Brands are fast becoming media publishers and producers

By Robert Wheatley

Is your brand ready to be its own TV channel? Magazine publisher? Is there a Chief Editorial Officer position looming on the horizon inside your organization? The answer could be yes.

We have entered the era of content marketing. Inbound rather than outbound communication strategies that serve to build Web traffic, remove barriers to purchase, activate brand ambassadors and support community building – all with a shelf life that has remarkable staying power. This shift will inevitably require optimization of brand communications strategies between the three primary platforms of Owned, Earned and Paid media. Of these, more and more momentum is surfacing around Owned Media. Here we discuss its role and value in the marketing mix.

What does your Owned Media plan look like?

We’re on a fast track now to define best practices in content creation for various forms of brand created media — videos, Webcasts, podcasts, blogs, e-zines, e-books and presentations. Not long ago brands worked with their PR counsel primarily to get product massages telegraphed through various editorial channels. While the world of “earned media” will continue to be a relevant and important mode of outreach — albeit along a refined path that assigns increasing priority to bloggers — ”owned media” is rapidly emerging as an important foundation vehicle for acquiring, building and retaining customer relationships. Now is the time to construct your own editorial and programming calendars that chart topics and story telling in a frame your audience will find useful in their daily lives.

Owned Media helps build trust, familiarity and mutual respect…

At the recent Pet Food Forum in Chicago, a conference of leading pet food brands and their minders, I presented the case for brand building that follows a new trail built around identifying a brand’s Higher Purpose – an effort to drive relevancy by aligning the brand value proposition closely with consumer (in this case pet parent) lifestyle needs and passions. Part of the presentation was dedicated to the over-arching requirement for trust-creation and how important social media will be to install the building blocks of confidence, familiarity, respect and comfort that must exist between brand and consumer. Interestingly the entire Higher Purpose proposition seeds and cultivates fertile ground for ongoing content creation that is by definition more meaningful to consumers – because its designed around their needs, interests and concerns.

Equally important, engaging content lies at the base of aggregating an audience in social media platforms. If you do this skillfully, brands earn permission for a relationship. And that includes becoming a resource for news, information, entertainment and education.

Essentially we’re talking about how you can exponentially increase your brand’s worth and engagement value by delivering content that is instructive and helpful to those trying to make decisions about what products to buy.

Says social media expert and author Brian Solis:

“Our road to the future begins with understanding that attention is finite and is increasingly thinning. It is now our responsibility to connect purpose and value directly with individuals where, when, and how their attention is focused. We must help ourselves by introducing relevance, discoverability, and share-ability into the mix. Empowering consumers to view the most material information and in turn, make advantageous decisions is now a critical priority and will determine our stature not only in online societies, but also in the markets where we hope to thrive and excel. We are either part of the information gathering and decision-making cycles or we are absent from them. Where we rank once connected is established by our understanding of people and the information they seek combined with our mastery of the networks, tools, and services they use to communicate. And, through the creation of compelling media, we earn the presence, awareness and ultimately the influence we deserve.”

A great example of this at work is Whole Foods and their Secret Ingredient video blog that is aimed at helping home cooks learn new recipes, cooking techniques, ingredient pairings and other useful advice. It sits in the middle of a growing catalog of video material that spans the waterfront of visits to a dairy farm or other tutorials that surround the increasingly popular topic of “where your food comes from.” It informs, entertains, rewards while burnishing the brand as a knowledge broker on subjects their shoppers care about.

Taking responsibility for consumer interaction…

In a way, owned media offers brands a plausible shot to take responsibility for engineering consumer engagement in communications. Ads can be ignored. PR, while intrusive, still requires that messaging pass through an independent filter – one that will certainly be credible. But in the end may not fully expose the audience to all of the relevant information. Editing is editing.

“Content focused on selling rather than helping is doomed.” Jay Baer, Convince & Convert

Thus Owned Media allows brands to create and build communication that is delivered in tact to consumers. Of course this creates enormous pressure on relevancy and unselfishness — you cannot do this well if your primary motivation is simply to thrust a selling message in front of someone. This never works. But with a proper nod to relevance, value and sensitivity the door is wide open to put enriched multi-media content squarely in the mix of social media engagement.

We live in exciting times. The PR business has now acquired an added role to combine and synthesize editorial outreach with content creation. The end result is a rich treasure trove of meaningful communication that can hit consumer lifestyle interests squarely on the nose – assuming, of course, that you know what those interests are.

Just think of the possibilities for brand to live in a place that matters and has meaning to the lives of those they wish to sell to –

• Cooking tips for the passionate kitchen commander

• Destination hints and experiences for the inveterate traveler

• Style immersions for the creative fashionistas

• Parenting advice for the focused purposeful mom

• Edgy ideas for the budding home decorator

• Shared stories of adventure for the outdoor enthusiast

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May 13, 2010

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