What Taylor Swift Can Teach You About Content

I watched a video posted by Taylor Swift recently -- oh, so what, you’ve never watched a Taylor Swift video? Come on now. Anyway, I watched a video posted by Taylor Swift and in it, Swift decides she’s going to surprise a fan by attending her bridal shower. The video plays out as you’d expect - Swift arrives, bride-to-be goes crazy, normal people marvel at the intersection of their lives and their fantasies, etc. But what struck me about it is how brilliant the video is. How brilliant that Taylor Swift is so aware of her brand, how the video underlines her squeaky-clean, down to earth, nice girl persona so perfectly. How valuable it is, even for big name stars, to create content like this to reinforce their brand purpose and message.

Within a week, the video had hit 1.5 million views (currently at 1.7 million). Now, you might think ‘yeah, but it’s Taylor Swift, everything she posts probably gets a million hits, right?’ Wrong – her previous five videos, mostly concert announcements and interview clips, averaged 351,000 views, well below the numbers for Swift’s bridal shower excursion. It’ll live on too, and will no doubt go well over two million, probably three million views in the end, expanding Swift’s reach and winning her a legion of new fans in the process. You may look at this is a celebrity video, separate from a normal company posting, but the process is exactly the same. Swift has (or her people have) identified an opportunity to underline her values and build her brand through video content. It’s low budget, easy to make, and, as you can see, has reached a huge audience. While Taylor Swift does have a large fan base to start from, there are lessons to be taken away from it.

1. Identify stories that resonate with people. People love to see a celebrity paying attention to a lifelong fan – it makes us feel like they’re one of us, they care about us, that those celebrities on high do get our messages. It’s a great story to tell, a beautiful story, and one which few people would be able to find fault with. It’s a safe story for Swift’s brand, and one which will resonate with her target audience.

When considering video content, or even story-based content in general, look at what stories best resonate with your target audience. Look at what appeals to them, what concerns them - what story do they want to be told? Ultimately, the best way to know what works is to be one of them, get involved in your online communities, listen to what people are saying and understand where your brand fits into their world. Then think over what ways you can develop a narrative around that.

Look also to viral campaigns, like Chipotle’s ‘The Scarecrow’ or Guinness’ ‘Friendship’, analyse what they’ve done that’s worked. It’s simple storytelling at heart, but done in a way the reinforces brand values and appeals to people’s sensibilities.

2. Think over opportunities that exist within your business or business relationships that can reinforce your brand values. Taylor Swift obviously has fans sending her letters - she just has to pick one out and go with it - but your brand is also dealing with people every day. What stories can your staff tell that align with your brand message, what experiences can you share? Even further down the chain, how does your business make the lives of your consumers better, how do you contribute to the improvement of their world? There may be stories you haven’t thought of, angles unexplored, and they can form powerful content that reinforces the values your company stands for. What about sponsorship opportunities, community assistance programs - what ways could you help that will be of benefit to society, will tell a great story and will help underline what it is your business is all about? It’s important such programs are delivered with sensitivity and that that align with your brand purpose, but these stories can be a great way to establish your brand purpose and spread your message beyond your existing communities.

3. Understand the mission of your brand. This is critical to the success of your content campaigns – once you understand your brand mission, your company’s purpose in the world, then you can create content that aligns with it. Your content efforts will be far more effective if they are always underlining your brand – think about Red Bull’s content and sponsorships, you could never imagine them sponsoring a bingo night at the local hotel, could you? No, because that’s not them, they do extreme sports, things that push people to their limits - that’s what their brand culture is all about, and everything they do reinforces it.

This same approach applies to all content strategies – while it’s fine to deviate a little with fun images and one-off events, 95% of the time, your content should re-inforce, underline and highlight your brand mission. Taylor Swift’s video highlights her brand, her persona and her attitude. It may seem like nothing, like a random event, but videos like this always underline brand principles and work to further expand reach and public support (and Swift is clever to do things like this proactively, rather than do it in the aftermath of a PR disaster of the like).   

So while Taylor Swift may have billions of fans and while you may not be interested in her video content (hey, I’m not asking you to watch it yourself – if you’re not interested, I took the hit for you – you’re welcome; if you are interested, now you can watch Taylor Swift for research purposes – you’re welcome), you should always pay attention to viral videos like this. What makes them so shareable? What brand elements do they underline and highlight? What lessons can you learn from this content? It’s easy to scroll past the latest viral sensation, especially as they normally flood your newsfeed with people liking and sharing and re-sharing, but it’s always worth checking them out at least once, just to see if you can take anything from it. Notice the detail, the purpose behind each. Note how the audience responds to such posts. It’s little details like these that might help you craft your own million hit masterpiece for your business, and help build your brand through social networks. 

Source: http://socialmediatoday.com/adhutchinson/2379536/what-taylor-swift-can-teach-you-about-content

A Handy Design Guide for New Twitter Profiles

In 2011 I wrote about the “New New Twitter” which placed a larger emphasis on the overall experience from a user’s home feed to the profile. That change was focused a lot more on driving more communication and engagement, while also introducing enhanced image cards.

