Intern See Intern do? Who is your online brand manager?

Social media is your company's brand face on the web, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Youtube, etc. but the questions is who is running this important face of your company? For many companies it's the person with the least amount of brand experience, the least busy, the least costly individuals. This means interns or the guy in the mail room, the receptionist or worse. Social Media is not so cheap when you do it wrong. It can cost you a huge price. Customer. image, even the future engagements.
Pay attention to who is skippering the social media ship. Yes everyone can help but someone has to be in charge and someone has to pay attention. Someone who understands your brand and the new media. So better to have someone who knows who you are, telling people who you are.  Right?
This can be as simple as having everything go through one person. One voice is a good thing. Don't rely on a cheap monkey to to the heavy Social Media Brand lifting, it's counter productive, possibly damaging to the brand and annoying to the monkey...

For more:  http://www.abandofcreatives.com/blog

Content is King but is it the Court Jester too?

OK we all know the saying that content is King but it has to be a couple of other things too. It has to play the part of Court Jester and Concierge. I know odd coupling but if it fails to entertain us we will never notice it. If it fails to help us we will be annoyed by it.

TV content can (depending on the brand) still get away with being just the Court Jester. TV has to be interesting and entertaining. The Super Bowl is coming up and that is the mecca (supposedly) of entertaining content. The Super Bowl ads I did a few years back were just that, entertaining. They created a buzz around E-Trade, this was the strategy and it worked. E-Trade is one of the old school .com's that is still around and still pretty strong. People talked about those ads, they competed with Budweiser, and with Bud they topped the USA Today polls. They were great Court Jesters.

Web content on the other hand still needs to be entertaining but it has to solve problems and be helpful as well. What I'm looking for on the web is sometimes different than what I want on my flat screen. I get annoyed by purely informational ads and boring content that appear on my screen while I'm cruisin the web. They had better be helpful, cool or entertaining and not too sales driven or I get pissed at the brand itself.

Just because you want to say it to the consumer does not mean they want to hear it. The days of talking at the consumer has been dead for a while now. You learn that lesson or you go out of business.

So let's modify the statement. Content must be interesting, entertaining and helpful to be King.
Content must be part Court Jester and part Concierge.

We all know what happen to unhelpful Concierge and unfunny Court Jesters. One gets no tips while the other loses his head.

Neither is good for us marketing advertising folk.

Good luck.