LISTEN TO ONLINE CONVERSATIONS
- Conduct a conversation audit – Analyse who is talking about you, your competitor, your issues and find out what is ‘hot’ now and likely to remain popular for a reasonable amount of time
DETERMINE KEY CHANNELS
- Find out where your audience is talking online and which of these places are most important to your campaign
- Develop a presence in these digital environments – you don’t have to invest huge amounts of money into web design I the content/purpose of the site is strong enough (content and purpose should be first priority, design: second)
- Choose tools to use in these environments that are appropriate to your campaign
CREATE AN EDITORIAL CONTENT STRATEGY
- Develop a forward focussed editorial strategy – this needs to be relatively fluid to account for the interest and issues you receive throughout your digital campaign but it should include the key messages and specific activities of interest to maintain consistently interesting and purposeful content.
- Tools can be used to schedule the publishing/tweeting of content (such as peoplebrowsr) but these tools should be used with caution
- Aggregated information from quality sources can also be used to bolster the content but should not be solely relied upon
- Content should be driven by the brand where possible
DO SOMETHING INTERESTING!
- You need to provide readers with something – whether it be you taking them on a journey, giving away prizes, recognition, a laugh etc
- Make sure that you have integrated tools into your content that will allow the user to easily virally spread your content
- Invest time to make sure the offering is a genuinely attractive, interesting and (relatively) sustainable one for the reader
- The content needs to feel unscripted, fresh, organic, instant and creative – not ‘suit language’ or marketing mubo-jumbo (bloggers and social networkers will not read this let alone spread it virally & it could be used against your brand by networkers who are keen to shoot down ‘corporates behaving badly’!)
DELIVER ON EXPECTATIONS
- If you set up expectations that you are there to listen, then you need to continue listening and responding in a timely matter
- Quite a large amount of time is required to build strong relationships
- Try to make it clear if the campaign is only a short term campaign… don’t let it die unexpectedly
- Maintain consistent updates across all channels to give readers a reason to come back to your site
Notes by Curious 