Page 72 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

The awesome power to ignite

With diligence and hard work, every person, and every organization, has the
chance to build an audience from scratch these days. The gatekeepers are no
longer publishers, editors, and advertising executives on Madison Avenue. We
all have the power to build a content-sharing Alpha Audience and create
influence on the web through our content.

Not everybody takes advantage of this opportunity. Pew Research reports3
that just 46 percent of adult Internet users are “creators” who post original
photos or videos online. Even fewer—41 percent of adults—have actively
transmitted content they’ve found online.

Unsurprisingly, the digital natives—or Millennial Generation—who will
represent 50 percent of the customer base and workforce by 2020, have more
aggressive content-sharing habits. Tech experts forecast4 that the Millennials
will lead society into a new world of unprecedented personal disclosure and
information-sharing. The digital natives have already embraced sharing through
social networks, and this behavior will carry forward even as they age, form
families, and move up the economic ladder. This is very good news for you, as
you’re reading this book in order to understand the Content Code and this
culture of social sharing!

The Alpha Audience—the fervent supporters who you can rely on day-in and
day-out for support, ignition, and action—are a rare breed. So how do you find
more of those people for your business?

Earning reliable reach

Using content as a connection point in the digital world provides an
unparalleled, historic opportunity to re-connect with customers and find your
Alpha Audience.

For the last 100 years—since the dawn of radio—businesses have been
conditioned to broadcast. We couldn’t have known it at the time, but when the
first commercial radio stations introduced the idea of mass advertising in the
1920s, we were buying a one-way ticket away from the intimate neighborhood
market culture that fueled business relationships for centuries. The customer
values of trust, loyalty, honor, service, and reputation—the linchpins of long-
term business success—were set aside for the intoxicating expediency of
advertising.

Today, we’re in the post-spin era and those social values are surfacing once
again because our customers are telling us so.