Digital Content Marketing Tsunami
Time flies when you’re having fun: it also flies when you’re incredibly busy. When you’re incredibly busy and having tons of fun, it goes by in the blink of an eye, that’s what the last 6 months have been like since I joined Q Media. I’ve been working on everything from educating customers on energy efficiency by developing a touchscreen kiosk game, to developing a digital content marketing strategy for an association to deepen their relationship with members and drive their professional development business, to helping a public broadcaster engage their online audiences in a conversation about the how technology is changing everything. And a million big and little things in between.
After 10 years as Head of Interactive at TVO, joining the crazy, nimble entrepreneurial team here at Q Media was a pretty big deal for me. But, as I rush about at what seems like the speed of light, I’m loving it.
The seed for the move was planted at SXSW in the spring 2012: Dorothy was speaking at the Conference and we spent the week having intense conversations about how profoundly the Internet was changing the way we live, give, work, play, buy, and learn. And we spent a long time talking about how Q’s business was increasingly relevant considering the trends in content marketing. We talked about the best way to describe this mingling, and recognized it’s something media companies, publishers and businesses are all looking to untangle. Bottom line, we realized that to be successful you need to have the research and journalistic storytelling tools, understand how to listen to and engage users and have both communications and marketing acumen. And Q Media had those skills in spades. And so the conversation continued.
Six months later, after chatting about where Q was headed over lots of coffee and wine, I finally made the leap. So much for getting settled in– I only had one day to get comfortable before I got busy with a ton of digital work that seemed to come in like a tsunami: in Week One we’re developing an interactive kiosk for Enbridge Gas’s new Savings by Design program, where the challenge was to engage commercial and industrial customers to see how they can save money on their next building project by making it more energy efficient. We’ve developed a great touchscreen 3D game in collaboration with pDoink Interactive, launching at the end of the month.
Next up, we started research on a digital content marketing strategy for the CMA Ontario that has since generated lots of insights around how small to mid-sized companies can best operationalize a content marketing strategy. When I did a presentation at a recent content marketing conference, implementing content marketing was the “Elephant in the Room.” For that audience, producing and rolling out a plan that delivers that perfect blend of content and marketing is where brands are struggling the most.
Since I arrived here we’ve been reflecting on why so many brands are now struggling with this and we realized that this “new trend” of content marketing is a sign of a shift that’s happening all around us—in business, education, government, healthcare. A shift in the basic relationship between institutions and their stakeholders. By week six in my whirlwind, we’d converted this thinking into a successful BELL Fund Digital Pilot application and “PULL: How Technology is Changing the Conversation” was born. Over 80 interviews later we are now in the process of “pulling” out the best of the best and creating a series of short podcasts. And to help TVO’s audiences understand some of the headier concepts like disruption, gamification, wearable technologies and Big Data, we’re creating a series of animated shorts. PULL will roll out this summer on The Agenda but you can jump into the conversation now by joining our PULL linked in group. And when I have a minute, between juggling digital strategy and content marketing in the ongoing tsunami, that’s where I can be found!
