Stiles Says: my friends at Altimeter can see the future, and they know content isn’t the future…it’s right now.
Brands must function as fully wrought media companies, according to a new in-depth report called “Organizing for Content: Models to Incorporate Content Strategy and Content Marketing in the Enterprise,” by Altimeter.
The Altimeter report, which interviewed 78 various brands, showed that on average, organizations have to manage content for up to 178 potential social media properties, plus any traditional content used on websites and other, more physical venues. According to the report, “The trend is toward ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ marketing and has been greatly accelerated by an explosion of owned media channels — both ‘fully owned’ (e.g., websites and blogs) and social media channels in which brands largely control their presence and must continually feed with fresh content.”
The research found that, despite the pressing new content demands, few of the interviewed brands were approaching their content with a broad strategy. Only nine of the brands interviewed have actually made employee hires, such as editors or content marketers, specifically for content creation.
Over on the Altimeter blog, analyst Rebecca Lieb pointed out that the internal governance of content for most businesses was, at best, fragmented. Charted out, it looks like a mess, with channels divided up between departments with no rhyme or reason (Altimeter suggests that most decisions are made via “hand-raising” than any particular internal strategy”). In a single example, Instagram and Google+ were managed by the PR department, while Marketing managed Facebook and Twitter, the Website division managed YouTube and Pinterest, Customer Service was in charge of blogs and the HR department dealt with LinkedIn.
The Altimeter report is filled with a number of case studies from which to draw more positive inspiration. For example, the “Content Lead” strategy used by Dell and Intel centers decisions on a single executive responsible for all content initiatives, putting power in the hands of someone high enough in the company to work cross-departmentally and form cohesive strategies. Other companies, like Marketo and Nissan, prefer the Content Department/Division, in which an entire in-house agency produces all types of content for the organization.
Of course, most of the strategies that the report suggests are designed for extra-large brands and corporations. Smaller and mid-sized businesses can avoid the problem early on by making good content decisions when they are first growing their brands. For a small company, this may mean hiring for a single content creator position, or forming flexible content teams to tackle marketing materials and their distribution across all channels. As the business grows, this type of cohesion can naturally grow with it, eventually developing into an executive position, a full department, cross-department team solutions or whatever else the brand needs.
Photo Source: Facebook
Tags: featured
Category: Content Marketing
