The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama, features a prominent character that’s a blogger/content marketer. Dev Patel, the actor most famous for his breakout role in Danny Boyle’s Academy Award winning film Slumdog Millionaire, plays the man behind the keyboard and in control of The Newsroom’s content needs. While reading this, your first thought is probably: What? That’s no big deal. Didn’t Carrie Bradshaw’s blog about a Madison Avenue shopping spree in Sex and the City (1998-2004).
Yeah, yeah, yeah…but here’s the difference:
1. From fledgling start-ups to medium sized businesses (and everything in between and beyond), content and content marketing is so vital to the digital age that Content Characters, for a lack of a better name, are showing up on high-profile and artistically minded TV shows. Of course, Aaron Sorkin also wrote and toolbarred the screenplay for The Social Network, so the guy knows a thing or two about how the online universe operates.
2. It’s believed that 60% of businesses are expected to increase their content budget over the next year. A recent study by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs says that nine out of 10 organizations now market with content – regardless of company size or industry.
3. Whether your business is just getting its feet wet in the world of content creation, or it has a blog but wants to fire up the base and expand (with a presidential election comes political metaphors), you need to decide if you’re going to handle your content needs in-house, like The Newsroom, or hire a blogger.
Advertainment:
Part advertisement, part entertainment, that’s the ideal DNA makeup of a blog. How you go about creating that DNA is up to the business and the blogger. Testimonials, case studies, product reviews, stories, insights, how to’s, there’s a zillion different ways to create and splice the DNA.
For Example:
A creative approach to blogging might look something like this: A dental blog shares food recipes on Wednesday, has a guest writer on Thursday (humor is the motif, as well as real life Little Shop of Horrors style dental tales), and devotes Monday’s post to dental hygiene, tips, etc. In other words, the company and its hired blogger are a think tank, and the idea is to come up with something NEW; don’t even think about using tired and limp phrases like “Game Changer” or “Outside the Box.”
After a company and a blogger agree on a marketing style, the secret to content success is consistency. This isn’t a slow and steady wins the race kind of gig; blogs needs to be reset with new content often and frequently. The links and pathways on the internet are just like the neural pathways in the mind. They need to be strengthened and reinforced.
Let’s put it another way. When you’re looking for that dental company’s mac and cheese blog on Wednesday, they better have a recipe posted because you’ve come to expect it. Internet marketing has a fancy psychological term to describe this process. They call it… Mindshare.
Damon H is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.
