Are You Ready For The Next Level Of Digital Content?

My weekly question to chew on….

“Are you ready to begin the next level of digital content?”

In a scene in Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne, searching for training to master his fears, gives a symbolic blue flower to Henri Ducard (no spoilers). Bruce has been told that delivering this flower to the top of the mountain will enable him to find what he’s been looking for. Henri takes the flower and says, “To manipulate the fears in others, you must first master your own.” Then he asks, “Are you ready to begin?” Breathless, Bruce says, “I can barely stand.” With a powerful kick to the chest that knocks Bruce halfway across the room, Henri yells, “Death does not wait for you to be ready!”

How about you? Are you ready to begin?

Earlier this year, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt was widely quoted as saying, “The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses … so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it.”

Think we have a lot of interfaces to worry about now? What will it be like when we can deliver content intelligently and dynamically on your product packaging. What personal message will you deliver? That’s the real question, isn’t it?

Yeah, how’s that website redesign and CMS implementation coming along?

Boris Kraft, the Chief Visionary Officer for open-source content-management provider Magnolia, wrote an article in CMSWire about how the Internet of Things (IoT) may change the entire idea of digital customer experiences. He notes that the consequences of bad digital experiences range from “comically misguided (such as bad personalization) to the genuinely life-threatening (such as providing incorrect location data at a critical point).”

I find all this fascinating.

Contemplating the storytelling opportunities and the differentiating, valuable experiences we could deliver to customers using the IoT opens up a new world of creative possibility.

But Boris is right to point out the darker possibilities as well. Let there be no doubt about the importance of content – and the importance of quickly preparing our businesses to be really, really good at creating, managing, publishing, and intelligently displaying our content to deliver valuable communication to our customers. If we don’t, our competition will.

As Henri says to Bruce with a swift kick to the gut, “Death is not considerate or fair. And make no mistake: here, you face death.”

Are you ready to begin?

About Robert Rose
Robert is chief strategy officer for the Content Marketing Institute and a senior contributing consultant for Digital Clarity Group. His first book, coauthored with Joe Pulizzi, Managing Content Marketing, is widely considered the “owner’s manual” for the content marketing process. It’s been translated into multiple languages and spent several weeks as a top 10 marketing book on Amazon.com since its debut in 2011. Robert is also co-host of the podcast PNR’s This Old Marketing, the #1 podcast as reviewed by MarketingPodcasts.com. He recently released, with co-author Carla Johnson, Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing. 

This article originally published on Robert’s Linkedin Page and was shared from the Type A Communications Blog.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Spielbrick Films

The post Are You Ready For The Next Level Of Digital Content? appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.