Content is Anything but King Without Strategy

A little over a week ago Bite San Francisco hosted its latest BiteBash event—“Finding Your Fans: Building Your Brand by Fostering a Following”. It was an impressive lineup (even if we do say so ourselves), featuring Fortune veteran (and author of The Facebook Effect) David Kirkpatrick along with Rick Silvestrini, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube; Shiva Rajaraman, Product Manager, Twitter; and Mekhala Vasthare, Director Product Marketing, LinkedIn. The discussion ranged across a number of themes, but interestingly two stood out. The first was a discussion that I have heard so many times that it barely deserves mentioning again were it not for the second topic… which we don’t hear often enough.

Content is king: a mantra that has not changed for years. It does not matter if you are referring to social media or traditional media, if your content is boring, stale and poorly presented, people will not pay attention–unless of course it’s so bad it’s laughable and then becomes a hit. As we all know, social media has delivered a potential audience to anyone with the most basic technical know-how. An increasing number of people and organizations are now vying for attention. In fact, according to this video by AMD (client), more than 400,000 blog posts were written on May 4, 2010 alone.

From a brand perspective this is great as it gives companies a multitude of channels to reach customers and prospects directly with information about products, opinions and customer endorsements – whether anyone wants to read it is another matter! It also, as the title of the panel would suggest, enables companies to pull their fans and advocates together to build communities by creating and sharing interesting and targeted content.

The second point is that of strategy – more specifically, social strategy and whether it should differ from overall brand strategy. It seems painfully obvious but so many times firms seemingly don’t have a social media strategy, as highlighted by Erik Sass in his piece lovingly titled ‘Your Half-Assed Social Media Strategy is a Quagmire’. Even fewer have one that aligns to overall branding aspirations. Instead companies seem hell-bent on being seen as a company that ‘gets’ social by having a presence, for presence’s sake. Rather than defining what that presence is, they have a tendency to just jump in. Without clearly defined objectives and a strategy for achieving them, what you’ll end up with will be disjointed at best, poorly executed with negative impact at worse–yes this is somewhat of a generalization and of course there will be lucky exceptions.

I think David Kirkpatrick said it best when he commented anecdotally that when Twitter first started, organizations spent more time responding to the most infinitesimal tweet to demonstrate they were there, rather than actually picking up the phones in the call center to legitimately help people. This only serves to back up what Chris Kirubi, Chairman of Coca Cola Nairobi suggests when he commented:

"You don't need a social media strategy–you need a brand strategy that leverages social media. Don't get off the brand strategy just because there's a new communications channel, that's how you lose the plot as a brand. Technology is the tail, not the dog."

Would it not have been easier and more effective to allocate those resources to the call center to improve customer satisfaction, as Kirkpatrick suggests? A lack of strategy is why it didn’t happen.

With strategy comes a plan, an objective and a raison d’être. With strategy, a company is not online and creating content because they feel an urge of mindless compunction, they should be striving to achieve a goal – maybe that’s recruitment or lead generation or even brand awareness – regardless, there is an objective that people are shooting for. With strategy comes analysis and an understanding of what content is needed, what content resonates with its audience and what content, is quite simply, a waste of time. Ultimately, with a strong strategy companies will succeed in building a community that believes in its brand–content is the car that gets you there but strategy is the route you follow.

So in a world where content is king, strategy is deity.

And for your viewing pleasure (don’t mind the sound quality – you get used to it), here are some excerpts from the event. Thanks to all those that could make it.