In the last two years, I noticed a significant shift in the world of Social Media Marketing, maybe Marketing as a whole. Entrepreneurs, business people, marketing, PR, and Communications managers are all overly obsessed with media and the medium through which they advertise their businesses, products, and services.
Let’s talk about content. Content is essential when we reference social media because without content or a content strategy, there are no social media. Content is the lifeblood of social media. However, when creating content, the recommendation is to create content based on the stages that persons are in their customer’s journey.
One of the most effective forms of marketing is Word of Mouth Marketing. Word of mouth is the earliest form of marketing that exists. Imagine the pre-historic marketer who had something to sell. You can only know he had something to sell if he told you directly face to face or if someone in contact with him told you. This last part is what facilitated testimonials and feedback.
I will never forget that day, as a Student of T.A. Marryshow Community College, around 2005, I saw a friend of a friend posting pictures of herself on the internet. In my naïve self, not knowing what it was….It was on some platform called Facebook. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. To me, this was crazy!! Why would someone want to put their pictures online for the world to see? I couldn’t picture anyone having success on social media.
I believe the best way to bring out a lesson and illustrate something is to tell a story. That’s why I like telling stories, especially stories of people who are doing great things. It is my hope that someone will consume those stories and get inspired. Maybe they have been on the fence about an idea for a long time and reading about someone who was in the same place as them and overcame can be the impetus they need to move forward. That’s why I am committed to seeking out Caribbean people doing great things in my eyes and sharing their stories.
I know I am not the only one who goes to YouTube or another video platform and looks up motivational videos. Whether looking at Les Brown’s “you gotta be hungry” or something from Tony Robbins, even Eric Thomas- The Hip Hop Preacher. I get pumped when I listen to these motivational speakers. At the moment, I feel like I can achieve anything. But then, I go to sleep and wake and that Motivation wears off, and I get nothing done.
You’ve probably heard that humans have the attention span of a Goldfish or something along that line. Many social media experts and gurus advise their clients to focus on brevity. Their content should be short; videos shouldn’t be more than one minute. After posting a 3-minute video on my Facebook page, I remember someone messaging me to say that I should know better. That people are no longer interested in watching a three-minute video on Facebook. They told me that our attention span is shrinking, and the shorter the video, the better.
A few years ago, I completed my master’s degree in Digital Media. As part of my research, I created a model organization can use when crafting a social media campaign.
The model rests on five pillars: Campaign Architecture, Narratives, Platforms and Delivery, Third-Party Resources, and Media Awareness. Below is a representation of the model.
One of the things that I have observed in the past few years is the share of advertising dollars has been increasing year over year. In countries like the US and Canada, research done by Juniper Research has shown that the percentage of digital advertising dollars keeps growing. While this is the case in places like North America, I do not believe that Caribbean brands have fully taken advantage of the many opportunities that digital advertising offers.
Covid19 has forced many countries one can argue to undergo about ten years of digital transformation in one year. Something as basic as online learning, many countries, especially Small Developing States (SDI’s) in the Caribbean, have a hard time dealing with this. Both students and teachers alike are grossly underprepared for the “University of Zoom”. Then there is the over-focus on technology; we somewhat believe that digital transformation is all about the new technologies available to make life easier for all of us, however, it is much more than that. In the “Digital Transformation Playbook,” Professor David Rogers wrote that digital transformation is not about technology, but it is about strategy and a new way of thinking. He further went on to assert, that preparing for the digital age requires businesses and organizations to upgrade their strategic mindset more than their technology. Put simply, Digital transformation is about a shift in the mindset of the leadership of an organization.
