Mike Geraci - FreeRange Media

Exclusive access motivates people. It makes us feel special, unique, appreciated. Willy Wonka knew this. Wonka built a brand shrouded in mystery with great products made from secret recipes, behind the sealed doors of his elaborate factory. The addicting candy and mysterious presence created an aura around the brand that left customers craving more. Plus, it was chocolate.

The famous Golden Ticket promotion put the energy of his customers’ curiosity to work, by providing five customers with exclusive, once-in-a-lifetime access to the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory and a lifetime supply of Willy Wonka Chocolate. The desire for exclusive access to see what was in the factory and how the chocolate was made drove a world-wide frenzied search and generated Page 1 headlines whenever one of the five tickets was discovered. The winners became celebrities because they had won access.

The exclusive access strategy should be applied when building a content plan. The special opportunity to have access to experiences, people, knowledge, or deals gives customers a more intimate and comprehensive appreciation of the brand, the products, the people. It enables them to be more of an expert on your brand than their friends.  

That access to insider information is what drives the celebrity Twitter dynamic. Fans have a direct connection and inside perspective on the athletes or celebrity’s schedule, tastes, and opinions. It is one of the rare opportunities when it is advisable to Tweet about what you had for breakfast, so the fans can go to school or work and be able to casually drop into a conversation about last night’s Celtics game that Rondo had a banana protein smoothie for breakfast and maybe that had something to do with the triple-double. That’s considered a scoop. You get peer points and props for that kind of stuff.

So, maybe your company isn’t the Celtics and your product isn’t Rondo, everything is relative. The athletes you sponsor, the events you attend, the business trips you take, the technology you develop, the people you get to network with (but probably not what you had for breakfast) are remarkable to your customers when presented in the proper context.

Give your fans the inside scoop on your industry, your business, your products. Give them the opportunity to chat with an athlete or a product manager or the CEO, publish a slideshow of a factory trip with color commentary, or bring in outside experts to answer questions on a current event. The idea is to use your unique position and relationships to provide your customers access to people and information that very few other people can get. 

Providing greater access to these people, events, and items through your brand content reaffirms your commitment to your customers, and gives them the info that earns them peer points within their network. Exclusive access to insider information (and deals) is how you reward your fans and customers for their loyalty, and it further builds their affinity for your brand. 

Running out of topics for your blog or Facebook page? Head over to your customer service department, where your customers are giving you new content ideas every day by calling and emailing questions and comments about your products and services.

The CS crew is better than Google Trends or any monitoring program when it comes to identifying what topics are important to your customers, right now. Ask any CS rep what the most frequently asked questions are and they will be able to fire off five without thinking twice. Write those down. Also, if one issue starts to trend about a new product or something seasonal you can be sure the customers that are calling and emailing aren’t the only ones with those questions.

Take the cue from the surge of customer interest and address the question or comment on your social media channels, with a detailed response, appropriate images, and information and quotes from the best qualified experts inside and outside of your company.  As well, publicly thanking the customer that asked the question is a nice way to show customer appreciation.

The topic-specific post has built-in SEO because you already know people are interested in the topic. 

Build a CS monthly or weekly report into your content system with a Top 10 or a CS Question of the Week category and you’ll have a timely and free new source for content ideas.

A couple of reports out today on the death of the corporate blog: 

• This USA Today Piece, ‘Blogs are Slogs, So Companies Just Quit,’ shares results from a study that shows the percentage of companies that maintain blogs fell from 50% in 2010 to 37% today.
• Results from this study by UMass/Dartmouth, ‘Blogging Declines as New Tools Rule,’ shows “…adoption of blogging is declining for the first time since 2007 among the Inc. 500 companies.” (Good charts in this study)

Both articles point to preferred use of other social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as the main cause of the exodus. And, as the USA Today headline references, most companies aren’t committed to the amount of work a worthwhile blog requires.  

A shame, really, but not entirely surprising as turning most traditional businesses into extroverted media publishers is quite a task, and putting corporate processes around such an undertaking may not be the best idea for creating a blog your customers will find remarkable.

Every company has great stories, great content, within their organization; be it employees, customers, vendors, customer service, sponsored events. It just requires someone who knows how to identify the greatness in the story and knows how to promote those stories in a manner that is of value to the audience. And, it requires someone who has the permission and the resources to do it on a regular basis.

The ironic part of the exodus is that an effective social media strategy, like those they are pursuing on Facebook, et al, is driven by a dynamic content strategy. All those other sites will require interesting content to engage the network. Changing channels isn’t going to address the problem. Figuring out how to capture killer content is the solution. 

Yes, it requires a lot more effort to create and maintain a great blog compared to a Facebook page, but the impression a great blog makes on your audience is much greater than any of the other social media channels can muster.  And the more other companies stop blogging, the greater the opportunity for those who do.

While Pinterest is great for grabbing/collecting/pinning images and videos, there’s a new pinning-style platform that could be the answer to every PR account assistant’s online placement clip book nightmare.

Snip.it is a Pinterest for online articles. You can snip the entire article into a collection, add some commentary, then share that snip through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Reddit. You can email it directly to your clients, as well. Make a collection for each client you are responsible for and have all of your online placements in one, easy-to-share spot. 

Snip.it has already created a collection of their media hits so you can see an example.