Reusing content and assets for social media: where’s your coal?

I’ve been thinking about the insatiable appetite that social media has for content and information. In working with some of our clients this can initially seem a daunting or even insurmountable barrier to getting involved in social media. But I think that this is because we’re looking at this from a marketing perspective and as a result we’ve got a fairly narrow idea of what actually constitutes ‘useful’ content. Because we’re looking for a specific set of branded assets that we have a preconceived idea of from our broadcast legacy we’re missing a lot of material that is actually gold to our audiences – or indeed coal.

I heard this story at a talk at the Tate last year celebrating the work of Bruce Goff, an American architect who used a range of found, ready made and otherwise non-traditional building materials in his work. An inventive design genius Goff was working on a private project for a client in the green and leafy suburbs of Aroura, Illinois in 1949.

As a part of the project there was a large central wall made of anthracite otherwise known as coal. A curious passing neighbour stopped in on the construction site and had a chat with Goff and his builder about the various unusual building materials and asked them about the construction of the wall. A long discussion ensued, concerning heat transferral and the possible combustibility of this unusual material with the neighbour obviously concerned that this was an unwise choice of building material. At the end of it Goff asked the neighbour where he lived; “Oh, down the road a-piece’ he said, indicating near-by. “And what is your house made of?” Goff enquired. “Well, its made of timber” came the reply.

For me the story highlights the way our preconceptions limit our ability to see the potential of things. The neighbour is perfectly happy to see wood, a highly combustible substance as a really versatile material, suitable for construction, furniture, cladding and decoration. But he struggled when it came to seeing coal as anything other than a fuel – suited only to burning.

Often we do the same in our own organisations. We look at all of the various assets that we have and think of them only in the way that we originally intended them to be used. Research is a great example. All too frequently we think of it as supporting material for a presentation, as background information to a broader initiative, or to be summarised in a graph or a table in the annual report and so on.  But if we go back to our audience and look at their interests and needs we may well discover that something we’ve relegated to a very specific ‘coal-like’ role is actually far more versatile when put in the hands of our audience who can invent all kinds of new uses for it.

And ironically we might well also discover that the things we’ve been using in social media (our television adverts and press releases) are actually more suited to a broadcast environment where meeting the audience need isn’t a prerequisite to having a dialogue.