Today we’re at the first Content Marketing Show at Conway Hall in London enjoying a day dedicated to content marketing, now linked closely to SEO and social. Throughout the day we’ll be writing up our favourite talks and getting them up on the blog as quick as possible!

First up was Philip Sheldrake, who believes we’re all influential, even if most of the room didn’t think they were when asked (except one brave soul at the front).

If you don’t feel influential, then consider that we are more influenced by 150 of our nearest and dearest than by the other 7 billion people in the world combined. So you’re influential after all!

Going back 100 years, Philip took us through a history of content, from early newspapers up to the modern day which he describes as thousands of monkeys churning out words. Reminds me of a few guest post requests we’ve received…

Something a lot of marketers will agree with is that you can’t ‘do’ viral content, no matter how much a client or stakeholder wants you to. Things either go viral or don’t, it’s up to us to look at what does go viral and what doesn’t and work out what can be repeated to make viral more likely. But you can’t just make something go viral.

You must be looking at content outcome metrics – how has content helped the business? This is needed to communicate the benefits of content to those not in content – saying tweets have increased by 3 times in the past years doesn’t help anyone.

Highlighting a growing trend, not all content marketing is ‘human-to-human’, machined media has growing potential influence. Content sourced, presented and published by machines for humans. Think the BBC Olympics coverage – all auto-generated, but humans interacted with it by reading, sharing and engaging with it.

This new approach could be a possible way of producing content for businesses who don’t believe they have the resources to generate enough human created content.

Actionable takeaways:

• Content should be for humans and for machines
• You can’t ‘do’ viral, it either happens or doesn’t
• Content has to be justified by ‘outcome metrics’
• Content doesn’t have to be ‘human-to-human’
• Everyone is influential!

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conference, content, content marketing, content marketing show, contentmarketingshow, influence, london, search

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