Paul Conley

In the trade magazine business, not generally known for early adoption of new-media developments, Paul Conley is something of an anomaly. He is, as he puts it, “hypersensitive to how new technology opens up opportunities in old worlds.” He was among the first in the trade press to recognize the significance of social media. And though he is now beginning to question its potential, he was an early advocate for content marketing as a promising new career path for journalists.

As early as 1996, not long after the birth of the World Wide Web, he founded a business-to-business internet news service. Though that effort failed, it provided the foundation for a subsequent career in new media, beginning with CNN’s web unit, CNNfn, and then key roles with Primedia, Bloomberg, and About.com. Conley is best known, however, for his subsequent work, starting in 2004, as a consultant and blogger. Throughout the last decade, his blog was required reading for anyone concerned about the future of trade publishing, and has made him, as he puts it, “weirdly famous in some cool media niches.”

In 2008, Conley’s focus began to shift from traditional trade journalism to content marketing, which at one point he described as “the most exciting part of the B2B world today.” By last year, he said, his working life was “consumed” by content marketing.

In a recent interview, however, Conley told me that he has begun to worry about the viability of content marketing. While “the biggest opportunities in B2B media are clearly in content marketing,” challenges to its potential as a new outlet for journalism are growing rapidly:

Much of my business in the past few years has involved helping non-publishers enter content marketing. And my experience has been that the overwhelming majority of these companies don’t have a culture that is open to journalism. These companies don’t have the stomach for news and the confrontations it can promote. They panic when someone complains. They’re afraid of controversy.

Journalists by the hundreds—both newcomers and legacy—are being recruited for these jobs. But once they get there, they find that their skills and their mindset are not appreciated.

Though he once hoped that content marketing “could be a new form of journalism,” and that it would both employ journalists and serve readers well, he’s less sanguine now. With a few exceptions, such as CMO.com, he says, “content marketing has turned out to be nothing more than a slightly cooler, slightly hipper form of marcomm and advertising.”

It doesn’t help, Conley adds, that traditional publishers are also entering into content marketing.

What they’re selling in the market is the ability to co-opt their journalists! Legacy publishers are telling advertisers that journalists will create content marketing for them. And the journalists who balk at this find themselves facing an enormous amount of hostility from their bosses.

This situation is rapidly turning into a nightmare in B2B. Marketers claim to be journalists. Journalists are hired as marketers. Publishers sell the use of their editorial staff to the same companies that buy advertising. Readers can’t tell if they reading editorial content or vendor content or vendor content that’s written by editors and then published by a magazine brand or editorial content written by editors but published by vendors or vendor content written by vendors but edited by editors and then published by a magazine brand as a column. There are some verticals in B2B now that are completely polluted by this crap.

Conley does not seem to have given up all hope for content marketing as a robust alternative to traditional journalism. But, he says, “finding a way to navigate this new world will be the biggest challenge for B2B journalists and readers for the foreseeable future.”

Paul Conley is one of eight new-media thought leaders profiled in the forthcoming e-book, the New-Media Survival Guide. More of my interview with him, in which he describes the ethical challenges facing B2B publishing, will be has been published soon on the ASBPE National Blog.

Related posts:

1. “Content Is Power”: Q & A with Mark W. Schaefer
2. Ethics and Content Marketing: Ex-BW Writers Weigh In
3. Journalists, Content Marketing, and Tough Questions

Mark W. Schaefer

A couple of years ago when I started B2B Memes it was my plan to focus exclusively on trade publishing. But as I looked around the blogosphere/Twitterverse, it didn’t take long to realize that the most enthusiastic and informed discussions about B2B communications involved not publishing, but marketing.

For me, a journalist, this came as a jolt.

In more than 20 years as a B2B editor, I worked frequently with both public relations and marketing people. Though I liked and respected most of them, the alliance was always uneasy. Our goals were fundamentally different. To put it hyperbolically, I was looking for truth, they were looking for sales.

