attention industry

Would your business benefit from a content marketing group?

It’s an odd question, but luckily we’re in an odd time. The expectation is that you will create content, and will have a brand that lives where the conversation is. 5 years ago, what mattered most in terms of online presence was your website. Now it’s your wikipedia page, comments on the blogs of others, YouTube, more or less the first page of google results.

Your statements about yourself, in your own garden, are not the expression of your brand. They are a starting point that will be ridiculed, remixed, interpreted and redefined by people who care enough to participate. It’s not just about watching these people. It’s about participating with them. It’s about giving them content to play with that is as reactive as it is interactive.

It’s about giving your brand a voice in the conversation, in a way that means more than good customer service in a new channel. It’s about creating content that has value of it’s own, adding to the value of your brand, instead of just drawing attention to it.

This occured to me when I looked at my notes on an alternate web-magazine model, after spending a morning considering alternate creative agency models.

A five or so person team, creating content in video, interactive, social media, text and infographics, could generate a steady stream of content that draws attention to internal projects, practices, ideas, individuals, and new launches. This isn’t new - it’s more or less why anyone knows who Robert Scoble is. But imagine a team who is working everyday to create this content in as many channels as possible, shaping it specifically to address the conversation that is happening online.

Blogs alone are insufficient. Online is not a medium, it’s a platform that supports nearly every medium. Users get to choose what type of content they interact with: your options are be everywhere, or be irrelevant somewhere.

If you’re a big company, you can hopefully afford five people to make you matter online. If you’re a small company, you hopefully have enough people with passion to make a content marketing initiative happen on no money and no time (not a new concept to anyone at a startup). If you’re in-between, you are officially a market that is going to matter for the future of the creative agency - you can hopefully find someone to help your company generate meaningful, authentic content across multiple key media types, and distribute it to the people who would be talking about you anyway. (I think the big boys will eventually outsource this to agencies that are better equipped to handle it, but that the mid-range will lead the way first.)

Brands are defined when what you create meets what people think. Ergo, what you create should be at least somewhat in reaction to what people think.