Page 13 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

CHAPTER ONE

The Ignition Switch

“Change before you have to.”
– Jack Welch

Life used to be so straightforward for marketers.

Even 20 years ago, our options were limited. Advertise on TV, radio or print.
Maybe throw in some billboards, PR, and trade shows for good measure. Those
were the marketing channels in a nutshell. That’s where marketers maneuvered,
every week, every month, and every annual budget cycle … with few
exceptions.

Today, the marketing platform options are changing by the day … and so are
the rules of engagement! Let me explain what I mean.

Let’s take a quick examination of the evolution of just one popular social
media platform, Twitter. Twitter was founded in 2006. Within a few months, it
became a beloved platform for communication in short bursts of 140 characters.
But very rapidly, Twitter transformed dramatically—not necessarily because of
any grand strategic business plan, but because businesses and faithful fans
discovered so many remarkable and useful new ways to use it.

The ubiquitous hashtag was first used at a tech conference in 2007. Slowly
it caught on and is now the preferred method of promoting, discovering,
and organizing content. Twitter (the company) had nothing to do with this
transformational innovation.
Many marketers consider Twitter the greatest source of real-time research
ever created. Some businesses are using advanced search strategies so
effectively to grow their businesses that it has replaced advertising.
Twitter chats, another “user” invention, have become big business. A cult
of self-made Twitter chat stars are making a decent income from sponsored
chats.
Twitter has become the de facto “second screen” for TV viewing,