If you don’t know Rahul Gandhi, he is the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family who is the cynosure of the English media lady journalists here in India and also, seemingly, the only beacon of hope for the Congress party. He is the son of Rajiv Gandhi who was assassinated by the LTTE terrorists, and Sonia Gandhi, who is presently the Congress president.

Why is there a parallel between Rahul Gandhi and an unsuccessful content marketing effort?

In order to succeed in content marketing you need to be regular. And not just any regular, you need to be regular with creation, publication, marketing and most importantly, quality and relevance. These shouldn’t be activities and traits that you orchestrate just when you feel like it. They need to be ongoing otherwise they never take off.

In fact, another good parallel comes to my mind. It’s like riding a bicycle. Unless your bicycle attains a certain speed, you cannot balance. You will fall if you pedal too slow. I remember once Rahul Gandhi also talked about the escape velocity – he had said something to the tune of that India needed Jupiter’s escape velocity in order to experience some progress. Or something like that. The concept of escape velocity can also be applied to content marketing – unless you put in a certain amount of work, it is never effective.

Rahul Gandhi is not a career politician. He is in this field because of his family history and maybe because he has never been able to build another career. He comes and goes according to his own whims and this is why he always fails to make an impact. Had someone else had the sort of opportunities that he has got, he or she would have worked wonders.

Politics is not a part time job, it is a full-time job, just like content marketing. When you’re doing content marketing for your business, you have to take it seriously, you have to give it all it takes. It cannot be a half-hearted effort. To ensure the success of your content marketing effort you need to

1. Create and publish quality content regularly (if possible, daily).
2. You need to use the channels available to you to disseminate that content and advocate it.
3. You need to respond to other people’s content with your own input.
4. You need to engage your audience so that it begins to recognize you for your strengths and other characteristics.
5. You constantly need to provide people something of great value.
6. You need to be there, be one with them.
7. You need to be present on the same channels being used by your audience.
8. You need to talk to people in their own language rather than using your own gobbledygook.
9. You need to take care of the core issues, the issues that really matter to people rather than simply beating around the bush.
10. You need to be able to inspire loyalty and turn people into your evangelists.

Just as all these qualities are missing in a badly executed content marketing strategy, they are also missing in Rahul Gandhi and this is why he comes out to be a quintessentially failed politician who, instead of inspiring confidence, inspires disenchantment, and sometimes ridicule (because he tries to portray himself as someone he is not).