If Content is King, Community is Queen. Okay, then context and technology must be Gods!
I was sent an email recently that included, among many other quotes, the notion that, “if content is King, Community is Queen”. I like these kind of clever metaphors most of the time because they work like grabhandles on a bus helping your brain hang on and get to the next stop. But this one troubled me.
I’ve just spent a large part of the past week as Chairman of the Young Guns International Awards jury and one thing has stuck with me as a result. Everyone who has been trained in the advertising business, sub 30 or not, is fixated, no, obsessed with content. Media, goes this thinking, are just places to hang our brilliantly creative content in front of an audience so that they get the chance to appreciate all the thought and hard work that’s gone into it.
Then, as the quote suggests, there are communities that form around this content, and the stories that develop and the conversations that ensue are now right up there with the value and significance of the content itself. Well, yes, of course. In fact, I’d argue that they are often even more powerful.
For me the larger issue for agencies and advertising creative people is that we’re all wearing goggles that appreciate the content, whether created by an agency (ads) or the community (conversations) above everything else. It’s a common form of professional myopia.
It’s time to remember that we’re not in the advertising business, the communications business, or indeed the content business, but the business of problem solving for our clients. When you change the goggles, you start to see different solutions.
The founder of a major digital company recently told me how they tackled a problem for a major multinational client. They problem they had to solve was getting more people visiting the website in China. How about better Chinese content? Or a more active dialogue with those visitors already turning up so that these good conversations spread? Or some ads well placed in other media to point people in the right direction? All perfectly sound approaches.
As it turns out their solution was to move the host server from the US to China so that speed increased and there were fewer issues with content filters on the mainland. Traffic to the site went up 10 fold.
I could bang on about this with other examples. In fact I will, just not now, plane’s leaving.
