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Grammys exec: Consumer-driven content is key in social media marketing

NEW YORK ? An executive with The Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammy Awards, stressed the importance of creating shareable marketing content for mobile and the significance of quality over quantity during a session at Forrester's Forum for Marketing Leaders.

With so many opportunities to connect to consumers today, it is important for brands to fully understand consumers and what they want. The Recording Academy focuses on creating content that fans and consumers are seeking, which creates more room for engagement and share-ability. 

"We found if we can enable the idea of discovery and empower the idea of share-ability, that leads to an engagement community," said Evan Greene, chief marketing officer at The Recording Academy, Los Angeles. "People are looking for two things, they want discovery and they want to feel like they belong and be a part of an engaged community."

To engage consumers in the social media sphere, it is important to fully understand the platform in which content will be shared. Different content should be produced separately for applications such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook because users behave differently on each platform. 

Marketing poker face 
The social and advertisement content must be authentic, or consumers will see through the marketing ploy and be quick to pass it over or even un-follow. It is easy to lose consumers, and once the brand has lost them, it is nearly impossible to earn them back. 

"In order to connect with fans across the border, it starts with authenticity," Mr. Greene said. "I think we can all come up with a lot of examples of brands that speak with authenticity and speak with authority, and brands that really feel gratuitous and get it wrong. 

"If you get it wrong, you can lose your audience," he said. "It is easy to be un-followed and easy for people to turn away, but almost impossible to get them back. 

"Authenticity acts as the corner stone of trust, and I think if you're a brand that speaks with a trustworthy voice and people trust you, those are the brands that set themselves apart and those are the brands that start to build an engaged and dynamic involvement in the community. For the Academy and for the Grammys, establishing trust is really about a proactive year-round strategy, not only talking about music and being involved with it, but to surround the music conversation."


Mr. Greene discusses brand authenticity at the Forrester's Forum for Marketing Leaders in New York

The Recording Academy focuses on building a community through all platforms where consumers can discover what they want to discover and share content they want to share. The key factor is to create consumer-friendly content and share instead of pushing what the brand wants the consumers to spread. 

The shift from brand-driven content to consumer-driven content was a huge change for the Recording Academy, and a successful one at that. 

One of the first campaigns with this idea in mind was a social media-driven campaign focusing on Lady Gaga. The organization encouraged users to record themselves singing Lady Gaga songs, as well as any other kind of related post. 

All of this content was then developed into a video advertisement that was shared on YouTube. Users that had seen themselves in the video shared it on their own feeds, causing the video to receive over one million views and even crash the video server at the time. 

Social harmony
Furthermore, another big change for the organization was integrating all the different factions. The Recording Academy has 12 chapters working at a local level, with a Facebook page for each team, which was not conducive to the goal of engaging consumers.

In response to this, the Academy created an internal Facebook Playbook, which solved these integration problems and other issues causing disconnection such as spelling issues. 

This year, there were over 65 million social media interactions in relation to the Grammys. The only way this was possible was from creating shareable content consumers were looking for, integrating all platforms and keeping in mind that social is no longer a novelty, but a part of marketing. 

"Consumers are smarter, they are more engaged, more demanding and frankly more cynical than they have ever been before," Mr. Greene said. "There is a deeper relationship and a deeper overlap between brands and consumers and fans. 

"The narrative is changing, and I think today there are far more ways to connect than there have ever been in the past," he said. 

"We built a very integrated social media team at the Academy. For us, it becomes not only about posting a pile of stuff across a bunch of different platforms, but really identifying what our message is."

Final Take
Brielle Jaekel is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer and Mobile Commerce Daily, New York