Well, here at PAN Communications we’re in the midst of conducting our annual client survey. During this time we give our clients the opportunity to speak openly and honestly about what they are seeing in the public relations /marketing industry, the agency and how is their team at PAN doing. It has allowed us to shape our offerings a bit and to make sure we’re staying ahead of our clients’ needs.  This year during a number of the conference calls, we have heard  a consistent theme from our clients – content creation. We’ve been talking about it here at PAN for a long time now but you never know when you’re stuck in your own world, drinking the purple Kool-Aid.

In today’s marketing world, a number of CMOs, VPs of Marketing and Directors all have the same question – ‘where do we get more content and how do we stay ahead of our competitors?’ Good questions and ones that seem to have a large amount of potential answers. Well if you’re sitting within an organization – go to your marketing department and ask them who is creating our content? They may ask if you’re talking about the web site content, but correct them and say no, in general – who is talking on Acme’s behalf? Who is tracking the conversations about our new Widget and who is answering the questions about it?If you have a communications/PR/social media agency – is your account team pushing ideas over to you on a regular basis? Are they offering ideas and content and where is it going and who is seeing it once it has been created? Are you working together to pull the uniqueness out of your company and into the minds of your PR team?In order to stay ahead of the plethora of social media sites and news outlets – you need to be creating the written content, videos, podcasts and other viral components that get your message out to the masses while opening the door for commentary and feedback. It’s the way it is today and if we as marketers are going to stay ahead of our competition (and our clients) we had better become that content creator.More to come on this I am sure….