Marketing Ninja

A Short Story

You’re a successful content marketer, corporate blogger, social media manager, or whatever the title of the month is for the dedicated new media expert on-hand. You’ve invested a lot of time and effort into building a valuable marketing channel your company. You were trusted by management to go off and do your own thing, to build a channel that would add value to the business, connect with potential new customers, and ultimately help build a bigger, more informed customer base.

You’ve never simply spammed or mercilessly shilled your product upon an unsuspecting audience; you’ve always provided relevant, usable information with an undisguised yet modest tie-in to your company’s product or service. Most importantly of your all, your audience trusts you, a rare thing for a corporate blogger. Everything is fine and good in the kingdom of content marketing and social media.

But one day someone from the product development team asks if you can run an announcement about the latest release of the product; you agree, because it seems pretty harmless. Many of your readers are customers, right, so what’s the big deal? The release is a hit with your blog’s audience and you see some upgrades and word-of-mouth sales as a result. Everybody wins. The product marketing people liked the results so much that they ask you to make the product updates a regular feature on the corporate blog. So you start dividing your team between touching up product marketing releases and producing new content.

The next thing you know the PR guy catches on and asks if you can start running some of the company’s press releases, testimonials, and so forth. He’s confident that the press material is blog-worthy and that the audience will love it, and that running the releases prominently on the blog will help corporate relations with partners and high-volume customers. You want to help the company, so you agree; after all, you’re already running product announcements on the blog so what’s the big deal, right? You start to notice a decrease in the number of comments left on blog entries, but you’re not worried.

After a couple of months a couple members of the sales team pull you aside and ask you a few questions about the blog’s traffic. They’re looking for some new areas to generate sales leads and they propose putting a few entries out there about the special offers that your company entertains every month or so. They figure that you can probably generate a decent number of leads based on the amount of traffic flowing through the blog.  You want to help boost sales, so you agree and start running the special offers. You hardly get blog comments any more.

At the end of the quarter your boss pulls you aside and asks about the falling sales from the blog. You have trouble explaining why the blog isn’t generating sales like how it was eight months ago and your boss warns you that the decrease in sales is "job-threatening" – what can you do?

The Death for New Media Channels

The problem I’ve described is one that most companies would be fortunate to have because most don’t have a social media channel that is actually worth anything. But as more and more companies get a handle on how to properly exploit new media I suspect that this will be less and less of an issue. The issue then becomes how other units in the company want to utilize their new media channels.

It’s a shiny new marketing medium that has gone unexploited in the eyes of those who are not familiar with it. If a social media manager builds up a popular corporate-branded YouTube channel, someone in the marketing department is inevitably going to want to use it to run pitches and promotions. A successful corporate blog will be transformed into a bastardized press wire after the PR department has butted its nose into it. A scalper from the sales department will unsuccessfully try to turn a LinkedIn group for customers into either a referral farm or an upsale channel. And what happens? In exchange for some short term profits the channel is burned to the ground by well-intentioned people who simply don’t know any better.

Here’s what often happens:

1. Discovery – The resident social media maven discovers some cool new service or platform and decides to try to experiment with a corporate presence on said channel.
2. Maturity – If the experiments start to bear fruit, then the social media manager starts spending more time expanding the company’s use of the service and builds an audience.
3. Exploitation – Other units of the company begin to notice the audience and success of the new media channel and begin to exploit it in order to increase profits in the short run.
4. Decay – As the information disseminated through the new media channel becomes less and less valuable, the less attention people begin to pay to the medium.
5. Death – Decay reaches a point where the channel becomes unredeemable. It’s no longer viewed as credible or authentic in the eyes of the average reader. The channel has simply become another marketing vehicle, and it is treated as such.

New Media Channels Don’t Have to Die – Just Know When to Say "No"

So why do companies invest time and money into social media channels? To raise interest, connect with customers and non-customers, and ultimately to increase sales. Yes, increasing sales should always be the top concern of new media managers, content marketers, and corporate bloggers alike. However, building a valuable social media / new media channel is very much a long term process. In order for the channel to be valuable over its lifetime it must be:

• Consistent;
• Current;
• Readily usable;
• Relevant to non-customers and customers alike; and
• Engaging.

Good content marketers instinctively know this – all of these things are pretty fundamental to writing a good blog, developing a good YouTube channel, and just about anything else. Unfortunately the other people in your organization, particularly in the marketing/sales/PR triangle, are usually unaware of the nuances of good content marketing. They see your new media medium as a new opportunity to advance the organization’s objectives without really considering what makes the channel valuable to begin with: the interest of the readers.

If you’re a content marketer then your first responsibility is making sure that you produce stuff that people actually want to read; this will lead to long-term sales as long as you’re consistent. The M/S/PR triad wants to increase sales immediately, and if you give them stick a finger in your content marketing mix, they will certainly generate some sales right off the bat but usually at the expense of your new media medium.

Think like the editor of a magazine or the producer of a TV network and less like a marketer – if NBC was asked to change the content of all of its prime time shows to talk about how great its parent company’s products are, would people still want to watch? Probably not.

The same is true for new media – you’re there to inform and entertain, and so long as you connect the dots between your content and your company’s products, sales will come about as a result.

The bottom line is that you need to say "no" to almost everything – the occasional press release, product update, or killer offer is actually a good thing for your bottom line, but if you let the PR/marketing/sales guys start running the show then you’re giving your new media channel the death sentence.

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