Can blockchain technology change your content management strategy?
Find out if blockchain is good for your brand’s content distribution efforts.
Content distribution is a huge part of any digital marketing strategy. Organizations use content as a way to talk about their product and service, demonstrate capabilities, share customer reviews and testimonials, and position themselves as a resource to their users. Whether the content is tweets, blog posts, or white papers, all content is meant to point potential users to back to the brand.
Anytime we talk about how a new technology has the potential to revolutionize a way we do our work, it’s important to understand exactly how that technology functions. Understanding blockchain will help us better understand how it can help us create better content distribution.
Here’s a brief blockchain explanation to start us off. Deloitte, the professional financial services organization, describes blockchain technology by saying:
“In a traditional environment, trusted third parties act as intermediaries for financial transactions. If you have ever sent money overseas, it will pass through an intermediary (usually a bank). It will usually not be instantaneous and the intermediary will take a commission for doing this either in the form of exchange rate conversion or other charges. The original Blockchain is open-source technology which offers an alternative to the traditional intermediary…The intermediary is replaced by the collective verification of the ecosystem offering a huge degree of traceability, security and speed. …Blockchain technology is broader than finance. It can be applied to any multi-step transaction where traceability and visibility is required.”
This open source, decentralized style of verification has led to overall better accountability and accessibility. Most current content distribution channels are third-party. Even if a business has an ecommerce website or blog, they likely share news of sales through emails (owned by a company with an email server, like Gmail) or promote their blog posts and new products through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or another channel. To gain the most readership, organizations often must pay to create and host ads that show off their content on this centralized, third-party site. Some companies host videos, like how-to instructions, tutorials, or reviews, on YouTube, which means that their content can potentially be associated with advertising that not only disrupts the content delivery itself, but might also be in contradiction with a brand’s messaging and positioning.
One benefit of the current content distribution model is that it serves content in places where there is built in readership – users are already on these sites for other reasons. But a decentralized technology like blockchain might offer a more direct means of communicating or a more financially viable content distribution method.
Blockchain applications in content delivery and distribution are already being used by companies like DECENT, which is aiming to give companies a new way to publish digital content, calling their methods “the future of online distribution.” One of the benefits they note is the transparency in content and complete record of all actions taken regarding that content – no more deleted comments or bad reviews or fake ratings, just complete transparency for both producers and consumers. This holds everyone to a greater standard of accountability and can even grow consumer trust and loyalty towards a brand or business.
It will probably take some time to completely transition from our current content distribution methods to thinking about utilizing blockchain in content strategies, but they do offer marketing professionals a lot to think about when it comes to the future of content distribution and the potential benefits of moving away from a strictly third-party distribution model.
