Knowledge Transfer: Putting It All Together

When brands have all the pieces in place, and they're publishing compelling content each day as a traditional publisher would, their work becomes bigger than the brand itself. They're no longer just marketing to consumers or other businesses. They're transferring knowledge that teaches, entertains, and inspires people. The most valuable work will stick with people.

When your work is meaningful, people don't just sit up and take notice. They don't forget it.

Strive to make an indelible impression on your audience, and think far beyond your products and services and the confines of your company's walls. Think about what matters to people and deliver the high‐value creative work that they won't be able to forget. It's the only way to truly move the needle for your brand and improve lives—because it's not a stretch to say that truly meaningful knowledge can improve people's lives. After all, journalists improve our lives, and talented content marketers aren't that much different.

Transferring knowledge requires fluency across multiple platforms and a distinctly strategic approach to each. When companies are overreliant on the separate units that comprise them, it can hamper this fluency. Content marketing teams aren't always looped into the social or advertising teams' plans, for example, and different lines of business aren't aware of each other's initiatives or focuses of the moment. Oftentimes, SJR becomes the connective tissue between the different units of corporations, sharing information about initiatives and different lines of business, and alerting stakeholders when the stories they request are duplicative of others' efforts.

To transfer knowledge externally, you have to first successfully transfer it internally, which is why we encourage our content teams to check in with other groups as often as possible. This way, your efforts are more all‐encompassing, reaching corners of the organization where information and knowledge were previously buried, and ultimately none of your work is redundant or operationally inefficient—every marketing dollar is well spent.

It's one of the most gratifying parts of any SJR account, when our clients tell us that the content marketing function has become an essential tool for crossfunctional knowledge sharing, collaboration, and innovation.

With more collaboration, you're able to view your entire operation at a macro level. We like to think of it as an ecosystem (see Figure 8.1).

And while every person on your team has a different area of expertise and focus, content enables everyone to see how their piece fits in with the larger effort to transfer knowledge. All employees can feel a greater sense of purpose in their work and are held more accountable. It becomes a collective effort to set clear goals and establish reasons for everything the brand does—the pieces you're putting spend behind, what you're posting to Twitter versus what's going on Facebook, and the stories you're telling in the form of native advertisements as compared to those on your own content hub.

Sometimes, our clients are so eager to publish content that they forget about the entire ecosystem their content will live in. The enthusiasm is thrilling for us content marketers, but we often have to slow them down and get them to see the bigger picture. We help them gather all the different stakeholders from the outset and work with them to develop a plan for how every piece will fit together.

To transfer knowledge skillfully, collaboration is a necessity—this is as true for brands across departments as it is for agencies and publishers across the industry.

How the Industry Is Changing

Across the communications industry, there are seismic shifts happening. In marketing, PR, advertising, and strategic communications, we're seeing a convergence of agencies. Legacy advertising companies are coming to terms with the fact they don't have the in‐house talent or expertise to do content marketing, and many newer, agile content marketing startups aren't scaled up to work with big brands yet. As a result, startups and large agencies need to work together to build our businesses and create our best work, thanks to a broader talent pool. It's a reality SJR has embraced, in our partnerships with some of our WPP sister companies: Ogilvy and Mather, Young and Rubicam, and J. Walter Thompson.

Outside of marketing, you see that the most successful businesses blend seamlessly with the competition. Apple uses Samsung processors in its iPhones.¹ Canon supplies photocopiers to Kodak.² Toyota and Suzuki have pooled their technological resources.³ Our industry is no different, especially as content marketing enters an era of refinement and the expectation and investment for quality content is greater. Every agency, media company, and social platform has its own set of advantages—and to think any one company will reign supreme forever—is extremely foolish. At the end of the day, we work better together than separately, and in the future, I envision our work becoming even more fluid than it is now, especially with legacy media companies. You'll see traditional media companies, startups, publishers, video production companies, podcast creators, and other formerly disparate companies will mix and mingle. And just as SJR's work has improved through working with partners, I foresee content marketing as a whole will become more provocative, substantive, and collectively more profitable.

In our industry, big brands won't work with 10 to 20 different agencies in the future, especially as they build their own in‐house teams (which are increasingly becoming more skilled at content marketing). They will seek to partner with the agencies with a proven track record across content, PR, media buying, social and so forth—with skills that complement those of their in‐house team. And the only way for us to get better across the board is by leveraging each other's strengths. The takeaway? Don't be dismissive of any of your competitors or indirect competitors doing related work. Look for opportunities where you can work together. Hire people with a diversified skill set and an ability to teach others as well as a hunger to learn.

As our industry changes, our platforms are simultaneously evolving, becoming more ephemeral, visually driven, aesthetic, and user‐centric, transforming how marketers communicate across them in the process.

Live content consumption is happening directly on social media platforms as opposed to in the past when sites like Facebook and Twitter merely referred links to users, taking them to a new website. Today, on Twitter you can watch live sporting events. You can read articles authored by CEOs on LinkedIn rather than on the company blog or on Forbes. On Facebook, you can live stream events in 360 degrees. On Snapchat, brand influencers can privately send exclusive, personal videos and messages. As these platforms evolve to allow for more organic media consumption, you can view them as competitors to your hub, or you can work alongside them to form holistic communications strategies—where your strategy for each platform as compared to what you post on your website is distinct but fits collectively with your brand so your users will find new and exciting content on each channel. I promise you the latter option will work most to your benefit. You have to adapt along with these platforms, or you'll get left behind.

Beyond our work with other agencies, our thinking is that a direct relationship with social platforms and publishers is the strongest weapon we can have in our strategic arsenal.

As brands join new platforms—and I'm sure there will be many in the next few years—you need to get inside the heads of your users before you do anything. It's the only way you'll be able to make an impression. Building a solid team of out‐of‐the‐box thinkers is the first step to achieving that, which we'll get to next.