Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

For an upcoming magazine column on the intersection of technology and publishing, I interviewed a number of smart thinkers about how brands should be self-organizing to create engaging, provoking, and ethical content (as opposed to inane social media filler).

One of the interviews I conducted was with Neil Chase, former New York Times editor and SVP at Federated Media, now a content strategy consultant (and friend). He had a lot to say on the subject of brand publishing — more than I can fit into my column — and I think every company ought to take heed. So I decided to post our conversation in its entirety....

All the wrongheaded bullshit about brand newsrooms seems to believe the gospel that human history began at CERN in 1994. In fact, the history of all this – of news, brand journalism and brand newsrooms – is long and instructive. My agency set up the first newsroom for a global brand roughly a decade ago. Microsoft, then and now, needed to create massive amounts of content all over the world in real time. A newsroom structure saved them much duplicated effort and huge amounts of money, while insuring accuracy, timeliness and consistency. Not bad.

 

The sum total of all this is that brand news, despite what marketing bloggers would have us believe today, can’t be all about hi-jacking events or tracking events or any such quixotic, overly broad enterprise. What brand news needs to learn from real news can be broken down into three important parts....

Should your brand journalism site live on your corporate site, or be a separate news site? Here are the benefits of and the strategy behind both locations.

Drinking From the Content Marketing Fire Hose

As we launched the site, the iQ team started to work with a team of journalists and editorial partners, conducted editorial meetings and worked closely with the Intel social media team to amplify and extend iQ content. Before we knew it, we were beginning to operate a newsroom, managing a robust content machine and starting to see our goals for iQ come to fruition.

 

By end of 2012, iQ was emerging as an essential asset to Intel’s marketing and social media strategy. Although satisfied with the early success of iQ, we knew there were many improvements to be made. In January 2013, iQ version 1 (the current site) was released. Several new changes and strategies were implemented from our learnings since the BETA launch. So what have I learned about content marketing in the last 11 months? I’ve distilled the 12 core lessons for brand publishers organized by the tenets of the iQ content marketing approach; production, process and promotion....