I had always been a staunch supporter of online revolution and usually scout the brand’s social media channels and blogs on the web before I make a final purchase. This aspect of marketing that includes authentic reviews comforted me a while back; I mean why wouldn’t you buy a product if the same is highly recommended by a blogger or has great reviews all over the internet? A reality check while being associated with a brand, introduced me to a unique mafia that operated undercover, and included the likes of celebrities, bloggers and other pushed form of reviews, mostly internal which may look authentic however are a mere façade! Many brands today indulge in these malpractices to push sales, the most recent ones being Samsung and MasterCard.
While this may be the latest in the hay, these malpractices by brands aren\’t new. One of the oldest examples in this regard was when L’Oreal came under the storm in 2005.
When L’Oreal Lost It
In early 2005, Vichy, part of the L’Oreal group decided to launch an anti-wrinkle cream (Peel Microabrasion) in the market, and while doing so L’Oreal created a fake blog named Le Journal De Ma Peau or Diary of my Skin along with a fictitious character, named Claire who supposedly whined about her ‘wrinkle’ story and how she benefited from this product. What L’Oreal didn’t realize was the fact that Claire was indeed a model who was photoshopped. The users were quick to realize this aspect and soon L’Oreal was bombarded with complaints from actual users.
L’Oreal accepted this mistake and apologized to its users and revamped the blog (unfortunately the same does not exist anymore) after inviting real bloggers to share their experiences, thereby bringing to light a seasoned blogger engagement that was authentic.
Another aspect of “faking” it would also involve marketing techniques, which may look lucrative (and sound new age) however are deceptive, something like the infamous MTV hack of its own Twitter account. Though L’Oreal was lucky to get a fresh life post its debacle, MTV was highly criticized. While the brand may have regarded this as a clever stunt, it surely played with customers’ trust, something that brands should never forget.
I knew MTV wasn’t hacked when their content continued to still be complete crap.
Mohit Doda, a seasoned marketing professional and currently AVP Digital Marketing for Zoffio, a Zuri Group initiative shared:
“As more people are relying on online reviews to make their buying decisions, marketers are tempted to plant fake reviews to acquire new customers. While they may get away with it, this practice can do more harm than good in the long run. If your brand isn\’t good enough, there will be too many negative reviews about you anyway. Moreover, sugar-coated fake reviews aren\’t too difficult to spot by your social audience who are quite evolved today and brands should not subscribe to such malpractices as it can permanently ruin their reputation.”
Having worked as a mystery auditor as well, Mohit further states, “As a marketer, being open to feedback is crucial as negative reviews can also contribute to improving your product or service. However, any business will have their share of satisfied customers and getting genuine reviews shouldn’t be very tough.”
The big question that arises today is how to gain trust from your social audience and to conquer we are sharing 7 tips with you in the infograph below:
While you are at it, I can’t help but share this awesome quote by Larry Light, a US Brand Consultant: “A brand is more than a trademark. It is a trustmark. A brand is a covenant between the company and the consumer. A trusted brand is a genuine asset.”
While honesty is the key to any business, a social savvy audience would not give your brand another chance in case of a fiasco (read fake reviews) and we sincerely hope that these stats would help you rank trust in high regard while addressing your customers!
We have been discussing content forever now! While it has been hailed as the king, the queen and whatnot, it is surprising that not much is said about its creators – the content marketers and the challenges faced by them.
While we cannot deny the importance of content marketing (and that it is here to stay), the job of a content marketer has become highly challenging and demanding. With a very fine line between the job profiles, a lot of us (read: social media managers) deal with this role reversal each day. Apart from being responsible for maintaining a highly engaging brand identity, we are also entrusted to roll out exciting content even quickly, each day every day!
We at Beta21 love to share firsthand experiences and for this story, we got in touch with Serena Mariani, who shared with us interesting insights on how to battle this aspect. Serena is an award-winning, social media marketer and a digital project manager based in London. A citizen of the Internet since 1992, Serena received the Mark Hanson Award 2012 as “Best Social Media Communicator under 30”. In 6 years of agency and in-house experience, she has been part of teams helping brands like Max Factor, Subway, and Vanish to successfully transition to the era of content marketing and social media. We tossed the following question to Serena and this is what she had to say:
Brands are trying to churn out a greater amount of content for their audience today. Is this tactic really helpful to brands to gain the reach they are looking for?
There are different aspects to this issue, so let me articulate with different examples. Content marketing is an area in which the “less is more” rule does not necessarily apply – in fact, maintaining an adequate output of content is generally rewarded in SEO terms (search engines love fresh content) and can help keep the brand top of mind for your customers/consumers. An example: an informative weekly blog post providing your B2B clients with valuable industry information they\’d take much more time to gather and digest; or a daily useful tip on your Facebook page – these are good examples of “more is more”.
However, the temptation to churn out generic content that does not add any value for your customers just for the sake of it hoping to generate “more views” has to be resisted. The risk is to alienate your audience and ultimately lose relevance in an overcrowded, noisy media environment – it happened with traditional advertising and it could happen quickly to relatively new marketing tools. I recently wrote about how the decline in organic Facebook reach is paradoxically a good thing for (better) content marketing. In short – if what you are going to publish is just “filler” content, think again – lose it, or even better, think of what could make it better. No one likes to see their Facebook feed (or inbox) full of “Happy Friday!” silly posts, and the “Mute/Unsubscribe” button is always just a click away.
What is the content marketing strategy taken by you for your clients in relation to the above-mentioned issue?
When working with clients on their content marketing strategy, I try and adopt a fully customized approach, adapted to the specific brand and area of operations. This also applies to volume and frequency of the content output. In short, you have to choose what is best for your specific brand. Sometimes, especially in niche, technical industries, less is really more – a small quantity of long form, high-quality content pieces (for examples, white papers or sector studies) can be more effective than a daily presence over a number of social media.
What are the challenges faced by you as a Content Marketer (on a constant basis) and what are the steps taken to overcome them?
With a new social network or platform coming up almost every day, I would say that the #1 challenge for a content marketer today is to make tough, but necessary strategic choices. New platforms (or new tools inside old platforms: for instance, Instagram introducing videos) pose as much of an opportunity as they represent a challenge.
A few questions to ask before jumping into another arena – Which channels are the most relevant (in terms of demographics, reach, potential) for my brand/client and for its specific objectives? Is my content plan sustainable with the current resources if I stretch it over more channels? Will the results be measurable and relevant?
This brings us to challenge #2 – proving the ROI of Content Marketing for your company/brand. The way to overcome this is simple – just remember content marketing IS marketing. A robust content plan is not a series of topics and formats: it starts from the objectives that the brand wants to achieve and draws a path to achieving them, and includes clear KPIs for performance analysis. “Increasing newsletter sign up by 15% in 6 months” is an objective – “publishing three blog posts weekly” is not.
Do you have any tips for content marketers that have just started out?
Three things about content marketing I wish somebody had told me before – but it is ok, I learned them from experience instead:
1. Start with the objectives, set ambitious but realistic goals, and go achieve them (see previous answer).
2. There is no such thing as a “boring” subject or industry – don\’t shy away from jobs or assignments because they sound less sexy than writing jokes or posting pictures of funny animals a\’ la Buzzfeed. In fact, technical or niche subjects offer great opportunities to provide value to customers through a well-thought content marketing strategy. For example, UK insurance company Simply Business is a great B2B content marketing success story.
3. It\’s about the story, not (just) the technology. Content marketing must start from good insights about your audience – what do your customers, prospects and stakeholders care and want to know about? It is of vital importance to nail this and decline it into a sustainable content plan, rather than jumping on the next social network bandwagon.
