On Tuesday, Nov. 13 at 7 p.m., the W20 Center for Social Commerce led a hands-on session in the I3 Center, 432 Newhouse 3, entitled “Content Marketing for Communicators: Succeeding in the Attention Economy.” This event was a part of the fall 2018 Social Commerce Days, made possible by the collaborative efforts between the W20 group and the public relations program at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
The “attention economy” exists because there is more content than there is attention. Thus, people have to choose what they will pay attention to, and not everyone will see everything. This is why social media has become so important, and it is even more important to understand how to use social media to leverage key audiences in order to better the brand.
This session focused on the changing forms of communication and how to use it, so it is important to understand how it has changed. There is a rise in paid media, a shift to “always-on” content, an increased level of investment to make content break through and a rise in self-publishing on today’s multichannel media landscape. With all of these changes, companies are beginning to understand the importance of understanding key target audiences and how to reach them, which is why there has been an increase in the “brand as publisher” model.
The “brand as publisher” model is when companies create their own content and push it out on their social media channels. The goal of this is to create awareness, thought leadership by the audiences, show corporate social responsibility and lead the generation.
Corporate social responsibility is especially important, as many people feel even more connected to a brand when the brand supports a cause that they support as well. A great example of corporate social responsibility is Patagonia. Patagonia works tirelessly to preserve the environment and make sure that key legislation is passed to support the outdoors. Therefore, when people wear an item from Patagonia, they show their support and imply that they also care for the environment.
During the session, experts from W20 walked through the steps of creating social media content. The steps are listed below:
- Analytics: what the audience wants to hear, where they want to hear it; finding the white space
- Content of social strategy: what to do and what not to do with your posts
- Content development and publishing
- Paid social strategy and administration: involves advertisements and what channels you will post on
- Monitoring and measurement: prove that your plan worked
A key step in the process is to define the strategy and content, which means developing an audience persona and creating content pillars for what each persona wants to see. Content can either be clicked or shared by people. Clicks come from an interesting headline and shares come from a well written and interesting article. Not only is it important to bring the reader in and earn clicks, but it is just as important to keep the reader interested so that they will want to share it with other people, creating even more clicks.
This information was very useful, informative and exciting to hear about, as it is all stuff I am currently learning in my public relations classes. One of our projects is a social media simulation where learn about audiences, content creation and the performance of our posts. The audience persona we created during this hands-on session also related to a class project, where we developed our own audience personas for our blogs.
Learning from current professionals and relating it to what we learn in class is very exciting, as it reassures me that I will be prepared to work in the public relations field one day. This session was helpful to reaffirm the methods and steps of a social media strategy, as well as put the methods to practice with a hands-on strategy. I would definitely recommend attending sessions with the Center for Social Commerce and I look forward to working with the Center in the future to further develop my skills and understand the social media landscape.
The Center for Social Commerce was formed in 2012 in order to ensure students were fully educated on important topics in public relations, such as social commerce, social media and analytics. With these skills, students can best understand how to use social media in an effective manner, from the inception of an idea to analyzing the results to determine the strategy’s effectiveness It is clear that the Center is doing a lot to help students, and this workshop was just one of the many ways students at the Newhouse school can learn from experts working at the W20 group.