Content is Just Something to Talk About
This week's 2¢ - Someone else doesn't agree with Bill that "Content is king".
For a recent episode of the Rockstar CMO podcast, I was doing some research into Cory Doctorow, an author who is famous for writing and talking about the “enshitification” of social media, and this quote, from a different publication, caught my eye:
Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
Over the couple of decades of working in content management and content marketing, I have heard a few versions of this sort of quote since Bill Gates once proclaimed that “content is king”. For example, some have argued that “context is king” as we became obsessed with personalization.
But I really like the idea that conversation is the daddy, whether it’s in person, via email, on social media, or even the one-sided shouting into the void of a podcast or a newsletter.
The content just fuels the potential for a chat; it is the prompt, and the conversation is the outcome.
The new gold standard for email metrics has now shifted to replies, away from opens or click-through rates, which are proving unreliable with the changes in email delivery technology. Underlining the point that conversation is king, not the content.
In a previous post, I talked about social selling in the LinkedIn goldfish bowl, which depends on conversational content rather than on promotional posts about attending events, launching new products, or new hires, which are conversational dead ends.
In B2B marketing, a conversation is a signal of intent.
If all you talk about is your company, your features, and functions, what conversation can we expect from that?
Similarly, if we create the perfect beige post, that ticks all of the boxes, rubbed as smooth as a baby’s bottom by AI, that hides what my chum Robert Rose calls “the pointy bits”, those little imperfections, and our differentiated point of view, how does that spark conversation?
Most B2B content isn’t designed to start a conversation. It’s designed to announce something, and announcements are conversational dead ends.
Sure, sometimes we need to write informative copy, but writing content for conversation is different; we need to consider what conversation this might spark.
And, that conversation is not just with you, it. might spark a conversation with a colleague, a peer, or someone looking for a solution like yours. A conversation you might not see.
You could also argue that it’s something that injects a bit of the human into synthetic content.
If your content doesn’t start a conversation, what’s it for?