Now Reading | You Need Editors Not Brand Managers
http://contently.com/strategist/2015/02/06/you-need-editors-not-brand-managers-marketing-legend-seth-godin-on-the-future-of-branded-content/
I love this little excerpt from Contently’s interview with Seth Godin:
But then there’s the whole obsession now with tying content to revenues—in other words, tracking whether people who are consuming your content will eventually buy something from you, and putting a hard number on each piece of content you create. Do you think that’s misguided?
Oh, I think there’s no question it’s misguided. It’s been shown over and over again to be misguided—that in a world of zero marginal cost, being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business. You don’t get trusted if you’re constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you.
I don’t have any problem with measurements, per se; I’m just saying that most of the time when organizations start to measure stuff, they then seek to industrialize it, to poke it into a piece of software, to hire ever cheaper people to do it.
The challenge that we have when we industrialize content is we are asking people who don’t care to work their way through a bunch of checklists to make a number go up, as opposed to being human beings connecting with other human beings.
How does a brand care? How do you build an infrastructure where you have people who care create content?
Well, a brand can’t care. All that can care is people. So if someone in your organization—and it doesn’t have to be the CEO—decides they’d rather work in a place where you care, they can start caring. They can hire people who care, they can reward people who care, and they can do work that demonstrates that they care. What we find is that the more people care, ironically, the better they do compared to the industrialized systems of folks who don’t care and are just doing it for the money.
What metrics do you think best measures the fact that you’re doing work that matters?
I think the only one that I care about is: Will people miss you if you are gone?
