What is Micromedia?
In my last post, I talked about crafting engaging, stand-alone micro-content to fuel your social media engine. Micromedia is closely related to micro-content, and the two-terms can often be used interchangeably. Micromedia refers to the medium—the environment in which short, atomized content can be shared and re-shared ad infinitum. Twitter, Instagram and Vine are micromedia at its purest, but you won’t find a website, blog, or app that hasn’t been touched by social media’s economy-sized, interactive technologies.
A grid of social media icons is commonplace on websites. But micromedia–with its 140-character messages, 6-second videos, and image-dominated blogs—has once again changed how we communicate and consume. Yet many companies still rely solely on the long-form press release and segregated web content to reach customers.
What Does Micromedia Have to do With PR?
Micromedia is the new way to reach prospects, engage customers, and woo influential bloggers and thought-leaders. Messages delivered via micromedia:
- reach consumers on their turf and in their language
- are inherently democratic, meaning consumers can take ownership of your message, and adapt and share it with their own trusted community
- can spread and aggregate into something much greater than the sum of its parts.
Put Micromedia to Work for Your Company: 3 Simple Strategies
1. Create Compelling Stories Around Your Brand
Digital marketers predict that micromedia “will be among the top B2C and B2B marketing trends in 2013.” The beauty is that micro-content can be used on almost any webpage to tell personalized stories about your company. Turn executive bios, awards, community projects, or milestones into micro-stories that connect with visitors. Micromedia turns a dull newsroom into a dynamic place of interaction, and a contact page into a high-converting landing page.
Nike has done a masterful job of integrating micromedia. In one glimpse, striking images and videos give the impression of a cutting-edge company with a history of boundary-pushing achievements.
The Nike+ app focuses on user-generated content and statistics. The message? The crowd is the corporation.
2. Pitch the Influencers
Today’s journalists, bloggers, thought-leaders, and conference headliners are all on Twitter. They pay attention to what’s being posted and reposted by their online community (i.e., the other influencers they follow). Each tweet is essentially a pitch for the content behind the link. The difference is bloggers like these pitches because they don’t flood an inbox, they are strictly limited to about a sentence, and the Twitter audience provides an instant thermometer for how hot a story may be. Some have even gone so far as to declare that the only pitch they’ll look at is a #twitpitch.
Companies who perfect the “twitpitch” have a better chance of getting their story in front of key leaders and their trusted followers, which include other key leaders and their trusted followers, which include…you get the idea.
3. Join the Conversation
Micromedia is designed to help you find existing, active communities relevant to your industry. Join groups on LinkedIn and Google+ that are engaged in conversations for which you are well qualified to contribute. You can join these conversations by introducing yourself (be transparent!), leaving thoughtful comments, and sharing valuable content. Comments are a feature of many social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr and most blogs. When used respectfully to offer quality content, interesting questions, or authoritative insights, you can increase exposure, earn trust, and get to know your audience at the source.
There is no one right way to join the conversation; each brand must listen to their customers to determine the most useful and authentic ways to respond. This infographic from Dell offers “Top tips on posting and responding to comments” that can help you make the most of online customer interactions.
