The Brainzooming Group

If you follow the @Brainzooming account on Twitter when I’m live tweeting a luncheon with someone incredibly tweetable, don’t be surprised to be inundated with forty or fifty tweets (sorry!).

That’s exactly what happened when Alex Knapp, Social Media Editor and staff writer at Forbes, headlined this month’s Social Media Club of Kansas City lunch talking about the intersection of publishing and social media strategy.

For those who don’t follow @Brainzooming on Twitter, here via reformatted tweets and paraquotes, are just a few of the social media strategy insights Alex Knapp shared.

Mistakes Publishers (and others) Make with Social Media Strategy

According to Knapp, the biggest mistake publishers make is thinking there is something new in social media. Publishing changes based on the platform, and the only thing that changes over time is the type of content you put on each one. The challenge (and opportunity) with social media is that it is communicating, engagement, and marketing all at once.

Social Media Talents

Social media requires multiple abilities from someone in a short time in a small space. Many publishers (and other types of companies) make the mistake of picking people with only one talent who then struggle. Among the many skills needed to be great at social media, headline writing is THE social media skill.

Alex Knapp proposed a thought experiment: You have two people, one of whom you can hire to do social media for a publication. Do you pick someone who is early in a business career and all over Twitter or someone more senior with lots of work experience and no clue about Twitter? Knapp advises picking the more experienced person since it’s possible to train someone on Twitter in an hour. Training someone who understands social media to write well, think better, and market more effectively? Well, that takes considerably longer than an hour.

Not Every Social Network Should Have identical Same Content

When it comes to taking the best advantage of varied content across channels, Knapp pointed out a great example from the world of publishing to illustrate his point: The New York Times wouldn’t run an arts story on the sports page unless it had a very specific sports angle. Given that, why would an organization run the exact same story at the exact same time on very different social media platforms?

Similar to how we covered Mall of America featuring different content by social network, Knapp shared that at Forbes, Google+ is for tech news, LinkedIn is for startup news, and there are twelve different topic-oriented Twitter feeds, some of which have come and gone over time based on what’s working. Ultimately the goal for each platform (which may have much larger readership than a publication’s paid subscriber base) shapes how a brand approaches it.

When faced with too many social media options and not enough time to go around, Knapp recommends to start where a brand has its biggest audience and focus there. He also advises against the common idea of not putting resources toward social media because it’s free. He asked why a brand WOULDN’T want to put resources toward something that was free and worked vs. paying money for marketing efforts that cost a lot and are difficult to track.

Social Media Strategy Fundamentals

• Social media is the industrialization of word of mouth, so it’s vital to make sure social content is easily shared.
• If you have great content that’s working, run it again, adding variety to how you feature it. He suggested pulling out a quote (because people love quotes), trying an alternative headline, or featuring a specific item from a longer list.
• Invite and reward engagement with personalities, content, and readers themselves (i.e., readers whose content and comments are featured will turn around and share it with others). It’s vital to show you are listening to social media exchanges and are able to engage your audience.
• Data from multiple sources helps determine the effectiveness of social media efforts. Social data sources may disagree, so you have to compare and contrast them. Knapp points out that Google Analytics doesn’t provide accurate information on Facebook traffic.
• Run analyses as often as possible (or as makes sense), measuring to the extent the results will drive change in what you are doing. While you’re measuring, look beyond the top clicks and shares. If you avoid going deeper or looking at alternative views, you’ll miss other valuable insights.
• Don’t get caught up in your own preferences. If readers love something you do, even if you hate it, keep doing it anyway.

Social Media at Forbes

There is a 3-person core social media team at Forbes. Their efforts are complemented by many, many freelance bloggers who are paid (very well according to Alex) based on the hits on their blog posts. (Hey, Alex, where do I apply?)  - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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I was writing a story for The Social Media Monthly magazine recently on the Mall of America and its social media strategy. In the course of interviewing Mall of America Senior Public Relations and Social Media Manager, Bridget Jewell, she discussed how the Mall introduced each of its social media presences based on a specific opportunity or seasonal campaign. Instead of immediately hopping on every new social network right away, MOA creates a presence when there’s a clear business reason to do so.

