Eloqua recently created a new role: director of content marketing. The title could easily be changed to director of irritation, because that’s essentially the function. You see, the director of content marketing (a.k.a., me) is responsible for extracting the expertise that’s nestled comfortably inside colleagues’ minds and desktops, twisting it into a new shape (tweets, slideshows, ebooks, videos, images, blogs), and setting it loose on the social Web. My boss, CMO Brian Kardon, likens the function to a newspaper’s editor-in-chief, albeit for corporate content. I’d agree with him, if only the editor-in-chief also wrote copy, managed distribution and hawked the paper on street corners.
But this post isn’t complaint; it’s a celebration. You see, when I initially envisioned this content marketing function, I actually drew the job description on a scrap of paper and raced into Kardon’s office to pitch it. Fortunately for me, he had the same idea. Eventually that sketch became the below Eloqua/JESS3 “infographic,” dubbed The Content Grid. It’s a simple framework for content — or “inbound” — marketing. That is, it plots content type and distribution channel across two dimensions: who should create it (a single owner or the entire staff) and how it should be distributed for maximum impact on the sales funnel.
But what started as an internal job description evolved into a pitch to journalists, fodder for Twitter, and this very blog post. In other words, describing the role and performing the function became, ultimately, one in the same. As Leslie Bradshaw (a.k.a., the smartest woman in social media) would say, “It’s all so meta.”
If you want to download the image feel free. A PDF version is here and a jpg version is here. Share it with others. Drop it in your slide decks. Upload it to your blog. It now belongs to the Web.
