How To Become The Next Media Company

If you haven’t figured out that the key ingredient to social marketing, and thus digital marketing, success today is through great content, you’ve not been paying attention. Even your old-school thinking of shoving ads at people was content marketing. The ad had to say something, right? It had to be compelling, right?

Advertisements are content, too.

While social brings with it the layer of service and engagement that other channels may not require, your success as a company in social marketing is still squarely predicated on whether or not your can produce content. Maybe it’s blog or Facebook posts. Perhaps it’s Tweets or Slideshare decks. Maybe it’s YouTube videos or catchy images posted on Tumblr.

You are a content machine. You are a media company.

Michael Brito captures not just this idea, but how to plan, build and manage it in today’s digital world in his new book Your Brand, The Next Media Company. And he does it all within the context of social business … not just social media. From understanding internal and external influences, strengths and weaknesses to consumer media habits and more, Brito brings to life a number of concepts for businesses:

1. The customer journey is dynamic – Let’s face it, as Brito puts it, Customer Attention Deficit Disorder (CADD) is rampant. How do we break through not just the clutter, but the tendency for the customer to suffer from the, “Look! A Squirrel!” syndrome.
2. Business objectives have stayed the same – Regardless of the changing landscape social technologies and the social customer have brought about, business is still business. Understanding how being a media company fits into that context is crucial for success.
3. The differences between social brands and social businesses – Brands use the technology. Businesses drive core metrics with it.
4. How Social Business Centers of Excellence and Content Strategies integrate in your business – There are few blueprints for this out there that are understandable. Brito’s is.
5. How content governance can transform your organization – When the internal and external focus is on the content needed to be a social business and drive marketing, customer service and more, every silo in the organization understands its role and responsibilities. This cohesion may be the thing your business is missing from social business and digital marketing success.

No book would be complete without plenty of case studies and no social marketing book would be complete without profiles of social technology vendors. This books is littered with them. That, in and of itself, make it a useful read.

But Brito’s latest is more than just a good pep talk or reminder of how to be social. It’s a blueprint for taking your organization to a new level of social business success through embracing content marketing and being your own media. It’s smart, strategically driven and written by someone who has proven success in building social practices at some of the world’s largest brands.

This book is probably better suited for enterprise and larger companies. The ideas here are not without their cost in implementation. But even small business marketers will be able to see what success looks like, provided they can find the time and meager resources to build what Brito advocates here.

Your Brand, The Next Media Company is an important book to take your business to a new level of strategic success in our ever-changing social world. Buy it. Read it. Share it. You won’t be sorry.

Note: I serve on the editorial board for Que Publishing, which is the publisher of this particular piece of work. However, I was not a part of its writing or editing and did not see the manuscript until the book was finished. Michael Brito is a friend and professional colleague who has spoken at my events before. But if his book sucked, I’d say so. He’d want me to.