Editorial Articles

We all know the social web has taken the balance of power away from brands. It’s not enough to solely broadcast product information and brand values; we now need to engage and share. Easier said than done.

For brands to achieve true engagement with communities, we need to consider what we are providing, the effect we want to create, what value our content delivers and, most importantly, to ensure it’s of interest!

How do you create value for your communities?

In order to engage successfully with recipients, brands need to be creating content that is valuable. It needs to have a strong social currency, meaning it needs to offer something that the recipient will value and want to share. If it doesn’t, then engagement can be difficult to achieve, risking the long term value of the relationship.

Ensure you are developing a content strategy

Taking a strategic approach to content is increasingly important to make it work. In order to develop and make sense of your content strategy, it’s important to consider the brand’s principles, objectives, substance, value and sources. Sitting at the heart of all of this is the value that this content can provide to a community.

Making sense of social currency

Social currency can be categorised according to five defined areas: utility, entertainment, monetary, information and personal. Some of these have a clearer connection to a particular brand or industry; however it’s vital to consider what your recipient will truly value, not creating content that they may have seen or used before.

1) Utility value. More commonly referred to as brand utility, social currency fitting into this category is increasingly found in the format of a mobile phone application.
2) Entertainment value. Brands have been commencing with an ad campaign with a concept that fits into this category. The content is the remixed and parodied to create social currency. However, it doesn’t have to start like that and doesn’t have to be linked to huge budgets. An example of this is TomTom which amplified real-life activity it was conducting over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend with a Facebook Fan Page that offered fun content to make the family journey more enjoyable. Some of this content included Spotify playlists for the parents and children, top ten lists of in-car games and a downloadable pack to aid in playing a game about counting cars.
3) Monetary value. This is the social equivalent of the conventional sales promotion or competition activity. A lot of brands are moving from running promotions on consumer websites, to now targeting key influencers (bloggers) and running promotions with them. Body Shop’s recent Christmas campaign created monetary value by producing a microsite which allowed readers to unwrap a gift that provided them with 50% off purchases. This was seeded out to beauty and personal finance/recession bloggers who also received a Body Shop badge to host on their blogs over the Christmas period.
4) Information value. Information is often found as thought leadership, and is the most agnostic in terms of format. Accountancy firm BDO is particularly good at this, producing thought leadership not only on their new community website, www.freedomtothink.biz but sharing video interviews and audioboos involving some of their key thought leaders.
5) Personal value. This is content that provides compelling social currency. The global success of reality TV shows, such as Big Brother, and the talent shows such as Britain’s Got Talent and X Factor demonstrate the importance of fame as a currency.

Some key principles to ensure you are creating the right currency are:

1) Set out with the right mind-set at the planning stage
2) Development must be built into a considered content strategy
3) Get the right inter-disciplined team to work together on the social currency idea.

Laura Zobel
Social Brand Manager, Headstream
Twitter: Laura_Z