Introduction: Why This Book Matters Right Now and for the Next Several Years!

“Tweetable Moment: Everyone is influential and through everyday conversations we influence others down the purchase funnel.”

—#nextmediaco

My first search query was something like “airlines that treat dogs safely,” but nothing of value came up. After about five minutes of searching, I came across an article that horrified me. The article, “More Pets Died on Delta Flights in 2011, but Why?” was straight from Yahoo!:

More pets died on Delta flights in 2011 than on any other airline, a government report reveals.

The report, issued each year by the U.S. Department of Transportation, shows that 19 of the 35 air travel–related pet deaths in 2011 took place in the baggage holds of Delta planes, up from 16 in 2010. Five pets were also injured on Delta in the same year, more than on any other airline.

After reading the full article, it was obvious that the pets’ owners may have been as much to blame as the airline. But still, the only thing that stuck was that 19 of 35 air travel–related deaths happened on Delta Airlines in 2011, which was also up from 16 in 2010. So I did what a normal social media user would do and solicited feedback from my online community; I also tweeted the article and mentioned Delta a few times. Several of my friends then had some misgivings about giving their future business to Delta without clarification or explanation about this report. One friend even sent me a private note afterward and told me about his personal horror story with the airline.

So I booked our family trip with Southwest.

I can’t be certain there wasn’t some technology glitch, but no one from Delta ever responded—not a word from marketing, customer service, or management—all silent.

The point here is that everyone is influential despite your Klout score or how many friends, fans, or followers you have. Me, you, people who use Twitter and Facebook or don’t use Twitter and Facebook, online and offline. Through everyday, random and organic conversations, we influence others to buy certain products or services or to not buy certain products or services. And these conversations are based on our personal experiences that we have with a brand on a given day. We either influence others or are being influenced by others—it’s the world we live in today. Even if someone from Delta responded and said that they were taking measures to prevent situations like this in the future, it doesn’t necessarily mean I would have changed my mind, although I certainly would have taken it into consideration.

We are not only influential, but we are also busy. There is a content and media surplus in the marketplace and most consumers have an attention deficit.

Every day, consumers are so inundated with media, social connections, status and relationship updates, event invites, tweets, retweets, mentions, direct messages, +1s, likes, loves, texts, emails, alerts, and other random noise that we purposely create filters so that we only consume the content that is relevant to us at a specific moment in time. And the fact that we must hear, see, or interact with a message three to five times before we acquiesce to it becomes extremely problematic, especially for those who work in brand or marketing communications.

So for you to reach the dynamic and unpredictable nature of consumers today, you must begin to think, communicate, and market your products differently. Traditional marketing tactics alone cannot effectively reach consumers. A 30-second television spot during the Super Bowl is nice, but it’s not going to turn around a failing brand—neither will a clever tweet during the half-time show. Aggressive social media marketing won’t work either. You must have a fully integrated content marketing plan or be what I call “brand omnipresent,” which means delivering value across the entire online ecosystem to fully change consumer behavior or brand perception. To do this, a consistent value message must exist across every form of content application, and all forms of media—paid, social, owned, or earned—must tell a similar story.

Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done.

Content is the number one challenge for brands today. The ability to tell a compelling and integrated brand story across the Web requires a significant amount of internal planning, cross-team collaboration, and coordination among different marketing teams in various geographies, and processes and workflows must be in place to optimize the content supply chain—content ideation, creation, approval, distribution, and optimization. This book gives a detailed approach to overcome many of these obstacles, allowing your brand to fully transform into a media company.

Social business is a cause-driven business. In a social business, the investors or owners can gradually recoup the money invested, but cannot take any dividend beyond that point. The purpose of the investment is purely to achieve one or more social objectives through the operation of the company, since no personal gain is desired by the investors. The company must cover all costs and make revenue, but at the same time achieve the social objective.

As much as Professor Muhammad’s definition is important to our world today, I define social business strategy as the following:

A social business strategy is a documented plan of action that helps evolve and transform the thinking of an organization, bridging internal and external social initiatives resulting in collaborative connections, a more social organization and shared value for all stakeholders (customers, partners, and employees).

Regardless of how you define social business, it’s hard to argue that organizations today must change if they want to stay relevant and competitive. I have seen business change and have lived through its ups and downs for many years. Smart Business, Social Business was my eyewitness account of living through these changes while working for large brands such as Hewlett Packard, Yahoo!, and Intel. In the book, I plead the case that all business, large and small, must evolve into a social business just for the sake of being a social business.

Where I got it wrong is I didn’t continue the story.

Becoming a social business for the sake of “becoming a social business” is only half the battle. Enterprise collaboration for the sake of enterprise collaboration might be a good idea, but how will it benefit content or better customer relationships? And deploying internal communities using software platforms like IBM or Jive just because your competitors are doing so is a waste of time, money, and resources.

