New York—The fast pace of change in marketing is creating more challenges for marketers, Scott Anderson, VP-customer communications at HP Enterprise Business, said Thursday in a keynote address at BtoB's Digital Edge virtual trade show.

“The world of marketing has moved from quarters to months, to almost an instant. A single individual can cause a revolution, which can cut to a company's bottom line,” Anderson said.

Also creating more challenges for marketers, he said, is the immense volume of online content, as well as search engine filtering of that content into “good” and “bad” categories that makes messages difficult to distribute.

“We need to evolve, be more relevant and not fight the filtering machine,” Anderson said. “It's now really important to think about long-term engagement, and designing relevant pathways to customers based on the information they reveal about themselves.”

To accomplish these goals, Anderson said his Hewlett-Packard Co. division has implemented a program of editorial planning and social listening to regularly engage with customers and promulgate high-quality content.

“Our editorial strategy is to become like a publisher, build an editorial plan and deliver messages through all our channels,” he said. He added that effective, quality content then can be shared by customers, who “help us evolve our products and services.”

“A transformational thing we've done is putting together a formalized editorial process, so that when content is distributed it's consistent,” he said. “We've hired editors, and have an editorial board where all lines of our business participate.”

Anderson said HP does not put social media into the hands of marketing. Rather, marketing helps enable the company's employees to be social ambassadors of the brand.

“Our job is to recruit and educate the broadest level of HP employees we can to engage in social media,” he said.

BtoB's annual Digital Edge virtual show, now in its third year, attracted about 1,900 registrants.