As I familiarized myself with B2B marketing blogs, though, I realized that while these goals may never fully align, in the social-media era they are coming closer together. For me, no one better epitomizes this trend than Mark Schaefer.

The reasons why might not be immediately obvious. Though he majored in journalism in college, he has built his career around marketing, and that remains his focus. But on Twitter and his blog he ranges far more widely than what we usually think of as marketing.

Even when he wasn’t yet the expert on social media that he is now (see his excellent primer, The Tao of Twitter, for example), his dispassionate looks at new-media platorms and personalities were both entertaining and informative. He sees his subjects with a wonderfully journalistic eye.

I don’t buy everything he says—such as his position on ghost-written blogs—but I always admire the way he argues his case and the respectful and constructive way he engages those who disagree with him. Journalists and marketers alike have much to learn from him.

For that reason, I’m including a profile of him my forthcoming ebook, the New-Media Survival Guide: For Journalists and Other Print-Era Refugees.  In preparing the profile, I recently conducted the following email interview with him. I offer it here with his permission.

What’s the most important message you have for people regarding social media?

Use your head. For a company, it should not be about “the conversation” or the hype. At the end of the day, it’s about the money, about creating shareholder value, as all marketing and customer efforts should be. Don’t act on an emotion of fear of being left behind. Learn enough about this new channel to ask the hard questions and integrate with your strategy as appropriate. Of course there are many uses and strategies for the social web, but at least with the businesses I work with, that is the biggest piece of advice I can give them.

What was the key pivot point, the moment of revelation for you, in your understanding of social media?

I was trying to figure out Twitter several years ago and noticed a trending topic of “new name for swine flu.” When I clicked, I saw a stream of hilarious ideas from around the world like “hamthrax and “the aporkalypse.” It was funny, but I also realized I was witnessing a real-time, global brain-storming session. Wow. That could not have happened just a few years ago. Think of the implications!

What’s the key issue motivating you now, the thing you most want to do or change?

I am in a fortunate position where I have had a foot in both marketing worlds, traditional and digital. Through my classes (I teach at Rutgers) and speeches, I help people connect the dots and that is very rewarding.

You were a journalism major. After graduation, did you go into journalism first, or directly into marketing? Why did you end up in marketing?

Journalism is my first love but I was increasingly interested in business. So I got into PR for awhile and then migrated to sales and then marketing. Marketing is the front line of value-creation. I love that!

In the minds of most people, journalism and marketing were once diametrically opposed. Has that changed in the social media era?

That is a complicated question, and an excellent one! Ultimately, journalism is the quest for truth. Marketing is the quest for “my truth” or a product’s “truth” that will resonate with consumers. For both areas, content is power on the social web and to the extent we can create it and move it virally through a network, we will be successful. So both fields are absolutely in the content creation business these days. Although the goals are still not the same, I think they are getting closer because for a brand to have integrity and be successful, it can’t be spinning the truth around any more. There are a million watchdogs out there now and they can all expose you. The deer have guns.

I was working with some marketers for a hotel chain and we were discussing negative hotel reviews they had received on a consumer website. “We don’t mind them,” they told me. “It makes us more real.” Interesting. Truth as a marketing strategy.

What do you think of the prospects for young journalists today? Will new media lead to brighter or bleaker career options?

I often speak at universities and journalism schools and I am struck that almost everywhere, enrollment is up!

Where are these folks getting jobs? New media. The hunger for content is nearly insatiable. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but my journalism education was the best possible preparation for new-media marketing.

I’m relieved to say that my questions were intelligent enough to prompt some further thoughts from Mark. You can find them—and much else of value—on his blog, {grow}.

Related posts:

1. Does Danger Lurk in the Language of Social Media?
2. B2B Blog Posts of the Week
3. Ethics and Content Marketing: Ex-BW Writers Weigh In

You might object to the ethical aspects of combining editing with marketing or sales, or to the excessive workload. I don’t. It’s what entrepreneurial journalism requires. But what I do object to is this—AOL expects its editors to be entrepreneurial without actually being entrepreneurs.

