Content Marketing at SxSW

At a panel at South by Southwest (SxSW) on "Brave New World: Debating Brands' Role as Publishers," the big political issue, as you would expect, was the impact on "journalism" once brands become media and publishers in their own right.

Moderated by National Public Radio host Tom Ashbrook, the panel included Lora Kolodny, TechCrunch; Pawan Deshpanda, Hivefire CEO; Joe Polizzi, Junta42 founder and me, representing Carrier Evolution. The broad issue is that both consumers and businesses now are creating content that overlaps with the sort of content traditional media once monopolized.

That obviously raises the issue of how consumers and citizens can be protected from attempts at manipulation by government and special interests of all sorts, as the number of voices grows exponentially and the number of of organizations and people producing traditional news media shrinks both absolutely and relatively. There seemed to be general agreement that "new" publishers need stronger and more effective systems to address those sorts of issues. 

A separate following panel, featuring C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley, authors of "Content Rules," rather more directly addressed the practical issues organizations have as they become content publishers.

What nobody seemed to dispute is that the line separating "traditional media" from "user generated content" and "brand-sponsored and created content" is porous, and that the trend will not stop. You can follow some of the tweet streams at #contentrules, #curatedebate and #brandjo on Twitter.

Video and audio will follow.  But here's some video of C. C. Chapman at an earlier event, talking about content marketing. 

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