Influential Marketing Blog

Manifesto For The Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job Of The Future ?

Every hour thousands of new videos are uploaded online. Blog posts are written and published. Millions of tweets and other short messages are shared. To say there is a flood of content being created online now seems like a serious understatement. Until now, the interesting thing is that there are relatively few technologies or tools that have been adopted in a widespread way to manage this deluge. We pretty much just have algorithmic search, with Google (and other search engines) as the most obvious example. Social bookmarking and social news have been around for some time (ie - sites like Digg or delicious), and new models of aggregation like Alltop are springing up to help us navigate all this content as well.

The real question is whether solutions like these will be enough. By some estimates in just a few years we will reach a point where all the information on the Internet will double every 72 hours. Double. I'm running out of metaphors to describe the magnitude of this content creation. The predictable result of this is that brands are beginning to focus on content creation when they start to look at social media. What are we going to create, or what are we going to get our customers/patients/fans/audience/victims to create? Is that really the best question we could be asking?

What if you were to ask about the person that makes sense of it all? The one who sifts through all the content and picks out the best and most worthy. This person is missing from most corporate communications teams. It's not a commonly defined role on any ebusiness teams. In fact, there are few jobs like this at all. The closest comparative role may be contained within the rising Library 2.0 movement (one I wrote about some time ago), but this is not frequently linked to business communication or marketing. If this role did exist, what would it be called?

The name I would give it is Content Curator. A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. The most important component of this job is the word "continually." In the real time world of the Internet, this is critical. If you look at how many individuals are currently using their Twitter account to highlight interesting bits of content they locate or how del.icio.us users have tagged and shared content on that site for years, you'll understand that this idea has been steadily growing organically.

In an attempt to offer more of a vision for someone who might fill this role, here is my crack at a short manifesto for someone who might take on this job:

MANIFESTO/JOB DESCRIPTION: CONTENT CURATOR

In the near future, experts predict that content on the web will double every 72 hours. The detached analysis of an algorithm will no longer be enough to find what we are looking for. To satisfy the people's hunger for great content on any topic imaginable, there will need to be a new category of individual working online. Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward. The people who choose to take on this role will be known as Content Curators. The future of the social web will be driven by these Content Curators, who take it upon themselves to collect and share the best content online for others to consume and take on the role of citizen editors, publishing highly valuable compilations of content created by others. In time, these curators will bring more utility and order to the social web. In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers - creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages.

After writing this, I can't help but wonder if there might already be people out there with this title. Let's find out: the first person to send me a scan or photo of a business card with this title on it will get a free signed copy of Personality Not Included ... (UPDATE 04/14/11 - This competition is now over!)

Interested in hearing more about content curation?  Click here to learn how to book Rohit to speak at your next event.

Additional Posts About Content Curation:

• The 5 Models Of Content Curation
• Why The Future Of Travel & Destination Marketing Is All About Curation

Can Hulu Crack The Code On Social TV?

Last night Hulu continued their partnership with Facebook to allow people to watch the premiere of highly anticipated Fall TV shows such as Heroes and The Office with their Facebook friends through a "social TV" app. With this latest effort, they are trying to popularize a concept that has been talked about among the techno-elite for some time ... the idea that people could watch programming in a live stream online with friends and have a real time conversation about it as it was happening. In preparation for this blog post, I was all set to register for the event on Facebook and login at 8pm to watch the premiere of The Simpsons with any of my Facebook contacts who happen to be also watching it live.

Unfortunately, that plan failed. My personal failure, however, offers a glimpse for marketers into what the true potential of social TV might be - and why there is so much skepticism and debate about whether it constitutes a real revolution in the world of entertainment, or is just another solution for a nonexistent problem by an industry increasingly desperate to find new revenue models.

The objections to the idea of social TV usually fall into three categories:

1. Time: In our time-shifted culture, people will never watch a program at a scheduled time or live (except sports).
2. Quality: Most people will choose not to watch TV on a computer instead of a big screen unless it is a last resort.
3. Motivation: When I am watching something on TV, I don't want to comment or listen/read others commenting either.

