Coupons and Contrition

Just wanted to share an article I wrote for AdAge titled Want to Tweet? First, Teach Your Brand to Speak: Coupons and Contrition Are Just Not Enough to Engage Audiences. Over the last few months I've been doing a lot of thinking about why brands struggle so much as content creators as it relates to some of the stuff we're doing with Percolate and brands (we've got a consumer and a b2b API offering). The main gist is that brands have been collecting friends, fans and followers and now they need to figure out what they're going to say to them, which seems to leave most completely lost. After spending a bunch of time thinking about why I started to realize it had a lot to do with brands not paying attention to the world (imagine having to Tweet, or even just have a conversation, if you spent your day not consuming anything). Leading me to the conclusion that brands looking to create content for the world of flow need to think about their inputs (what they pay attention to) as much as their outputs. Anyway, rather than repeating myself more, just go check out the whole thing over at AdAge.com.