Being a long time blogger, I remember the
early days of marketing and PR related blogging, then everyone was new. The climate was very much one of exploration, dialogue and conversation. In fact those early days gave the pioneers an advantage, we really did not have any rock stars, except maybe
Dave Winer, and because the playing field was so level, everyone was in the same boat learning from one another, and the climate of ideas prevailed. In that environment the process of dialogue, engagement and conversation was strong. I believe that’s one reason why the cluetrain manifesto resonated so strongly with all of us early newbie’s.
Mack Collier wrote an article about
social media needing fewer rockstars and more rockstar ideas. He wrote that he found more ideas from non-rockstars at a recent conference, and gave three ideas for increasing the number of ideas in the community. Really if you are on board with the idea of crowd sourcing, it makes sense that the majority of new good ideas will come from those people who are perceived to have less influence, why, there’s more of them, and crowsourcing is all about getting ideas from everyone in the community.
Mack's point about rockstar ascendancy has given me pause for thought about the whole concept of content marketing and inbound marketing. I'm not saying that content marketing is completely associated with the cult of the personality, the basic concept that writing good content that provides value is a good one, and comes directly from Search Engine Marketing. However, I suspect the goal of most content marketing strategies is to be the most influential, the winner in the race for high SEO ranking, the rock star if you will.
Though don’t get me wrong I think a good content marketing strategy has its place, after all I was very happy working as Director of Marketing for a
good content marketing agency like ideaLaunch.
What I shy away from in the
concept of content marketing is focusing on promotion from the marketing mix to the detriment of product, price and place. The ability to create content online gives everyone the chance to develop their own website. That ability gives companies an opportunity where instead of content creation being solely about publishing your own content, the interactive nature of the web means you can engage your audience where they write their content. Reading what people write on their site, really listening to what is said and learning from your audience and as a result taking action to make a better product, better price, better location, and even better promotion.
Without an outreach strategy, a company misses the opportunity to conduct a dialogue with the community where its members are building their content. To me engagement is the answer to the problem of finding rock star ideas, and bringing rock stars down to earth. But engagement is tough; it means you have to read even more content.
Engagement means you have to interact with people even though you don’t have the opportunity to sell your ideas, but instead learn from others. And for a company engagement means building a workflow process where listening, triage, response and action are fully supported. Some companies have concentrated on building a great engagement infrastructure, Dell, Comcast and General Motors come to mind here. Other companies focus on content and becoming rockstars.
Today new people entering Twitterville, the Blogosphere, and Social Media land see a different landscape from just a few short years ago. Instead of finding a group of pioneers all building the road ahead, people see towering personalities pointing the way and its easy to imagine the new people looking around believe the right path is content marketing to achieve fame. Actually, I have to admit they would be right in part. But what’s easy to miss is that the really successful companies are not just about messaging or content, but having a product that people want and need, and you only discover those rock star ideas by engaging your customers.
Recent Comments