As Howard Owens puts it, the problem AOL editors face isn’t the workload, but the payoff. As salaried employees, their only incentive to work as hard as AOL expects is the chance to keep their jobs. “They are expected to do all of the things they would have to do if they owned their own web sites, but merely in service of building wealth for AOL shareholders.”

I suspect this will be an ever-larger issue for trade publishers trying transition into the new-media era. Most trade editors I know already complain about their steadily increasing digital workload. To some extent, their complaints are based on distrust of digital media. But they’ve correctly identified the problem: Like AOL Patch, as Ed Pilolla has noted, their employers want them to behave as if they are working for a startup without any of the upside rewards.

I’m not sure traditional publishing businesses have any choice, though. Digital revenue has not increased to the point where they can afford to pay their editors more, let alone cut them in on growth potential that may not exist.

The future of online trade journalism may not lie with large independent publishers. For B2B journalists, the most promising options appear to be either small-scale startups where they share both the risks and rewards, or content marketing groups within those companies formerly known as advertisers.

Though I hope they can, trade publishers may not be able to find a way out of this dilemma. But there is at least one positive step they can take: vow not to misuse the concept of entrepreneurial editors.

Related posts:

1. A Lesson from the Digital Productivity Terrorists
2. Rethinking the Article as the Basic Unit of Journalism
3. It’s Time to Embrace Editorial as a Profit Center

They’ve got it wrong, of course. But we should not be too quick to dismiss their reactions. They may be on to something. If the language of new media is so prone to misinterpretation, is it not also dangerously vulnerable to manipulation?

That was the lesson I took from Gene Weingarten’s criticism last month of the new-media concept of personal branding. When the Washington Post columnist wrote that branding is ruining journalism, he set off a barrage of rejoinders from personal-branding advocates, most notably and prolifically Steve Buttry.

Replying to a journalism student who had written to ask how he had built his personal brand, Weingarten offered a scathing but eloquently funny response:

“The best way to build a brand is to take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot. Then, apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question. You want a nice, meaty sizzle.”

As Buttry points out, it’s clear that Weingarten in fact has no objection to the concept represented by the phrase “personal brand.” What he objects to, rather, is its intimation of commercialism, that it’s turning individuals into “Cheez Doodles.” As he put it, “We are slowly redefining our craft so it is no longer a calling but a commodity. From this execrable marketing trend arises the term you ask me about: ‘branding.’”

Ironically, the idea behind personal branding is just the opposite: taking a depersonalized commodity—the average byline, say—and showing the human face behind it.  It is, really, a revolutionary concept. A word like reputation just won’t do to describe it. As Buttry says in a subsequent post on new-media buzzwords, “Life is always changing, and journalism is certainly changing swiftly. Why should we use inadequate and inaccurate old words and phrases to describe the changes?”

But while I’m firmly on Buttry’s side in this debate, I worry nonetheless about the vulnerable duality of much new-media vocabulary. There is, I suspect, a troubling nub of validity in Weingarten’s reaction to it that should sound a note of caution for all of us new-media enthusiasts.

If on the one hand social media has co-opted the language of corporations and humanized it, there is an equal likelihood that corporations will try to do the same to the language of new media. In the blink of an eye the emphasis in the phrase personal branding can shift from humanizing a brand to branding a human.

Similarly, I worry about a phrase like content marketing. When Joe Pulizzi talks about it, I’m ready to leap onto the barricades with him and raise the banner for personalizing and equalizing the relationship with customers through great editorial. But how many corporations will see it only as another tool for trapping yet more leads into the ever-ravenous sales funnel?

