I attended the Social CRM Summit earlier this year, and the presenter – Paul Greenberg, who is generally credited with inventing the category – said (basically): People can argue all they want about the definition of social CRM, but I am through discussing it. I am happy with the definition.
It was great. This social media era is all about a faux “conversation.“ The notion that anyone is actually conversing on Twitter, for example, is laughable. It’s dueling monologues.
Anyway, I’m channeling Paul’s unapologetic comment now. You see, one of the more debated topics in marketing is content marketing. People define it in all sorts of ways. Some say it’s synonymous with “inbound marketing” (though I am sure the godfathers of that category, HubSpot wunderkinds Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, would object to the conflation). The Wikipedia definition initially struck me as excessively broad … that is, until I read that content marketing firm Junta42 said content marketing is tantamount to "custom publishing, custom media, customer media, customer publishing, member media, private media, branded content, corporate media, corporate publishing, corporate journalism and branded media.” (In the firm’s defense, they supply a succinct definition after that exhaustive list.)
So what is content marketing? For those, like me, who are partial to visual learning, I say it’s this infographic, dubbed The Content Grid:
… and I am happy with this definition.
