Obele Brown-West, an award-winning digital marketer based in Chicago, shares her thoughts on what makes up the constantly-evolving digital communications landscape.
Navigating the digital communications landscape on your own can be daunting. After all, the landscape consists of many constantly-changing elements. Digital marketing expert, Obele Brown West breaks it down for us. She takes us on a deep dive into the depths of the digital communications landscape. In this episode, you will learn the components of it and a key strategy to successfully navigate it.
Elyse:
Digital communications can feel like a vast ocean where it is easy to get lost…but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Elyse:
Welcome to Digital What?!, a podcast series where we join UNDP personnel and experts in conversation about your digital communication questions you’ve always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.
In today’s episode, Understanding The Digital Octopus, we take a deep dive into this vast world of digital communications with Obele Brown-West, a digital marketing expert based in Chicago. In her work she’s kind of like a digital communications superhero...rescuing poor souls like us who swam out too far into this digital abyss and are now stranded at sea.
Obele:
I honestly, I think the super power that I have is that I am very aware of the fact that digital is always evolving. And because of that, I am always trying to keep up with how the evolution is occurring. There are some people that are very comfortable and learning something and then executing that digital evolves minute by minute. As we're talking right now, I'm sure that there is an algorithm change or a new social network that's being tinkered on right now. And I want to know about it. So I am always constantly keeping up with the trends, keeping up with human behavior to understand how people are using digital media…and I think my digital marketing superpower, is that I am a curious person and I'm always constantly trying to keep up with the trends.
Elyse:
As someone who is a bit behind the trends, alright, I am more like an ostrich with my head in the sand, I asked Obele to help me understand this Digital Communications Landscape.
When I think of a landscape, the first thing that comes to mind is nature. I can maybe see mountains, run my fingers through the grass, hear the sound of the ocean waves crashing, … but this digital world is intangible. I can’t really grasp it. So I asked Obele...
If you were to give us a visual description of this world, which, of course, is invisible to us. Is there a way that you could help us describe it, for instance, as another landscape or another planet? Like, what does it look like? What does it feel like? How would you try to explain this world to someone who's never seen it interact with it before?
Obele:
Oh well, that's a tricky one. It's almost like the solar system where at the center is the story and it is the nucleus of the rest of the things that happen. It is a piece of content that you are trying to get out there. And it's an organization or it's a person. It doesn't necessarily matter. It all starts with the content. And there are a number of different ways where this content can be distributed and it can be distributed in social media. It can be distributed on a web site. It can be distributed in a video. It can be distributed in a voice communication. It can go to a lot of different places, depending on who it is that you're trying to attract and who it is that you're trying to speak to. It all starts with the content that you are trying to get out there. And ultimately, the decision of how you put the content out there is based on who it is that you want to see the content. So you're not going to necessarily put a a Snapchat piece of content out there for your grandmother. What is the best vehicle for your grandmother to see something? If you're an organization, it might be going directly to a media outlet. If you're a person, it might be going onto Facebook and putting that piece of content out there. So I think it is at the center is the content and there's all different types of tentacles that come out of that. I'm using a lot of different analogies that started with that...
Elyse:
I love the idea of tentacles, tentacled-creatures in the universe. That’s definitely happening.
Obele:
Yeah, exactly. Maybe we'll go with an octopus. We'll use the octopus where the head of the octopus is the content and all of the different legs are the kind of where it could actually go, depending on who it is that you're trying to talk to.
Elyse:
So, if this digital landscape is an octopus, the tentacles are the channels that you use to get your message across. Yet, an octopus has only 8 tentacles and our digital communications octopus has many more.
Obele:
They are lot, but that is ok. There is no need to be overwhelmed.
Elyse:
Digital marketers like Obele, categorize channels by their characteristics in order to keep them all straight. There are many, but these four are the main ones. The biggest category is social media.