There must be positive business outcomes.

There needs to be a reason why.

There has to be a strategic initiative as to why you want to change your business—one that makes smart business sense.

Even before my first book was released, I often talked about the need for companies to socialize their internal business models and communication strategies. But the question I often got was “Why?” Why is it important for my business to deploy internal communities, tear down silos, coordinate go-to-market plans, or get my rear-end out of my cubicle and have a conversation with my colleagues down the hall? These are all good questions, and this book is full of answers. Becoming a social business with no vision for where it’s going to take you is like investing thousands of dollars building your first home from the ground up and never moving in to live in it and enjoy it.

I look at social business strategy as an enabler. Let me explain.

I am a marketing guy by trade, so many of the challenges I help my clients with are the ones that help them improve the way they communicate externally and internally. Sometimes it’s about operationalizing a content marketing strategy. Other times, it’s about building processes and workflows that can help scale social media globally. And many times, it’s fixing disjointed content and community management practices.

In other words, to fix many of these challenges, you need a social business strategy that can stand the test of time and one that enables better content, smarter marketing, integrated communities, and more effective customer relationships. And that’s exactly what this book is about—enablement. It’s about tackling a real-world marketing problem and using a social business strategy to solve it. Figure I.1 illustrates how deploying a social business strategy enables external marketing initiatives.

Figure I.1 Social business framework

So what is this real-world business problem?

It’s actually pretty simple. Your brand needs to start thinking, acting, and operating like a media company. And the reason why is right in plain sight. There is a content surplus in the marketplace today, and consumers have attention deficit. Their daily lives are dynamic and unpredictable and all consumers are influential. For you to reach them with your brand message, you need to manufacture an environment where you are creating, curating, and aggregating relevant content—at the right time, in the right channel, and to the right customer. And your brand story must be consistent everywhere. Unfortunately, it’s not like we can turn on the “media company” button and change operations and behavior overnight. It requires a change in attitude, behavior, and thinking coupled with processes and governance models, as well as technology that can facilitate the transformation.

Richard Edelman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Edelman Public Relations has said for a few years now that “every company is a media company.” Sadly, some companies don’t know it, resist the change, or have no clue on how to fully transform their businesses into media companies. This book will help enable your brand, whether large or small, to leverage the frameworks, practices, and strategies of social business to fully transform your brand into an operational content marketing machine. Or better yet, a media company.

But before you continue reading, it’s important for you to get a baseline understanding of the definition of a media company.

In the book Content Rules, co-author Ann Handley (Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs) defines a media company as the following: “A media company is any business that publishes useful material to attract and build a certain audience.”

“A media company is any business that publishes useful material to attract and build a certain audience.”

During a conversation on Facebook, she elaborated further:

It used to be that you needed significant resources to do that, but in a digital and social world, every business (and every one of us) has a new ability (and opportunity!) to be a media company far more cheaply and easily. Of course, I’m talking about tactics—every one of us now has the ability to use media tactics (publishing, building an audience). The key difference between a traditional media company (where I started my career) and a new media company is the revenue stream. The former makes its money from advertising; the latter makes its money from product or service sales. In other cases, though, the quality of the content and the audience are key.

Here is a different perspective from Shafqat Islam, the CEO of NewsCred:

Media companies have historically been defined by their aptitude to create and deliver content, responsible for all elements of the content stack. The creation and distribution of content has always been underwritten by advertising—selling audience to marketers. However, in today’s world, the definition is changing since the creation and distribution of content is no longer limited to traditional publishers. Brand marketers are no longer just buying audience. They are the ones who are participating in the conversation by creating and distributing content to their audience directly. As such, in today’s world, brands are starting to become media companies, challenging the positions traditionally occupied by magazines and newspapers.

Although these are great definitions, it’s important to understand that traditional media companies such as Gannett, Time Warner, New York Times, and more recent “New Media” companies such as Mashable, AOL with the acquisition of Huffington Post, Techcrunch, and even Google are in the business of creating, displaying, or bringing content to a given audience. For the most part, they don’t necessarily sell a tangible product or service. So when thinking about transitioning your brand into a media company, you must consider it from a communications and content perspective. Core business objectives such as selling products and increasing market share, revenue, margins, and stock price should always remain front and center.

As mentioned earlier, this book is about using a social business strategy to transform your brand into a media company. Notice in Figure I.2 that the black portions illustrate a social business strategy and how it enables various initiatives that will help operationalize various elements of your content strategy. When all of these are achieved and optimized, your brand will reach media company transformation.

Figure I.2 Social business strategy enables the transformation from brand to media company.

I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.