The Parachute Digital dandelion represents the content linkages across the internet
Zan Rowe from Triple J mornings is one of my favourite interviewers. I think she’s incredibly adept at asking tough questions, in a very gentle way. She is considered and knowledgeable about the people she interviews and her “take 5” interviews on Friday mornings are thoroughly enjoyable.
The reason I mention Zan is because it is from her that I first heard the term “ear-worm”. I may be a little behind the times in terms of youth lingo, but this term has a correlation for me with how good content worms its way around the internet, being linked from blogs and social networking profiles and YouTube and sent via emails as illegal personal and offensive content in large companies all around the world.
The same concept is the reason that I use a dandelion for the Parachute Digital brand. The dandelion, for me, represents the beauty of nature but also a visual metaphor for the internets connections and linkages from one page or piece of content to another. The internet, and the digital channels that us marketers use to promote our businesses and causes, are simply a glorified distribution channel for content and information.
Parachute Digital Marketing is a Sydney based online marketing consultancy who focus our energies on building digital marketing strategies around content that the users want. We firmly believe that there is no excuse for a bad online user experience. It is fairly easy and economical to provide good quality content to your web visitors. In fact there has never been a better time to create content and distribute it at relatively low costs given technology developments over the last decade or two. It is simply a management choice and priority whether they choose to focus their business on meeting their customer’s needs.
Our business, and thus our website, is clearly centre on content marketing. We’re a small business, all of the content that we create is done on a shoe string. Our videos are done using iMovie and posted to YouTube to redistribute via our website, through emails and via social media marketing. All of the content on this site is written by one person, early in the mornings before the work day starts, or as the start of the work day. I (Shanelle) have the same amount of hours in the day that every other human being on the planet has, how i spent them is a choice. I prioritise creating content for our audience. Some weeks I produce less content than others, but for the last 3 years, consistently, I have written and produced, low cost, high quality content that adds value to the reader. I know this because people comment on Parachute Digital’s facebook pages and in Google Plus and my clients and colleagues tell me that they enjoy my emails and blog posts. I wish they would comment online more, but as I have said in many other blogs, people think and behave differently online, and that includes whether they are passive or active consumers and contributors to online content. People that have a personal connection to me, often tell me in person rather than comment online. And I’m grateful for the feedback, however it comes.
Currently there are about 150+ inbound links to this website. Not a single one of those links has been requested, commissioned or paid for. Every one of them has been generated organically, by people reading this blog and linking to it as a reference point. Good content is rewarded through linking and continues to be re-distributed online by its readers. Parachute Digital has many digital channels that we distribute our content through, as mentioned above, but we also have partners and advocates and clients and friends who also believe in our philosophy of putting the user’s needs and experience first and generating quality content that adds value to their lives, and they share our message for us.
So next time you have an idea to write a blog or make a video or share some data, do it. Don’t make excuses that there’s not enough time or that its too expensive or that you don’t have the budget to promote it. That’s bollocks. Take some initiative, be bold, try something a little bit different to what you normally do and see what happens. I imagine you’ll be pleasantly surprised.