Content Marketing Workshop

 

I was able to learn a lot about Content Marketing when I attended the Content Marketing Workshop last October 19, 2012. It was held at the SGV Conference Hall 3rd Floor, AIM Conference Center, Jesus Del Rosario Foundation Building, Legaspi Village, Makati City.

 

The workshop was officially started by the grandson of the late Senator Blas Ople. That big man on stage is no other than Carlo Ople, currently the Digital Publishing Business Unit Head of TV5 and the Editor-in-Chief of two blog sites namely Unbox and The  New Media. He started his talk with the saying that came directly from the late Senator which goes something like, ” Umiikot and mundo, hindi pwedeng nakatayo lang tayo.” Indeed,there is a constant change going on around us so we need to continuously reinvent ourselves by going along with the flow or the trend otherwise, we would surely be left behind.

Carlo also said that there is already a steady shift from buying media to publishing media, and that the cost of creating and distributing content has gone down significantly with the use of social networking sites. He also showed us several videos where he highlighted the fusion of traditional media with the digital version.

The second speaker was Rappler’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief, Maria Ressa. She said that our marketing tactics doesn’t really matter if we don’t know  exactly what we want. Everything becomes nothing but hodgepodge and chaos even if we know a ton of tactics.

Her goal for Rappler back then was to redefine journalism and get some form of collaboration with their readers. She realized when she formed Rappler that its the right time to take advantage of the power of social networks because almost anyone can be a publisher now. She showed us some statistics where Internet access has the highest percentage of 21.5%, followed by Television in second with a 13.3%. third was radio with 6.3%, and lastly was newspaper with 3.6%.


She said that Rappler likes to believe that they have somehow disrupted the Philippine media industry by creating a platform that is purposely built for social media, and offering a media portal where crowdsourcing was given great importance, and where the feelings of the people are measured scientifically thru the use of mood meters and sociograms. She says Rappler does not stop in just accumulating the emotions of the people, they also do analysis for better understanding. These are just some of their secrets in keeping their audience engaged and why millions of people keep coming back for more stories.


For her, social media is not just a fad but a game changer. In the end it is about people. When asked where they draw the line from being opinionated with their articles, she said “Objectivity is a myth” and that “Everything is written from a perspective.”

Yves Gonzales, the Head of the Communications Group, Twitter Team and Navigator Team of the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) talked about their Twitter presence. He gave us five Twitter principles (that he just totally made up). Number one on his list was to define our persona. He said that we should have a clear-cut definition of our Twitter account name. he said to think of short, easy to remember and easy to pronounce Twitter names. Along with the Twitter name is for us to define our purpose, set expectations by laying our goals clearly using our profile info and to build personality through time.


He then told us to learn how to maximize the medium by understanding the limitations like the 140 character limitations of Twitter, tapping into the crowd by getting their participation and making everyone part of the solution, and using photos, videos, infographics FAQs and URL links. He also taught us to use a rule for best RT potential. His example was to follow the “username +6″ rule to avoid our message getting mutilated when it gets retweeted. He said that message integrity is very important so we must get assurance that our message is not loss by getting mutilated.


He also said that we should monitor our brand by using utilities like Tweetdeck, defining our hashtags, being proactive and publicizing our hashtag for association. He then told us that we should learn from our mistakes by having a backup plan, to grow from our errors, and realize that sometimes our mistakes even works better than expected. He showed us instances where their mistakes and humorous tweets had the opportunity to get retweeted more than their “more serious” tweets.


Finally, he said that we should be “hitting the heart” of our followers when we send out a tweet. We should be able to entertain, and even make them laugh occasionally, but keep being a positive force in this world by emanating good vibes in our tweets.

Ricky Baizas of Nestle Asia-Pacific gave us a philosophical approach in his talk. He presented us with several quotes coming from famous personalities and the first one was “To thine own self be true”. Linking his messages with the quote, he shared to us some trivia that we do not know about the Nestle products. From there we learned that their products were anchored to some kind of truth thus probably the reason why they were able to develop the affinity and loyalty of their customers.


He even had this saying ” Hinay-hinay basta kanunay” which translates roughly to keep doing something consistently to become better, if not perfect. Other things we learned from him is to present our products by being funny, emotional, compelling, or different to our audience. In advertising, he said we should try to follow the “Three Acts of Magic” as seen in the movie The Prestige, where there was a “pledge”, a “turn” and a “prestige”. Plus a lot of other useful strategies to create “Peaks of Excitement” and to draw more people into the products or services we are selling.

 Andre Yap, the founder and CEO of Ripple 100, explained that the next 5 years would be more about content that provides solutions and not just information or entertainment. People would be looking for content that moves them, makes an impression or grabs the heart and mind. He said we should be focusing more on content creation and not just content distribution. These days were technology have lowered the bar for sharing, we should also be progressing towards raising the quality of what’s being produced.

Roby Alampay, the Editor-In-Chief of Interaksyon.com from TV5,  was next and he talked about transmedia interplay of content, communities, brands and commerce. He explained that we should be making our presentations interactive, and to tell stories that are non-traditional like using motivational posters, online quizzes containing information about the news, a caption this activity for pictures, and a lot of other interesting ways to tell stories with readers’ participation. He also shared that some people believe that “social media is some sort of magic bullet. More than that, its putting things into context.”

Jos Ortega, the Chairman and CEO of Havas Media Ortega, took us through some of the more exciting global examples of content marketing and shared his thoughts on how to apply things in the Philippine environment. He highlighted the Old Spice TV commercial that became viral and the Stratosphere Jump or “Freefall Day” of Felix Baumgartner that everyone witnessed online and later watched via YouTube.

He ended with a discussion on how to measure success at the end of the day and the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that we should monitor…..and oh yeah, everyone had sort of a laugh when he made a mistake in mentioning RedTube instead of YouTube.

The last speaker was Mike Constantino, the Digital Solutions Manager of  Yahoo Philippines. He proudly said that Yahoo is the king of content, and that they also create microsites for custom branded experience. He said that we should not only be concerned about site aintenance but also on curation where we should actively curate ourselves.


He shared with us their approach in marketing by “slowly plugging in the product” and not immediately introducing the brand to the consumers. What they normally do right now is to post articles minus any branding, and when they feel that they already have a captive audience, that’s the time when they display the brand. “Don’t put your brand on the articles, otherwise expect to get some backlash.”