Content vs. Conversation

For marketers seeking success in the digital marketing era, there are any given number of strategies one could be convinced of and follow. This can be a daunting task considering once a plan is conceived, mapped out, and executed, a lot of energy has gone into one strategy and changing the approach is more-often-than-not a challenging task. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that modern marketing strategies—i.e. content marketing—don’t always have an obvious connection to sales, so it can be hard to understand how strategies are working or not working.

Content is King

In the readings from this week, the debate between building efforts around content compared to building efforts around conversation arose. Michael Greenberg wrote, in an article titled Content is King of Social Marketing, that…

“social marketing efforts need to be driven by content, not vice versa. Without content, there is not a whole lot to talk about.” (2009) He goes on to add that “More than anything, you have to think of yourself as a publisher…The reality is, if you aren’t already generating a fair amount of content, it will be difficult to keep up any sort of cadence and maintain your content promise. Plus, most e-commerce marketers’ websites are specifically geared towards conversion.”

Greenberg here makes a valid point: at the heart of a social campaign, content is king.

Conversation is King

Catherine Novak in a related article offering a different point of view argues that a campaign built around content is misguided.

“Content without conversation is just broadcasting, or just advertising.  It goes to the listener/reader/viewer/visitor… and stops there.  If the sender is lucky, it may lodge as a piece of information in the receiver’s consciousness, and they may act on it someday.  If the sender is luckier, or perhaps more engaging, it may be something that the receiver wants to talk about.  And then the message gets a whole new burst of energy.  The energy behind the message is what gives it meaning, and a life of its own.  That happens because we humans like to communicate with each other.  Thus the conversation begins.” (Novak, 2010).

In her article, Novak goes on to compare content strategies without conversation as impersonal and more commercial in feel, making them resemble traditional media as opposed to being properly social.  

Who is right?

There are, of course, many truths embedded in both Novak’s and Greenberg’s articles: content can lead to great conversation, and if executed improperly--as Novak suggests--content strategies can fail to have the desired effect on the audience.

The way I see it, however, is that focusing on great content is the key to winning the social media marketing game. To be honest, we cannot expect users to sit around on social media sites chatting about products or a content-related article; that is simply not what they are there to do. We can, however, expect them to share interesting and relevant information with friends that will spark interesting conversation offline, be disseminated by the users themselves, and ultimately build brand awareness.

One example of how a well-executed content strategy can play out is Mint.com:

“Mint owes much of its user adoption and brand success to its aggressively intelligent content strategy. Unlike the half-hearted, months-between-updates blogs that most businesses keep, Mint’s blog “MintLife” was a core part of the company’s operation.

Mint dedicated significant resources to its blog, including a full time editorial staff and a slew of freelance contributors. It invested time in social news sites like Reddit and Digg, and after months of seeing consistent, quality Mint content, readers in those communities began trusting Mint as high quality, reliable, and cool to share. Eventually, those users turned into Mint customers, even advocating Mint in their personal networks.”

News and tips posts, link roundups, slideshows, videos, and infographics were all key components in Mint’s content strategy, and they were held to a strict editorial standard. By establishing itself as a smart resource that was easy and accessible to the financially curious, Mint was able to leverage its content credibility to convert readers into buyers of its actual product.” (Snow, 2011)

The point is that Mint, a seller of personal finance products, was able to build its credibility and brand by focusing on having high-quality content. This helped build trust in the brand, ultimately resulting in more users of its products.