Twisted Toast’s Brand Content Continuum™ is an interactive tool used to determine the appropriate Twisted Toast services that will match a brand’s content requirements. This tool plots a brand’s current internet, social web and own content creation activities on the continuum.
The TTBCC also provides a mapped plan for moving the brand along the continuum to its desired brand content creation position. Ultimately the tool assists brands to increase content influence.
Key Stages on the Twisted Toast Brand Content Continuum
Scouting
A brand in the scouting phase of the TTBCC is interested in getting involved with social media such as Facebook and Twitter and is potentially looking at smart phone or tablet applications, but has not actively done so yet. The brand has a website and some online presence, but a brand at this stage has not fully developed a content strategy yet.
Appropriate Twisted Toast Services:
- Website design and development
- Social media development and web integration
- Content strategy creation and execution
- Content management
- Website, social media and other training
Active
An active brand has a presence on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. It has entered this space by itself, or with the assistance of a digital agency. Typically an active brand has integrated social media with its website and perhaps also its email newsletters, with commenting and other basic user interaction enabled. Through its action in this regard it has developed a social media strategy, even if it’s informal.
This could mean that an active brand’s communication strategy is one-to-many, with social media treated “just like any other marketing communication channel”. Brand content is seldom purpose-created for social media, but as it moves along the TTBCC a natural inclination towards having direct conversations with brand fans develops.
Brands at the active stage are typically not yet measuring the return on its social media investment in a formal way. Although brands at this stage may be using some basic social media tools to simplify interactions, these are frequently not utilised to their full potential.
Appropriate Twisted Toast Services:
- Website design and development
- Social media analysis, measurement and reporting
- Content strategy creation and execution
- Content management
- Content strategy consulting
Immersed
A brand positioned as immersed has invested in its own content creation and social media, in addition to its website and its social media integration. Brands at this stage generate own content and propagate it through a variety of own media platforms including apps for mobile or tablet devices, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and picture-sharing websites such as Flickr, as well as more traditional channels such as email newsletters and via its own website’s content delivery mechanisms.
As a result, an immersed brand experiences real, authentic and meaningful interaction with its brand fans on a frequent basis, due to the deeper engagement made possible via professionally executed brand content across digitally connected media devices.
Brand communication with fans becomes direct, honest and transparent. Immersed brands receive frequent feedback from within an expanding sphere of social influence. This deeply engaged status is made possible by the appropriate and professional use of social media tools, which consolidate and simplify the management of the brand’s social media activities.
In addition to using social media management tools, immersed brands continuously gauge their return on own media investment via quantitative measurement tools. These bespoke reporting instruments are capable of providing accurate, actionable quantitative data, interpreted to deliver sets of information on which future brand content decisions can be based.
Appropriate Twisted Toast Services:
- Mobile or tablet application development
- Social media analysis, measurement and reporting
- Bespoke content investment return (CIR)™ measurement and reporting
- Content strategy consulting
To be influential, specifically via own brand content creation and its delivery to its target audience in its chosen category, is a desirable position for many brands. Such an influential brand invests a significant portion of its marketing communication budget in professionally created content, similarly to which it invests in advertising, publicity, printed marketing materials, event activations and sponsorships. A brand that influences via own content has reached a self-actualisation stage across all its communication channels.A formal, clear and defined brand content strategy exists and is or will become an essential component of such an influential brand’s culture. Every execution of own brand content thus becomes a careful, considered application of brand content strategy. A brand at this point seamlessly and simultaneously propagates custom-made own content across a variety of channels, with full quantitative and qualitative measurement and reporting of all brand fan interactions.The aim of such detailed measurement disciplines is to entrench the quantification of content investment return (CIR)™ and to compare it over time. In addition, properly populated measurement tools enable brand management decision makers to continuously fine-tune brand content execution as required.A brand at this stage judiciously employs a content-influenced one-to-one-to-many marketing communication strategy. Brand acolytes eagerly take up and spread the brand’s content, via their own social media networks and spheres of influence. This means the brand has become influential, with Facebook fans recommending content to friends, re-tweeting brand tweets, forwarding email newsletters, recommending subscription to the brand’s YouTube channels and more.The brand has developed a real relationships with fans, somewhat akin to being friends (albeit through digital media means). Because the brand is acutely tuned to its fans’ needs, brand communication decision makers are capable of marketing to these fans on a real-time basis. The brand now engages fans continuously through real time marketing.Appropriate Twisted Toast Services:
- Own brand media development
- Content strategy consulting
- Content creation event recognition
- Brand content production across own media platforms
- Own brand media management
- Tailor-made brand content solutions
- Continuous measurement of content investment return (CIR)™ in real time
