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We do food here on Friday and I was kind of struggling to come up with a good food-related topic as I reflected on my week. One of the things on which I spent some time was helping a client with some strategic thinking on content and how best to distribute it across multiple channels, both digital and linear. At one point we even had a long discussion about the difference between content and channels which of course leads me to tomatoes and today’s business point.
If I’m cooking something involving tomatoes, it’s pretty obvious that I need to have tomatoes before I can begin. We can talk about if they should be Romas or San Mazanos or some other type, but the first step is having the raw ingredient. Once I do have it I can figure out what I want to make with it – if the tomatoes are prefect, I don’t want to do very much to them. If they’re canned, maybe I’m making sauce of some sort. You wouldn’t do the same dish with cherry tomatoes as you would with beefsteaks.
This is the discussion I was having with my client in a different form. He and his team were spending a lot of time on a channel-focused discussion – web content, mobile content, TV content, etc. They should have been having a content-focused discussion – you need to have the tomatoes and understand what they’re about before you can decide what to do with them. We often get hung up in what we should create for a specific channel and then end up repeating work or assigning multiple people to do similar things. No matter what the content – news, sports, entertainment: gather it once and publish it everywhere. Of course certain pieces are more appropriate for certain channels – you can do things on the web you can’t on TV, for example – but being focused on gathering everything at once and evaluating what’s in hand before designating a channel strategy seem to make more sense to me. Grow the tomato first (I was going to make the piece about being a content farmer but that has such a bad vibe these days I changed it up!).
Enjoy tomato season!
Consult Keith 