By Tom Chalmers
My publishing company works with a large number of corporate contributors, and various conversations have developed around additional ways content can be used for marketing that generates a tangible return on investment (ROI). As content today is commonly a business's most powerful asset, this has become a core area of opportunity for us. It's a part of our business that is evolving and growing rapidly.
The digital revolution has opened up marketing for everyone. It's made it possible to spread information globally at the click of a button. The internet has created a freeway with never-ending lanes. And as a result, literally billions of people are trying to drive down it as quickly as possible.
We’ve seen the world changing entrances of Myspace, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and so many others, with no doubt more to come. As a result, marketers at companies everywhere have jumped on the latest trend and fired content into it as quickly as their fingers can hit "send."
Bringing Quality Content to the Forefront of Social
Then some people saw an opportunity for not only outer-connectivity, connecting with the outside world through these new avenues, but also linking up the systems internally. And they developed tools such as Hootsuite, Sendible, TweetDeck etc. to feed across the various platforms, offering a wonderful union of speed with efficiency. Suddenly it became possible to send the details of your breakfast to potentially millions with the click of a single button.
But as all marketers have been in the speed game, many may have overlooked a key ingredient for marketing success: the content itself. Aided by the huge recent growth in AI/machine learning, I think this will be the next phase in successful digital marketing.
After the frenzy of quantity, curation is becoming the second most important ‘C’ in digital marketing. The challenge with content curation is that it sounds manual and labor-intensive. And everyone knows the true success in the digital space comes with automation. However, fueled by the best technical minds and seemingly complex algorithms, our machines are now learning.
Machine learning isn’t as new as you might think. Amazon sending you details of products you may like based on previous purchases is a classic example of machine learning. It has been doing it for many years. You may think novels would be impossible to process in any meaningful way, but companies such as Trajectory have software that can pull out recurring themes and other metrics.
Automating Content Curation
Say someone on your team has written a great article or chapter for a publication. A marketer's first thought would likely be to post it online and feed through their various platforms. You probably wouldn’t ask them to re-write the post in various forms so it could be used as an article on LinkedIn, an image for Instagram, a snippet for Twitter, etc. Well, we are now approaching a time when software will be able to do that for you.
This was something the marketing departments of several large corporate customers of one of my companies recently asked me to look into. And after speaking to our technology partners, I learned that the process has now become reasonably straightforward. Once the patterns are established for what works best on each platform, this can be programmed to work like a shape-cutter on the content run through the software. In fact, some tools are now appearing on the market, such as Washington Post's Arc Publishing, its content management software, which is being licensed by a number of U.S. publishers, with many more expected to follow.
So, after the opening global reach and the subsequent rush, as is so often the case, the focus returns to quality. Marketers are now central to businesses as they hold content, the most valuable IP asset in today’s digital world. Success won’t come from pinging it out into the night. It will come from curating that content to maximize its use and value of that asset. And now the software is being developed to help automate that process. Suddenly it is no longer about how many vehicles you have on the digital freeway, but rather using one to get to all the places you need to go.
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Tom Chalmers is the founder and Managing Director of seven publishing and publishing-related companies (including the Legend Times Group).