By Chris Battle
In this month’s PRWeek, the oddly named monthly magazine, an article examines why “marketers struggle to gain consumer trust and interest with branded content.” First, let me offer a shout-out to the new monthly format of the magazine (if not the now-dated name). Having been a reader of both versions, when PRWeek was actually a weekly, the stories often seemed rushed and obligatory rather than thoughtful and analytical. The new version of the magazine – perhaps because the writers have more time to develop their stories – is a far more insightful, digging into tactics and strategies rather than merely publishing the latest news releases from PR firms touting a new business win.
That said, I do think that the editors were asking the wrong questions in this story. The author quotes a Forrester Research analyst as concluding that corporate blogs do not “resonate with consumers,” and then asks whether it’s even worth the time and expense of corporate brands to develop their own content through venues such as blogs. (In this sense, the term corporate can refer to private sector-companies as well as the kind of corporately operated non-profit organizations, such as trade associations, that dot the landscape of Washington, D.C.)
Having asked whether blogs are a smart return on investment, the evidence presented in the article seems to conclude that “the jury is still out,” as one interviewee asserts, “if you’re trying to reach mass mainstream consumers.”
There’s your problem. If corporate chief marketing officers really think that their company blogs, no matter how gargantuan and successful the brands themselves, are going to compete with independent mainstream content sites … well, then they’ve set themselves up for failure. It’s the wrong measure of success.
That doesn’t mean that branded content – whether via blogs, video or whatever – is a poor return on investment. If comparisons of branded audience readerships to mainstream media readerships were the accepted metric of success for corporate communications throughout history, then you could conclude that corporate communications in general has been a failure throughout history. It hasn’t.
Corporate brands want to communicate directly with their consumers, with the public, and new media tools offer the capability to reach such audiences in a way never before possible. That said, corporations – other than media corporations – are not the mainstream media. They have not been embraced by American culture, over the course of centuries, as the accepted vehicle of independent thought and judgment. (Not that the media always live up to this lofty standard.) Thomas Jefferson did not say: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without corporations, or corporations without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” It was newspapers that he heralded as more important to democracy that government itself.
This is why, despite all the handwringing taking place among my old colleagues in the mainstream media, the world of professional journalism will never go away. What is changing, though, is the near monopoly on publishing that the media previously held. Today, independent writers are publishing excellent content in blogs that cover every topic of society, challenging the mainstream media’s dominance in this arena. Most of the blogs, even the successful ones, cannot claim the kind of readership that, say, the Wall Street Journal claims. The good blogs, though, are producing valuable content and building respectable audiences. In the aggregate, these many and diverse blogs are pulling readers away from traditional media outlets in record numbers. And the corporate world would be foolish to ignore this trend and not take advantage of it.
These brands, however, must go in with realistic expectations. They are not going to generate readership levels to compete directly with mass media outlets. Not generally anyway. (There are always exceptions to the rule.) Instead, corporate brands should angle to deliver their content to consumers who are looking for additional information, looking for new facts that they suspect the mainstream media isn’t providing. They should look to deliver content about information the mainstream media isn’t providing at all. They should look to blogs and other vehicles of self-publishing to provide this information to readers who do come to their sites directly, but they should also use these vehicles to pro-actively distribute their content on other sites throughout the Internet that influence public perception about their corporation or product or industry.
But they shouldn’t look to branded blogs as competing sources of news for the general public. That should not be the purpose of a corporate blog.
The PRWeek story notes that Johnson & Johnson has created a YouTube channel boasting more than 1,000 subscribers. “While that figure is relatively impressive, it is still far from the millions of viewers that morning programs or network news shows reach.”
Yes, yes it is. And it always will be. But that is irrelevant.
