This essay was originally sent as an email newsletter on February 18, 2021 with the subject line "CT No. 74: The not-yet-wild world of B2B media."
B2B media is having a moment: suddenly it’s cool to launch your own content marketing company, per A16Z’s new venture.* Business bro newsletters are propagating like mushrooms in the Substackosphere, many of which are“curating” a list of the Medium posts and corporate blog posts easily found in more established marketing newsletters.
The Content Technologist is one of several indie newsletters focused on media and content operations, and don’t even get me started on the millions of words spilled daily from those covering the Big Tech Social News. Business podcasts are the talkers’ pandemic side project, even when they suspect no one's listening. There’s also the social network that rhymes with Pub Mouse, which was overhyped before the invites even disseminated to plebes like us.
Prosumer outlets are getting in on the fun, suddenly diving deep into workplace culture, teasing the edges of nondisclosure agreements to squeeze out the juiciest stories of institutional racism and sexism across Big Tech and Legacy Media. Digital advertising is another crossover target, with consumers and watchdogs increasingly concerned about privacy and the Apple vs. Facebook IDFV fight providing a spicy narrative frame to discuss the abysmally dull issue of cookie-based tracking.
*Shout out to Rusty Foster who appropriately — although somewhat pejoratively — dubbed the endeavor content marketing and not an "independent media outlet.")
Unfortunately, for those of us who have been here for a while—I’m in my tenth year focused primarily on B2B media and marketing—we’re still not seeing much diversity in the way media covers either business or technology. B2B-focused outlets are a combination of the following:
- So pro-business that they forget businesses are comprised of people and communities working together, not all of whom hold Reaganomics in the highest regard
- So pro-technology and pro-“inspiration” that they conveniently ignore the very real social strife that has affected literally everyone in the past year
- So desperate for advertising and subscription dollars that they can’t afford to publish much beyond press releases and basic, hastily compiled blog posts contributed for free from other companies
- So obsessed with characters—movers, shakers, hustlers and rocketships—to have any sense of the gestalt.
The consumer and prosumer vein of tech and marketing business coverage is similarly dissatisfying, with lonesome writers and academics who don’t really attempt to understand the technology they’re covering complaining about concepts, buzzwords and strategies they don’t understand. Reporters and editors for mass consumer outlets are more interested in a garbage hotdog byproduct (let’s be fair—this hypothetical hotdog is radioactive) than exploring the daily processes and practices of how the sausage is made. The mass market, finance-focused business outlets are too focused on dumbing it down and getting the talking points so that Johnny MBA can recite case studies rote rather than devoting resources to letting talented reporters shine light on a story’s nuance.
As a writer, B2B marketer and professional working in and around digital media for a decade, I’ve been all of the above. I’ve been breathless and overenthusiastic, rapid-fire and thoughtless. I’ve also been hypercritical and frustrated, assigning individuals and technologies blame for larger cultural issues. In past gigs I’ve leaned too heavily on advertiser materials and haven’t had the energy, resources or context to question my assumptions in writing. I’m also acutely aware of one of the main barriers to quality content: practitioners actively working in their fields are rarely paid directly for their public-facing business writing.
Dimensions for evaluating B2B media content
When reading and evaluating the business content I consume, what I spend time with, and what I link in this newsletter, I consider the following dimensions:
- Are the contributors professional practitioners or are they journalists? I tend to prefer professional practitioners who have some stake in the subject matter, since I want to share in their expertise, even if consumer audiences would find it boring. I support journalism in all its forms, but I wish legacy B2B outlets were less “pro-business” and more “pro-people,” especially when their mission is not directly tied to a professional lobbying association. I’m into prosumer reporter critical thinking, but… half the time reporters don’t know the difference between the front-end and the back-end of a website or what it's like to work at a company that's not mired in media ego power struggles. And independent outlets, particularly those in the side hustle/growth hack vein, many of the ideas proposed by novice marketers don’t scale ethically. So. Professional expertise is a continuum to consider!
- How much of the content is voice/take and how much is practical knowledge? In the second episode of the excellent Reply All series about racism at the media workplace of Bon Appetit, Sruthi Pinnamaneni summarizes Bon Appetit's editorial approach as "priz[ing] voice above all ,” a problem endemic to mass consumer media. I’d argue that most B2B media is either voice or practical knowledge, a take about the promise of technology with no evidence or a list of instructions that reads like no humans work at the business. I like B2B content that balances voice and practical application — and there’s far too little of it. (I have to hand it to UX writers here: y'all are great at mixing voice and practical info!)
