There’s another “magnetic content” out there (besides me).

Imagine my surprise when a friend alerted me to a company called Magnetic Content, which is a content marketing agency.

A rival, if you like, because not only are they implementing content marketing, they also do training.

So, I thought I would write a feature about them.

Why? Because every true content marketer will write about their rivals.

After all, you might prefer to hire the team from Magnetic Content – which was started in March this year by Brian Corrigan, a man with a perfectly fine journalistic pedigree – rather than me.

What I care about, as a content marketer, is that you are fully informed about the market – and can make your own buying choices.

It turns out, too, that I really like what Corrigan’s Magnetic Content business is doing, and why they are doing it, and I reckon you might like him too.

I decided to give Corrigan a ring.

Hello Brian

What did I discover? Corrigan, another former Fairfax journo (like me), is the brains behind this new agency.

Corrigan’s new venture has the backing of a heavyweight parent company, public relations agency, Spectrum Communications.

Spectrum, in turn, is owned by the 125-year-old printing giant, IPMG, which last year turned over $400 million, according to IBIS World.

Corrigan, as I mentioned, is an experienced journalist. After moving here from the UK, he edited Fairfax tech mags such as MIS and CIO (acronyms that techie people understand) and the online edition of The Australian Financial Review.

Having left Fairfax in 2012, he spent a two-year sabbatical back in the UK looking after elderly grandparents, and hatching a plan for a new career. “I wasn’t keen to go back into journalism,” Corrigan says. “But I wanted to use the skills I had gained. Everyone was talking about content.”

He set up meetings with half a dozen agencies, and landed a job with Spectrum. “We spent four months developing Magnetic Content and the range of service we would take to market,” he says.

Plan, create, share, measure, enable

Corrigan breaks down the process for his clients into these five steps: plan, create, share, measure and enable.

While he takes a thorough approach to the first three steps, it is in the last two categories that Magnetic Content (the second) adopts a decidedly different tack to other agencies in the market.

“A lot of organisations are tracking clicks, likes and shares, which are important metrics, but which generally don’t convince the CEO or CFO to spend more money,” he says. “We help companies nail real lead generation programs that they can feed to salespeople to follow up. By having landing pages, and different calls-to-action, we can track how many leads per month we are delivering.”

I was also impressed by Corrigan’s final step – enable – which involves training the senior executive of companies. “This involves helping senior executive to have a voice in social media. So if you are the CEO of a technology company, you are not blogging or tweeting about technology, but about leadership. If you are the head of finance, you are talking about cost-saving initiatives.”

What’s the future for all this magnetic content?

Corrigan believes that in 10 years’ time, most organisations will have their own branded newsroom, like ANZ’s BlueNotes.

“We will see more companies do that, and there is a training opportunity there to go in and help marketing departments start to rethink about how they engage.”

This will change the content they produce. “The big thing about this kind of content is the philosophy: it is about trust and relationship, not about product and service. It is flipping marketing on its head and talking about the issues – that is the name of the game,” he says.

“Traditionally marketing departments crafted messages and we journalists spent our time pulling them apart, and finding out what is interesting to our audience. We have that skill. When we are telling a story, we think first about the audience. That is what marketing has to do.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Conclusion

You see, Corrigan is an interesting guy, isn’t he? You might like to get him to do some work at your organisation. (If you do, tell him that you read about him here.)

There’s quite a few agencies out there now – King Content, Edge Custom, and now Magnetic Content – and me. (I’m changing my newsletter’s name to Sticky Content, by the way.)

I’d prefer that you came to my site to read about those agencies and decide if they are right for you. That’s why I love content marketing. It is about respect: with enough information, we all make decisions we feel are right. That is the world I want to live in.