Your Brand, The Next Media Company
The book Your Brand, The Next Media Company by Michael Brito makes the case for why and how all brands need to think, act and operate like a media company. He believes that there is a major content surplus and customers today live in a multi-screen world in which CADD ‘Customer Attention Deficit Disorder’ is inevitable. For your brand message to reach these customers, relevant content must be created, curated and aggregated to reach the right people, at the right time and through the right channels.
The book provides an outline of how to change a brand’s attitude, behavior, processes and technology to act like a media company. I agree with the recommended first step of understanding the internal and external landscapes. Core to any brand is a deep understanding of customers and a strong business strategy based on this knowledge. Brito’s suggestion of a Centralized Editorial Center of Excellence puts in place effective systems to ensure collaboration as well as the creation and management of content. Given the challenge and importance of having good content, I agree with Brito on enabling employees, customers and others to create content.
Brito also correctly spent a good part of the book on the need to define content strategy. Again with any brand, defining the unique brand story is a crucial first step. From this, brands need to create great content through storytelling that brings their unique benefits and value to life. Part of the strategy is also channel based given that customers are spread over many platforms and have distinct preferences in how they like to engage. Given these may channels, a content governance plan is needed to ensure that various channels are appropriately managed but that the brand story is consistent. One thing that Britol did not cover sufficiently is a content distribution strategy. Last year, the Social Media Today blog posted Content Is King, But Distribution Is Queen and She Wears the Pants which states that too often content is not read due to a focus on content creation to the neglect of content promotion.
My client, Friends of McMillan Park, is very early in testing out digital and social media. They have a website which mainly features a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter page, a YouTube Page and a Flickr gallery. The need for a content strategy is highly applicable to my client. The organization is volunteer-based so the content for each of these channels is managed by a distinct individual. Therefore, each channel tells a different brand story, in a different tone with different images. A lot of what Brito recommends in the book is beyond the resources of an all-volunteer run organization. However, there is a lot that can be improved in creating great content. As the organization grows beyond the assumed strategy of 'just getting the word out ', they can leverage the rich history of the park, very passionate supporters, worthy cause and truly gorgeous images to create captivating content. The organization has a volunteer assigned to each channel but it needs to go a step further and engage a volunteer to create and provide this improved content.
I was surprised by the extent to which Brito profiled vendors. While it was good to learn of these vendors and the range of capabilities in services I never knew existed, it was too much. Additionally, although Brito makes the point that digital and social media platforms are in constant flux, he did not apply this point to these vendors. I anticipate that these vendors will date the book and may not be relevant over time. On the other hand, I am always glad to see case studies on brands doing interesting marketing. One example of a brand creating interesting content is American Express Unstaged, a program in partnership with YouTube that streams concerts and other live events. For a financial services firm, I was surprised on see this example but was impressed but the diversity and unique type of content available.
The example from Marriott Hotels was especially great. The hotel has created the website RenHotels.com that allows people to virtually explore cities through providing content on hotels, dining, shopping and things to do. I did a search for the city of Baltimore and both the content and how it was displayed is great. The places featured are unusual and displayed in an engaging tile format that reminds me of Pinterest.
Similar to Groundswell, written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Your Brand, The Next Media Company provides a roadmap to change. Whereas Groundswell focused on understanding, tapping into and transforming businesses using social media, Your Brand, The Next Media Company takes the next step of creating great content for these channels. Both books also talk about the need to clarify objectives and plan your business strategy. Both books also focused on understanding the customer yet Groundswell took a much deeper dive into how by providing segmentation frameworks.