The Future of Communications – in three easy steps
I was listening to the stories being told at the Nokia Forum for developers recently.
If content is king, distribution is...
When Kenny Mathers stood up and announced “if content is king, distribution is king kong.” This quote he attributed to Mark Ollila, another Nokia guru. Of course, their reason for flogging this line is that if the developers create the content, Nokia says it can deliver the right distribution.
A wonderful aphorism. Worth repeating again and again.
If Content is King, Distribution is King Kong
However, this takes for granted a key component of communications. Targeting.
So here, let me build upon my last blog post, where I quoted myself from a story written in 2007, stating, in a roundabout kinda way that the future of communications relied upon interactivity found via: usefulness-ubiquity-usability.
Well, I stand by that. But it misses out my favorite aphorism du jour:
#datadriveseverything
I first came across this hashtag on twitter by accident. (I find most things on twitter by accident!) And it sticks in my mind clearly. So simple and so strong. You see, data CAN drive everything. Data SHOULD drive everything. But saying in the present, non-conditional tense becomes more of a mission statement.
Others have said with less hyperbole that “data drives optimisation”. But the point is that data can revolutionise the way we write and deliver content: through targeting. So, we might say, a little more prosaically, “data drives targeting”.
The Future of Communications relies upon having a clear plan for the only three things that really matter:
Content; Targeting; Distribution
From the perspective of the future of communications there are three easy steps:
1 – Content – get yourself a great creative communications agency (who knows how to collaborate with the teams mentioned below)
2 – Targeting - get yourself a great data analytics team
3 – Distribution - get yourself a great media planning team.
UPDATE: It’s been brought to my attention that PR should be included in this article. Of course it should. In the case of PR, the PR team will be able to create and distribute the content. But it seems to me they often don’t get to work with the data analytics team to refine their targeting…
[...] on April 11, 2010 In an earlier post we discussed the three steps to success in communications: Content, Targeting, Distribution. One conclusion was that in the world of targeting and beyond, #datadriveseverything. It seems that [...]
[...] to Kenny Mathers [...]