With Monday’s public launch of Meet Content, a website devoted to all things related to content in higher ed web marketing, I thought it might be appropriate to revisit a post from earlier in the year that suggests content is not as important as some of us might think.
Back in January, Jae Kim wrote a post called It’s Not About Content; It’s All About Communication that attracted some attention on Social Media Today. Citing the success of Facebook, the failure of MySpace and a couple of studies that contradict the idea that “content is king,” Kim states that “enabling communication is really the key to harness the explosive network effect of social network.”
“Contrary to popular belief,” he writes, “they all talk about [how] content, as we know them, is not the king.”
My take on this is that it’s misleading to discuss content vs. communication. The two are so interwoven in any marketing effort that they cannot be separated. As one of the commenters on the Social Media Today post points out, “[W]ithout content of some shape or form, there is no communication. It’s just the content of the communication isn’t always consumable.”
It’s the second part of that comment that really matters to us, I think. Is our content worth consuming?
Whatever we’re putting out there — words, images, sounds — we’re asking people to invest their time. There’s a trade-off involved. Are we giving them something of value in exchange for their time?
If the content doesn’t offer something of value, then there is no need for the communication.
Am I right?
