South by Southwest is not the sort of venue lots of telecom professionals routinely attend, at least not in the past. In 2011, Carrier Evolution was asked to join a panel taking a look at how traditional media is changing, especially the role now played by software and hardware suppliers, for example, in creating content that once was a media monopoly.
Along the way, there are new issues to confront, ranging from trust and authenticity to the impact on traditional journalism. As you will glean from this discussion, there is substantial concern on the part of the traditional media about new media produced by brands.
There are legitimate issues, and content marketing practitioners will, sooner or later, need to address the issues. Some of us might argue that most of the traditional journalistic rules still are useful guides to behavior, because content marketing still requires, first and foremost, “good content” to add any value.
But readers also must exercise greater discernment, as they now have substantial ability to customize news and information feeds of varying quality and veracity. In that past, that has typically meant being discriminating consumers of content provided by major newspapers and TV stations.
These days, consumers also must evaluate content provided by a much-wider range of sources. The need for some amount of judgment and evaluation, by the consumer, has not gone away.
