Temple of Knowledge!? But why? I just want some blog posts for ranking…
Why use the Web as a repository of human knowledge, while we can use it as a giant TV channel?
Why care about telling, while we can just be selling.
Why think thorugh content from the perspective of dialogic communication, knowledge management and knowledge tretrieval, when we can just run a few prompts and get 15 pages of polished but empty bla bla?
Because this is how exchange works. It doesn’t work as a single transaction in a vacuumn. It is part of a dynamics in an ecosystem.
Exchange is not a single transaction happening in a vacuum. It is part of a dynamic ecosystem, unfolding over time, shaped by memory, trust, and feedback. Think of a page that actually answers an important question (read – meets a pressing need) and gets linked, reused internally, and cited externally. Now think about a glossy landing page, promising all the world’s goodies, well optimized for conversion, with all the behavioural psychology advice applied to make you click.
What about them?
One becomes part of the knowledge on the Web, part of our ecosystem. The other is forgotten the moment the campaign ends. It sells and dies. Only to open an empty space for another page to be written, fill the void and die again. Alone. Never linked. Never webby.
But webby is who we are!
And yes, I will use a sentence from 1999.
Markets are conversations. Where people meet, talk, change.
Content is conversation. It is as good as the processes in the company work, as good as the information plumbing functions:
- How information flows inside the company
- How decisions are communicated and implemented
- How updates propagate
- How feedback is captured and acted upon.
How do we make it function?
With structure and plans which also allow the freedom to freely engage in a dialogue.
Dialogue in a corporate setting is impossible you might argue.
It’s not impossible. It is inevitable.
Customers ask questions. Prospects are curious about features, processes, services. Teams do explain things on LinkedIn, via email, responding to needs and requests. This is the pulse of the exchange. And it is more than the sum of it parts. And it is in this “more” that meaningful content seeds grow.
And now that we cracked to some extent the use of schema.org, the use of structured data for content, we have another thing to crack.
The dialogic communication approach.
How do we do that in content? By borrowing frameworks from theoretical PR and from relationship marketing paradigms:
- Treating content as relationship-building, not messaging
- Writing with responsiveness instead of broadcast in. mind
- Acknowledging uncertainty instead of hiding it
- Enabling follow-up instead of closure.
And by also doing the work of helping people understand the more we care about the Web, the more it cares about us.