The Content Code follows best sellers – Tao of twitter and Social Media Explained (reviewed by Amith Prabhu and Radhika Nandwani respectively) by Mark Schaefer

Mark is a renowned social media expert who brings experiences from counselling a variety of brands on the subject. He has synthesized those and an exceptional lot of other researched case studies into this book to address the most fundamental question that content creators will have:

“I am a professional marketer working as hard as I can. I am producing content, engaging on social media, and spinning right along with the revolving door of every digital marketing innovation and new platform. Why is my business not getting anywhere?”

The book finds the answer in the B.A.D.A.S.S model, studying where your brand lies on it, and perfecting every wing of it to “Ignite Content” and overcome “Content Shock”.

Good quality content alone is insufficient to attract, influence and retain audiences nowadays, owning to the information highway overpopulated with content – content shock. What takes it to the next level is finding the right factors and impulses that makes your content break that barrier – content ignition. So far as that is concerned, Mark has written a great guide for practitioners to isolate and ignite the right kind of content. The guide addresses the barrier with an incredible list of (22) practical tools to achieve content ignition – one the things that makes it a must read for communications professionals.

The book is laid out into a matrix of best practices inspired by case studies of successes, and how each can be retrofitted in some way for your brand’s ecosystem, something that makes it very handy and readily applicable. It establishes power of your community which comes not from it talking to you, but your community members talking to each other. Being a facilitator of such conversations is what makes an influencer.

I would call The Content Code a rare read that inspires content creators to continue to have faith in the power of content. Mark explains how to convert everything around you, every source of idea into a source of content, and maintain a healthy pipeline of content. It also busts a myth of the life span of your content, which can stay alive on the shelf longer than you may think and the right impulse can (re)ignite it into freshness. Content interacts with brand along its life cycle and “by providing a drip, drip, drip of communications, you let people know that you’re there, you care and you’re working on something new”

It really boils down to the philosophy – “create great content, love on your audience, rest will take care of itself”.