• by Jamie Tedford , Op-Ed Contributor, June 3, 2014

When people ask me about my professional background, I often quip that I’m a “recovering ad guy.” After reading Business Insider’s “The 45-Day Planning Process That Goes Into Creating A Single Corporate Tweet,” I’m reminded this is exactly what I’m still recovering from. What a Huge (sorry, too easy) waste of time and money.

Too many hours of my stint at a “traditional agency” were spent obsessing over a single piece of content. We debated passionately about brand essence and the voice of the customer. We fixated on the perfect combinations of words, headlines and copy. We glamorized the most mundane product imagery -- a process our art directors called “romancing the beef” -- for fast food photo shoots. And we spent months to produce a movie-quality piece of 30-second footage.

All those billable hours, creative energy, and expense for a piece of content that was increasingly being ignored and skipped via the traditional medium that delivered them. Yup, it was this special breed of insanity that had me running from traditional marketing to the more authentic, fluid and human canvas that is social media.

Cue my anxiety-filled realization that social media is now at risk of being crushed by the same weight that makes traditional advertising content creation so slow, expensive and often ineffective: 45 days, one tweet, two “favorites,” hundreds of thousands of dollars. C’mon social-media marketers, we can do better. We need to do better.  

To start, let’s consider the following:

Plan with more efficiency: Sophisticated marketers and agencies are beginning to implement “content engines” that generate, categorize and store content at scale for omni-channel use.  All the “romancing of the beef” might make sense if that same image was leveraged across print, TV, in-store, and social.  

Done is better than perfect: Unlike traditional ads that carry the weight of media spend from their inception, not all social content is created equally (or permanently). Test and learn what content is working, not just for you, but for your competitors as well. Technology enables this competitive advantage and takes the guesswork out of content creation.

Recognize great content by making it an ad: The only functional difference between a piece of organic content like a tweet or a post is the little text that indicates it is “promoted” or “sponsored.”  This is the beauty of “native advertising.”  Let analytics tell you when a piece of content has earned the right to become an ad. Then amplify it. Moneyball, people. It works in advertising as it does in baseball.

Automate when possible: In the age of big data, social data, and fast data, we cannot dedicate large teams and months of time to a task that could be done quicker, by fewer people, and with greater results. Imagine using streams of data to publish dozens of different promoted tweets at once, with little to no human interference. Suddenly, you have one tweet for President Camembert, another for President Brie, and a third for President Feta -- all geo-targeted to the markets in which their supply is highest during that given week. 

Finally, let’s appreciate the need for a balanced approach to the art and science of marketing.  We are human; images, words and music move us. Despite this example, Huge. and many other firms, have created beautiful content, delivered efficiently, to drive measurable results. This is the legacy from traditional media that can inform the healthy growth of social-media marketing. The alternative is too painful for me to consider at this critical step in my recovery.