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.
I ran across this 2-minute video (also embedded below) recently (hat tip to @steverubel for the find). It resonated with me because it affirms what I and many others in the higher ed marketing and PR fields have been thinking about for some time now.
“Think Like A Media Company” is the title of the video. The speaker is author David Rogers, and he’s talking about the shift occurring from traditional brand-building techniques (read: advertising) to one less dependent on established brands and traditional channels. The money quote comes at around 1:30 in the clip:
So, from a brand point of view, what this means is rather than piggybacking on this really powerful brand with a huge built-in audience [i.e., television], we need to look for opportunities to engage by creating our own content. Thinking like a media company, not like an advertiser.
David Rogers: Think Like A Media Company
For a lot of us in the higher ed marketing and communications fields, we’ve been forced to think in those terms anyway, because we don’t have a huge ad budget to begin with. (And if we did, once upon a time, it has been slashed.) Or if we aren’t thinking in those terms, we’re still pinning our hopes for engagement on traditional PR and media relations efforts. That’s a losing game, too. Because as ad revenue declines in traditional media, the news hole shrinks.
But maybe the fact that we haven’t had big ad budgets puts us at an advantage in this new world. Higher ed is blessed with having a wealth of stories to tell.
The greater challenge, perhaps, lies in our ability (as marketers and communicators) to convince the leaders of our institutions that engaging our audiences with great stories that resonate with them will ultimately strengthen ties better than advertising ever can.
Of course, this is not an either/or situation. Media organizations spend money to advertise themselves in order to build awareness and attract audiences. (You’ve seen those billboards around town for your community’s “number one news team,” right?) In the same way, traditional advertising can be used to drive audiences to your self-created content. It isn’t the splashy ad or the big mainstream media coverage that matters (although both are nice) but the content we create ourselves, for our audiences. (Related: When we do get those big media hits, what matters is how we parlay that third-party endorsement to inform our most valued constituents — the ones who tell us we never get any notice from the big-time media, etc.)
And by using social media, we do rely on established channels (i.e., Facebook) to help get our word out. But it’s cheap.
A bit of blatant promotion here — just to illustrate the point. Here’s an audio slideshow some members of the Missouri S&T communications staff put together as a feature for our website (thanks Lance, Brad and Jessica). The audio portion of the show also ran on our public radio station, KMST. It just went live late last week, so the number of views is modest. But it’s an example of how a campus communications team is using the tools and talents at our disposal (the web, talented content creators) to create our own content.
How is your operation thinking like a media organization?
Andrew Careaga 