Are we finally at the convergence of content marketing and social media software?
I’ve written a lot about content marketing software and the content marketing software and tools industry.
I believe it’s overbuilt. I believe it’s too frothy.
I believe there’s too many startups with too much venture capital. Some of them will fail. Some of them will be disintermediated. Some of them will be rolled up. But they ain’t all going to make it.
I have been under the impression for quite a while that eventually one of the large content marketing platforms — Kapost, NewsCred, Percolate, Contently — will develop social media capabilities and try to become the ultimate content marketing meets social media stack. I believe that to be the case.
Maybe Social is the Parent and Content is the Child?
However, a very interesting announcement from Sprinklr, which is certainly one of the leaders in enterprise social media software.
Sprinklr has rolled out its own content marketing suite, including calendaring, the ability to surface topics, and the ability to build out real-time newsrooms. A lot of the tools and technologies that the content marketing platforms have, Sprinklr is now trying to build into their software offering.
I’ve thought that content marketing would be the parent, and social marketing would fit underneath it.
What Sprinklr is trying to do is flip the script on that, where social media becomes the parent and content marketing is the child. It is a very interesting move.
Sprinklr has an absolute metric crap ton of venture capital, and they’re spending it like a drunken sailor on shore leave, and good for them. They are trying to build out a defensible platform that nobody else can come after them or not easily come after them, unless you are a big, big, big company like Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, or IBM.
Ladies and gentlemen, the line in the sand has been drawn. Shots fired. We are going to see a major, major shift in the next 12 to 18 months in the social media software business and the content marketing software business.
I’m not sure who’s going to win yet, but with Sprinklr’s announcement, we are entering a brand new era. I’m fascinated to see how it’s going to turn out.
What do you think?
About Jay Baer
Jay Baer is a renowned business strategist, keynote speaker and the New York Times best-selling author of four books who travels the world helping businesspeople get and keep more customers. He’s advised with more than 700 companies since 1994, including Caterpillar, Nike, Allstate, and 31 of the FORTUNE 500.
He is the founder of Convince & Convert, a strategy consulting firm that helps prominent companies gain and keep more customers through the smart intersection of technology, social media, and customer service.
His Convince & Convert Media division owns the world’s #1 content marketing blog, multiple podcasts, and many other education resources for business owners and executives.
