When I was a teenager, I worked for one of the top restaurants in Los Angeles. They do about $20 million annual revenue between their two locations.
I became close with one of the owners, and I’ll never forget what he said to me one day:
“It’s amazing how you can run a terrific operation, with terrific food and terrific customer service for decades and, yet, in today’s digital world, with Yelp and TripAdvisor and social media, you’re only as good as your last sandwich.”
As marketing and communications professionals, we feel the same way about content: You’re only as good as your last tweet, Telegram message, Facebook post, Medium article, media pitch, et cetera.
Think about it on a micro level: Let’s say, you as a personal user follow a company on Twitter. As you’re flipping through your Twitter feed one day, you see a tweet from this company, and this tweet isn’t really interesting, helpful, or otherwise valuable to you in that moment.
Then, a few days later, you see another tweet from the same company and, again, the tweet isn’t really interesting, helpful, or otherwise valuable to you in that moment.
So, now, your brain is being programmed to associate uninteresting, unhelpful, and/or non-valuable content with this company, which means you’ll start ignoring the company’s future tweets because your brain will automatically assume they’ll be uninteresting, unhelpful, and/or non-valuable.
Eventually, you’ll probably unfollow the company and never see another one of their tweets again. Or, at the very least, you’ll completely stop paying attention to their tweets, automatically scrolling past them every time you see a mere hint of the company’s logo or name.
Either way, a negative brand association is being created here, which certainly has bigger implications.
Some might say this is the problem with social media — for example, that you as a company always have to come up with something interesting, helpful, or otherwise valuable for your followers. At BlockGroup, we see it as a challenge, and even more, an opportunity.
In other words, we see content in general — from social media and email marketing, from blog posts and Medium articles, to media pitches and press releases — as a way to interact on a deeper, more consistent level with our clients’ customers, would-be customers, journalists, investors, and anyone else who matters to our clients.
And we believe that taking the “right” approach to producing original content over the long run — an approach that, whether it’s a tweet or a media pitch, consistently creates positive brand associations, and produces the right results: more growth, more outside investment, more exposure, and more of whatever your organizational goals are today and in the foreseeable future.
Based in Tel Aviv, Josh is the Head of Marketing & Operations for BlockGroup.
