Social is platforms or software (apps included) used for communication to connect and interact.
Mobile is the technology used to communicate; capture, create and share.
Analytics is the information or data that tells us how people are responding and connecting.
Content is the substance of communications be it text, audio, pictures or video.
Content was fitting to be the last part of #SMAC, after all it is the foundation of communications, while Social and Mobile are the tools to communicate and Analytics provides data on how people communicate and consume, without understanding our content the rest is useless.
Everything has a message, the trick is in finding and facilitating that message. The message is the basis for all content, be it what you read, hear, see or experience. If you’re planning on doing business or developing an organization in this day and age, you better be thinking #SMAC.
What is your message?
“Wants are greater than needs”, Seth Godin explained to us in a room at Google New York, “think about your content in the form of what makes me feel good, that’s what sells”.
A few years ago I explained marketing as “the practice of developing a message that could create or invoke an emotion that had a memorable impact.” Seth Godin’s position is that wants are greater than needs, which means we need to rethink how we develop content for need based services. A plumber does great on SEO, pipes break, NEED a plumber, Google and done. How do you position a message for a plumber when you’re selling the want?
Social requires us to think about the placement of our content or message, do we put it everywhere? Niche marketing isn’t just subject based, its platform based. The introduction of Pinterest had marketers scratching their head in February 2013 when it outpaced Twitter for traffic sources in Magazines and Retail. News outlets have been forced to make twitter a core component for its journalists as now more news breaks on twitter than any other source in the world. The social strategy needs to take into account the type of content and the audience that consumes it.
Mobile has changed the way we can both consume and create content, imagine that a chef can be in a kitchen preparing tonight’s menu specials and share them with their followers by simply nodding his head and saying “OK GLASS Record a video” or “take a picture” followed by a “OK GLASS, share with …” having never interrupted his work continuing through his evening preparations with minimal distraction and no editing or file transferring. The ability to bring a laptop, tablet, mobile phone or GLASS with us anywhere has made us an always connected society, with the opportunity to craft and capture or have us captured at anytime.
Analytics help us understand our audience, what type of content engages them (likes, shares, retweets and comments), what type of content keeps them on our sites for longer periods of time, what generates revenue by creating conversions or sales. What type of device or browser are they using when they see our content? Flash was the most widely used form of web development into a time period where the most popular mobile devices didn’t have access to it.
#SMAC is a call for a strategy or business plan”
- what is your message?
- how do build that message?
- where do you share it and how?
- where and how do they consume it?
The word “digital” is to all encompassing, to direct a business owner or organizational leadership in the right direction. The idea that social and mobile are independent of one another or that analytics prove ROI is just silly. So to provide a path, a better understanding of communications and marketing, I would tell you to think #SMAC.
