The Information Highway in Crisis
Leigh Cowan
Advisor-mentor-consultant to c-suite & board members of multi-national & national, large & small, corporations & organisations. Speaker & trainer sharing secrets of scientific corporate governance, strategy & planning.
#SocialMedia is a Mess
Using the word, #Marketing when meaning #advertising or #promotion has cost, and continues to cost, millions in badly invested marketing spend around the world.
The cause has been opportunists who saw the confusion around the introduction of the internet, who were quick to contribute to the perplexity by crafting clever pitches using the word “marketing” incorrectly to the broad population of people who didn’t know any better.
These opportunists included IT people and graphic designers, two groups whose specialist skills help businesses develop web sites, and who target prospects found appealing – either from a design perspective or a functionality perspective.
In the explosion of internet usage that followed entrants into web communications, these self- anointed “experts” described themselves as “marketing” gurus, not knowing (nor caring) what marketing is, but as a means of attracting those indiscriminate buyers with sales promotions targeting hungry users.
The expression “Content Marketing” is a perfect example of the blind leading the blind… In time, people will laugh at this ludicrous description because anyone with professional PR skills knows that content marketing is clearly Public Relations management with a heavy publicity lilt, some "advertorial", or poorly disguised classified advertising.
What we know as #SocialMedia SHOULD (more accurately) be called "online publicity" while “content marketing” should really be called, “Interactive Online Communications”, because that is exactly all it is!
As the world comes to grips with the phenomenon of mass communication via the world-wide web, professionals will return to the marketing profession and the internet will be treated as it should: Nothing more than a medium of communication.
Right now, social media hasn’t quite been recognised for what it is... a rough and ready combination of talk-back radio and newspapers, WITHOUT editing, ethics, or professional scrutiny! Hopefully, it soon will be.
When that maturity arrives, it won’t be too soon for me and many others, who now must cast a cynical eye over EVERYTHING they read in fear of fake news, a scam, grossly biased or simply ignorantly uninformed and prejudiced by personal bias.
Hopefully, in due course, white-hat journalists will join to deliver honest, credible, trustworthy, legitimate and balanced perspectives as we once enjoyed with top-quality newspapers of the last century.