Don't Dumb Down your Social Media Content
Paul Gillin has an excellent post today about the costs of generating content. He makes the argument that a decline in traditional media has led to a surplus of hungry writers and brought down content costs. Paul blogs:
Marketers often ask how they can train engineers and technical people to blog, podcast and otherwise engage in deep online conversations with customers. My advice: don’t bother. You’re better off investing in professional communicators and teaching them what they need to know about your business.
The ability to communicate well in any media demands a certain amount of innate ability and it’s a difficult skill to teach… It’s a lot harder and costlier to train technology experts to write than it is to teach writers what they need to know to about technology.
So if you’re going to create your own blogs, white papers, e-books and such, you should probably use professional communicators to help you do it. What’s that going to cost you? Like most things in life, it depends.
It seems that it is a growing trend to try to save money and hire interns, recent graduates or perhaps former journalists who work on the lower end of the pay scale to produce social media content.
Paul continues:
The cost variable is the level of technical skill you need. If you’re in a consumer industry where the necessary level of technical knowledge is quite low, decent freelancers can be hired…The higher the level of technical expertise you need, the more it’s going to cost you.
Some may question the merits of hiring an agency when so much commodity talent is available. But Google adjusted their algorithms recently to push websites built on light content down in the rankings – and, in any case, do you want to entrust your brand to those who are just churning out words by the pound?
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