Patricia MacDonald has an excellent rumination building on posts in the first few weeks of this year from Mel Exon, Andy Whitlock, Toby Barnes (and Alexis Madrigal's piece on The Year the Stream Crested) that thematically all talked about the need to take a step back from the never ending streams of content that seem to continuously wash over us. I have a couple of immediate thoughts to add.
When I wrote about that Madrigal piece I wrote about appreciating the desire for a sense of closure, edges, and structure. If I'm honest, what worries me about the whole Content Marketing thing is that there will be too much focus on content in the context of simplistic, one dimensional marketing goals and not enough, as Ian Fitzpatrick rightly says, on content as something that can facilitate great customer experiences.
There's a lot of crap out there. There will be a lot more crap out there. In fact I don't think we can even appreciate now just how much more crap there will be out there. But there will also be brilliance. And perhaps it is (as Clay Shirky said long ago), less about information overload and more about filter failure (hello Fraggl). We all needs rocks to stand on in the stream. We just have to create bigger and better ones.
So has the revolution really paused, as Pats suggests? It certainly feels like we've moved into a different phase. And yes, one where the real hard work begins. For me, that means a focus on the things that rarely get talked about yet will drive the real change. Stuff like organisational design, resourcing, processes, behaviours and culture.
To bastardise that Socrates quote in the post below, it feels like we've been fighting the old for a long time. And now it really is time to build the new.
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