In part, a combination of these factors led to my own failure to have a social TV experience around The Simpsons premiere last night too. I was putting the kids to bed at 8pm, and when I did watch the show on the DVR later last night - I had no desire to comment online about it or watch it with anyone but my wife at home.

You could easily conclude from my description above that I'm not a believer in the promise of Social TV. Actually, that's far from the truth. Despite these shortcomings, I think there are some very real and very interesting ways that this concept of Social TV could be applied to marketing, as well as used as a real time feedback channel to improve/optimize programming. Here are a few:

1. Track the conversations about programming in real time to understand where the best audience response is and inform future scriptwriting.
2. Offer another way for the most avid fans of a particular show to engage in their passion and potentially integrate the actors of a show into this live stream for an added "VIP" experience.
3. Create a new category of interaction centered around TV - such as "virtual date nights" where couples separated by distance can still watch the shows they love together.
4. Build more interactive advertising into the programming so that watchers can interact with and discuss ads just as they might discuss the show - offering more engagement and feedback to advertisers.

For most brand marketers, it is this last category that may present the most interesting opportunity around social TV. After all, if you can get people to engage in a real time discussion around the programming as they are experiencing it - extending that to the advertising alongside that programming shouldn't be too far behind.

9 Ways For Luxury Brands To Use Social Media

Late last week I had the opportunity to be part of a unique event for the Washington DC area. Dubbed "All Access Fashion" - the three day event was part of Washington's response to NY's Fashion Week and featured many luxury retailers participating in runway shows and customer events hosted at one of the largest luxury malls in the country - Tysons Galleria in Virginia. My role was to be part of a well chosen panel that included the CEO of German fashion brand Baseler and Ritz Carlton's VP of Marketing and Communications, Julia Gajcak. 

Through our hour long discussion moderated by Washington Post Style Editor Ned Martel, a key topic of discussion was the impact of the recession on the luxury market and how luxury brands could retain their customers and brand image in a world where anyone can speak for your brand online. The point of view I shared was that in many ways I believe luxury brands are the IDEAL brands to be using social media and that social networking, microblogging and online content creation represent big opportunities for these brands to really stand out, improve their customer loyalty, drive sales and, in fact, maintain the image they have worked hard to create for their brands. If this seems like overpromising, keep reading for what I feel are some of the biggest opportunities for luxury brands to use social media:

1. 

   Live up to the promise of your brand. In luxury marketing, the brand is critical in creating an emotional attachment that goes beyond just a product or services features. If the value of your brand is built through your attention to service, such as the Ritz Carlton, then how can you use social media tools to reinforce that idea for your customers and live up to it?
2. Find your biggest fans. Most luxury brands have a steady stable of hardcore fans. Often these are the people who buy the products frequently, but it could just as likely be the enthusiastic aspirational customer who dreams of one day buying your product. Luxury automakers have known this for a long time, using tools like social networking to make sure that teenage boys continue to dream of one day buying a Ferrari, so one day when they can afford one, they might.
3. Create exclusive experiences. Exclusivity and luxury often go hand in hand. The nice thing about social media is that you have many opportunities to create things like exclusive private networks or special content that is only for customers or VIPs. The added benefit of this is that you can make those individuals feel engaged with the brand in a way that isn't open to the general public.
4. Let fans make your brand part of their digital identity. As each of our digital identities moves online, we have new ways of attaching "badges" to our online profiles, becoming "fans" of brands and using other methods to not just connect with brands we love, but to broadcast that affiliation to our entire social networks online.Gucci does a great job of this on Facebook with hundreds of thousands of fans.
5. Track product or service opportunities. People talk about anything and everything online, and when it comes to the category of business you are in, listening can lead to breakthroughs that you may never have otherwise seen - including what your next product line might be or a new type of service that people are wishing for.
6. Identify emerging brand crisis or issues. The real time nature of much of social media means that many brands are seeing news of potential product defects or other types of brand crisis break through social media before they show up anywhere else. This alone could justify the effort of more actively listening to what people are saying about your brand online.
7. Improve retail and/or distribution. Sometimes the challenge in selling a luxury product or service has less to do with what you have and more about where you sell it. When it comes to deciding markets to focus on, many luxury brands simply focus on large metro markets - but social media can help you identify unlikely markets that might offer golden opportunities.
8. Prove customer base and demand. Part of the challenge for any luxury brand, particularly one that is less established or newer, is proving that there is enough customer passion and interest in the brand to warrant being stocked or sold through more mainstream distribution channels. Having a strong base of support through social media can help you get past this hurdle and demonstrate to a buyer that your brand is worth the risk.
9. Share live events more broadly. Often exclusive events are a core part of how many luxury brands connect with their customers. These are, by necessity, closed and focused on smaller groups - but social media could offer a way to let an equally exclusive subgroup participate in the event (or see an archive after the fact).

