Content - the new Company Requirement

Back in the day, it used to only be that academics had to publish. Professors at esteemed universities had to "publish or perish" when it came to getting and maintaining tenure, establishing themselves as experts, and otherwise creating a thought-authority on segments of knowledge.

This phenomenon of publishing trickled out of academia to other businesses. Consulting companies such as McKinsey & Co started publishing authoritative literature, putting out quarterlies and case studies, then law firms were doing more and more law journals and write-ups in their papers, then doctor journals started exploding in circulation...lots of B2B literature was cropping up everywhere. I'm not trying to say this is a new phenomenon - it's not. Law journals have been around for centuries. What I'm indicating is that the momentum (and pressure) has escalated on all the other industries. Trade journals are fine, but if all McKinsey was doing was publishing its Quarterlies, they'd be literaturally-irrelevant in no time. They're not: they're a bonafide publishing house with all the articles and books their consultants and former employees publish.

And we're seeing it now more and more in the small and boutique firms. I'm finding that if you're trying to establish your biz, you got to produce some content. The bigger the business, the more your content. I'm not talking about Twitter-ing, Blogging, or Facebook updates: your business has to produce thought-provoking articles on the industry it's in, what it's doing currently, and some honest-to-goodness debate on current industry-specific events. It makes one wonder if the quality of the content will ever catch up to the quantity produced, as there seems to be an explosion of trite branding these days.