I’ve been deep in the music discovery game for a decade and change.
I like to explore the underground and discover new bands that you’ve likely never heard of before. My favorite period for music discovery was from 2010-2016ish. It was the period that hosted the rise and fall of the mp3 blog…remember those?
Individual creators would spin up a blog and begin to embed mp3’s of music that they were finding and write a little blurb on why it mattered. The mp3 blogger community was passionate, informative, and above all else great for bands who they shined a light on. I was a part of this community and worked with my buddy on our blog Thought on Tracks. It’s been a while since I visited this site and seeing that the last post was in 2014 makes me feel really old and actually inspired at the same time.
While mp3 blogs might have come and gone the idea of an individual tastemaker has not.
The Michael Jordan of mp3 blogs is Pitchfork. Their decimal based album scoring became a magnet for music degenerates to visit their site and see what their new favorite album received. There was a period of my life where the next move after my alarm clock was to visit Pitchfork to see all of the new scores for the day. I wasn’t the only one. Good, bad, or ugly it didn’t matter the score. People kept coming back and would take their opinions online. This has been going on since the early 2000s to the present day and is part of the reason why Pitchfork has created such a monumental brand.
Their commentary on music became the content that fans like me needed. Pitchfork grew their audience and started throwing music festivals. Their growth was so monumental that Condé Nast (who owns editorial brands like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and GQ) decided to purchase Pitchfork in 2015. While I don’t frequent the site as much as I used to, I'm still drawn to their homepage to see if my opinion on a new release aligns with what their editorial staff is thinking or not.
It’s not just music either. Think about Rotten Tomatoes for movies, Yelp for restaurants, or Goodreads for books. We are fortunate to live in a world that has an endless supply of things to listen to, watch, or consume and sometimes we don’t have the time to explore for ourselves. We are content overload in our personal lives which causes us to rely on these sites or tastemakers to tell us what we should explore. In most cases these are people who we don’t know, but trust because of the platform they have built or are contributing to. They are curators. They are helping us shrink the sea of options and offer a fast pass to our next source of entertainment. This seems like an important role and responsibility, right?
I reflect on these examples in my personal life and think about how often I rely on tastemakers for information. I think about that album review that interests me enough to hit play on Apple Music. That listen turns into multiple listens and then a vinyl purchase. That vinyl purchase triggers moments where I’m playing that album while my wife and I are eating dinner. Those spins turn us into fans and we buy tickets for that band when they come to play in Indianapolis. That ticket purchase creates an unforgettable connection with that band and a night that we will never forget. That night we will never forget, transforms us into fans for life and the first people in line to buy their next album when it comes out 2 years from now.
Tastemakers help streamline entertainment in my personal life and save me time.
I can’t help thinking about these examples in parallel to what’s available in my professional life.
..and quite frankly there aren’t a lot of tastemaker options out there.
Where are my curators for B2B content?
Where are my tastemakers in B2B that can point me to the podcast episode on permissionless co-marketing that can help me grow professionally?
Who is spending the time to send me the greatest hits that are perfect for my role?
Anybody?
When the options are few and far between that means there’s opportunity to help.
Helping facilitate amazing connections through content and leveling up the ability to grow is the opportunity for tastemaking in B2B.
How The Juice is helping with B2B Tastemaking
Jonathan is presenting at MarketMuse’s Content Strategy Collective Live next week. He shared his deck with the team and I pulled the slide below to place an exclamation point on the sea of content that we all have to navigate through in B2B.
Too much content is an understatement. We are on a mission to shrink the sea of B2B content and make great content more accessible to marketing and sales professionals. All you have to do is look at Scott Brinker’s Martech Map 2022 to realize that the supply is insane. Each of these little specs have a content team and each of these content teams is churning out new content weekly and sometimes even daily.
How are we supposed to not only know all of these brands, but understand which of them is building content for us? It’s impossible to do alone. Have you ever tried researching B2B content in an efficient way on Google? (SMH!)
Since Q1 of 2021 The Juice has aggregated 120k pieces of content from 500+ brands in B2B. We are doing our part to shrink the sea by asking members a few questions during onboarding. A couple extra minutes up front allows for us to begin to shrink the sea for our members to make sure that the content that we are showing is not only relevant, but will resonate with our members.
Another way that we are helping shrink the sea of B2B content and help point members to content that is trending on The Juice is through Top 5 Content. Each week we are curating the Top 5 pieces of marketing and sales content on The Juice. This is the most popular content that members are consuming. It’s like getting your content validated by our community of B2B marketing and sales pros and getting some extra love from The Juice team in the form of promotion.
Lastly, we’ve used the Modern Day Marketer podcast as a medium to go deeper on pieces of content that we are finding on The Juice that are helping us grow professionally. I can’t tell you how rewarding it’s been to share a piece of content with a teammate and ask them to unpack it with me for 20-30 minutes. It’s allowed me to reflect on what makes up great content. Also, it’s helped us provide recommendations to our audience while shining a light on brands doing it the right way at the same time.
Jonathan shared an article with me during my onboarding process. It’s an outline of why curators are the new creators. I got back to this article monthly for inspiration. We’re going to continue to put over our favorite B2B content pieces. We want to become your tastemaker for B2B content and make it easier for you to eliminate hurdles on the way to your professional growth.
Need help finding your next favorite B2B brand or content creator? I’ve got a few places for you to go:
