In my E-Marketing class today, we talked about content and online communities.

As for preparation, we had 7 articles which gave us different perspectives on the importance of great content, and presented tools that could help us on our misson to produce great content. – In total, a very interesting class!

However, after we finished class, something struck me: One thing is content, but what about the medium that facilitates the content?

Every medium carries a message

The great Canadian thinker (the picture really shows how much of a thinker he was), Marshall Mcluhan, once said that the medium is the message, which, if taken literally, would ruin the whole idea about concetrating on great content. BUT that perspective is also a bit to radical from my point of view.

Instead, I will allow myself to use Lars Thøger Christensen‘s more moderate interpretation of Mcluhan, which states that every medium carries a message.From this perspective, content and the medium becomes equal, and therefore deserve equal attention.

To me, the most important take-away from McLuhan’s work, is his way of thinking about media: A medium is the medium of another medium.

It is kind of a tricky way of putting it, but when one relates it to content marketing, it suddenly makes much more sense. One could say that a sort of media hierarchy appears.

An example of a media hierarchy:

1. You choose whether to go with an online or offline medium. An offline medium as a handwritten mail can carry the message of effort and therefore caring, but it can also carry the message of being out of tune with the new and “online” world. It depends on the person receiving the mail and the content of the mail.

2. You choose which online and offline medium you want to use. If you want to reach out to people in their privat sphere, you might go with Facebook. You don’t go for LinkedIn, which carries a message about professionalism.

3. You choose who should be the sender of the message. If your company has received massive critique and you want to make an apology, you might want to put an important person as the sender, because that will carry the message of your company actually caring about the critique.

4. You choose the “medium” of your content. That could be an apology – as stated in the example before – or the medium of the content could be a question. Depending on how “equal” the relationship is between your company and your customers.

And I could go on like this for quite some time…

My point is, we should always take the medium into account, when we talk about creating content, because you want the message of the medium and the message of the content to tell the same story.