If a writer as sensitive to the subtleties of words as Weingarten can mistake the meaning of personal branding, the risk that ruder corporate ears will do the same is high. Will the social media revolution be co-opted? I don’t think so. But its benefits will be slow in coming if its language remains ambiguous.  Proponents of new media probably can’t change that language, but they can do the next best thing: constantly and consistently define its key terms.

Related posts:

1. Managing Your Career in the Social Media Era: Sources
2. Be Yourself. Just Not Your Real Self: Scripps’ Muddled Social Media Policy
3. Nine Keys to a Robust Editorial Career in Social Media

Having worked for many years with editorial boards, I share his appreciation for them. But while I second his advice, I do so with a few words of caution. Advisory boards only work well when you put sufficient energy and thought into forming and maintaining them. So before you leap in, consider the following six tips for ensuring their effectiveness.

1. Ask yourself if you really need or want a formal board. An advisory board is most useful when you cover a fairly narrow range of technical or complex issues. If your topics are too diverse, a small group of niche experts won’t help much of the time. You should also make sure you have the time and resources to maintain a formal editorial board. If you do it right, it’s a lot of work. Many advisory boards wither on the vine. Don’t let it happen to you.

2. Know your board members. Resist inviting people onto a formal board until you’ve worked with them enough to be certain that they are genuine experts and that they truly want to help. If you keep your board small—Pulizzi wisely suggests limiting it to six members—you’ll want to make sure every one of those members is an active, insightful contributor.

3. Beware editorial board disenchantment. Even when editorial board members start out as enthusiastic participants, they may well start to lose interest or become too busy to offer meaningful help.  When that happens, you have to be ruthless (in a nice way, of course) and ask them to step down. Unless your board is just for show, you should expect every member to be an active participant. One way to deal with this problem is to make appointments to the board for a clearly stated period of time, such as a year. If a board member doesn’t work out, you simply don’t renew the appointment.

4. Be conscious of potential conflicts of interest. Even the most objective board members will have blind spots, particularly when their business interests are involved. Keep that in mind when you ask their advice, and avoid putting them on the spot. Concern about conflicts of interest goes both ways, of course. Board members will want to make sure your own business interests won’t compromise them. This is not a problem for most independent publishers, but for content marketers, the potential for editorial bias is much higher. Assure your board members that you want them to counteract your bias, not to provide a cover for it.

5. Think about compensation. Though Pulizzi didn’t mention this sensitive topic, it’s bound to come up sooner or later. I don’t recommend honoraria or other payment for services—it complicates and limits your relationship with your board members.  But there are benefits you can and should offer. In the trade magazine world, for instance, publishers give board members perks like VIP passes to conferences they sponsor and free copies of special publications. At the very least, send your board members an annual gift.

6. Don’t ask for too much. It may be slightly optimistic to suggest, as Pulizzi does with Independence-Day spirit, that an “advisory board will completely revolutionize your content marketing.” That is an unrealistic expectation for most boards. You can avoid disappointment by defining in advance what goals you have for your board and sharing them with board members. When it comes time to measure the results, you’ll likely be pleased.

Though my passion for them falls slightly short of Pulizzi’s revolutionary fervor, I think we would agree on this: well-managed editorial advisory boards can make the difference between good publications and great ones.

Related posts:

1. Content Marketers: Think “Editorial”
2. Editorial Walls: The Good, the Bad, and the Virtual
3. An Editorial Wall for Content Marketing?

He’s right, but I prefer stronger phrasing. If the people who hold the pursestrings are to pay attention, we need to call editorial what it is: a profit center.

As any editor who’s somehow crept into the upper echelons of B2B publication management will know, the language of accounting and spreadsheets rules most boardroom discussions. Sales is a profit center, editorial is a cost center. Too many executives accept this distinction as the smart way to protect their business. In fact, it is a recipe for publishing’s demise.

What treating editorial as a cost center fails to recognize is that money is not the only form of currency. Commercial, for-profit publishing is really a process of generating one form of currency—attention—and converting it into another—money—via advertising or subscriptions.

