To say ‘content is king’ is like saying ‘Martin Scorsese is a good director’ or ‘John Lennon was a singer with a nice voice’: it is just brutally reductive. The truth is content is EMPEROR, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Czar of the web and Summus Arbiter of the Internet.
Let’s see why.
Facebook changes its look more often than David Beckham – we know that, and we are almost getting used to it. But the last wave of changes is rather interesting: very soon we will be able to switch to Timeline, which will be some sort of “digital autobiography” as Nir Refuah, vice president of McCann Digital in Israel, put it. “First Facebook became the digital ID of everyone, and now it will try to gather our whole life story,” says Refuah.
Brands smell blood, already; think about the picture taken on your seventh birthday, in which you’re sporting a big smile and brand new sneakers, or look at your bio on Twitter ‘cappuccino lover, Apple fanatic, other-things-like-geek-or-foodie’, to have an idea of how companies could step in.
Moreover, users have gained more control over their feed, with options like “Highlight/unhighlight the story”, which means, in simple words:
Boring story = lower visibility
Therefore, advertisers will have to come up with super duper cool content, as we said in the intro. New apps will appear, in order to increase the level of users engagement and involvement.
Share is the new like.
The “like” button will become increasingly less important, as stories have to spread more; Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, a digital marketing firm, argues that “Facebook is a channel, albeit a collaborative one, that needs to be programmed. We need to get people to share and interact with more content.”
Less selling, more storytelling.
Sponsored Stories will prove a very effective tool, especially if the text will be customised; until now it has been ‘Joe likes Whatever Brand’, but it could be soon become something more structured and interesting.
Meanwhile, everybody was talking about this: ‘Burberry has hailed its decision to switch the majority of its marketing spend to digital as a key factory behind a revenue increase of 29% in the first half of its financial year. The fashion brand is said to spend 60% of its marketing budget on digital channels, about three times the average investment by most brands in most sectors.’ (NMA) As usual, when it comes to innovation and great storytelling, Burberry is in pole position.
Google+’s health issues.
Let’s go back to Timeline, which will offer new and interesting potentialities for brands (Mashable recently published a few interesting examples of how brand pages would look like).
Now, you’d expect a social network to go ‘Brands pages? I’m in!’, right?
Wrong. At least, when it comes to Google+.
A few months ago, Google+ Product Manager Christian Oestlien starred in a video, saying ‘The business experience we are creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses. We just ask for your patience while we build it. In the meantime, we are discouraging businesses from using regular profiles to connect with Google+ users. Our policy team will actively work with profile owners to shut down non-user profiles.’
They finally came up with the solution, but many people say Google+ is moribund, if not gone; Slate.com went even further, simply stating that ‘Google+ Is Dead’.
The article reads: ‘Google did finally release brand pages this week, but at this point the effort might be moot. The search company says its network has attracted more than 40 million users in the months since it launched, which likely makes Google+ the fastest-growing social network of all time. But considering Google’s marketing muscle—it hasn’t been shy about directing Web searchers to Google+, and everyone who’s logged in to a Google account sees the Google+ toolbar at the top of every Google page—it would be a surprise if Google+ didn’t have so many users’.
Finally, the epitaph: ‘The real test of Google’s social network is what people do after they join. As far as anyone can tell, they aren’t doing a whole lot’ ‘There’s nothing to do on Google+, and every time someone figures out a possible use for it, Google turns out the lights.’ ‘Even Google’s own executives seem to have gotten bored by the site.’
The general sentiment has been summarised by Stephen Fry, a true Tweetaholic, but not a big fan of Google+: ‘(the social network) Doesn’t seem to offer anything that will make my life happier, larkier, easier, more interesting or convenient.’
The end?
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