Obele:
There's Facebook, there's Twitter, there’s Instagram. Those are kind of the big three. But there's also Snapchat, TikTok is emerging. But then there are other platforms that are considered social as well that are more in this social communication realm, and that is WhatsApp, that is WeChat. Even Skype I would categorize into that. Where it enables communication and contact one to one and in a very interpersonal way.
Elyse:
Another category is the media.
Obele:
That is any type of website or media outlet that exists within the ecosystem.
Elyse:
Then there are “owned experiences”.
Obele:
Which are any organization or company that has its own owned website. So anyone who would cultivate content on their website.
Elyse:
And there’s also search engines.
Obele
There is Google and there is Bing, there’s Baidu. That's where people are looking to just search for different types of content and explore.
Elyse:
That’s a lot to keep track of. So I asked her...
And so if you if you're still going with, say, deep sea analogy, or universe analogy, what is the what is the black hole that I…you know, what's the tunnel I don't want to go down? What should I be avoiding in terms of what's going to maybe throw me off navigating this place?
Obele:
It is trying to put that piece of content everywhere and trying to make it talk to everyone. That's never going to work. One piece of content isn't going to be able to be everywhere and speak to everyone.
An example of that is I have had and currently have clients who spend millions of dollars on television commercials, they want to see that commercial everywhere. They want it not to only live in TV. They want it to live in any digital channel that I can think of to put it in. But the reality is they are making that commercial for a television audience. That's not necessarily what people are looking for in certain digital channels. That's not how people are consuming digital content. And so the trap that a lot of people fall into is that they try to use one piece of content and put it out to everyone and within every channel and I think that is a trap that a lot of people are falling into.
Certainly it can be the same story that you're trying to tell, but it's not going to necessarily manifest itself in the same way depending on the different types of channels that you're trying to be in. So I think it's being very focused on what is the story I'm trying to tell, who am I trying to tell it to and what are the best vehicles in order to get that to them and focus on that, as opposed to saying there are 20 different social channels that I've heard of. Let me put this into every social channel. That will be a trap.
Elyse:
So I wondered what Obele would recommend for someone who say is working in development and trying to get their story out there and to connect with their target audience? How would they go about doing that?
Obele:
I feel like I keep on talking about the audience, but it is insanely important to really have a deep understanding of who the audience is and how they are currently using these digital marketing channels. So really having an understanding of these people is how best to start.
You can figure out very quickly whether you need to invest all of your time and effort into one channel or whether you need to scale outside of that one channel to reach that audience.
Elyse:
At the end of the day, feeling agile in this digital landscape is not so difficult. Once you have an understanding of your content, who your audience is, and which channels are the best way to reach them, you’re ready to take a deep dive.
Obele:
I certainly don't want to people who are not in the digital marketing world, I don't want to scare them by making, by saying that it is constantly evolving, but that is just the truth. But that doesn't mean that because it's evolving, you can't participate. It just means that you should go back to the foundation of what it is that you're trying to do at the end of the day. You're trying to put out content that people are going to consume to know more about you or to educate themselves or to potentially make some sort of conversion action. Right? And all of that comes into understanding the people. We know that about 50 to 60 percent of the globe is connected to digital channels.
And so how do we make sure that we are getting an understanding of these people? And that's where you focus your efforts at the start and then scale from there. So if you get back to the basics of just understanding the end user and how you want to have a connection to them and how you want them to consume your content, it becomes a lot easier to figure out the strategy to do that to make sure that you're staying educated in those places where they are.
Elyse
This episode of Digital What?! is produced by Oscar Durand and myself. Our theme music is by Lemon Guo, and additional music is by Chris Zabriskie, and sound design by myself. Special thanks to our expert Obele Brown West, from Weber Shandwick, for taking the time to speak with us.
To listen and subscribe go to wherever you find your podcasts or DigitalNow DOT UNDP DOT org.
I’m Elyse Blennerhassett. Stay with us.