It’s no secret public relations professionals aim to create content that elicits an action, especially through social media channels. It’s called “social media” for a reason – we want people talking about, engaging with and sharing our client’s content and messages.

Nuffer, Smith, Tucker co-hosted the “Content Marketing Insider Secrets” webinar last Tuesday with Social Fresh, a social media education company, that discussed content creation in-depth. The webinar gave attendees a glimpse of the dialogue that will take place at the Social Fresh WEST conference in San Diego on September 27-28, and featured conference presenters Anna Lingeris of Hershey’s and Zena Weist of Expion along with NST President Bill Trumpfheller.

The lively discussion focused on the importance of knowing your brand’s voice, prepping your content with appropriate research, and being an engaging participant and curator. Here’s a recap of some key points:

• Content shouldn’t repeat your traditional ad copy. Figure out what voice will resonate with your target audiences and tailor it accordingly per social media platform.
• Identifying a focused brand voice helps all employees within your company understand social media goals and activity. It also makes it easier for people to participate.
• Listen and respond to the needs of your audience.
• Create content, but also let others’ (your audience) voices and opinions come through.
• Metrics and data are available – use statistics and data to create a plan, and see what’s resonating with your audience.
• Cross-pollenating content per platform can increase the shelf life of your campaign.
• You want people to trust your brand – engagement helps build trust.
• Listen first; talk later.
• Create content that your audience can easily share on and offline.
• Engaging content must have a personal relevance. Find out what matters to your audience and create content that sparks a discussion around those topics.
• The top three types of engaging content are: personal questions, loyalty questions and call-to-actions with photos or links.
• Figure out how to make a local tie to your audience for increased interaction.
• Content marketing research is critically important and should be a large part of the resource pie.
• What experience are you trying to deliver? Use this to drive content creation, but realize in the end it, your content may not be all brand focused.
• Don’t succumb to “shiny object syndrome” each time a new platform emerges. Do your research before diving in.

Did you join “Content Marketing Insider Secrets?” What were your takeaways?

Digital engagement, in particular social media, has given marketers an unprecedented new way to participate in a two-way dialog with consumers. As we often coach our clients, with earned media channels such as PR and social media, a company needs to be comfortable giving up a certain amount of control of its message to be able to have authentic conversations online.

Recently, our newsfeeds have been rife with a number of examples of companies relinquishing control of their brands’ message and the outcomes have been somewhat mixed.

Performer Pitbull and retail behemoth Walmart recently earned kudos for rolling with the punches when a contest didn’t go quite as planned. The promotion offered a visit from Pitbull to the store location that received the most new Facebook likes, but Facebook users rallied to send the artist to perform in Kodiak, Ala., the most remote Walmart in America. The company and performer responded with enthusiasm and made good on their promise.

Mountain Dew recently asked consumers to select a name for its newest soft drink flavor. Instead of clever, feasible options, the top trending name suggestions were at worst disgustingly inappropriate and at best simply unusable, with entries such as “Diabeetus.” An online hacking group also established inappropriate banner messages throughout the brand’s microsite, which was later taken down.

The branding/PR world has erupted into debate on how to view these types of situations. Some warn against performing any crowd-sourcing campaigns, saying they put too much control in the hands of the public. Others say marketers should loosen their controls on such sites to encourage tinkering with the hope these antics could potentially provide the campaign with more media exposure.

While it certainly depends on the clients’ overall goals, I think with a solid understanding of the public perception of your brand, a good grasp on current issues/challenges facing the industry, the right technological safeguards in place, and a plan for if/when things change course, crowd-sourcing is still an opportunity worth pursuing.

What are your thoughts on the future of crowd-sourcing? Will brands see this as an opportunity to extend their reach or as a canary in the coalmine for digital campaigns gone awry?

This past week I have been working as an intern for Nuffer, Smith, Tucker, doing a wide range of different tasks, from going through old birthday coupons to writing a press release. And I think I can confidently say that it was one of the most enlightening (and busy) weeks of my life. Most other 15-year-olds would scoff at the idea of spending a week of their summer working. I, however, must be one of a handful that would leap at such a wonderful opportunity. If anything, I came out of the office on my last day surprised at just how much I learned in such a short period of time.

On my first day here at NST, I was sat down at my desk and given a stack of about 1,000 old birthday coupons and instructions on how to go through and organize them. For about five minutes, I was worried this is how my entire week would be – doing file clerk work. Then, within the hour, I had three different projects on my desk that were, fortunately for me, the opposite of filing away cards. Each project (a PowerPoint, learning how to use the Adobe software, and a writing assignment, repsectively) lent itself to different areas of my creative consciousness.

On Wednesday, I toured the Neyenesch Printing Plant, and got to witness the production of several different pamphlets, posters, and magazines. The digitized printing presses were very impressive, and gave creedence to Neyenesch’s great reputatation. Thursday provided a very interesting experience, when my uncle, and the president of NST, Bill, took me with him to a Rotary International meeting, where I got the opportunity to meet several very nice people and listen in on a very well-structured organization. Plus, the food they served at the meeting was quite delicious. On Friday, my last day, I got to see the NST web team in action, and got to learn the basics of HTML coding, which was much simpler than what I had expected. However, once you move beyond the basics (which I tried, and failed to do), it starts getting into the territory where you have to be quite well-versed in the area of coding to even be able to comprehend.

After spending a week with them, I can now see how well put-together Nuffer, Smith, Tucker is, and how hard all the people there work. It seems like all of them are pretty close with one another, which really helps in a workplace that’s dependent on proper communication. Overall, the experience really taught me a lot about businesses and how they work, and I would be more than happy to do it all over again sometime in the future.