conversation is an engine

Strategy is a fuse. You must light the fuse.

Say you’re writing a blog.

Any blog. Maybe…a blog where you want to get people to tell their stories (purely hypothetical example). Or this: maybe you are running a blog aimed at pulling in people looking for insights about what our national obsessions say about us, as told through the press. Again: pure theory. Just making this up. Both blog examples sound a bit vague—but that’s the groovy deal with social media: you try something and see what happens.

So, say you try stuff.

Say you fail.

But…you learn stuff. And you tune it up.

You go back to your original strategy document and realize: Oh! Our stories must be more than just well-told (though that is certainly the beginning point). They must pull people in with tight surprises or well-crafted morals. Or something. Because these stories are competing with Angry Birds and Facebook and actual paid work—all manner of distractions that keep people from reading our blog. So those stories gotta be good. They’ve got to be better in a way we’ve not quite yet devised.

And so your strategy evolves.

Congratulations: this is what forward movement looks like.

These are the questions any brand faces, with the added goal of trying not to devolve into a selling spiel. This social media world is no static, set-it-and-forget-it deal. It’s more like a living, breathing conversation in a room full of people constantly walking in and out. And for your brand to be heard, for your blog to be recognized, for your insights to be caught, you must continue to tighten the focus on who you are trying to reach and get better at laying out the right content for your target audience to feed on.

And this: there is an aspirational part to providing strategic content. I like how Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach says it in Content Strategy for the Web:

Aspirational: it’s a stretch for the organization, focusing on what you want to become ideally (not what you can feasibly do).

Content must paint a picture of who we are that is slightly in the future and slightly a wish list. Brands do this constantly, of course, which is why people buy BMW or Coke or Apple. They buy into the vision as they purchase the product.

How can we do that for the community we want to build with our blog content? It starts and continues with focused attention on what this audience needs, today, tomorrow and the next day. Our content must paint a picture of we can be at our best.

This will always be a moving target.

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