Your brand, the next media company - Michael Brito

Content is still king-and if you're a brand marketer, you need to start thinking like a media company, too. Your Brand, The Next Media Company brings together the strategic insights, operational frameworks, and practical approaches for transforming your brand into a highly successful media company.

There is a content and media surplus in the marketplace, and there is an attention deficit in the minds of consumers today. Their lives are dynamic and completely unpredictable. They are highly influential and aid their peers down the purchase funnel using organic conversations about the products they care about and the ones they don't. In order to reach these consumers, brands must create recent, relevant, and game changing content to break through the clutter and successfully change their behavior.

Social business pioneer Michael Brito covers every step of the process, including:

• Understanding the unpredictable nature and dynamic behaviors of the social customer
• Deploying social business strategies that will help facilitate the change from brand to media company
• Building a content organization and setting the stage for transformation
• Creating a real-time command center that will help facilitate reactive and proactive content marketing
• Creating a centralized editorial team that will drive content strategy, governance, and cross-team collaboration
• Building the content supply chain (workflows for content ideation, creation, approval, distribution, and integration)
• Enabling customers and employees (brand journalists) to feed the content engine
• Developing your content strategy that can be executed across paid, earned, and owned media content
• Transitioning from "brand messaging" to a highly relevant content narrative
• Evaluating the content marketing vendors and software platforms vying for your business

Along the way, Brito presents multiple case studies from brand leaders worldwide, including RedBull, Oreo, Tesla Motors, Burberry, Sharpie, and Pepsi-delivering specific, actionable, powerfully relevant insights you can act on to begin the transformation from brand to media company.

Michael Brito is a Group Director at WCG, a W2O Group company. He is responsible for helping clients transform their brands into media companies by implementing social business strategic initiatives that operationalize content strategy, scale community management, and integrate paid, earned, and owned media initiatives. Prior to WCG, Michael worked as a Senior Vice President of Edelman Digital and also for large, influential brands in Silicon Valley, such as Hewlett Packard, Yahoo, and Intel, where he was responsible for consumer social media marketing and community building. Very early on in his career, his role was focused on search marketing (paid and natural) and digital marketing. He has been building external communities ever since and believes that brands should focus on turning friends, fans, and followers into brand advocates and storytellers.

Michael is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, as well as a guest lecturer at various universities including the University of California, Berkeley; the University of San Francisco; Stanford University; Syracuse University; Golden Gate University; and Saint Mary's College of California. He is also an Adjunct Professor at San Jose State University and UC Berkeley teaching social business and strategic social media.

Michael has a Bachelor of Arts in Business degree from Saint Mary's College and a Master of Science, Integrated Marketing Communications degree from Golden Gate University. He is also the author of Smart Business, Social Business: A Playbook for Social Media In The Organization, which was released in July 2011. He proudly served eight years in the United States Marine Corps.

"In the social world, content rules. Michael's book makes the case that in order for brands to thrive in this brave new world, brands must become media companies."

-Pete Cashmore, Founder and CEO of Mashable

"Your Brand, The Next Media Company is a great read for anyone who wants to understand and learn how to overcome the challenges of content marketing."

-Elisa Steele, Chief Marketing Officer, Skype

"An intelligently structured narrative that's peppered with applicable, pragmatic advice. Your Brand, The Next Media Company belongs on the bookshelf of every CMO."

-Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, Chief Marketing Officer, Mindjet

"Looking to use social business strategy to build your brand into a thriving media company? Michael Brito's new book holds the key. For practical, tactical inspiration, read on."

-Claire Diaz-Ortiz, Social Innovation, Twitter

"A must read if you are serious about using social business strategy to transform your brand into a media company!"

-Mei Lee, Vice President, Digital Marketing, Conde Nast

"In Your Brand, The Next Media Company, Michael Brito puts the content marketing conversation into a necessary and much needed context."

-Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs

"Brito has written a practical and thoroughly engaging book for brands looking to effectively become a media company using a sustainable social business strategy."

-Amy Kavanaugh, Vice President Public Affairs, Taco Bell (YUM Brands)