Not surprisingly then, as Bridget reviewed the content strategies and specific content media shared by channel, each had a different purpose. While its multiple social media presences are brand consistent and integrated, the Mall of America Twitter and Facebook sites are used differently (i.e., not simply sharing the same links), and Instagram isn’t simply for sharing photos from MOA YouTube videos.

Can you answer these 5 social media strategy questions as well as Mall of America can?

Taking a cue from the smart social media strategy at MOA, here are five questions any organization should ask about its own social media content strategy:

1. In what ways is our content well-suited to the specific social media network and our current and prospective users on each of them?
2. How is our content across the channels integrated and collectively representative of our brand?
3. How does our social media content vary across our different platforms?
4. What is included in our social media content to move the audience toward progressively beneficial behaviors for our organization?
5. What do we incorporate into our social media content that makes it worth remembering, sharing with others, and returning to in the future?

All five are very rich strategic questions. That means you need to be able to provide strategically rich answers.

Need some ideas for your social media strategy?

If you want to go to school on an organization doing it right to get a sense of how these questions should be answered, check out the varied social media presences for MOA. You’ll learn a lot – trust me. - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Photo by: Bastografie | Source: Photocase.com

There is value in increased web traffic and brand reputation from being more frequent and consistent with business blogging. But achieving a multiple times per week business blogging schedule can be a challenge when an organization does not have enough people to handle everything it needs to get done.

In those cases, it is beneficial to consider easy ways to enhance your social media productivity by taking advantage of normal business activities to create one more easy post weekly.

Seven Ways to Enhance Your Business Blogging and Social Media Productivity

A key to improving your social media productivity with business blogging is to tie the extra weekly blog posts to typical weekly business activities you (or your organization) are doing any way. Here are seven ways to take advantage of your:

1. Online Reading – Create a compilation blog post featuring links to valuable articles you read in the past week.
2. Tweeting – Put together a post with ten of your most pithy tweets (or use Facebook or Google+ status updates instead).
3. Customer Service Calls – Feature a customer service question of the week along with the answer.
4. Email Inbox – Summarize the most intriguing upcoming webinars and conferences related to your industry that you’ve been invited to this week.
5. Web Analytics – Create a compilation post listing previous blog posts receiving the most recent visits related to specific keywords of interest.
6. Sales Calls – By using a three- or five-question set of guest blog interview questions, feature a written or video interview with a client or business partner of interest to your readers.
7. Business Conversations – Share insights and industry commentary from discussions you’ve had with business associates and clients.

Through these ideas, it is possible to create an easy one or two additional blog posts weekly. If you’re better with video or images than writing, there are even more possibilities. This boost to your social media productivity can move our business blogging from one post weekly to a consistent multiple times per week blogging frequency. - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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During a conversation with a business owner on the advantages of content marketing, he asked why he’d want to continue paying to educate somebody who decided to go with another provider other than his company.

My quick response during our conversation was to ask whether potential clients his company didn’t win ever come back after being frustrated with their initial choices. He said they did. If the client opportunity was significant in the first place, that’s reason enough to keep using content marketing to maintain contact and educate even those who aren’t doing business with you right now.

11 Reasons to Use Content Marketing to Educate Non-Customers

Unfortunately, the business owner didn’t select us to develop and implement his social media strategy. But demonstrating that we do what we recommend, here’s a more in-depth answer to his question.

