The Backlash edition: Slack, Bots & Content Marketing (Top3ics , 27 April)

The theme running through this edition is that bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots. 

As always, browse all issues and subscribe. 

Content marketing: PewDiePie is better at this than you

And only two of the ~100 people assembled at EuroComm16 knew who he is.

I was invited to speak (very briefly, and very fast) at the IABC’s European conference in Rotterdam earlier this month, so I thought I’d take the ideas from last year’s Time to integrate Innovation into your Comms strategy and make them a little more accessible.

From the result (blogplug):

“… the first signs of content marketing failure are already visible… 
Slide 5 [above] compares the number of YouTube subscribers of Redbull (marketing budget: 2bn/year, 5m subscribers) with PewDiePie (marketing budget: minimal-to-zero, 43m subscribers)…”
- My EuroComm2016 Rapido on the Future of Communications.

Now a Rápido is max. 20 slides in 5 minutes, so I spent precisely 2.3 seconds on the above Slide before moving on to the meat of my presentation. 

Which was why I was both grateful and astonished when Katie Macaulay included PewDiePie in her presentation. Grateful, because I finally had a chance to explain my own slide properly. Astonished, because noone else there had heard of him.

Now if you don’t think that the way this young man is wiping the YouTube floor with multibillion corporate content marketing budgets is important, then you probably need to update your thinking about content marketing. Try:

• Branding in the Age of Social Media (Harvard Business Review)
• The Death of Content Marketing: Why Brands Must Become Cultural Currency (David Armano), which riffs off it
• Why No One Is Reading Your Marketing Content 
• 7 Worst Mistakes That Are Eating Up Your Content Marketing Success

The last one still sees content marketing as a viable strategy - and to a certain extent I agree, under certain circumstances. As with all ideas, however, it gets overused by people who jump on the latest bandwagon blindly, rather than looking under its hood and asking "when does this tactic make sense?“.

More: 79 resources tagged content marketing on my Hub.

Work tools: Got Fomo? Get CIFIL

The Slack Backlash continues, so can we decide what to call it? 

Following a quick quip on LinkedIn I’ve launched a poll on Twitter: Slacklash or BackSlacksh? You decide.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, there are 8 resources tagged Slack on my Hub, with the most recent ones either about Slack as a Bot platform (see below) or Slack as a habit to kick:

• Curing Our Slack Addiction
• Is group chat making you sweat?
• So Yeah We Tried Slack… and We Deeply Regretted It

The origins of this go back a while, but I’ve seen so much anti-Slack recently I stopped Hubbing it as they all boiled down to the same thing: Slack can do more harm than good when you just jump on the bandwagon without asking "what is this good for, and what does it not do well?”~

Not that this was entirely unforeseeable: I published a similar critique about Yammer in November 2014 (blogplug):

Yammer is a great example of ‘all stream, no memory’ – even if users tag their content, there’s damn-all chance you’ll ever be able to use those tags to find that content later, as taxonomy menus… are basically impossible to find. 
None of these systems want you looking through the back catalogue for useful content – the essence of the stream is nowness… [and] the stream is a lousy organising principle if you want people to actually use information more than an hour old
- All stream, no memory, zero innovation

As a result, you need to check the stream obsessively, and so catch a bad case of FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out.

Now a stream is useful, but it needs to end up in a library where you can find useful knowledge the following day, week, month or year. This Library would be vaccine against FOMO. We need a positive acronym to rally around for it, so I suggest CIFIL (Confident I’ll Find it Later).

Because if you have CIFIL, you can’t catch FOMO.

More: slack, internal (communications), innovation

Chatbots: Are we entering #PeakBot already?

Everything’s getting faster, including backlashes. 

My March edition touched on the surging interest in chatbots - I’ve tagged 11 resources bot since January - but the latest is Bots won’t replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.

One post does not a backlash make, but I thought I’d flag it because:

• the author is one of the guys who helped started the whole thing in 2014 with Chats as Universal UI
• he convincingly punctures the “conversational UI as solver-of-all-problems” meme
• and thus illustrates my overall point about bandwagons 

You read it here first.

More: resources tagged bot, messaging, AI, UX and (1 so far) peakbot.

Footnote: Welcome to my World

Next time you stumble out of a meeting wondering whether it was in fact held in 9-dimensional hyperspace populated exclusively by gibbering idiots, please remember that you are an expert and you are not alone:

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