Redefining Work... Globalization Meets Content Marketing

Redefining the Deal

We all know that the post-war social contract most developed countries are familiar with is rapidly changing. Education has become much more expensive even as it has become a less reliable path to employment. Employment - until recently a promise of rising wages, rising expectations and social mobility - is now itself a lifetime of continuous uncertainty and anxiety. Personal learning must be continuous to learn new skills as technology replaces even more labor, and the better jobs involve more intellectual skills than ever before. The developed world faces billions of new workers competing for the jobs that are available and employers are increasingly more global in their search for new markets and for low-cost production. If you have kids, you’re nervous for them. You're nervous for yourself too. Globalization lets companies become less nationalistic and less concerned with - or accountable for - social well-being. Even so, here in the US the SCOTUS has ruled that corporations have unlimited ability to fund political discourse. Distanced from employment and distanced from civic representation - citizens, voters, taxpayers, and workers are increasingly on their own. The magazine Fast Company called this the “Age of the Individual” in its now-famous cover article, “The Brand Called You.” That was in 1997.

Redefining the Desk
Developed nation economies (especially the US) are increasingly moving toward a services economy at the expense of traditional manufacturing. Manufacturing now involves sophisticated technologies and systems controls over complex machines. The deployment of capital through technology is currently much more efficient than the use of labor. The jobs in the most productive of today’s factory are more likely to require a PhD than a strong back. But outsourcing is not limited to jobs. Many household brands now routinely use contract manufacturing, and the major trend in Information Technology integrates Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing as the new norm.

There is also a pronounced shift in who provides the capital infrastructure that even service workers need. The service economy worker, aka knowledge worker, is being downsized from offices to cubicles, relocated from office to home, and re-classified from employee to contractor. This trend toward engaging people as independent contractors also shifts overheads like heating, lighting and connectivity, tools like hardware and software, and human resource issues like healthcare and pension benefits – all onto the individual. Gains in collective advantage are being redistributed as corporations respond to, or take advantage of, the globalization effects of technology dispersion and increased labor competition. It is probable that hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of knowledge workers are now working from home.

Redefining the Dialog

Compounding the increasing fragmentation of traditional civil relationships is the change of control in public and marketing communications. The days of one-way communication from party to voter or vendor to customer are over. In the business world, today’s customers – both consumer and business buyers – are increasingly vocal and participatory in discussing and critiquing the goods and services they buy. They use social networks to seek referrals and use their own social graphs to curate, not only the content they consume, but also the products they research and purchase. In this post-PC world of mobile communications, time spent on social networks has passed that of time spent on traditional web portals. Social Commerce is the hot new investment trend in VC right now as consumers increasingly rely on their own social sphere of influencers to make their buying decisions.

In order to stay part of this never-ending conversation, today’s marketer must adopt communications strategies that involve listening, conversing and messaging to their audience. The sheer amount of content required to satisfy this always-on dialog across multiples of media is enormous. Who will create this? How can we afford them? How will we manage them?

It was once famously said that what this country needed was a good five-cent cigar. I think what this world needs now is a good network of independent experts who create marketing content for businesses on a reliable, affordable, sustainable basis.

How will your organization develop the personal stories and deep-dive content that will keep your audience engaged?