Best Practice in Digital Communications and Content Curation
Best Practice in Digital Communications and Content Curation.
Right now, everyone has an opinion about what your digital brand is doing online and offline. Whether it’s in your customer service, innovation, media presence, content creation or digital PR If your team can respond to the key elements of conversations this is an amazing way to do some live market testing for free. It is important to keep a strong view on the ‘sources’ of these conversations without negative connections to competitors, politics or stakeholders skewing the mix.
Let me please re-visit and age old one liner that “customers are always right”.
NO – They are not but they DO come FIRST!
This is where you can learn from best practice examples from other brands, other digital communities and consumer blogs that will help you and your team formulate appropriate business responses and also to help you design your future digital communications plans from trends in industry.
As regular readers will know I am THE biggest fan of the term ‘content is king’ and then aligning it with the best ‘brand concept’ possible as your major key starting point. If the brand concept is wrong or off in the first place it will rarely work even if a business or investor throws serious finances at it.
It just as simple a getting it wrong with:
- A weekly business task/co-owned business concept for Sir Alan Sugar on the Apprentice
- Choosing a poor song choice and then delivering a weak performance because of the choice on the X Factor
- Writing and producing leading music content for digital channels that wins awards and produces long term sustainable revenue streams.
Many of the current wins of fails in industry are born from exactly one of these two major points in my opinion, most of my recommendations and solutions are highly transferrable to many industries and wider than entertainment. It is therefore critical that now even more digital attention is given to these fundamentals and the growing smart reactions of key digital and social communities. Let’s look at three brief case studies into the three brands mentioned above.
- The Apprentice – Recently in an all time first, ALL THREE contestants were all fired at the board for a gross failure in the task. Mainly down to two key elements not understanding the task and sales required and then complete failure to communicate appropriately leading to a failure in team’s performance. There was digital applause for the three contestants to be simultaneously fired across the many social media channels and the national press the next day.
- The X Factor UK – Cheryl Fernandez-Versini recently mimed her way through her new record ‘I don’t care’ showing a highly confident pop star which was very unusual as her previous performances have been very shy. Not helping to calm matters the official XF response on Twitter within 120 seconds of her performance was broadly ‘Did you really expect live vocals’? The social outrage from this admission would not be what I call best practice from Cheryl’s management team. In contrast to this later that week, Cheryl performed a new ballad from her album live with no tricks and guess what …..which was met with much more positive applause from all social sides. This will help all important album and single sales. ….#jobwelldone.
- John Legend – The UK Top charts last week saw the incredible artist John Legend go back to number 4 position (after a flawless X Factor rendition of ‘All of me’ – oh the irony!) and enjoyed his 43rd week on the UK chart! Content Curation at its finest! What an incredible achievement and absolutely justifies the basis of many of my articles and recommendations on how to become a market leader. It is not a techno track or punchy R&B record it is simply what John Legend has done from day one, gorgeous soul music that moves audiences to tears. This was the ORIGINAL brand concept aimed at a contemporary market of live music lovers. John and his team of experts have never swayed too much from the outline concept and I praise them for this exceptional work in industry.
Refection
Hopefully these examples provide a clear testament as to how consumers can better align with your company/product/service/concept more effectively idea if they know what the expectation is around quality before they press ‘play’ or press ‘enter’ on their mobile device. Using entertainment as one key example, I am sure you are able to see why I think so much transferable business best practice can be derived from these examples.
best practice, Brand Concept, Content Curation, Digital Communications, Digital Planning, featured, John Legend, market testing, marketing, Social media, strategy, sustainable revenue streams, The Apprentice, x-factor
