As members of the Social Media Club of Dallas tweeted busily, Pulizzi introduced them to The Furrow, the quarterly journal of agriculture published in 12 languages and distributed in 40 countries by Deere & Company. It debuted in 1895.

“Brands have been publishers for a long, long time,” he said, before introducing a free 1905 recipe book featuring recipes for Jell-O. “We can do a lot of what media companies can do, and sometimes we can do it better.”

The key difference between the media and the marketers, he said, has been their monetizing method. While media companies look for advertising, marketers seek new customers. “Everything else is the same,” he said.

Brands are ‘Owning the Media’

Pulizzi showed examples of several engaging online magazines: Home Made Simple, Being Girl, and Man of the House, all vehicles for Procter & Gamble. Pulizzi termed such ventures “owning the media, not renting the media,” and went as far as to say he expects the shift in content creation from media to marketers to pick up even more momentum.

“Most of the M&A you’ll see in the next several years will be brands buying media companies, because the brands have money and the media companies don’t.”

Content 2020 Shows the Way

As further evidence of the transformation, he cited The Coca-Cola Company’s Content 2020 plan, the subject of a recent Media Orchard post. When he asked how many in the audience had heard of it, we were surprised at how few hands went up.

Most of them belonged to people here at Idea Grove.

Then along came the Internet. And web design. And Google, Facebook and Twitter. And blogging, analytics and metadata. As soon as we get our heads around one idea, another one comes along. And doesn’t it seem like the boss wants to try them all — right now?

The boss is right about one thing: Today’s increasingly borderless and transparent information environment demands that customers and potential customers have full, whenever/wherever access to compelling content about our companies and their offerings. Still, though, sometimes there’s a new-product launch, a new CEO, or a funding announcement that really calls out for some traditional, For Immediate Release PR.

New Tasks for New Times

So how do companies choose the right message, the right vehicle and the right timing, especially as options expand and budgets contract? The same way they make a lot of decisions: They look for experts, and choose them carefully.

These days the most reliable experts in public relations have embraced the principles of content marketing without forgetting that more traditional public relations strategies can still be very effective. Furthermore, they understand how each approach can augment the other.

The highest performers can crank up two engines for ideas. One is centered around outreach, and produces results through both traditional media relations and newer vehicles like social media and link building. The other engine is content-focused, and produces blogs, articles and other online elements as well as press releases and collateral. These two approaches don’t compete; they complement.

A PR Campaign for PR

All this change has gotten a whole industry thinking, and currently the Public Relations Society of America is the process – literally – of redefining PR. Soon there will be a summit meeting and a vote on the group’s official definition of public relations.

We hope that as our industry branches out in new directions that it embraces the new methods without jettisoning some older ones. They both work. Together they work even better.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … .” Were it written today, it could be about one of our favorite things: storytelling.

For generations, journalists have been among our society’s most important storytellers. Their recent struggles are well known, and 2011 was another miserable year. An estimated 3,775 newspaper journalists were laid off or took buyouts over the course of the year, up from the 2,970 downsized a year earlier. And those numbers don’t come close to the ones from the industry’s dark days of 2008-09, when more than 30,000 newsroom positions were eliminated.

The reason for this sharp decline, of course, is advertising. U.S. newspaper advertising sales struggled to reach $24 billion in 2011, less than half the total from 2005. Clearly, businesses are finding other ways to convey their marketing messages. One convert is a very familiar name.

Content Is the Real Thing

“… The Coca-Cola Company will evolve its approach to the creative agenda on its key brands,” begins a wonderfully creative video presentation by a top marketer at the soft-drink maker. “We will move from creative excellence to content excellence. … Through the stories we tell we will provoke conversations and earn a disproportionate share of popular culture.”

Coke says it is shifting its focus from one-way storytelling (advertising) to dynamic storytelling, which it defines as “the development of incremental elements of a brand idea that get dispersed systematically across multiple channels of conversation for the purposes of creating a unified and coordinated brand experience.” In other words: content marketing.

The Survey Says: Growth

Nine out of 10 organizations now are marketing with content, according to a 2011 survey by the Content Marketing Institute.  More than 60 percent of those surveyed said they planned to increase their spending on content marketing in the next 12 months. And B2B marketers already are using an average of eight different content marketing tactics to achieve their goals.

The most popular tactic, the survey says, is articles, followed by social media, blogs, electronic newsletters, case studies, in-person events, videos and white papers. Some of those tactics are being employed much more often than just a year earlier, notably blogs, videos and white papers. The goals are familiar, led by brand awareness, customer acquisition, lead generation and customer retention.

As spending has increased, so has outsourcing. Some 62 percent of the respondents in the CMI survey said they planned to hire outside agencies to assist with at least some of their content marketing activities, and that’s up from 55 percent just a year earlier.

‘A Ruthless Editor’

The trick, of course, is finding outside help that really helps marketers move the needle. And for that to happen, the focus has to be on the creation of content that is accurate, fair and compelling.

As Coca-Cola’s presentation puts it, “The role of content excellence is to behave like a ruthless editor. Otherwise we’ll risk just creating noise.”

So to everyone who rejects creating noise and instead reaches for content excellence, here’s to a 2012 full of continued growth and success. It’s shaping up to be another banner year for new kinds of storytelling.

Amid the celebrations of the season, we want to take time to thank everyone involved during 2011 in bringing so much good fortune to the Idea Grove.

With unprecedented support from our clients, the Idea Grove had a truly transformative year. We added five new faces to the roster and moved to larger quarters — not once, but twice!

As we plan for an ambitious 2012, we know we have the team in place to continue to grow our already strong client relationships. We’re excited; and we want it to show in everything we do.

Happy Holidays; and all the best in the new year.