What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, content marketing is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a set of technologies, tools and platforms facilitating the search, the discovery, and participation and sharing of content.
Content marketing is transforming the role of marketing and media. Online communities, social networks and blogs have taken off and are engaging, influencing and connecting people around the world.
Online conversations and opinions have a tremendous bottom-up effect and are now influencing the mainstream media and in doing so have a huge impact on the business of almost any and every company. In many instances the new sources of information are considered to be far more valuable and reliable than any communication issued by a company or brand concerning their product or service, because it is directly from the consumer. Peer to peer marketing is the future and is growing in popularity.
The web is progressing from a pull model to a push model. What we see is that not only have social media or social profile sites surpassed emailing as the number one way of spending time online, they are here to stay and are redefining the way we develop new business, new products and how we perceive brands and their marketing. The power literally is to the consumer. The brand still leads, but in close dialogue with their audience.
Everybody and everything is a brand
Another maybe even more significant development in the ‘new’ communication era is that in fact everyone and everything has become a brand. We are visible, exposed, extremely connected and therefore vulnerable. As a personal brand we are gaining or losing in currency. The same goes for companies. Even the most remote enterprise will now be in the social arena whether they intended to or not. The question is what will you learn from this involvement, how much will you try to control this, or will you risk a ‘free market’ for your brand and company.
What does this mean, a ‘free social market’? A positive or indeed negative opinion about a product, service, brand or person is no longer under control. Through a range of social media forms, people are talking, for good and bad, and in real time. So…The challenge of today is to make sure that as many people possible ‘carry out’ and spread your (positive) message at as many places possible, and you as a brand or product owner engage in order to affect a positive outcome.
Loaded and Content
How do we perceive Content Marketing? Well we are entering a new era and a whole new ballgame. Only in the last year or so are we starting to see the true possibilities, but according to some of the big guns in social media land, like wonder Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway, we are only at the very beginning of the content marketing, search and real time web age. We have been on the online case since the late nineties, first building simple websites, later working on interactive platforms for big Dutch brands such as ABN AMRO, Rabobank, Achmea, Vodafone, etc. All combined with ‘traditional’ advertising. Over the past three years we have changed our model; the starting point for any campaign or promotion, or almost any communication activity, is now an investigation online to determine the health and condition of your brand, product, service or company. How fit are you for the future?
Cheers
Marko (Im the one in the middle!)
used to be referred to as Tidal Waves. I don’t know when this changed. I know that scientists don’t particularly like the term Tidal Wave as Tides are driven by the moon, and so this is inaccurate. But frankly Tsunami is hardly a good replacement as it means harbour wave!
