Getting Found

One of the biggest problems being faced today by companies in the business of content is that of discovery.  It used to be that if you could weasel your way into a spot in the newspaper odds were that you would get a reasonable amount of people to look at your product. Ideally those people would tell their friends to check it out in the paper and eventually you have an old school social media explosion. In the last ten years this has really started to change. The internet has provided for an experience where you not only go get exactly what it is you are looking for,  but people have also been trained to look away from those things that look different or aren’t specifically what they want. In the old days a reader would pick up the paper and thumb through looking for the Dave Barry column, get a chuckle, and would probably read a few columns around it. These days a person pops open the web page reads the column and is off to do something somewhere else on the internet or doesn’t want to click that side link because who knows where it will take them. With the newspaper no longer being theubiquitous medium the built in mass marketing and cross promotion that came with it is simply gone.

The new battle is building brand digitally at the start and most content producing companies are still in the process of figuring this out. You have to let people know the “New Tide” is out there and simply putting it on the shelves isn’t going to make it a best seller. Socially engineered digital marketing has to be the first step because the keyholders’ no longer have a set of golden keys. Content producers need to go directly to the public, which in an ideal case, when the content appeals will create a demand for more of it (note the tv show life cycle). This build brand from the get go outlook is starting to show it’s head in the content world but it’s a slow process. Old habits, old ways and old comfort zones are hard to break out of. If you are comfortable though, someone is probably doing it better than you.