Monica Bussolati, whose firm offers services to help improve both content strategy and effectiveness in content marketing, recently posted a piece about association editorial processes. In it, she argues that they should look a lot like content marketing, with:
- Active promotion of content assets
- Publisher engagement, responding to comments and questions
- A balance between content creation and social media activity
- A willingness to crowdsource and embed, and
- Social media tools used to broaden the mix of experts and resources
In her post, Bussolati includes a useful table offering a dozen ways in which the advent and growth of social media have changed content development. Her "then" and "now" comparisons try to make the shift clear using a set of real-world editorial examples.
Over the last several years, "publishing" and "content marketing" have blended, perhaps most visibly in the business-to-business and association publishing markets. Evident for a while, this trend poses challenges to the traditional model used to create, maintain and disseminate content.
The separation of "church" and "state" is an early example. Reframing a publisher's perspective from "product" to "service" is another. Both are hurdles to consider and overcome if we want to truly serve communities.