Using content marketing to educate non-customers allows your organization to:

1. Help maintain and build targeted awareness.
2. Demonstrate new thinking and capabilities as you develop them.
3. Stay top-of-mind for when the new wears off with the new provider.
4. Keep filling apparent gaps that still exist in the case you made to use your products or services.
5. Maintain contact with only a small incremental investment in effort, time, and cost when you are already engaged in content marketing.
6. Have a reason and a means to contact them in the future for something other than a check-in sales call.
7. Build relationships with additional influencers and decision makers involved in future sales opportunities.
8. Be in the potential consideration set in case they know other organizations / people who may be nearer-term prospects.
9. Add value to the relationship outside business transactions.
10. Raise ongoing issues they may be experiencing currently that you have solved for other customers.
11. Keep the door open to uncovering new opportunities matching your current or new capabilities.

Beyond this blog post, I’ve forwarded the business owner who inspired it a Content Marketing Institute article to address some of his questions and our white paper on social media ROI metrics. In our initial presentation, we also shared our own case study and strategy assessment of where his organization had clear social media opportunities.

How are you staying in touch with prospects or customers who’ve passed you over previously?

Are there other benefits you see to educating non-customers? And how are you doing it successfully?

Will our content marketing and education pay off with this potential client? Only time will tell, but if nothing else, it’s made us smarter on laying out a solid business case for successful business-to-business content marketing, so we’re already ahead of where we were! - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Any time we have an all eyes on the news tragedy, there is a question about what brands should do with their social media content:

• Do you act like major networks and news programs and start exclusively sharing updates and (second hand) news about the tragedy?
• Do you act like a cable network and keep up with whatever social media content was already planned, irrespective of the news?
• Do you go completely dark out of respect for the tragedy and its victims?

So, what do you do with social media during a tragedy?

David Armano offers five pieces of advice for brands and how they should conduct themselves. It is great advice oriented toward a brand with a larger collaborative social media effort, although some of it (review your scheduled content and remove anything sensitive) applies across the board.

Another piece of advice from David Armano, summed up as “Do the Right Thing,” is a great sentiment, but there’s no one answer to what the right thing to do is.

One safe answer seems to be sending out your brand’s thoughts to a tragedy’s victims. Thoughts are nice, although not particularly efficacious. Some brands take advantage of their large audiences to help broadcast emergency and relief updates. Some brands are willing to go out on a limb and offer prayers. Since many times all you can do in these situations is pray or pay (i.e., donate), prayers are at the top of the heap to help victims.

Other brands, keep on with what social media content was already planned (or inappropriately chosen amid the tragedy), as others (typically individuals) spend their time calling these brands out for their social media miscues.

Perhaps the safest answer is to go dark in the face of tragedy. The challenge is there are tragedies and victims daily.

So does that mean a brand should NEVER share any social media?

No, it doesn’t.

But when there’s discussion about the importance of being “human” on social media, it’s not some b.s. social media strategy mumbo jumbo. You DO have to be human with your social media content, no matter how big or small your brand is.

And if you’re human with your social media sharing every day, you have a lot better chance of getting it right when a human tragedy is close enough to intersect with your social media content.  – Mike Brown

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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It’s Friday, and this post was written on Thursday night. You know what that means? Hang on for a Larry King post . . . You can learn something from someone you don’t respect, but it’s much harder to respect someone you can’t learn from . . . It’s been a long time since first grade, but I saw the little red headed girl from grade school at our local Starbucks. Her smile has not changed one bit . . . I’m a lot better at stress-induced eating than stress-induced creativity . . . I love the world of multiple screens except I keep muting and increasing the volume on the wrong screen . . . Why is it I can watch Pawn Stars & not go to a pawn store, but 2 minutes of Diners, Drive-ins & Dives, and I’m ready to start eating?

Social Media Hype and Cool from Way Back

Fear, forgetting, and fecklessness can all get in the way of making progress . . . Maybe one little change will be all you need to fix a problem. But sometimes, as they say in NASCAR, you have to take a big swing at it. It just depends . . . Someone having the right words in their Twitter name doesn’t mean someone knows ANYTHING about those right words . . . At some point, you can either talk about your area of expertise for 3 1/2 days straight…or you can’t.

