Content marketing need not only be done by content marketers

The looming content war in Asia

Content was once hailed as king in the new digital economy, a comparison which may be apt in a way beyond originally intended.

While content does have the power of royalty — allowing founders to seize share from competitors, enrich their coffers, and secure market leadership — it is also becoming as scarce.

The content crisis in Asia

To look at it another way, compare the creation to consumption ratio for most forms of digital content. The gripping series you consume on Netflix over the course of a weekend might have taken more than a year to produce and tens of millions of dollars to bankroll.

The same goes for other digital mediums. The column you read in The New York Times may have taken the essayist the course of several weeks to write, revise, and rewrite. The ten-minute documentary you watch on your Facebook Newsfeed was probably created with man-hours a thousand times that figure.

In short, the cost of creating content — including not only money, but time and resources — is spiralling ever upward, and even then, it seems to barely keep pace with our insatiable demand.

But, much like a price war, a content war produces only a pyrrhic victory: The ostensible winner may have the most popular content for viewers now — until that is someone with a bigger warchest comes along to produce more, produce better.

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Companies in Asia Pacific staring down a possible content war should avoid one at all costs, and instead take notes from their peers in the region succeeding through co-creation or outright user-generated content.

These collaborative approaches allow the companies to keep pace with the demand for content, while minimizing the necessary investment to the bare minimum. These companies are pioneering a MVC, if you want to repurpose a term from startup terminology, with their minimum viable content.

Everyone is a content creator

Perhaps the most prominent example of co-creation content in Southeast Asia comes courtesy of iflix.

The Malaysian video on demand service launched what it calls a Creators Hub earlier this year, which will incubate 30 content creators for one year, providing them funding, networking, bootcamp, and other resources. As the program is still in first year, the results remain to be seen, but iflix knows very well the goldmine it is tapping into: It will source and develop the very best content creators from the more than 500,000 active across the region.

One platform that has already benefited from a surplus of user-generated content is livestreaming hub Kumu from the Philippines. While Kumu has its own shows produced in-house, the vast majority of its content is user-generated.

The very best of its user-generated content is as creative and slick as any in-house show — these amateur hosts self-produce livestreams that including singing, dancing, improvisational acting, and even games.

The proof that such user-generated content is as effective at capturing hearts and minds as traditionally produced shows is in the numbers: Although it launched only last year, Kumu already boasts of an astounding 500,000 users. Venture capitalists see the value of these user livestreams, too, as a group of top investors, led by Summit Media, invested US$1.2 million in the company at the tail end of last year.

Their dollar goes further here: That warchest will support exponentially more user-generated content than it will studio-produced shows.

Even traditional publications are getting in on the action.

Social news network Rappler has been embroiled in political issues as of late, which has arguably overshadowed its incredible effort for user-generated content with RapplerX. The platform allowed non-journalists to contribute meaningful stories, as part of the company’s overall commitment to citizen journalism.

That RapplerX is reportedly being shuttered to give way to building a new, improved platform only shows the value of user-generated content. Rather than adding more journalists one-by-one, you can expand storytelling capability exponentially by giving way to community voices.

It would be a mistake to think that co-creation and user-generated content can only benefit companies already in the media space. Entrepreneurs in consumer or enterprise verticals would be well served to look into producing their content this way, as part of a more efficient bid to be the thought leader of their respective industry.

Recruitday in the Philippines, for example, is leveraging knowledge and data gleaned from its stakeholders — job seekers, recruiters (“Scouts”), and employers — to create content beneficial for all three, in a way that no other competitor can. This creative alchemy helps job seekers land the perfect job, scouts to successfully refer candidates, and employers find the best talent.

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Other consumer and enterprise companies should take note and think of ways on how they can use their already existing community to create content marketing that is a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Content marketing, in short, need not only be done by content marketers. You can tap into the collective wisdom of your community and emerge with a winning strategy.

While your peers sink time, money, and resources into expensive, company-owned content, you should turn to co-creation and user-generated content to achieve thought leadership in your space, and before long, market leadership.

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