Last Friday (18th of November), I attended an e-PR conference at Sunderland University in the North East of England and the main thing that came shining through was the exponential growth of blogging.
Not much surprise there as anyone with even a passing interest in the web and new media communications could have told me that. No, the comment that hit me right between the eyes came from Tom Murphy of Microsoft who reminded everyone in hall that marketing is now all about conversations. It seems quite an innocuous statement yet I think it has quite profound implications on the marketing communications industry and highlights a profound lack of copywriting skills in the new media sector. The words on a web page are the only thing between you and your client yet all to often getting text for a web site is seen as a necessary evil – the result copy being published from other marketing materials just because it is there.
All the techies out there have pushed us towards Content Management Systems sadly this doesn’t address the problem of content generation. This has led me to consider the power of blogs and RSS feeds and suddenly I can see how it starts to fit together.
In terms of it’s revenue generation potential for marketing communications companies I am still a little bit unsure – what I am just sure of is that it can’t be ignored.