- How do I see the ideas actually working in different types of businesses? As someone who has rarely worked with sexy consumer brands (by choice!), there’s nothing more frustrating that reading a successful, creative marketing case study from Coca-Cola whose ideas would never fly for a medtech startup client.
- Does the outlet pay contributors? B2B media needs to get better about paying contributors, period. Good content is a collaboration, and it requires time, effort and compensation. As writers have insisted in the past decade, "exposure" for an individual or brand still doesn’t count as payment. Many professional practitioners create event and digital content in addition to their full-time jobs and are rarely compensated. Only the media outlet—many of whom are using the free content to sell extremely profitable ticketed events—benefits from the traffic and engagements of unpaid contributions. If an outlet only accepts completed pieces that it does not pay money for, edit or revise, then why should I give my time to reading a thinly veiled press release?
- Does the outlet require contributors to pay for their contributions to be published? At my last two companies, Forbes gave us the “opportunity” to be on some content contribution committee if we paid a fee to be involved. It was horseshit. The Forbes brand is not journalism; it's corporate user-generated content, and there's no unified voice or perspective, and I'm always suspect of the quality of its contributors. Any brand trust Forbes once had before its UGC era is extremely devalued. Forbes sucks. Don’t be like Forbes.
- Does the outlet regularly publish/link to women and people of color? Does the outlet address racism and sexism? This is a given. If I scan your New Ideas newsletter and you only link to or interview other men, then I will not subscribe.** If your B2B content “ignores politics” or derides social justice efforts I will not subscribe. Ignoring others’ identities is not a tenable position in 2021. I firmly believe that the more businesses ignore racism and sexism, the more negative consequences they will experience from employees and customers. This goes quintuple for B2B media. Even if you aren’t ready to advertise your diversity and inclusion policies—which should be well-considered and intentional and not a PR stunt—you have to acknowledge that we live in an inequitable world, and business processes have significantly contributed to those inequities. As they used to say: Man up and own it, B2B.
- What’s the outlet’s financial stake in the content/idea? The content Google publishes is going to be pro-Google, and the content from the digital media trade association is going to assert that Google took all their members’ revenue. I’m a huge fan of agencies that run their own B2B outlets, but I’m also aware that agencies often promote tech without vetting it properly. A UX practitioner is not going to talk about the deep, systemic challenges and sleepless nights in a blog post about their pet project. I’d love an independently funded B2B outlet that fairly paid its conflict-of-interest-free contributors, but I’m also realistic: almost all B2B content is engulfed in a strong hug of money.
- Is it about finance? A disproportionate amount of B2B media is about finance. I don’t actually care about finance! Or boards! This is a preference, but if your audience is investors, your audience is not me.
- Does the outlet care more about advertisers than readers? Most legacy B2B media content was developed with sponsors and advertisers in mind first. If your B2B website is covered in display ads so I can’t see any content and your only contributors are “co-sponsored” white papers, I don’t think you’ve earned my attention as a professional reader, even if you've snagged those ad dollars.
- If you curate your content, do you add original thought or perspective to the links and recommendations? There are lots of good curated B2B newsletters, but few provide original perspective on the links beyond "I like it" or "what an interesting idea." Curation isn't easy, sure, but it's a crowded market. Providing original ideas and responses to others' content is essential in the new age of conversational B2B.
**Men, I encourage you to have this same policy and talk about it with other men! Men only quoting and sourcing men is a huge issue in B2B.
At the B2B content frontier, the best is yet to come
I work to be empathetic to everyone working in the content and marketing mines — we’re all doing the best we can. Whether as the subject or creator, we’re all working to make our lives a little more tolerable, doing work that feels fulfilling as we tolerate the constant odor of bullshit.
But we need better mouthpieces telling our stories. The communities are out there—so many awesome, supportive professional communities—and those conversations should be synthesized into something bigger. And I haven’t run the numbers, no, but there has to be a market for translating all these ephemeral conversations into meatier stories.
I believe there’s a massive opportunity for better, profitable B2B media, driven by people who love their jobs but aren’t, y’know, solipsistically and rabidly drooling over their own successes. I’d love to see more outlets in the vein of Smashing Magazine and The Information and less of a AdAge/Digiday/Tech Crunch echo chamber. If vaunted venture capital firms are going to start their own content marketing outlets, then I hope they hire good reporters, editors who question and shape stories, and practitioners who pose original ideas that practically work in real companies.
Because we deserve better B2B conversations, those that advance our practice and help us make the necessary changes to make systems better and our lives more manageable.
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