Content is king. It’s all about the conversation.
These principles are told by social media marketers on a daily basis. Yet for the most part, business owners have no idea what these marketers are talking about. Yesterday, I stumbled upon a post by @briancarter where he asks: Is content more important than conversation?
*Go ahead and read the post 
In my opinion, both are important. I don’t think it’s an ‘either/or’ argument but an ‘and’. The conversation can fuel great content.
I have a feeling that all this focus on producing content is the same as creating un-differentiated products and services. Just like creating more products and services because it worked for someone else fuels the commodity mindset, with the end goal of selling more crap, the same holds true with content. If the end goal is attracting retweets, likes, subscribers, follows, etc. then we’re just creating more crap.
It’s a never ending feedback loop.
But if the end goal is to improve our customers lives through content, which it should, then we can mine social networks for insights into how we might do that. We can start conversations with customers and partners around those insights and include them in the process of creating that content. Wouldn’t this produce better content? With access to social networks, we all have this capability. All it takes is time and the right mindset.
But if you start with the mindset of reverse engineering others ‘going viral’ strategies thinking they will work for you, your scoreboards doesn’t have people’s best interest at heart.
For example, last month Megan McArdle argued that we must put an end to the ‘infographic plague‘. If you’ve spent enough time on Twitter then you know that there isn’t a day that goes by where some new infographic is introduced. Most of these infographics are mashups of other previously released infographics with different colors and data.
Why do we have a plague of infographics? Because businesses know they attract links, likes, comments, retweets, etc, etc…
The same story repeats itself all the time. We resort to repeating everyone else’s tactics thinking that if we repeat them, we’ll achieve the same results. At the beginning it might work, but when everyone else catches, which in these days happens pretty quickly, but eventually that advantage erodes.
So let’s not treat this as a ‘either/or’ discussion; but, rather let’s look at how both conversation and content work in tandem.
And let’s focus on creating content that improves and educates our clients/customers. Because if we do that, the retweets, likes, subscribers, comments, etc, will come 
