2010: Resolute and Resilient

It’s no secret that 2009 was a rough year for all of us. In fact, you could say the entire decade was not our best. But we’re still here, and (at least in the com­mu­ni­ties in which I take part) we’re still thriv­ing. That’s great news.

I’ve got some excit­ing news about Con­tent The­ory in 2010 at the end of this post, but first, I wanted to talk about where I think we’re headed, and what a fan­tas­tic set of oppor­tu­ni­ties await us.

Mov­ing into 2010, the dis­cus­sions about whether the dig­i­tal chan­nels will be game chang­ers have mor­phed into dis­cus­sions about how we can all use the dig­i­tal chan­nels to cre­ate new busi­ness mod­els, com­mu­ni­ca­tion plans and infrastructure.

But I’m not try­ing to sound like a pun­dit or politi­cian, so let’s get down to it: 2010 is going to be a great year because we’re past the tip­ping point. We know that excel­lent con­tent devel­op­ment in the dig­i­tal chan­nels is the way to attract and engage an audi­ence and poten­tial cus­tomers. Now the chal­lenge is to develop that content.

Excel­lent content.

Not extended ads mas­querad­ing as enter­tain­ment. Or sales pitches mas­querad­ing as infor­ma­tive how-to blog posts.

We in the mar­ket­ing and enter­tain­ment indus­tries have to get past the top­i­cal spec­u­la­tion, and under­stand at a gut-level that we are now deal­ing with conversations.

It means we’ve lost con­trol of the mes­sage, but gained the world’s largest focus group, if we’re savvy enough to mine it properly.

It means the notion of an art director/copywriter team work­ing off of a brief devel­oped from account plan­ning and media is now con­sid­ered quaint, but if we rede­fine the way we work and tap into our entire orga­ni­za­tion, we’ll make huge leaps for­ward in inno­va­tion from the enhanced col­lec­tive perspective.

It means we lose the oppor­tu­nity to craft mes­sag­ing from a clean, well-lit, white office space, deploy it and then sit com­fort­ably back and watch what hap­pens. But we gain the invalu­able oppor­tu­nity to hone our com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills in real-time as we put our work into this very busy marketplace.

It means we’ve moved from Water­fall Com­mu­ni­ca­tions model to an Agile Com­mu­ni­ca­tions model.

As a part of our com­mit­ment to be res­olute in embrac­ing real­ity and con­tribut­ing to the con­ver­sa­tion, watch this space for a new Con­tent The­ory Pod­cast in 2010, focused on get­ting views and insights from peo­ple of all walks of life: not just mar­keters. Because let’s face it: we’re not inter­est­ing because of our mar­ket­ing back­grounds, but because of all of the other things we do in our lives.

Happy Hol­i­days, and I look for­ward to work­ing it out with you in a pros­per­ous 2010!