What happened to our content? I remember when you could read the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune and each article was a masterpiece. The world was filled with complex editorials, in depth articles and human interest stories that would make you cry. Even our magazine ads and television commercials could make you laugh like a kid. Our daily content was awesome!
What happened to this type of journalism?
You could argue that content changed when social media was born. It began when PR agencies and social media firms had to customize current content to play nice with social media channels. These marketing people started customizing articles and chopping them down in size. Paragraph structure and free form ideas were replaced with simple blurbs. It was almost as if the rules of journalism didn't apply anymore. Three short paragraphs about nothing in particular replaced the beautiful content we knew and loved.
Our content morphed again into another strange beast when native advertising became part of the content. Every company from Taco Bell to the Internal Revenue Service started weaving native advertising into our precious content.
I divert, but HBO’s Last Week Tonight did a great show on Native Advertising.
Basically, instead of unbiased stories every single article had a bias. Every single article represented a commercial for product or service. Native advertising has become so woven into the fabric of articles that even the advertisers themselves don’t know the difference. Journalists even became part of the advertisement pushing products and services. It got so bad that sometimes you couldn't even decipher what you're reading was a fact or was it just a paid advertisement for Monster Soft Drinks.
Just when you thought it was all over... content went high frequency and this is when everything changed.
We became content pushers…
Social media’s urgency for real time delivery made it so that every brand, every company and even every small business needed to deliver content on a daily basis and on multiple social media channels. Not an easy task, when brands couldn't satisfy this new beast of content delivery social media professionals picked up the slack and now as we enter 2016 content pushing is big business.
From 2010 to 2014 you could argue that quantity outpaced quality. In 2016, social media professionals deemed content king. Without quality content your social media was lost. I believe that quality content matters. A companies content should reflect both company values and be conversational for customers but…
I’m here to say that pushing content without a strategy doesn’t work. Marketing and social media professionals need to return to engaging content that is delivered strategically.
What do you think?
