It was recently reported in New Media Age, picked up by the Hubspot blog that Coca-Cola were moving their campaign sites from “traditional” websites to social media platforms and they are not alone – Pepsi recently created a stir as they announced a move from big budget Super Bowl ads to investing in their social media community (as commented on by our own Connie Bensen). So what does this mean for “traditional” web content management?

From a content publishing perspective (rather than a marketing trend) this isn’t really a big deal is it? Surely these guys have merely changed platform – moving to platforms that have greater focus on community tools. Should we now consider YouTube and Facebook as web content management systems, or at least web publishing platforms?

Well… I think… yes…and errr… no.

The core functionality of any content management system – whether it’s digital assets, structured text content or documents – are the principles of not just authoring/uploading and publishing content, but of governance, permissions models, brand protection and approval processes. Stuff these social media platforms simply don’t have.

Does this move suggest that perhaps Coke has surrendered all that back end control for some community features? I think, probably not.

The key I think is the quote from the New Media Age article where Prinz Pinakatt, Coke’s interactive marketing manager for Europe says:

“We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform.”

They want to publish content to where their audience is – and their community hangs out on Facebook and YouTube. Of course it’s the community that these platforms have attracted that is their value to these brands, rather than their functional and technical capabilities.

Build it and they will come. That’s the normal mantra of community building on the web, build a fantastic destination, invest in attracting visitors and encourage them to interact, engage and form your tribe.

But, hey with these social media networks, someone else has already built it and the people have already arrived.

As I referred to in a recent post on my Persuasive Content Blog, there is a lot of talk about the redefinition of WCM, of separating the management bit from web delivery; publishing to social media networks could be a strong use case of that. Organisations are increasingly going to think of these sites as part of their multi-channel publishing strategy.

Of course the nice thing about the “build it and they will come” philosophy is that you exclusively own that community, you can listen to their interactions through web analytics and personalize or adapt your content and delivery in response.

So, besides needing a CMS for publishing and brand governance – a social media publishing strategy also  needs a social media listening strategy to build that insight – a topic we’ll no doubt revisit in coming posts here on Engaging Times.

For now, as web publishers looking to engage our visitors, we need to rethink our idea of what the ‘destination’ is.

Share