At the height of the now-fizzling Lupita craze, a local tabloid went ham on one of my lists about the lady of Kisumu Central. Their writer placed my work on a chopping board and just cut away, throwing in a few shabbily done lines. When I bumped into this mutilated version of my work, I realized we are smack in the middle of a content war. It woke me up to the fact that suddenly, people want quality content, and the guys with the platforms do not know how to develop it.
For the last five or so years, Kenyan companies have been evolving, investing in an online presence through websites and sometimes shady social media accounts. Marketing execs were gradually getting caught unaware by a new wave of consumer interest and the wacky world of trends. They have put their brands online but what they keep getting wrong is the need for content. Keeping the audience engaged, retaining customers, creating impressions and brand salience through quality is the game now. Old rules no longer apply here, at least not as they used to.
The houses are built, but who will furnish them? An army of content developers of course. You and I; photographers, artists, writers, poets, digital content guys, people with an opinion and a voice. Suddenly, everyone wants you to say something about them, for them, sometimes for a fee. Here, what counts is the quality of your work. Don’t be afraid to turn down work if the pay is ridiculous. A wave is coming, of nerds and disturbed creatives who only know how to do what they do. Be Frank Underwood, Be that lady from Scandal with a lip that has a life of its own. On the arena of content, go on, be a gladiator!
Although the market hasn’t quite grown to appreciate quality content, especially when it is the result of a creative process, there is a clear demand. Funny enough, the one way to know we are headed for a tide is to check the recent cases of online plagiarism. It is transcending the digital world, as a poet recently noted that a lady who won a prize at a local comedy show actually used his original line. No retributions because no one really cares. A local TV station stole a whole collection from a digital magazine that had itself been accused of plagiarising a blog post on sports. This is a vicious cycle, vicious and spiralling out of control. The question remains, who will bell the cat?
Suddenly everyone is noticing the mediocrity of our comedians, and that what they do is not art at all. None of them has ever done a special or a successful individual show, and the most successful comedy series in the country has such poor content that you might just cry for mother Kenya. Not that our musicians are any better. The last time any of them made quality music was in 2003. Our series have only increased in number, not in quality. Everything sucks, and the most drama we ever get is from hurriedly researched excuses for exposes of scandals we would rather not know because we will not do anything about them anyway.
Everyone wants to be a professional photographer now, and photographers can make good money outside the wedding business. Cameras are expensive, which doesn’t deter us from investing in quality because there is a prize at the end of the lens. There is money to be made doing what you love, because Kenyans have disposable income to invest in quality content. There is nothing as fascinating as a needy customer with demands, because that makes you Heisenberg. Make and supply your meth, and words, and photos, and graphics, and poems, and infographics, and things they do not even know they need yet.
Competition to stand out and attract the attention of the average Kenyan online is at an all time high and for the next year or so, will become even crazier. Plagiarism will take centre stage, as the current name and shame strategy is poor and effective. The battle for SEO will get ugly, and as Darwinian logic suggests, only the strongest, most relevant content will survive. Maybe by the end of the current wave we will have our own Buzzfeed, Cracked.com, or something. Maybe we will pay our writers enough, pay our poets something, and actually pay instead of ruthlessly exploit copywriters. No matter how awesome the theme on your website is, it is not enough to sustain traffic if there is nothing to see. Traffic is a fickle thing that demands to be entertained, dwelling only as long as there is something to see.
For corporates, hiring pens and influencers has a high chance of hurting the brand. ‘Bigwigs’ are just as likely to tweet about nipples and bananas as endorsing a brand. Someone is likely to enter into a tweef, and Twitter as a medium is flagging in KE. All the cool kids are on Instagram anyway, and who knows how long they will stay there. We are a fickle people, and so in an attempt to retain our interest, corporates, the government, and NGOs will hire bloggers and content developers, almost at the same speed they have been gobbling up social media managers in the last two years.
The wave is here, the tide is coming in. If you develop content of any kind, brace yourself. Package yourself so that, if nothing else, you will say you had a good view of the raging waters before everyone realized that good content is not just about money, it is a labour of love.
Ready Yourselves! Winter is coming.
This post was written by @Owaahh. He blogs at www.owaahh.com