Any noteworthy tools that you use as part of your content marketing and would want to recommend to our audience?
On a daily basis, I use Hootsuite to manage a number of different social media channels on behalf of clients – remember, a good mobile up s a must for an online publishing and engagement platform as we live more and more on the go, and this includes content managers! For industry knowledge and professional development, I find the Smart Insights website and newsletters always informative and up-to-date. They also offer excellent content marketing plan templates and evaluation tools. Other must reads include Copyblogger and Moz (aka SeoMoz). You may also want to look up the Content Marketing curriculum at General Assembly, where I am also an instructor.
Follow Serena on @social_serena or go through her digital marketing blog for some hands-on tips! We also highly recommend her food & travel blog, so check it out too!
The latest buzz word on the Social Media runway is “Content”, something that would put other aspects of this business to shame. A life without actionable content marketing tools is therefore baffling. With numerous options available today, picking up the best is a task and in our quest to provide you all with the very best, we are sharing with you all our chosen four.
Percolate
This tool is God sent, and quite literally too! If you are responsible for content marketing at your company or agency, Percolate would pass as your new BFF.
Key Features:
Say Goodbye to spreadsheets and welcome the ‘Percolate Content Planner’. This feature would help brands plan content across platforms, schedule and streamline campaigns and events along with leveraging content across teams.
It recommends shareable content thus facilitating, curation. If you are brand with a huge network this aspect would help to find the right content and sustain conversations. It also offers focussed trends, images and media recommendation in sync with your brand, thus enabling the team to come with full form content based on the ‘seed’ ideas.
Percolate Content Planner
Images are an important part of content marketing and Percolate offers an exceptional suite including a Photographer App. This app helps capture images and syncs them to Percolate Media library along with the regular image editor and photo filter options. The app supports unlimited uploads and also allows customisation and branding, thereby ensuring brand consistency and quality. A great feature to involve employees!
Percolate Photo App- A great tool to engage employees
Percolate also believes in shunning –Photoshop, and works closely with Getty, Shutterstock and more recently Aviary to yield more ‘shareable human and real time images’ for your brand.
Percolate has an excellent publishing, monitoring and analytics tool to elevate your usability.
Curata
An important aspect of content marketing is content curation. While you would want a great “story” to be told, it requires consistent planning and brands often struggle to churn quality content. This is when Curata, comes to your rescue. Here’s how
Key Features:
Curata enables users to find content across platforms that includes social media, RSS feeds and even site without feeds. The interface also allows customisation to the extent of providing a self learning and recommendation engine.
It helps users to categorise content. Once a category is created, Curata follows an automatic process further! It also recognises important and trending topics and creates landing pages to boost SEO results. Curata also assists with pictures, quotes and recommendations, to improve the end user experience.
Categorizing Content is quick and easy with Curata
Curata offers great publishing options with CMS integration that includes platforms like WordPress and Drupal to name a few. It is also integrated with marketing automation systems like Marketo and HubSpot.
Curata is integrated with Google analytics to help analyze, measure and assess your content marketing strategy to the fullest.
Gather Content
Moving onto our 3rd content marketing tool, a hot favourite with agencies like JWT and Saatchi and Saatchi, Gather Content’s marketing mantra is simple. It aims at gathering content from clients without much effort, thereby helping agencies and clients to work better and avoid project delays.
Key Features:
GatherContent is a pre- CRM tool, and puts a full stop to endless hours of agony that is caused by late content approvals or any other crucial delays impending at your client’s end.
A campaign or a project usually involves endless mails, shared documents and the likes. With GatherContent all this data is under one roof, a big plus while working on multiple projects!
It enables client and agencies to interact by means of discussion and comments and also evaluate the status of their project at each step, thus keeping it under control. This video would explain its functionality to the T.
GatherContent also aids in auto-reminders and detailed progress reports. It also has a white-labelled platform providing your clients with a unique experience.
