Guest post by Bryan Rhoads, global content strategy, Intel
Today’s web is an endless 24/7 cycle fed by content and social actions. In this cycle, brands are realizing that content is currency and social actions are the transactions in this marketplace for eyeballs and attention. To remain relevant, not only do brands need to produce more interesting, useful and more timely content, they need to adapt to a new “social publishing model” to best feed the social graph and this hungry cycle.
I’ve listed two ways below that our brand, Intel, is tackling this content and social publishing challenge.
First, we built a new social publishing platform called “iQ” that we use to feed the graph and better integrate our owned and paid media strategies. The iQ by Intel platform leverages the social actions of our global employees to curate content that is grabbing Intel’s collective attention. In addition to original content, we source and surface content from these social actions (FB Likes, RTs, +1’s) combined with an intelligent algorithm that filters content based on social data points like recency, bit’ly clicks, shares and defiance from the norm, etc.
iQ is a blend of content flowing from the social actions of employees (referred to as “Flow” content) and original content developed by the brand (or our partners like The Creators Project and contributors, that we refer to as “Stock” content). This “Stock & Flow” approach is relatively new, but in our case borrowed from others in the industry, including the popular Percolate publishing platform. iQ blends original Stock & Flow content to produce a very timely branded storytelling platform to feed the social web and our own social properties on Facebook and Twitter. We believe this to be an effective way to get our story (and the World’s technology story) into the social graph.
Secondly, social publishing is a challenge for brands and businesses. They have not historically been structured for publishing. However, brands are excellent at producing the more traditional “Stock” content like video, TV commercials, campaigns, websites, etc. But today’s Facebook status update or ephemeral tweet requires daily and oftentimes sub-daily content. Traditional Stock content is great when you have it, but no brand is resourced for the daily TV ad or video.
At Intel, we are implementing a 3-tiered approach to content production (see “Social Content Tiers” diagram below). The top tier includes the longer-lead or more traditional content that brands have been generating for years, i.e. the videos, TV spots, the programs and partnerships that are highly produced and require greater resources. In the middle we have quicker, several times a week stories, visual graphics, blog posts and really anything interesting we can get our hands on. At the bottom is the highly frequent and ephemeral content. These are the daily and sub-daily Facebook status updates, Google+ posts and tweets from branded accounts and employees. Looking at content in this manner helps us to better manage the content pipeline. iQ manifests this process and is an engine towards output.
We launched “iQ by Intel” as a BETA in English just over a month ago. So far, we’re seeing great results in its aiding of social content publishing and feeding our social properties with content. Its “touch-friendly” design is built for the next generation of devices and its sourcing of content through curation, including direct publishing from Twitter through #iQ tweets from employees, has been successful.
Lastly, iQ and our publishing model allows us to tell our bigger technology story. Intel is an ingredient in almost every technical ecosystem on the planet. We are lucky as far as brands go that we can help tell this story, that we can follow technology to all of the beautiful places it goes, and also narrate on the challenges and obstacles facing our modern world.
Follow @bryanrhoads on Twitter
This is part of a series on brand journalism / brand publishing as told by the businesses that are paving the way. Please send me a note if you would like to tell your company’s story on its move to what Tom Foremski dubbed EC=MC, Every Company is a Media Company.
Disclosure: Intel is a client of Altimeter Group
This looks very interesting.
What free tools can the average joe or jane use as a proxy for the filtering and aggregation of content you described? It would be great to be able to source content on recency, likes, +1’s, RT’s, shares, etc., across the web, by topic. I’m faced w the same problem and don’t have the benefit of a proprietary tool!
Rhonda – while not free, look into Percolate.
I use the following tools — twittertim.es, summify.com, percolate.com, eqentia.com, icurrent.com and trove.com — all at no cost.
There are many ways to get your name out there, some may be harder than others. Ever consider PR. May not be a “free” tool but will definitely pay for itself.
Jamie@ PR Firm
That’s very simple, thanks
To remain relevant, not only do brands need to produce more interesting,
useful and more timely content, they need to adapt to a new “social
publishing model” to best feed the social graph and this hungry cycle.
Social publishing model” to best feed the social graph and this hungry cycle.
To remain relevant, not only do brands need to produce more interesting,
useful and more timely content, they need to adapt to a new “social
publishing model” to best feed the social graph and this hungry cycle.
I’ve listed two ways below that our brand, Intel, is tackling this content and social publishing challenge.
To remain relevant, not only do brands need to produce more
interesting, useful and more timely content, they need to adapt to a new
“social publishing model” to best feed the social graph and this hungry
cycle.