When it comes to marketing, social media suffers from the Curse of the Giddy.  That is, the battle cries are so busy being cheerful that they forget to be useful.  “Engage with your audience.”  “Join the conversation.”  “Market with your customers, not at them.”  We’ve all heard these convenient axioms, each more delightful than the other.  But, as a practical matter, none are instructive.  None tell you what to actually do. And social media has been around far too long for us to be talking more than doing.  (Random tweets and a semi-formed Facebook Fan Page no longer constitute doing.)

That’s why in my newly created role as director of content for Eloqua, I teamed up with superstar designers JESS3 to create The Content Grid.  The idea was to design a framework that I could follow to perform my self-assigned job.  The result is an infographic that depicts who in an organization should be creating which types of content, and where on the social Web that content should be distributed for maximum impact on sales.  The y-axis is the “creation” spectrum, ranging from centralized control (such as the marketing department owning a sensitive analyst report) to looser reigns around more fun activities, like geosocial check-ins).

The x-axis plots content and channel along the purchase funnel, associating media with particular points in the buyer’s journey.  (And because JESS3 never saw information they didn’t want to visualize, they layered on additional dimensions, like which channels facilitate bi-directional communications and which provide rich data back to the marketer.)

The result, hopefully, is a how-to for today’s marketer – a starting point for identifying, sourcing and delivering the digital content that your audience doesn’t only demand from you, but is coming to expect.  Or, as A-list blogger Paul Armstrong put it, “content is king … again.”