This web-based tool offers a seamless interface and with transferring docs in Word or PDF format along with real time back-up.
It is integrated with WordPress, Drupal and also has an API.
Divvy HQ 2.0
Number four on our list is Divvy HQ 2.0. It is a great content and workflow marketing tool, and is especially useful when you have a team spread across geographies
Key Features:
The dashboard aids in monitoring your team activity in real time and looks like a Facebook feed, apart from the same you can also monitor content that is due or is already published. It also provides an overview of your production task list.
Divvy Dashboard
Divvy HQ offers multi- calendar architecture and customised solutions for that can be shared with your team. It offers a unique calendar admin that leads to customisation tab. This may include inter-department calendars, individual calendar, other topics or plain themes.
Divvy Calendar Dashboard
It also offers an amazing workflow mechanism. Explained effectively with this video
While content ideation is a regular process, we tend to shun them, missing opportunities for future use. Divvy HQ offers an amazing feature called ‘parking lot’, making brainstorming a cake-walk. It also provides opportunities to manage any type of content apart from the ones outside Social Media periphery. This may include webinars, e-books and print projects to state a few.
While this content marketing tools list is not exhaustive, you may also want to check our previous posts on Kapost, and Swayy, which offer some great features too! Before I leave you all with some time to explore these tools do have a glance at Coschedule as well, a brilliant social media editorial calendar for WordPress. If you are looking to analyze content performance or get some new ideas for content, then a social listening tool from Circus Social would be your best bet!
And yeah, we would love to hear more on this one, so let the comments flow!
In the ever-changing landscape of Social Media, content has always been hailed as the king (we also know that you have heard this umpteen times) . Community managers and social media managers worldwide fight the demon of ‘producing fresh content’ every day. It may not be always feasible to provide ‘uniqueness’ and therefore it is a common practice for them to continuously repost, retweet or reshare an image, video or article that has been published. This aspect has its benefits too, unless it is overused.
What exactly should be the ‘usage’ pattern for reposting and how often should you be repeating your content is a question that doesn’t have a definite answer and would differ with each brand and the chosen social media platform.
Use Storytelling To Reshare Content
Socialbakers recently launched a campaign called ‘The Smart Storyteller Award’ and are promoting it with a hashtag #smartstoryteller across their platforms. Though this may be an important engagement campaign for the brand, its strategy to promote doesn’t come across desperate.
Know a brand telling great stories? Nominate them for a #smartstoryteller award. Tweet @socialbakers or use the app — Socialbakers (@socialbakers) May 9, 2014
While the brand started with a blogpost, the relevant details and conversation happened in a phased out manner on Twitter. The details were shared twice on the first day (few hours apart) and gradually spread and shared at least once a day for a week thereafter (this campaign is still in effect) along with conversation and other content.
Where does your brand fall on the #smartstryteller scale? #contentmarketing
This was about a campaign; however, the strategy with your blog may be slightly different, but not completely. At Beta21 we often reshare our content on Twitter and Facebook. However, we ensure that each time the ‘packaging’ is right. Though we make sure that the most ‘relevant’ and ‘new’ content gets priority, an adept strategy and presentation of content save us from looking repetitive and boring.
Pro-tip For Twitter
Share the updates 2-3 times on the first day spaced out at equal intervals. This is essential for two reasons. Firstly, not all your followers are on Twitter at the same time and hence posting important content would ensure better engagement and reach. Secondly, this would also help you determine the best engagement period for a certain type of content (a funny contest video) as against different content (apple to apple!)
Taking forward the same example, I evaluated their strategy on Facebook around the same hashtag. Socialbakers again showcased a smart resharing strategy here and stuck to the ground rules of not being repetitive.
The post was first seen on its Facebook page on May 9th, 2014. The brand has not shared the same content since then, however, it did connect the same idea with a different post, subtly reiterating the same to its followers.