Editorial that generates attention, therefore, generates profits. At the first part of this equation—generating attention—publishers are pretty good. At the second, however—converting it into money—they increasingly suck.

The old “profit centers,” advertising sales and subscriptions, aren’t very good at the conversion process anymore. But rather than looking for new profit centers, new ways to convert that attention into cash, all too many publishers prefer instead to decimate the only profit center they really need—editorial.

Is it any accident that as traditional trade publishing declines, content marketing is on the rise? Content marketers—in many cases, former advertisers—understand what traditional publishers have too often forgotten: editorial generates currency. Have you wondered why advertisers have been devoting more of their budget to content marketing and less to traditional advertising? It’s not because they value editorial less than publishers do, but because they value it more.

Unfortunately, editors tend to abet rather than resist their characterization as cost generators. Though they may wince to hear themselves described as expenses, they find the concept of commercial profit tricky. They love it when their sales force sells editorial in general; they hate it when they sell editorial in particular. It’s time for them to throw their reluctance aside and, as the key profit generators, get more involved in the business of publishing.

It’s an accurate and inspirational thing to say that our editorial departments should be treated as engines of success. But until editors and their bosses accept their role as profit makers, those engines will be stuck in reverse.

Related posts:

1. The Decline of the Single Editorial Voice
2. Editorial Walls: The Good, the Bad, and the Virtual
3. New Editorial Rules Nod to Content Marketing

The problem is this: To make great content, you sometimes have to be a wee bit obnoxious.

If you’ve worked much with journalists and editors, you understand. The trait is not genetic, but occupational. They are as nice as anyone else, but if they do their jobs right, they will often rub people the wrong way. In my days overseeing a large editorial group for a B2B publisher, my counterpart in sales was fond of telling me that advertisers found our editors arrogant. They weren’t, and he knew it. But they were scrupulously insistent on getting their facts right, being open to all points of view, and serving the readers.  This sometimes made them look like jerks. It’s a perception that most editors learn to accept as the price of doing their jobs well.

Within a publishing company, there is high tolerance for irksome editors. But in a content-marketing setting, staff and stakeholders new to the publishing ethos may be less understanding.

Don’t let that stop you. If you want to produce great content, you must risk irritating people in one or more of the following three ways.

1. Care about details. In my experience, the most annoying of all editorial specialists are proofreaders. Why? Because they care deeply about details. Their role is to find mistakes and point them out to you.

This doesn’t make them many friends, and leaves them vulnerable to ax-wielding executives who declare, as one has in my presence, that there’s no value in paying someone to rearrange commas.

But commas and other details do matter. Editorial details are to content as fit and finish are to automobiles: they account for the difference between a functional product and a great one, and between humdrum and robust sales.  If you don’t believe me, ask Zappos.com. As BoingBoing reports, by having user reviews on its site proofread, Zappos has demonstrably increased its revenues.

Proofreaders as a dedicated job function are well-nigh extinct, but the activity is just as important as ever. And their attention to detail matters not just at the end, when you’re proofing copy, but from the very beginning of the process. If you don’t worry about details when you’re doing the research and writing, no amount of proofreading will fix the resulting problem.

2. Keep asking questions. How do you get all those details right? By asking questions. Or more specifically, by asking annoying questions. The five W’s are just the beginning. You have to ask questions that may make you look skeptical or hostile. And you have to keep asking questions after everyone else is sick of the topic.

What’s more, the questions should not be limited to the people interviewed for stories. Everyone involved should be asking questions like why you’re covering this event and not that one, or how this story fits your mission, or what outcome or action you’re looking for, or one or more of Bob Steele’s 10 ethical questions.

If your goal is just to generate copy, you’ll never need to ask any irritating questions. But if you want to bring your reader as close as you can to an accurate and complete understanding of the topic, your questions will sometimes have to be probing and even disruptive.

