Ikea’s Holiday Catalog Includes Interactive Content

Ikea’s new interactive online catalog for the holidays includes videos clips with social media integration, and “a feature to change the furniture and accessories in a photograph by using a mouse to ‘pull down’ a virtual window shade,” writes The New York Times’ Stuart Elliott.

The catalog is promoted through an online banner ad campaign as well as e-mails to customers in the United States.

Fiat’s Branded Content Efforts

Social Media Manager of Fiat Esperansita Bejnarowicz talked about the brand’s live storytelling events at Ad:Tech in New York, Media Post reports.

Dubbed “Alternate Routes,” the event featured Moth storytellers and was filmed and put online. It also appeared on CBS radio over the period of two months. There were 76 million impressions of the campaign, along with 440,000 hits on the videos.

Bejnarowicz said, “try to make your content as good as — or better than — the content around it; that’s what we learned. Make sure your content organically fits with the brand. Real content, like stories, engages.”

Branded Content Worthwhile?

Adrian Flores of mUmBRELLA says that, basically, branded content is a bit of a waste of time, and that it’s not profitable.

While he praises Harley Davidson’s Ridebook as being on point, some branded content is not selling anything, he says.

“For every pitch perfect execution like that, you have an Intel asking Kiefer Sutherland to reprise a character from a defunct television show with the only link back to their product being the fact it’s in the same room as him,” he continues. “As 1950s adman Howard Gossage said: ‘Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.’ And if your ad is not about selling, the question must be asked; why exactly did you make it?”

The Power of Brand Media 

Blogger Steve Earl writes that brands now have just as much power as the media, which might get them in trouble.

To avoid this, he suggests knowing what the audience can take, and valuing editorial skills. People creating the content need to know the laws, and there should be planning for stories and how they could work across different channels.

BBC Chief Steps Down Over Scandal

According to the BBC, Chief George Entwistle will receive £450,000, or one year’s salary, as part of his deal to step down this past weekend. He stepped down after a Newsright report accused Tory politician Lord McAlpine of child abuse (McAlpine denied the charges, and the accusation was taken back by the man who claimed to be the victim).

Tim Davie, who is director of BBC Audio & Music, will be taking over the role of chief in December.

Content Marketing and the Competition

CopyBlogger’s Beth Hayden discusses why it’s necessary for content marketers to scope out the competition. Marketers should look on social media sites, in search engine results, and see who is getting a lot of attention in the industry.

It’s important to study the products and services competitors offer, along with their strengths and weaknesses and SEO strategy, she says. Marketers should monitor the social and SEO campaigns so that they can learn to beat the competition.

The Local Marketing Push in 2013

According to ClickZ and Balihoo, 91 percent of national brands will be investing at least the same amount or more into local marketing efforts next year. Forty seven percent of those brands “said they plan to invest more in local marketing for 2013 than they did in 2012.”

Local mobile marketing is also going to play a factor in campaigns; 34 percent of survey takers said they would be using it in 2013.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

With the right tools, companies can control the message and make sure that everyone is happy.

Letting fans speak for the company and relay their experiences to other customers is a key local marketing strategy, says Business 2 Community’s Ashley Furness.

She suggests using Compendium, a company that “provides tools for brands to creatively encourage, curate and promote customer-created content.” Fifty-two percent of customers rely on other customers’ reviews and experiences to decide whether or not they’ll give a company their business.

A similar tool Furness mentions, Yext PowerListings, helps brands manage their local search listings on sites such as Yelp, Yahoo!, and Foursquare. This saves companies a huge hassle so they don’t have to contact the individual sites to get listings changed. It ensures a more accurate and effective listing since companies can upload photos and add addresses, phone numbers, and websites.

Actual content marketing at specific locations is important as well. Adcentricity, a service that puts display ads in windows, provides location-based shopping apps, in-store television screens, and more, will take care of that outreach, writes Furness.

“This strategy isn’t just about catching the customer on location,” she says. “Marketers can target segments by choosing geographically relevant settings. For example, if a company wants to target younger buyers, Adcentricity might suggest media channels in and around colleges.”

Creating a system that allows individual location owners to update their websites, social media messages, emails, and in-store materials is also a way to manage localized marketing, according to Furness.

Companies such as Balihoo and Saepio take care of these strategies, and make it so that “the corporate marketing team doesn’t have to manage individual marketing assets for every location.”

Going about localized marketing in this fashion is a way to make sure the message stays consistent–a problem that many companies face.

Localized marketing is an important asset to all companies. Forty-one percent of marketers dedicate 30 percent of their budgets to local campaigns.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence sets the strategy and guidelines for all social media content across the company’s far-reaching locations and business units.

It’s quite a task managing all that distributed content. Intel’s Facebook profiles, for example, have around 10 million fans spread across 36 pages (and almost 50 countries). The company also has presence on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

“Our team of nine provides a central POV on everything social,” said Intel social media strategist Ekaterina
Walter. “We help create a social infrastructure that geographies and business units can use. We also create unified branding and presence and then scale it globally,”

Global is Local, Local is Global

In large distributed organizations, content needs to flow from the local to the global, and vice versa.

“We have some content and branding that we create centrally, but a lot of time you have to go specifically local because local is important,” Walter said. “Centrally, we can’t presume to know everything that works and everything that doesn’t. However, sometimes we create programs centrally that are then easily scaled within geographies.”

Similarly, she said, sometimes fantastic ideas begin locally and then the company can implement them in various countries.

As an example, Walter cites the popular ‘Museum of Me‘ application, which allows users to upload videos and photos to a personalized online museum. Developed in Asia for the Asian market, Museum of Me went viral “mechanically,” Walter said, “without any media support.”

“Because we have a central structure in place in the Social Media Center of Excellence, we were able to take that and run it out to all our countries automatically,” she said. “Central support helped us to scale up the content distribution.”

Engaging with Content

The measure of successful social media content –particularly for B2B brands– is the level of engagement shown by its audience, Walter said.

“The number of fans you have is all great and good, but it’s a vanity metric,” she said. “We want to move beyond that to look at who we reach, how often we reach them, and unique compressions within that. For us, the beauty of social is increased engagement.”

In terms of engagement, says Walter, brands should ask:

• Who within the brand demographic engages the most and how does that change across time?
• What does that engagement look like?
• How many likes, comments, and shares does the brand have?

Walter suggests using social media content to bring customers’ opinions in to the fold, including trivia questions, challenges and puzzles.

“Things like that allow you to have true, meaningful conversations around topics that you and your audience are passionate about,” Walter said.

Content Tips

Walter’s #1 content strategy tip is to focus resources on understanding audience. (Use polls and analytics to really understand an audience and figure out what type of content resonates with them.)

Brands should use also analytics to test, track, and adjust new content strategies in flexible ways, Walter said.

“Make sure you know your voice,” she said. “There is no way you can use a PR broadcasting voice and expect your audience to relate to you. Ask yourself ‘What kind of human voice can I develop that people can relate to?’”

And finally, to support content across different locations and business units, Walter said that companies must make sure to document everything. And then they need to distribute that information across all relevant locations so that stakeholders know what works and what doesn’t work.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently