Have you ever thought about what gets valued more between content and actions?
In many marketing blogs there’s been so much great discussion about how what content produce affects people’s perceptions of you and your personal brand. From blogs to micro-messaging to this recent revival and shift to life-streaming by some big names like Steve Rubel.
What is it about content that makes it so compelling? And important for our perception?
It goes against that one so common phrase we all heard while growing up, “Actions speak louder than words”.
Maybe I’ve missed it, but when is the last time social media experts have dove in to how to best take action to help your brand?
Epiphany: Good content creates action.
Creating good content does speak volumes, because online we since we can all “make stuff”, making great stuff is appreciated and it stands out. Not only that, what makes content so fulfilling online is the power that we as information consumers now have over content.
Our ability to share content is what makes it so important, and powerful. Our ability to share content, and I don’t think it goes much deeper than this, be them stories, experiences, or the opinions and ideas of others, is what makes content so powerful.
Through the sharing of content we can inform, create ideas, create action, or we can change beliefs and behaviours. We do all this coupled with the intrinsic benefit experienced through sharing (our sharing with our readers, and their sharing with their friends and so on).
From this perspective we can see that the content you create, the blog posts or comments you write, contribute only a small amount to things like your brand, and that the bigger truth of it is that you are represented by your impact on other people.
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2 replies on “Speak Loudly”
“Epiphany: Good content creates action.” I respectfully disagree. Good content creates excellent self-promotion that could land you clients, speaking gigs, a book deal, etc. Good self promoters aren't necessarily good at helping others. It's one thing to propose a solution to yourself (you don't argue with yourself), it takes a completely different skill to work with vendors and client teams in order to implement a solution for a client.
I don't think you're actually disagreeing with me there Jason. Landing speaking gigs and getting clients could be called self promotion sure, but it's all still action as the result of content. And normal social media actions, or any for that matter, are never required to be helpful, they _could_ technically all come from the goal of self promotion.You're right though, that proposing solutions and executing on them or negotiating with partners are different skill sets. But proposing, and negotiating are still modes of communication requiring content. Though that's a good closed system example of the idea I'm exploring.