Many brands struggle to integrate traditional media with interactive environments. In particular, social media can challenge entrepreneurs and marketers.
Here are three easy tips to repurpose traditional media for digital environments:
1) Take Photos in Physical Locations
Often you will see novelty items in an office or storefront. These items show office character, and help customers get a feel for the personality in your underlying corporate culture.
Consider a piece of art in your law office, or neat messages on packaging in the store. Take photos and share this ambience with your online stakeholders. Check out how local sustainable salad company Sweet Green shares pictures like this Big Lebowski napkin on Twitter.
You can use a photo sharing service like Instagram and cross post across major social networks like Twitter and Facebook. If you are a consumer business, Pinterest may be a good option to share photos of your physical location. And if you keep a Flickr page, this site helps your images get indexed into Google. Be sure to tag your photos well.
2) Crowdsource Logo and Ad Decisions
Companies hire creative firms to develop ads and redevelop logos all the time. The final decisions to determine the new logo or the final ad campaign can be a grueling internal process.
Why not ask your online communities for their opinion? Feedback on ads and logos are great things to post blogs and on Facebook.
Your most loyal brand evangelists will love that you asked them for their opinion and gave them a voice. Plus the feedback serves as a great barometer on how your community will accept the design. Check out how Multilingual Mania chose its logo using a crowdsourcing voting platform. Make sure not to commit to the most popular selection. Your CEO may have put her/his foot down!
3) Divide And Explain Annual Reports
Most companies and nonprofits write an annual report. Some produce research reports, too! These documents can become grueling affairs that drive communicators and executives alike crazy!
But instead of publishing a massive document as a PDF online, you can divide your annual report into smaller pieces of online stories, making them more easier to consumer in interactive environments. Locally-based nonprofit Humane Society of the United States divides its annual report into manageable documents like this.
There’s an opportunity to go even further and provide personal insights into the company/nonprofit’s actions. Insider tories offer a great way to bring a dry document alive. Embellish you annual report material with insights, perhaps video interviews. Consider them the case studies and blog posts behind the larger document. See how locally headquartered Case Foundation executes this storytelling style with its reports.
Do you have suggestions to bridge traditional to integrated media?
A version of this post originally ran on the Washington Business Journal site.