It may seem parochial in nature, but the social media strategist must understand that the creation of a phenomenal strategy requires superior content, continued innovation and ongoing creativity.
Unwaveringly, content and and initiatives are created to educate or inform readers, listeners or viewers about a particular or general subject matter. Successful strategy revolves around fulfilling a mission and serving the community. Unfortunately, a classic marketing error involves not understanding the community and what it cares about. This often leads to failed marketing initiatives and rants from bloggers, some of which make it to the larger blogosphere.
Marketing minds have to understand the importance of creating a mission-oriented strategies for their social media efforts. By creating a strategic editorial mission, social media marketing is grounded in serving the community (value) and providing content, regardless of the media form. This enables execution with individual tools in different media forms to stay on track, and creating value for the community by providing regular, prescient content.
And that’s really the rub. Going through the difficulty of creating value for the community so they find it worthwhile (a.k.a. what’s cool for BMW owners).
This requires a) knowing what the community wants, b) understanding the intrinsic value the company has to offer, and c) being creative enough to deliver this value in a way that’s interesting and compelling. At this critical juncture, your team needs to deploy the art of strategic marketing to make your social media initiative successful.
It seems simple. But simple is not easy.
There’s one major pitfall to avoid in an organizational content mission: Trying to overtly promote the company. This error remains one of the most common reasons corporate social media initiatives fail.
Companies engage in social media because they want to market themselves, and think social media forms are just another way to promote their wares. This error creates blogs that are never read, empty community sites, videos that are never played, and podcasts that don’t buyers don’t download.