source for information, comment and content about the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15). It’s different from mere aggregation services because there is an editorial layer and a social layer. The editorial layer allows curators to highlight specific pieces of content. The Social layer gets users involved in tagging and categorising content. In the near future, you’ll even be able to take away a widget containing the flow from Climate Pulse – a widget that lets your friends, contacts or audience to not only consume but to contribute their own content, straight from your site, back into that flow.”

In plain English, Climate Pulse basically monitors and aggregates blog posts, news websites, twitter tweets and a wide range of other sources we’ve configured in the backend. An editor can then curate this content and display it as they wish – for example letting the flow appear as a raw feed, tagging or geo-tagging content, featuring the best stuff, etc. Here’s a diagramme showing the flow of content into the system, the editorial and tagging layer, and the social layer:

For the social layer, in this instance we’ve asked users to declare an interest based upon work based affiliation – energy business, business, government, environmental NGO or journalist. As can be seen in the screenshot below, users then determine whether pieces of content describe a problem or a solution, and add free tags to describe, in their own language, why:

All content is tagged, either by the original author, the editor, users, or by the system scraping the content for key words. When visitors click on a tag, say “nuclear energy”, they get a graph showing how each of the five categories of users voted. Using this example, it’s likely that government and energy business will see nuclear energy as a solution and, because of they’ve tagged the content, we can see that they feel it’s clean, brings jobs, is future proof, etc. Environmentalists, however, area likely to see nuclear energy as a problem because, again based on likely tags, disposal of spent fuel, mining, accidents, etc. Here’s a few possible use cases:

• If the UN, which is organising the Copenhagen Climate conference, or an environmental NGO was using Climate Pulse, they’d be able to see, at a glance, what issues people agree upon and why, and could push delegates to spend time negotiating on topics where it’s necessary to do so.

• Businesses wanting to send the message, “we know you care about this issue, we’re doing what we can understand your views, and we want to be part of the solution” could use a proposition like this to do exactly that.

• A media organisation, wanting to provide coverage and analysis of a range of viewpoints, based upon content from a wide range of sources, could use a tool like this to create a compelling editorial proposition that feeds content to journalists.

One last feature, which would help exposure to the proposition spread virally, is that we can easily build widgets of the flow from the page, and enable site owners interested in a particular issue, for example deforestation, to create a widget that displays, on their own site, that content. Social features could then be made available, meaning that the audience on third party sites could participate on the sites they choose to visit, rather than visiting Climate Pulse itself, and that participation, likely to be ranking, voting or comments, could feed back into the general flow to be highlighted and editorialised by the site curator.

It’s been, and I hope will continue to be, an interesting example of how Headshift, working with technology partners, can help implement exciting and useful propositions that extract real value from audience participation, wherever that participation takes place. It is, to me, a giant leap in the direction of resolving the issue many have grappled with in the past, which is how to find and reflect the content and opinions of a wide range of participants, without being overwhelmed, as is so often the case, by the flood of content and rising moderation costs.

The model here is a nice example of the social business archetypes that my colleague Lee Bryant described in this earlier post and it’s easy to see how we could use the ideas here not just for climate change but any topic or event, such as an election, a popular television programme, a brand, or the research or strategic work being done by an organisation.

You can see the alpha release of Climate Pulse at http://www.climatepulse.org