3. Insist on finishing. As with any other product, obsessing over details and searching for and correcting flaws won’t do any good if you never ship. The practiced editor’s equally annoying solution here is a firm insistence on meeting deadlines.

As the deadline looms, people will inevitably beg for an extra hour to review copy, check a fact, or polish their phrasing. You must disappoint them. Others will want to get home in time for supper. You must resolutely point them to the vending machine down the hall.

Enforcing deadlines will not make you popular. But increasingly in the social media era, timely publication is a critical component of great content.

In listing these three editorial imperatives my point isn’t that deliberately unfriendly behavior is good for content. That’s not a strategy for long-term editorial success. Rather, it’s this: if you aren’t willing to ruffle some feathers now and then, your content will never soar.

Related posts:

1. The Great Ghost-Blogging Debate
2. Content Marketers: Think “Editorial”
3. Journalists, Content Marketing, and Tough Questions

I was reminded of how tricky this balance can be last Friday when I logged onto my RSS reader. There I learned about a new experiment with monetization being tried by one of my favorite bloggers, Mark Schaefer. As I’ll explain in a moment, the way I learned about it was vaguely, if misleadingly, disappointing.

As he says in his post, Schaefer’s monetization experiment involves a couple of small but notable changes. Fed up with many shady web sites stealing his copy and, presumably, making money on it, he wants to make his own direct money from the site. For that reason, he’s now including “a modest amount” of advertising in his sidebar. In addition, he’s vowed to share any revenue from the site with four frequent guest bloggers.

To my mind, neither of these changes has any effect on the social aspects of his blog. There is one unmentioned change, though, which does: As I discovered last Friday, his RSS feeds are now short summaries instead of the full text of each post.

For those many people to whom RSS is still a mystery, the change is meaningless (if you’re one of these people and are curious, you can read about it on Wikipedia).

But for anyone who reads many blogs each day, as I do, a good RSS reader is essential, and a full-text feed of each post is vastly more efficient than a summary. With the full text in my reader, I can immediately read the entire story. I’ll often click through to the full blog if I want to make or see comments or view the original layout and graphics. But clicking through is optional.

When I have only a sentence or two from a post in my reader, however, I have to decide whether to click through to read the full story on the blog. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t—but it takes a few seconds to make the choice. For one blog, it’s a minor inconvenience; for many, it would be a disaster.

The logic behind using summary feeds is clear, if debatable. It requires readers to visit your site (and see the ads) and makes it harder for disreputable site owners to scrape your site’s content onto theirs. But for dedicated readers like me, it feels, well, ungenerous.

My first thought was that Schaefer’s switch to summary feeds was part of his monetization plan. But when I asked him about it over Twitter, he expressed surprise at the change and emphasized that it was not intentional. I’m glad to know that (although several days later, the feed is still partial-text only).

You only have to read the extensive comments on his post and his replies to see how complex monetization of social media can be, and how sensitive Schaefer is to its perils. His concern is not new. In a blog post almost exactly a year ago, “The End of the Trust Agent,” Schaefer noted how Chris Brogan had shifted his social-media approach from giving content away to taking making money from it:

Around the time of his book release last year, Chris flipped this philosophy upside down and took steps to aggressively monetize his audience.  He explained this change by saying that he had been giving stuff away for a long time and that it was time to make money.

Although Brogan thought otherwise, Schaefer’s post struck me as a thoughtful analysis rather than an attack. (A year later, though, he seems to have given up on Brogan.)

As Schaefer noted last year, the more the emphasis is on business, the harder it is to maintain the social nature of social media. Each of us has to come up with the right balance and hope that it works for both us and our followers. As Schaefer himself says, he’s experimenting with that balance now. I hope his results—or my pleas—will persuade him to err on the side of sociability and resume full RSS feeds.

UPDATE: Happily, the full-text feeds have been restored. Thank you Mr. Schaefer!

