Content marketers: throw out your editorial calendar!
The first recommendation in Accenture’s publication, Social Media: Rewriting the Rules on Content Management, is to throw out your editorial calendar. Shocking! Isn’t the editorial calendar the tool you use to keep a regular flow of relevant content moving out to constituents? Doesn’t it drive your budget, assignment, and approval cycles? Didn’t you just pay a consultant a lot of money to get you into the discipline of working through the calendar?
Accenture’s point is that editorial calendars are based on push rather than pull marketing. The calendar ignores today’s news and recent developments. Its relevance is rooted in one point in — the past.
These same reasons make a strong argument for content curation in marketing. Through content curation, marketers can harvest timely, relevant topics from news articles, blog posts and social mentions. They can build on the conversations already going on, demonstrating their company’s perspective and adding value.
Sure, we all need a Plan B. On a slow news day, dust off the old calendar and see what makes sense in today’s context. Have some longer term fact-based investigations underway to make your own news. Just don’t plan to use an editorial calendar to drive your content marketing initiatives. Customers are in the drivers seat these days.
Read more about content curation at a curated site focused on B2B content curation and in my reports for Patricia Seybold Group.
Sue McKittrick
I wrote a blog post about a similar topic, about how curation is the new foundation of any content marketing pyramid. In this framework, the latest and newest relevant curated content is the fodder for higher quality content:
http://www.contentcurationmarketing.com/articles/8378/the-foundation-of-your-content-marketing-pyramid-c/
I missed your post when it came out and just now read it. I like the way you’ve placed curation as the foundation of the pyramid and make the point that it gets increasingly difficult/time consuming as you move up the pyramid. That is the beauty of content curation for marketers…it is easy. You just need to work out a process and employ a technology to facilitate the process. Thanks for commenting.