Attention social media rock stars: If you’re going to describe your blog using hyperbole, make it grammatically correct . . . Some people were talking about how my grandma used to go places with a camera and tape recorder. She was a content creator before content creation was cool . . . It’s amusing when someone “whiny tweets” you about nonsense, then goes back & deletes all those tweets (and by “amusing,” I mean “pathetic”) . . . You can tell I’m more than mildly amused (or befuddled) by the cool kid hype out in the Wild Social Media West.

Hate Not, Want Not

Why do they call them “task forces” and expect people to volunteer? “Fun forces” would make more sense, even if it is a lie . . . Three people I hate? Whoever designed airport bathroom stalls to swing in, people you’ve met before who won’t say their name next time you meet them, and salespeople who talked to you once on the phone three months ago who expect you to recognize them by their voice and first name . . . Ever notice how people say they want interaction at conferences, but they really just want to be talked to – and gifted with a copy of your slides . . . What if Pavlov had a cat? How would that have worked out for him?

Who Said That?

It’s fascinating to meet someone new who’s already formed a perception of you that’s so counter to what you think of yourself . . . Right now, I appear to have about 4 mini-offices located around the house . . . You can’t tell how warm the social media water is by standing on the side of the pool & pissing into it . . . One of my high school teachers gave us Hollywood Squares tests. Each person had to answer one question out loud in class. If you were wrong but bluffed well, you still got points . . . I continually forget how many lines I’ve lifted from “Broadway Danny Rose,” i.e. “It’s late, we’ll get right out of here,” “I’m willing to bet that your full of good ideas, but what you lack is confidence, ” and “You can’t ride two horses with one behind.”

There’s a reason for most everything I do, but it may have nothing to do with the reason you think . . . Official spokespeople say official things. Passionate observers provide the real sense for a story and what’s happening . . . People at TEDxWyandotte kept telling me to, “Break a leg.” Two days after the Kevin Ware deal, that wasn’t what I wanted to hear . . . I read about someone described as being a bold social media presence. The first thing out of her mouth was she watched TED videos all the time for inspiration. Obviously the standards for bold were cut by 95%, and I missed the announcement . . . It’s not just me that thinks what I think, but that doesn’t make it any better or easier to deal with.  - Mike Brown

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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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I’ll admit I was tempted to create an April Fools blog post for today on “The Top Ten Reasons Creative Thinking Is Overrated.” It would be a funny and quick post to write (ten spoof reasons followed by “April Fool”) during what’s going to be an already hectic week.

Then I remembered a post author Jim Joseph wrote last year extolling brands creating April Fools social media as a way to show a human side. I replied to Jim’s blog saying I’d considered writing a post with reasons why a brand shouldn’t do April Fools prank social media.

Well, fundamental brand strategy won out over blog writing expediency!

5 Reasons April Fools Prank Social Media Is a Joke for Your Brand Strategy

Here are five reasons April Fools prank social media content is a joke when it comes to your brand strategy:

1. Your brand represents a promise, and unless you’re Penn & Teller or Stephen King, tricking your most important audiences is likely not part of your brand promise.
2. Just because another brand creates April Fool prank social media doesn’t mean you should. If another brand jumped off a cliff, does that mean your brand would too?
3. Your brand doesn’t use “funny” and “surprise” as a part of its brand strategy and brand experience any other day of the year. Doing it one day a year doesn’t make your brand seem human. It just makes your brand seem confused or that it is a mindless follower.
4. Since your brand is more conservative than it is fun, you will only approach April Fool prank social media half-heartedly. If you are going to introduce humor into social media, you should be broad and/or consistent with it so your audience gets it.
5. Self-deprecating humor is safer than “at your audience’s expense” humor. Can you turn your April Fool prank social media idea into one where your brand is the butt of the joke? Would you want to? Probably not.

What do you think about Aprils Fools prank social media and its fit with brand strategy?

You can say I’m too much of a stick in the mud, but if a brand tries to make fools of its customers, that doesn’t seem to be part of a great brand strategy and brand experience. And on that point, I’m serious. No joke.  - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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