Rob Tarkoff, CEO of Lithium Technologies speaking at LiNC13 (source: Rawn Shah)
Content marketing has become a growing trend to reach out to potential customers online, supplanting traditional advertising. According to MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute, more than half (55%) of B2C marketers plan to increase their content marketing spending in 2013, on average constituting 28% of their budget. Advertising as a means to draw an audience is still a big spend but reading actual content rather than just clicking on an ad is starting to draw online readers attention.
The debate now is not whether content marketing is a viable strategy but whoshould be creating that content, and what can you trust. It’s plain and simple, with social media tools easily available everywhere online, it is possible for anyone to take up shop and start creating content, claim themselves as experts on a topic and write away. We suffer from the reality of Internet-scale. Per Author & Professor, Clay Shirky, rather than an economy of scarcity, we face an economy of abundance. Content is so easily available we need systems to help us find the relevant, useful, trusted ones.
So, how can a reader trust content?
The Reconnected Organization 