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Flow and Archive: Managing Social Media Assets

5/7/2010 at 1:35 pm by

web flow and archiveWhen it comes to marketing, it can be useful to think of the Web as being in two states: flow and archive (an idea I first heard from our colleague James Sherrett). The web used to be all archive. Marketers created slick printed materials and, as an afterthought, handed their brochures to a web designer who replicated them online. These archival brochure sites often remained static for a couple of years until an organization launched a new product or changed office locations.

On the flip side, almost all of our offline marketing is flow. By flow we mean communications that people mostly experience in real-time. Whether it’s radio or TV ads, media coverage or street-side billboards, flow marketing is broadcast at a point in time and then forgotten. With the exception of “freebies” that hang around for a while, such as your real estate agent’s calendar, archive marketing in the real world is rare.

Today’s web smoothly blends flow and archive. Unlike yesterday’s static websites, much of our online experience is now concerned with the flow:

  • The river of real-time status updates from your friends in Twitter and Facebook.
  • Many of us keep connected to colleagues and friends using an always-on instant messaging channel, like Skype or Facebook.
  • Your RSS reader offers a near-real-time flow of news from around the web.
  • Blogs and news sites offer a slower flow of their own, pushing older articles off the homepage with new stories. The same is true of content channels such as YouTube and Flickr.

In a radical 180 degree turn, these days marketers tend to focus on the flow. However, don’t get so excited about the real-word nature of the web that you forget about the archive! For nearly every social media channel, content that was once flow becomes archive:

  • Blog posts leave the front page but live on as individual pages.
  • Tweets don’t disappear into the ether, they’re archived on Twitter’s servers.
  • YouTube videos that spike in popularity continue to collect views into the future.

Because these assets remain searchable and interlinked across the Web, they accrue value over time. Each archived asset provides a new opportunity to connect with a fan and convert a casual searcher into a dedicated follower of your organization’s flow. Web users will, through the external links and search, continue to discover the archived digital trail you leave behind. Tend to those archived assets. Here’s an example.

Perhaps you run a photo contest in Flickr. After it’s completed, photo enthusiasts will still find and explore the Flickr group you created for the content. Take the time to revise the group page, indicate that the contest is over, and point Flickr users to new contests and projects. By embracing both flow and archive you can harness the full marketing power of the Web.

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About the Author

Julie is a co-founder of Capulet Communications, a marketing agency based in Vancouver, BC. Since 2003, Capulet has been helping companies, from start-ups to national retailers, understand and engage with today's and tomorrow's Web. A co-founder of Northern Voice, Canada's social media conference, she regularly speaks about social media, marketing, and emerging technology. She is a co-author, with Darren Barefoot, of "Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook" published by No Starch Press.

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