Content marketing taken to new level with online blog networks

Top advertising agencies have been using content marketing for quite some time. With all the recent buzz it’s created; you would think it was the latest advertising innovation.

Lewis DVorkin (@lewisdvorkin), Chief Product Officer of Forbes Media talks about the evolution of content marketing in his post, “Inside Forbes: The Advertising Trend That Will Shake Up 100 Years of Journalism.”

Schmertz, the top PR guy at Mobil, was among those leading a nationwide debate in the 70s about rising gas prices and the energy industry. Every Thursday, on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, he bought space to explain, promote and advocate Mobil’s side of the story. He was a pioneer using the limited tools of traditional media to go straight to the public. “There’s a dialogue out there,” he said, “and you’re either in it or you’re not.”

That’s a quote right out of the era of social media — just 40 years early. Today, what Mobil did might be called thought leadership. Its decade-long campaign in The Times might be called content marketing. Combine the two and you’ve got the hottest trend in media business — and perhaps the single most difficult reality for the news industry to wrap its head around.

Although content marketing may never completely replace traditional advertising, the days of banner ads are coming to an end. DVorkin defines content marketing as, “brands using the tools of digital media and social sharing to behave like original-content publishers. They want to break out of the silos (full and partial-page display ads, 30-second spots and Web banners) that both traditional and new media forced them into.”

In 2010, FORBES launched AdVoice, a unique blog network product that offers content marketing opportunities for brands. It’s a way for marketers to publish and curate content such as blog posts directly onto Forbes.com and selectively run columns in their print magazine.

For FORBES, everything we do cascades from a belief that there are five vital constituencies in the media business, each with a different agenda. FORBES certainly has a voice. So does the journalist, the consumer, the social community and the marketer. In the digital era, each can produce content at will in an effort to be heard. That leads to a corollary principle: content is content, and transparency makes it possible for many different credible sources to provide useful information. We’ve built a scalable platform and easy-to-use publishing tools for staff editors and reporters to cover the world of business news. Nearly 1,000 carefully selected topic experts can do the same. So can AdVoice partners (SAP has more than a dozen employees and others writing posts).

Content marketing is essential for any lawyer’s or law firm’s marketing mix. It allows them to prove their specialized expertise. With geography becoming less of a factor, it is important to build trust and show potential clients what you have to offer without the traditional face-to-face meetings.

Networks, whether like Forbes (a very string one) or LXBN (LexBlog’s network) which can open the door to content marketing, with their own blog or independently with selective pieces contributed to network channels, only add to content marketing opportunities for law firms.