There are a handful of conferences and speaking events that I’d love to go to if I had the time and money. You know– good times like SXSW, Confab, TEDx PDX, and of course Blizzcon. If I can’t go, then thank goodness for Twitter, hashtags, and the numerous folks who love to relay new bits of ideas and info across the web.
I was going about my day and came across Edward Boches’ tweets covering the Making Digital Work conference over in Boulder, Colorado. Boches, lead strategist over at Mullen, a full-service ad agency, was para-tweeting portions of a presentation by Matt Britton. Britton is the founder of Mr. Youth, a social media firm based in New York.
I couldn’t tell if it was Boches’ response to Britton’s thoughts or an exact para-tweeting of the presentation, but the idea captured was simple enough to grasp. There is a shift towards user participation metrics over the standard awareness metric.
Participation? As in getting an audience to do something? I immediately thought of content strategies that could yield such results.
Focus on the buyers and the paths they take.
Since content strategies often have a Halvorsonian goal of bringing a buyer down a buying cycle (the other being to achieve business objectives), applying a little metric love to a solid content model can achieve the metrics that Britton and Boches believe to be game-changing.
Creating a model that bases benchmarks on interaction and participation could be a very interesting exercise for business willing to try. There are probably plenty of great examples of this in many industries as of late. I’m going to focus on the game industry, specifically on Electronic Arts’ recent social media campaign.
A few weeks ago EA promised to premiere their Battlefield 3 trailer if the page received one million “Likes” on Facebook. The page was close to their target and released the trailer anyways. What they gained was a solid Facebook following of north of 900,000 people.
That’s quite a few people to read your news feed right? There plenty of folks to banter about the upcoming game and start all kinds of conversations with future gaming friends or foes. Sounds like everyone in this model wins. EA continues to hype up their upcoming blockbuster while their fans get to converse about it.
I know. We can’t all be a kick-ass video game publisher with the money and wherewithal to launch such a campaign.
Well, we can all do so in our own industries if we really wanted to.
Heck, my coworkers and I are making it happen in small business finance. Yes. The oh-so-exciting world of small business finance. We’ve created a content strategy that focuses on educating our customers in steps, opening the floor for dialog and insights while qualifying leads down a very specific path.
It’s a lot of work, but what do we gain?
A better understanding of our target market. Learning which types of content and communication channels they prefer. Gaining anecdotes and testimonials that better our services.
We get all this through an ever-evolving content strategy and marketing campaign.
It can be done with the right team and an open mind that understands strategies and tactics only based on awareness are not enough. I truly believe that a keen eye on content, its purpose, its model, and metrics can lead to the participation metrics that Britton considers valuable.
These insights can become the source of inspiration for other user-content focused efforts to really make digital work further into this new decade.
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