On the most recent episode of the Nuxeo Content Journey’s podcast, we welcomed Robert Rose, the Chief Strategy Advisor at the Content Marketing Institute, and self-proclaimed “Chief Troublemaker” for The Content Advisory group. I’ve known Robert for several years and had the pleasure of seeing him speak on many occasions on various aspects of Content Marketing. Robert is a great conversationalist with a passion for content across the enterprise.
Here’s a little taste of our discussion:
Alan:
We both use the word “content” a lot, but what does it mean to you when speaking about it in a business context?
Robert:
Historically it’s one of those things that you say the word so many times that it loses its meaning in many ways. But content ultimately is about communication, and it can be anything we use to communicate, from spoken word to written to visual imagery; basically, anything that we use to communicate what we are doing. From a business perspective, that means how are we communicating to the constituencies that we need to communicate value to.
So that can be marketing, public relations, corporate communications, internal communications, sales, technical documentation, and more.
But content ended up being everybody’s job and nobody’s strategy. Nobody really harnessed the idea of using all that communication from a business perspective. Technology has lead to many new ways and channels to communicate, so getting our arms around that as a business has become an important part of what we do. Getting our arms around the cost, the consistency, the scalability, and the measurability of that is a really important thing.
And I would argue as important as accounting, as important as legal, as important as sales, as important as any other strategic function that we put into the business.
Alan:
I’d like to address something that’s dear to both of our hearts. We both like to describe ourselves as storytellers. So just how important is it that organizations learn to use their content to tell the right stories?
Robert:
It’s the most important thing that a company can do these days. In fact, one of the things that sometimes gets me into a little bit of trouble is that I will often offer the idea to a CMO that figuring out the brand’s story (as opposed to the brand story) is more important than figuring out some of the classic brand attributes.
In many cases where you see the brand’s story failing, it’s because the storytelling aspect is so far down the line. You often find the order of priority is the brand, the product, and then the stories we want to tell around that. I would suggest it should be exactly the opposite, because the storytelling is about why people will care, and everything should follow from that. In today’s world where everything else is commoditized, the only thing we are going to be able to do that differentiates us is to tell a better story and make someone care more deeply.
I want to again thank Robert for his time, and the engaging and entertaining discussion. You can join us for the full conversation on The Content Journey podcast, now available on your favorite podcast service, and at nuxeo.com/podcasts.