Any other thoughts from readers working on luxury brands for potential opportunities with social media?  From my conversations at the event, I got the sense this was a dramatically underdeveloped space and I'm looking forward to seeing more examples of brands actively using social media in the luxury market.

Burger King's School Of Endorsements

In a recent ad that Burger King just started running, NASCAR champion Tony Stewart teaches a course to other celebrities about only endorsing brands and products they actually believe in. The ad features Eric Estrada selling his own line of Estrada sunglasses, and an overly botoxed Carrot Top (the comedian) selling his own Carrot Crusher juicing machine (both of which have mock websites selling the fictional products - nice touch by Burger King). Clearly, neither of them understand Tony's point of only endorsing brands you really believe in:

It is a lesson that is forgotten over and over in nearly any type of advertising - and just as often by Burger King themselves, ironically. Why is this simple advice so hard to follow? There are three big reasons that brands so often choose the wrong people to endorse their products, and launch ineffective marketing campaigns around this mistake without realizing it until it's too late:

1. Lack of knowledge about their real fans. Part of the reason for choosing a person to speak for a brand in marketing and advertising that isn't already a fan of the brand is because often brands don't know who these people are. With social media and the ready availability of opinions online, there is really no excuse for lacking this knowledge - especially when it comes to celebrities. Actually, the excuse comes down to laziness and a general unwillingness to do the right amount of research.
2. Emotional attachment to bad endorsement choices. I have spoken before about how most ill-advised choices for spokespeople that brands make are based on some sort of emotional attachment to the idea rather than a real strategic or business reason to work with that person. When you choose a celebrity or personality based on your personal desire, often the connections that you make between the person and your brand become unbelievable and customers don't make them as well.
3. Ineffective strategic choice to use a spokesperson. When you decide to work with a celebrity or personality to represent your brand in marketing, you are effectively making a strategic choice that an influencer-based message (ie - "buy this product because someone you admire recommends it") will work best. The problem with this is that in some situations the best strategy may be instead to focus on a particular feature or attribute of your product or some other marketing message that doesn't necessarily involve a spokesperson.

I love Burger King's choice to expose this element of ineffectual brand endorsements as part of advertising - a great implementation of a concept I talk about in PNI which I called "Anti-Marketer Marketing" (a technique where a brand aims to stand beside their customers and shake their head at all the other clueless marketers, thereby positioning their brand as rising above that sort of message). Now the only challenge for their future marketing is to try and live up to their own advice.