Related posts:

1. Social Media and the Decline of Editing
2. Nine Keys to a Robust Editorial Career in Social Media
3. Managing Your Career in the Social Media Era: Sources

That was the implicit question in a plaintive tweet last week from Bob Scheier: After a look at HubSpot’s Writers Network, he asked: “Why are rates so low ($50/blog post)? Was hoping to eat in 2011.”

The skeptical might reply that HubSpot’s network is too new to be representative, that the writers set their own rates (some much higher than $50), and that those with established clients probably earn much more.  But the overall effect of such outlets, in which writers bid against one another, is undeniably to lower writing fees.

We may not like it, but behind this trend is the force of economic law. In a time when everyone is becoming a journalist, Neil Thackray says, “that must mean there is an oversupply of content. And that means the price falls.  Try writing for Demand Media and you will quickly learn the harsh economics of content oversupply.”

On its face, this trend would appear to be great news for marketers. As Josh Gordon pointed out last week, one of the primary attractions of social media is its low cost. Cheap content fits right into that equation. The only problem is this: Cheap content is crappy content.

Gordon puts it this way: “As anyone reading this blog should know by now, good content is not cheap and a social media program is only as good as its content.” As he points out, though, many marketers, at least for now, “see this differently.” It’s no wonder, he says, that they also think social media is one of their least effective marketing tools.

Fortunately, every yin has its yang. While an abundance of content creators leads to oversupply, the scarcity of attention among overwhelmed audiences increases the value of good content. As Paul Conley has argued, the result is an “excellence craze”:

“In B2B, where I make my living, it seems like every company in every tiny niche of every industry has become a content creator. There are a thousand voices competing for very small audiences. . . . The only way I can ensure that my voice is heard is if my content is fantastic.”

This is alien thinking for traditional B2B content producers, notes Conley: “Both trade publishers and custom publishers have seldom felt the need to be great. In a market with only three or four voices, only a crazy person would spend the money to become great.”  But in a market oversaturated with content, spending money for content that stands out from the rest is not just sane, but essential to success.

At the moment, low-cost commodity content is attracting all the attention. But its very prevalence  should ensure that well-written and thoughtful content with a unique point of view will be valued at its true worth.

Related posts:

1. Damnation and Creation: Is Demand Media Devaluing Content?
2. 5 Keys to Effective B2B Content
3. Journalists, Content Marketing, and Tough Questions

Not all journalists can claim that talent, but the best can, and it’s what makes journalism shine. But are B2B brands ready for tough questions?  As I’ve worried before, maybe not. But if that’s the case, they aren’t ready for marketing in the social media world either.

By tough, I don’t mean adversarial or unfriendly. Rather, I mean any relevant question that might make someone uncomfortable, whether the person posing the question, the person answering it, or both.  Asking tough questions is the journalistic equivalent of due diligence in business. Both are critical to getting the facts right and avoiding disaster.

I’m not suggesting that content marketers undertake investigative reporting. But they can benefit from an ability to know when the easy answer is not the right answer, and when they need to probe more deeply to, in the words of Jesse Noyes, “create content that will challenge long-held assumptions.” The trick, of course, is to challenge your brand and your audience in a positive and constructive way—as good journalists have learned to do.

In the old days of mass media and mass marketing, tough questions could be avoided. But markets are now conversations among equals. As companies like Nestle and Dell have learned, educated buyers empowered by social media will ask tough questions. Educated content marketers will answer them. Better yet, they’ll ask themselves those questions before anyone else does, and share the answers. It’s a role good journalists are made for.

A word of caution to marketers, though: as I’ve suggested, not all journalists can pass the toughness test. So before you hire a journalist to ask tough questions, make sure he or she answers yours first.

Related posts:

1. Journalists as Buzzword Killers
2. This Might Be Big: IDG Enters Content Marketing
3. Ethics and Content Marketing: Ex-BW Writers Weigh In