The Engagement 4Cast
Last night, I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel for the NetSquared DC Meetup with Colin Delany, Suzanne Turner, and Lawrence Swiader. The panel, titled “What’s on the Horizon for 2013”, covered broad strokes what the emerging trends are in digital marketing, design and technology that organizations, mainly nonprofits, should be paying attention to in the coming year.
I put together a short presentation to highlight some trends I think will be key in the evolution of the social sector as digital becomes a bigger part of the work nonprofits are doing to better communities.
Below are my slides from the event.
To sum up the trends I see happening:
Traditionally, organizations have followed a “hub and spoke” model for their content strategy, creating a bunch of content on their website and using paid and earned media to drive traffic to that content. It is becoming increasingly harder to do that as people spend more and more of their time on social media platforms. It’s no longer about creating a funnel to drive people where you want them to be, you need to engage people where they are.
Organizations should approach content creation keeping in mind that the content they drive on external websites (i.e. social media platforms) is just as important as content created on their own domain. With that in mind, organizations should begin to design brand experiences that drive desired actions on the platforms where they are engaging people.
Content drives social media. Publishing good content generates engagement. Seems simple enough, right?
The one thing organizations do not have much control over is reach – getting their posts in front of their audience. With statistics coming out on the general reach of social media posts on Facebook and other social platforms, it is becoming increasingly apparent that social media lacks efficiency in getting key messages in front of your target audience, unlike email, SMS, and paid media.
Social platforms are offering brands the opportunity to increase their reach and engagement by paying to promote key pieces of content to their audience. This is creating an interesting paradigm where organizations need to approach content creation like media buyers, planning for real time activation of content through paid media as trends in engagement with your content emerge.
Often when we think about responsive design, we think about producing desktop websites that scale down gracefully to be viewed on a mobile phone. Two interesting stats appeared in the most recent Nielsen Social Media Report – the number of people accessing social media through tablets grew 400% from 2011 to 2012, and the number accessing it from connected TV’s grew 100%. If you have been following CES 2013, you are seeing that connected TV’s, tablets, and phablets are all the rave, and not just for early adopters. Many of these devices will be hitting stores this year.
From here on out it is no longer enough to design just for desktop and mobile phones. We need to take into consideration the multiple screens that our users will be accessing our content and products from and design digital experiences that allow them to interact with your brand in a way that is device appropriate.
I have written about this concept in the past, stating that nonprofits should take a more iterative approach to technology development and marketing. Spending large amounts of money on upfront strategic planning and development is inefficient and often sets organizations up for failure because their strategy is based on assumptions. By applying “lean thinking” in developing digital campaigns and technology, organizations test the assumptions that are often made in strategic planning processes. Only the assumptions that are valid and return desired results are adopted.
I highly recommend reading Eric Ries book The Lean Startup, or contacting us, if you are interested in learning how to apply this methodology to your digital marketing campaigns and development projects.
There is this interesting trend emerging in the nonprofit sector of organizations building products. These aren’t apps for advocacy or fundraising per say, but digital solutions to various social issues organizations are working to solve. Nonprofits have been building products for a number of years, but I think this year and beyond is when you will really see this trend become more apparent.
Some examples I shared last night are:
The thing that I also love about this trend is community-building is at the core of many of these products. Organizations are, through organizing and digital products, creating peer networks of people who are supportive of a cause and getting them to create change together.
Regardless of sector, social media is forcing brands to rethink how they engage with their constituents and where that responsibility falls within their organization. Social media is often wedged into marketing or corporate communications teams, which creates this false perception that social media should be approached as just another mass communications platform.
While it can be effective at that, the real power in social media is building a constituency of people that share a common passion or interest as your organization, and interacting with them in a way that increases brand recognition and loyalty; persuades people to support your cause or product; and drives business metrics such as items sold or houses built in low income communities.
I think a big trend that will emerge in the coming year and beyond is the creation of cross-functional teams – traditional communications, digital marketing, social media, customer/constituent services, etc. – that are tasked with designing better customer/constituent experiences across various touch points. Some organizations have even gone to the extent of creating new roles, such as Chief Community Officer or Chief Experience Officer, to oversee the unification of community-building efforts across an entire organization.
What do you think are some emerging topics in digital that nonprofits and social change organizations should be paying attention to in the new year?
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