Heresy you say? Your company really doesn't care about your idle chit chat? Well...they may but there is something much larger at play here and like many things it comes down to simple economics.
Content has always driven exposure and conversation. Remember Coke's Teach the World to Sing?
Remember the Pillsbury Bake Off? Old school social media. The problem is not that all of a sudden we've discovered content marketing. The problem is...it was friggin' expensive.
Think about all of the different types of content and how you would have presented it to the world ten years ago:
Documents: Someone wrote them in MSWord, sent them around to 20 different people to fact-check, edit, add to, comment on, etc. which probably took about a month and created a headache for someone to parse through even if all 20 people did use their review tool correctly which, of course, they didn't. Once the text was finalized it had to go to a publishing group to ensure it used the correct language, formatting, etc. based on company policies. That group would then publish the document to the corporate document management system so that edits could be tracked. Then you had to get the person in the web publishing group to post it to the website - maybe putting the request into a ticket tracking system to accomplish. After a couple of days or a week (faster if you begged) it was finally on the website. Yay. But wait...how would anyone know the website had new content? So then you have to get the document highlighted in the weekly or monthly email newsletter or create a webinar to promote it. I'm tired just thinking about it. Writing it was really only half of that battle - and probably still is for most companies.
But what if the website was a wiki and as the head of product marketing for one of the products, you had permission to change the pages on the website related to your product? What if everything on the website was RSS-enabled? You write the document in the wiki - send out the link for 20 people to edit and they make their changes directly to the single source of the text. You review it, clean it up and have someone look at it for final edits. The CSS already ensures proper layout and formatting. Once reviewed/approved you change a setting and save. Presto - it's on the website and in the feeds of everyone who is tracking your company through their RSS reader.
And that is just text. In the video world, we have gone from needing this:
to being able to use this:
Never mind the editing, publishing, and distribution channels necessary.
What's going on here?
While we used to have to use different tools and channels to author, produce, publish, and distribute we can now use the same tool to do all of those things because the content is saved in the same action in which it is published and because it is all wrapped in social functionality - it gets immediately broadcast out to the people who care the most.
So while it's nice that it is 'social' what really matters to companies is that the cost to produce content has dropped like a manganese nodule in the middle of the Pacific.
Update: I'm extremely flattered that my friend Heather Strout voted this post the runner-up for Social Media Blog Carnival this week - see her post about it here.
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