This month Twitter rolled out a new design for users around the world placing significantly more emphasis on content consumption and discovery by visiting other’s profiles, instead of just consumption from the home feed.

In addition to the obvious facelift of the profile, new options allow users to see another person’s feed through multiple display options: tweets only, tweets containing just photos/videos (or photo collages), or all tweets and replies. Even individual tweets become larger or smaller depending on how many people have engaged with it.

From the Twitter blog:

The new web profile lets you use a larger profile photo, customize your header, show off your best Tweets and more. Here are main features:

• Best Tweets: Tweets that have received more engagement will appear slightly larger, so your best content is easy to find.
• Pinned Tweet: Pin one of your Tweets to the top of your page, so it’s easy for your followers to see what you’re all about.
• Filtered Tweets: Now you can choose which timeline to view when checking out other profiles. Select from these options: Tweets, Tweets with photos/videos, or Tweets and replies.

While we’re still in the early stages of the rollout, all brands should be prepared to make some changes to optimize their profile for the change. Fortunately, the folks over atMcBeard, an online creative agency out of LA, created this handy design guide to help illustrate the new changes.

If you’re looking for a photoshop template to work out of, Re/Code‘s community manager Anthony Quintano also created a quick and easy PSD file that he has been using with success. You can download it here.

Source: http://socialfresh.com/a-handy-design-guide-for-new-twitter-profiles/

Google+ Is Walking Dead

Today, Google’s Vic Gundotra announced that he would be leaving the company after eight years. The first obvious question is where this leaves Google+, Gundotra’s baby and primary project for the past several of those years.

What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform — essentially ending its competition with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

A Google representative has vehemently denied these claims. “Today’s news has no impact on our Google+ strategy — we have an incredibly talented team that will continue to build great user experiences across Google+, Hangouts and Photos.”

According to two sources, Google has apparently been reshuffling the teams that used to form the core of Google+, a group numbering between 1,000 and 1,200 employees. We hear that there’s a new building on campus, so many of those people are getting moved physically, as well — not necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure.

As part of these staff changes, the Google Hangouts team will be moving to the Android team, and it’s likely that the photos team will follow, these people said. Basically, talent will be shifting away from the Google+ kingdom and towards Android as a platform, we’re hearing.

We’ve heard Google has not yet decided what to do with the teams not going to Android, and that Google+ is not “officially” dead, more like walking dead: “When you fire the top dog and take away all resources it is what it is.” It will take copious amounts of work for it to un-zombie, if that’s even a possibility.

It’s not clear, according to our sources’ intel, where the rest of the employees will go, but the assumption is that Larry Page will follow Mark Zuckerberg’s lead at Facebook and send the bulk of them to mobile roles.

This would telegraph a major acceleration of mobile efforts in general, rather than G+. The teams will apparently be building “widgets,” which take advantage of Google+ as a platform, rather than a focus on G+ as its own integral product.

One big change for Google+ is that there will no longer be a policy of “required” Google+ integrations for Google products, something that has become de rigueur for most product updates.

One impetus of this was that the YouTube integration with Google+ did not go well, something that the public recognized through the comments blowback, but that was also seen inside the company as a rocky move.

That doesn’t mean that all G+ integrations will go away, though. Gmail will continue to have it, but there may be some scaling back that keeps the “sign-on” aspects without the heavy-handed pasting over of G+.

We’ve heard that there were tensions between Gundotra and others inside the company, especially surrounding the “forced” integrations of Google+ into products like YouTube and Gmail. Apparently, once each of those integrations was made, they were initially being claimed as “active user” wins until Page stepped in and made a distinction.

Taking Gundotra’s place inside Google will be David Besbris, though we hear that parts of Google+ are under “the person responsible for Chrome,” according to one source. It’s not clear if this is Sundar Pichai, Google’s head of Chrome and Android, or why this would happen. “It’s complicated,” our source said. Google PR denies this account.

We’ve heard that the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook may have been a factor in the phasing out of Gundotra’s grand experiment. There was a perception that Google had missed the “biggest acquisition in the social space.” Though another source tells us that Google knew what was up with WhatsApp but simply didn’t want to pay out for it.

Google+ is and always has been about turning every Google user into a signed-in Google user, period. If true, these changes dovetail with that focus going forward, with Google+ acting as a backbone rather than a front-end service. That being said, there are a ton of really interesting things going on in Google+ like its efforts in imaging. Having the photos team integrate the technologies backing Google+ photos tightly into the Android camera product, for instance, could be a net win for Android users.

In the long run, the issues with Google+ didn’t especially stem from the design of the product itself, but more from the way it interjected itself into your day-to-day Google experience like some unwelcome hairy spider. Perhaps these changes will scale back the grating party crashing?

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/google-is-walking-dead/?ncid=twittersocialshare