Joe Pulizzi, the de facto worldwide thought leader for ‘content marketing’, has included me (along with Seth Godin, Mike Volpe, David Meerman Scott, John Jantsch, and 55 others) in his list of contributors. I’ll give you the link (I’m about half way down the list), but first here’s my prediction:

Bob Leonard

In the B2B world, it’s going to require what Oliver Wendell Holmes called “simplicity on the other side of complexity”.

What I mean is that marketers are going to have to work hard to distill product and service information (features and benefits, competitive positioning, value propositions, etc.) into easily consumed, and quickly digested morsels. I’m not referring to slogans or tag lines. Marketers have moved beyond sales messages to delivering relevant and useful information. As the sheer volume of this information grows exponentially, marketers must learn to communicate to target prospects not only in a meaningful, concise way; but also using multimedia to engage more of the targets’ senses. To teach and to entertain simultaneously.

I happened to have a prediction ready for Joe because it’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit.

As a content developer, my primary communication vehicle has been the written word. As technology advances, and the amount of information available to people explodes, text on a page or a screen is becoming less and less capable of competing for peoples’ attention. So, I decided to work on something new. I was looking for something I could do largely by myself with just a PC, some software and an internet connection. I’ve found that thing. I call it ‘storyboarding’.

It’s a mashup of PowerPoint, video and podcasting (voice over).

I’ll be evolving this blog to that format within the next few weeks. And will be using it to help clients communicate to their customers and prospects.

Meanwhile take a look at Joe’s 100 Content Marketing and Social Media Predictions for 2010.