Content marketing – Singing a song that others want to listen to isn’t easy

Everyone’s talking about content marketing at the moment.  Don’t run before you can walk is nicely summed up by Altimeter's report on the subject.  Particularly the point about bright shiny objects.  It’s a bit like taking your iPod along to a party, because you are very excited to have something new to play music on, but when you plug it into the dock everyone else is horrified to hear you singing loudly and badly about how wonderful you are. What they were actually expecting was for you to play some fantastic new artist you had discovered.  You may not be invited back!

We’re all guilty of shouting on Twitter ‘here’s my news, you must listen to me’ – basically using it as a traditional marketing medium – like advertising or DM.  If we apply the rules of content marketing then as long as we regularly share great ‘tunes’ then the occasional burst of bad singing (as long as it still a good tune) will be tolerated.

PR people quickly learn that if they don’t want to be ‘Simon Cowelled’ then they need to learn to carry a tune.  So the move towards content marketing is less of a shift in mindset for us.   We have to ‘pull’ the media into our content web as ‘push’ doesn’t work – journalists just won’t be cajoled into writing a story no matter how drunk you get them.   But we can only write a good song when clients let us in to their organisation, to uncover the unique content that they possess or if they make the shift themselves to become amazing content creators.