The concept of re-sharing works differently on Facebook. It may be a great idea to post the same content (even as a campaign) multiple times on Twitter in a day, but it is forbidden on Facebook especially in the first 24hrs.
Pro-tip For Facebook:
Re-sharing is important but has to be strategic, in a way that best suits your brand. Considering the fact that organic Facebook reach has severely dwindled, sharing content on this platform can be done occasionally. We suggest doing it only once a month.
6 Tips for Strategic Content Resharing:
While updating your content calendar make sure that it has space for older content too. This should include blogpost, videos and images, and done only when you can support the renewed interest. For example, we did an article on Social Media Resolution for Twitter in 2014 and it makes sense to repost the same to our readers and check with them their status midyear since we are practically completing 6 months! See what I just did there?
Plan reshares well in advance. Use analytical tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to do the needful.
Analyse the reposting strategy and apply the learning to subsequent content.
Don’t reshare content that’s trendy or topical months after the date it has been published.
Try the sample content in different scenarios to have a better understanding.
Create a timeline for the lifespan of topical articles and refrain from sharing it after the period has ended.
In a scenario where community and social media managers would prefer their content freshly brewed, reshared content is like the perfect sugar cube, and if used effectively, it would add just the right sweetness to your content strategy.
Coca Cola as a brand has carved a niche for itself and has become ‘yoda’ of sorts for fellow Community Managers and Social Media Managers alike. We recently did a story on how Coca Cola benefitted from its visual branding strategy and needless to say the brand’s fresh perspective on engaging content has kept its users on toes, something you can’t overlook for sure!
Movement Is Happiness
The “Movement Is Happiness” campaign was conceptualized by Coca Cola to induce ‘activity’ by making Singaporeans enjoy various activities and eventually endorse healthier lifestyles. Coca Cola engaged its audience through unique ideas like setting up activity stations that allowed short physical activities thereby inducing movement. The brand also took the initiative of taking this campaign online through a social media route.
To boost the ‘activity’ quotient online, Coca Cola Singapore tapped into music as its chosen channel and linked it to simple day-to-day activities of individuals. The campaign gave its social followers an avenue to stay connected with their favorite music while indulging in their daily activities, thereby increasing its engagement.
Facebook App
While the campaign was a great thought in theory, it was put in action by a nifty Facebook app. The app allows you to create your very own “Happiness Playlist” in three easy steps by logging on Facebook. One can pick an activity from the list that includes plethora of choices that range from the mundane “Daily Commute” to more exciting like “Shop Hopping” creating playlists for almost all your daily activities! As of May 21st, the app has already received close to a thousand playlists made.
Create Your Own Playlist
You can pick up the length of your playlist and even customize it further by entering your favourite artist (Can, it get better than this?)
The Facebook Campaign Landing Page
Once you enter the required details you get your own playlist!
Create Your Own Playlist
Vote For Songs
Coca Cola also kept in mind to interact with its audience and therefore gives its followers an opportunity to vote for the best songs for each happy activity!
Vote For your Favourite Happy Activity
The app is integrated with Spotify API for playlist generation and you can check it out here.
Accepting a healthy lifestyle cannot be enforced on individuals. However, linking it to daily activities without hindrance is what Coca Cola achieved and is clearly reflected in its data.
Customized Facebook Apps
While many brands engage in activities like contests, sweepstakes, and the likes for audience engagement, a customized App always stands out! A Community Manager therefore should not shy away from experimenting with the same. This wonderful campaign by Coca-Cola is just a gentle reminder of endless possibilities in the field of Social Media.
This app for Coca Cola was designed by the able team at Radarr and if you are looking at an exciting and customized way of connecting with your audience (and somewhere feel like Bob ;)) it’s time for you to say hello to them here!
This website uses cookies to improve your user experience. By clicking 'accept' or continuing to navigate the website, you agree to our use of cookies.Accept & Continue
Percolate Content Planner
Divvy Dashboard
