Author: Tom Green, Sales Executive, Training and Events
Last night I attended the SLA Europe event ‘content creation - at what cost?’, kindly sponsored by Marketresearch.com and held in Aldgate’s Exchange. The premise of the evening was to address how content can be used to create and generate interest around businesses to keep them relevant within the current and ever-changing online marketplace. Before walking through the door my own view of this question was that it could be down to innovations purely within the confines of the content information itself. What I learned, however, was that getting content effectively out there required movement away from what it contains and more toward how it is publically associated, linked or connected.
The first speaker of the night was David Frigstad, Chief Executive Officer of Frost and Sullivan. His talk covered the strategic importance of their content moving into areas not naturally associated with corporate business, such as certain social media; and the effect this will have on maintaining and evolving their client base. Interestingly, an example he used to reflect his ideas upon was that of the late Steve Jobs and his use of ‘outside the dots’ thinking as key to his Apple brands public and financial success, from his trust in and transformation of certain technologies through to well publicised use of the hallucinogen LSD and even skills from a calligraphy degree to why this happened.
Secondly, and possibly most controversial of the evening, was the talk from speaker Roger Bamkin, the current chairman of Wikimedia UK. Roger covered the importance of community and sharing within the Wiki Empire, from how articles and information can be edited by anyone to the nature of this community like structure to how influential and important the content can become. He continued this by relaying the importance of sharing information to how it comes up in search engines such as Google. In overview, the more sites and links your content is attached with, the more popular you will show and the higher you will be placed and found on searches. Coincidentally, this is where the controversial moment occurred. On a question from the audience on where this idea puts the value of information aside of how it is shared in popularity, he replied by declaring that organisations can no longer have an information strategy but must instead rely on the association to other sources to extend their online market reach.
The final talk of the evening went through the slightly different, yet equally interesting, frame of news content and was presented by Nic Newman, formerly the future media controller for journalism at the BBC. Reflecting on his own experiences and ideas he addressed models and strategies of spreading news content through community and social media, indicating clearly the return on investment it has in quickly moving and spreading news information on a mass level. Nic’s talk provided an engaging end and made the clear point that content, no matter what it is, can be made important on a consensual level through different collaboration.
Overall, I found the evening to be a very informative and inspiring insight into the importance of business content and how it is managed. With the positive mention of illegal drugs, controversial statements and focus away from information and toward innovative collaboration it really shattered any previous ideas I had.
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