Content to Commerce: Engaging Consumers Across Paid, Owned and Earned Channels

Introduction

Chances are that if you have started to read this book, you may be among the more than 90 percent of marketers who believe that the use of social media is irrevocably changing how consumers interact with brands and that you have no choice but to substantially alter your marketing strategies.¹

Or maybe you work on the agency side and are attempting to integrate social media with your traditional and digital services. However, the process of creating the kinds of engaging communications that social media demands is turning out to be a lot harder than you thought.

Perhaps you are still in school studying marketing, public relations, or communications and realize what many of your predecessors are first learning on the job: knowing how to manage social channels and platforms is critical to your future success. Indeed, when LinkedIn polled more than 550 business professionals and asked what class would help them most if they could go back to college, one in three answered, “advanced social media skills.”²

Then again, you might just work at one of the dwindling number of large organizations that have yet to embrace social marketing, but are considering it and hope to avoid many of the mistakes made by earlier adopters.

Whatever your reason, you likely recognize social media's capacity to fuel stronger relationships between companies and consumers, and you are looking to get better at it. The question is how to best do that.

Getting Up to Speed

Although most businesses today ...