Your Brand: The Next Media Company by Michael Brito
Over the course of the last decade, social media has transformed how businesses operate. To survive in this content-saturated, fast-paced market, companies must not only become active on social media, but have a comprehensive âsocial business strategy,â according to Michael Brito in his new book Your Brand: The Next Media Company.
A social business is more than just one that has a social brand. A social business is one that uses social media, both externally and internally, to encourage collaborations across departments and empower employees to engage with customers.
First, businesses must understand their customer, and the influential nature of each customer. Marketing is no longer top-down, in the sense that a company creates an advertisement to market their newest product and then they watch the money roll in. Now more than ever, businesses can learn about their customers by using innovative web vendors, such as Keyhole, which can look at your social media fan demographics and give insightful information such as what they talk about among themselves, which topics they care about, and what websites they share from. With this information, businesses can provide content that is relevant and engaging to their customer. Itâs vital for businesses to do this background research, because the attention span of customers is short, and they live in a content-saturated online economy.
Businesses must also understand that social media impacts their internal practices. They must come up with systems to address new concernsâboth good and badâthat social media has brought to the business world, such as: what employees can and cannot post, how to use social media during a communications crisis, technology selection and adoption, consistent social media practices, and more.
Once youâve determined this, your business must create what Brito calls a Social Business Center of Excellence. This center will consist of your editorial team that shapes your brand how it will appear to the world, and how customers will engage with it. Brito gives examples of institutions excelling at creating these centers. One was Gatorade, which utilizes a large conference room in their marketing department to display six large LED screens, streaming social media and blogs related to their product, as well as competitors.
Next, a true social business has to empower employees, customers, and partners to engage and âfeed the content engine.â First it starts with employees who, if engaged organically and authentically, can be great brand ambassadors. Social businesses must also understand that empowering customers to engage is key, since surveys show people can be heavily influenced by their peers, even more so than company employees. Empowering customers at this level means several things: post contests, polls and research questions; ask for them to upload content about your brand; or post about upcoming events.
The remainder of the book is related to the challenges of content marketing. Businesses canât just come up with an idea and employ it, they must think carefully about how it might be perceived by their customers, traditional media, and internally. Will it be seen as authentic or inauthentic? Engaging or boring? The book is rich with examples from Fortune 500 companies and various institutions that highlight these challenges. The remainder of the book is also dedicated not just to creating your content, but executing itâthe nuts and boltsâwhich are quite interestingâand how to structure your organization to perform as efficiently and creatively as possible.
While Brito goes quite in-depth in Your Brand, I do think there is too much repetition. The chapters on Social Business Center of Excellence and the Social Business Command Center were redundant, and couldâve been rolled into one larger chapter. I also felt that chapter 11, which covers how to govern the structure of your social media team, couldâve been folder into chapter 4 (or vice versa) since they both are about how to make a social business operate smoothly for employees.
I also felt that sometimes the writing contained too much jargon and could be intimidating for someone just diving into the concept of a social business. This was especially true with highlighting vendors.
I found Britoâs wealth of examplesâfrom major companies to universities to vendorsâincredibly helpful. This book can give even the most experienced social business advocates examples to help their company or program.
I also think Brito is right-on that businesses simply canât just post on Twitter and Facebook and expect it to go well. They need to methodically plan out how their social media engine will engage with employees, partners, and customers, and how this new age of social media can impact their internal business. Policies must be set in place to engage employees, but also make clear whatâs appropriate and whatâs inappropriate.
Llamaste, Inc. has limitless opportunities to become a true social business:
Their social media presence seems disjointedâthere isnât clear design unity among social media channels, and there is no Facebook page. This could be solved by having a strong editorial team, with a graphic designer included, to craft the narrative they want to present to the world. Â They should also set policies as to how employees can use social media on behalf of the company.
Have an employeeâlikely the CEO or social media managerâbe the face of the brand on social media. This would empower other employees, too.
Some ways to engage with their customers could be:
Creating a hashtag and asking people to post with their bag and yoga equipment, and then RTâing/sharing those posts
Give more contextâmost of the Instagram posts are all hashtags. Rather they should explain the photos, ask questions, and more.
Once these basics are honed, I think Llamaste, Inc. would then be in a good place to create a Social Business Center of Excellence and begin exploring beyond social media, such as creating a thorough converged media plan.