 

The 5 Big Myths Of Social Media

As a consultant working with many brands on social media strategy and efforts, I hear a lot of perceptions about social media. Extended out to the conferences that I attend and sometimes speak at, it is surprising how often I hear the same myths about social media. These are not things that brands are just using as reasons to not engage ... they often come from brands and marketing teams that are actively using social media as well. The following is a selection of some of the myths that I hear most often, as well as some thoughts on why they are simply myths and what your brand can do to get past them:

1. You need to give up control. By far the most common myth, giving up control is a defeatist way of looking at social media. It means that anyone can say anything about your brand and there is nothing you can do and no input you can have. The truth is actually that control in the best of cases is shared. You have a point of view and your customers do as well. To effectively create a dialogue, you need to be willing to share some of the control with those people conversing online ... but keep some for yourself as well.
2. It is all about going viral. Starting out with social media with the intention of creating a viral success or getting "X" number of subscribers, followers, friends or fans is a sure recipe to focus on the wrong things. The point of most social media programs is not that they may reach millions of people blindly, but a smaller subset strategically. To that end, focusing on creating something engaging is far more important that just trying to get volume or go viral for its own sake.
3. Someone needs to be managing it full time. Resourcing can often be a huge roadblock - in part because of the perception that if you don't have someone ready to make social media their full time job, then you are not prepared. The truth is that you can manage social media effectively by making it a core part of someone's job. You do need to identify someone who will take the lead, but this doesn't have to be a 24/7 job.
4. Everything has to be open, transparent and public. There is a lot of talk about openness and transparency, which often forgets one of the most powerful things about social media: that it has huge potential to foster internal dialogue, enable better collaboration and allow more efficiency. In these cases, you might want to use social media more for something that doesn't (and shouldn't) belong in the public. This is not about hiding information (and you do still need to assume that some or all of it could end up online) - but sometimes the easiest place to start using social media is internally ... and in private.
5. Measurement just involves "soft" metrics. Every day marketers are learning that social media doesn't just have to be about awareness or influencing perception. Depending on the strategy, you can use social media for everything from direct sales to generating real relationships online which lead to revenue generation. Our own team at Ogilvy has created a metric model called Conversation Impact that goes far beyond the soft metrics to prove the real value of social media to the brands we work with.

Jay Leno And The End Of The Mass Broadcasting Era

Tonight On September 14th at 10pm EST in the US, a new experiment in television will take place that is both a sign of the times, and a quiet revolution in the way that broadcast TV (and perhaps media itself) will work. The Jay Leno Show will debut at its new time slot of 10pm - a full hour and a half earlier than he used to be on when doing The Tonight Show - and aim to reach people "exhausted by kids, work and so on" as he has said more than once in interviews. The significance of this moment is not so much about the change in time - but in what types of programs he will be up against.

The 10pm time slot on the other big American television networks (ABC, FOX, CBS) are filled with expensive to produce dramas like CSI and Private Practice. Over the last five years, more and more of these types of programs have been moving to cable television channels like Bravo, FX, Lifetime, HBO and others. Cable offers broader creative control, more niche audiences and the creative license that producers of those programs often seek. Perhaps most importantly, DVRs and Tivo have been allowing a higher and higher percentage of Americans to skip the ads - reducing the effectiveness of television advertising and steering brand advertisers to consider spending money elsewhere.

Put all these pieces together, and you can start to see that the new Jay Leno show is very likely the new model of the broadcast television of the future (as the recent Time magazine cover piece explores). It will be broadcast live 46 weeks a year (as opposed to the usual scripted drama's 22 weeks) and will have a built in focus on current events that makes it much more unlikely that people will record it to watch later. In other words, if you want to see something current that is on RIGHT NOW, Leno will be there five days a week.

If it works, this experiment may demonstrate that the future of broadcast television may be all about live events such as the Leno program, some types of reality television, national and local news, and sporting events. Scripted dramas and comedies, on the other hand, may continue their move to cable television. Ultimately this may mean that live events become the only thing that can still truly attract mass audiences enough to keep the broadcast TV channels afloat. But here's the most interesting part: one of the best things about social media is that it is focused on real time collaboration and sharing. If the future of broadcast is pointing towards live moments, then the intersection between television and social media may be one of the most interesting stories of the future. I, for one, will be watching that collision closely.