We All Need to Be "Brand Journalists"

We all need to be creating content and sharing it with the world. This is lesson #1 of the Internet.

Almost no one does enough of this -- we could all do more. Many people don't do any, and that's a mistake. More and more, people are looking for answers by searching the web, and those who are providing the right answers are getting the business, while those who are not, while perhaps not suffering immediately, will become more and more marginalized all the time.

David Meerman Scott uses the term "brand journalism" to describe what we all should be doing, and his definition is so accurate that I'm just going to paste it here:

Brand Journalism is when any organization—B2B company, consumer product company, the military, nonprofits, government agencies, politicians, churches, rock bands, solo entrepreneurs—creates valuable information and shares it with the world. Brand Journalism is not a product pitch. It is not an advertorial. It is not an egotistical spewing of gobbledygook-laden corporate drivel. Instead Brand Journalism is the creation of Web content—videos, blog posts, photos, charts, graphs, essays, ebooks, white papers—that deliver value to your marketplace and serve to position your organization as one worthy of doing business with.

Get it? Now get going. It doesn't need to be a treatise or your greatest thoughts. It needs to be a little value-add. A few paragraphs. An interesting photo or video. A link and a reason why you're sharing it. That's it. There are only two requirements: 1 -- doing it. 2 -- doing it with some level of consistency. On the later, 2-3 times a week is a good starting point.