{"id":4806,"date":"2014-07-09T14:14:11","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T20:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=4806"},"modified":"2014-07-10T11:18:18","modified_gmt":"2014-07-10T17:18:18","slug":"cluetrain-crashes-casualties-widespread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=4806","title":{"rendered":"Cluetrain crashes, casualties widespread"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"trainwreck\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“The community of discourse\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0the market. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.” \u2014The Cluetrain Manifesto<\/em><\/a>, 1999<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alexander Jutkowitz wears a couple of hats. He’s the chief strategist at the public-relations\u00a0giant Hill & Knowlton, and he sits on the board of the Columbia Journalism Review<\/em>. That makes him particularly well positioned\u00a0to opine on the great PR-journo mashup otherwise known as content marketing. “The success of content marketing has radicalized the way companies communicate,” Jutkowitz writes<\/a> in the Harvard Business Review<\/em>. “For innovative brands, an award-winning Tumblr now carries serious clout; hashtag campaigns have become as compelling as taglines; and the Digiday Awards are as coveted as the Stevies. The content marketing revolution signals more than a mere marketing fad. It marks an important new chapter in the history of business communications: the era of corporate enlightenment.”<\/p>\n

The next stage in the era of corporate enlightenment is a full-scale move into publishing and broadcasting, as businesses\u00a0establish the means to push their voices into the center of the culture, into the center of the conversation. “Today, large corporations are becoming their own media companies, news bureaus, research universities, and social networks,” writes\u00a0Jutkowitz, noting how\u00a0“big brands are\u00a0poaching top-talent journalists\u00a0in droves and implementing the most successful aspects of the traditional media house.” He goes on:<\/p>\n

Trained journalists and writers are in the best position to synthesize information, capture a reader\u2019s attention, and uphold a critical editorial standard.\u00a0…\u00a0Yet, it would be misguided to assume that corporations are simply transplanting the traditional newsroom. Branded content is a brave new world and a brand\u2019s editorial team, regardless of how it\u2019s organized, must learn to live and breathe a company\u2019s bottom line while also being mindful of the kinds of stories that appeal to readers. The editorial organization within a corporation has to be independent enough to form unique perspectives, but embedded enough to access exclusive information.\u00a0This kind of commitment to storytelling and editorial integrity, albeit shaped by sponsorship, is undoubtedly how content marketing has begun to encroach on the whole of marketing. Content, it seems, has miraculously given brands a greater purpose.\u00a0Brands are no longer merely peddling products; they\u2019re producing, unearthing, and distributing information. And because they do, the corporation becomes not just economically important to society, but intellectually essential as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Feeling nauseous yet? Ex-Googler Tim Bray is. He says<\/a>\u00a0the article\u00a0“smells like con\u00adcen\u00adtrat\u00aded essence of evil; an uniron\u00adic paean to the take-over of jour\u00adnal\u00adis\u00adm, and pub\u00adlic con\u00adver\u00adsa\u00adtion, by mar\u00adke\u00adteer\u00ads.\u00a0I rec\u00adom\u00admend read\u00ading it, if on\u00adly for shock val\u00adue.” But if, as the Cluetrain<\/em> writers declared with such innocence at the turn of the century, “markets are conversations,” should anybody really be shocked? If markets are conversations, then conversations are markets, and markets are where marketeers tend to congregate.<\/p>\n

No, Jutkowitz isn’t kidding about “the era of corporate enlightenment”:<\/p>\n

The Age of Reason in the 17th<\/sup>\u00a0century was defined by the promotion of ideas and intellect. Considered a revolution of human thought, the Enlightenment bore world-changing advances in the form of ideas, discovery, and invention. Like the philosophers and scientists who populated the salons of that era, corporations today can and should participate in the dynamic exchange of innovative ideas, unique knowledge, and expertise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He provides an example:<\/p>\n

Red Bull is proof of the extraordinary results great brand publishing can bring. The company\u2019s top-notch content resulted in the creation of an in-house content production arm,\u00a0Red Bull Media House. Red Bull crafts content that isn\u2019t just compelling, but lucrative in its own right, launching an entirely new ideas-based business for the beverage company.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Red Bull is our\u00a0new Voltaire. Let the\u00a0intellectual buzz begin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The community of discourse\u00a0is\u00a0the market. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.” \u2014The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999 Alexander Jutkowitz wears a couple of hats. He’s the chief strategist at the public-relations\u00a0giant Hill & Knowlton, and he sits on the board of the Columbia Journalism Review. That makes him particularly well positioned\u00a0to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4806"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4820,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4806\/revisions\/4820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}