Content Marketing and Social Media

Nevada Interactive Media Summit

This last weekend I gave a presentation on content marketing in the social media age at the second annual Nevada Interactive Media Summit at the University of Nevada Reno. It was a great conference, and a really engaged group of people attended.

Content Marketing

Drawing on our experience creating and managing ski resort content, I presented on how content marketing has changed with the new demands on digital brands in an interactive culture. Creating engaging and interactive content can be an awesome way to get customers engaged with products or services in an ecosystem of social sharing and networking where even the best social media tools are slaves to social objects.

Social objects are what we talk about. They’re the bright shiny ball we can kick around a group for hours. Relevant and meaningful dialog can’t occur in a social community without some object that multiple parties can engage with. And that’s where your brand comes in.

Interaction is important. And we all know that whether or not brands take part in conversations, those conversations will happen anyway. On top of that, when you do get into the conversation you need to interact with a credible level of authenticity and transparency. But we know that consumers trust other consumers more than they trust even their favorite brands – so interaction between your customers and each other ABOUT you can be far more beneficial (or damaging) to your brand. Creating social objects through content marketing gives you a way to become the focus of social interactions.

References

• Pareto Principle
• Augie Ray: Tapping The Entire Online Peer Influence Pyramid; Forrester Research
• Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. Collaboration.
• Marketing Sherpa Marketing Wisdom for 2010
• Jeremiah Owyang: Roadmap: Make Your Corporate Websites Relevant by Integrating Facebook, Google, MySpace, LinkedIn, or Twitter
• Pew Internet: Understanding the Participatory News Customer
• Hubspot: State of the Twittersphere
  Rob Gaedtke and Mike Henderson: Marketing and Measuring a Social Brand Strategy