Everything old *is* new again. No idea is really a completely *new* idea. Perhaps variations on a theme. An idea extension. A different flavor. A different shape. A different angle. But it’s definitely a case of deja vu.

Take, for example, content strategy. It’s a fairly newish term but it’s been a de facto business approach for years… decades… centuries, perhaps! 

Case in point:

I recently stumbled across a friend’s Facebook post with a picture of the Easter cake she had made. It reminded me that my mother had just given me some old books and papers. One of the papers was page from the March 28, 1976 Atlanta Journal Constitution Magazine (see image), featuring a recipe for a “Baker’s Coconut Bunny Cake” that we made for my father’s 33rd birthday 38 years ago. I promptly posted a picture of the yellowed article on Facebook.

One friend commented that she had first made the cake for a family “bon voyage” party about 38 years ago, another commented that they made it every year for Easter from a recipe in Redbook Magazine, and yet another friend commented that they used to make it when she was younger from a Baker’s brand recipe cookbook for “cut-up cake shapes.”

You know what Baker’s was doing? Re-purposing content… about forty years ago. Weren’t they smart and savvy?!? That recipe was all over the place – BEFORE PCs, the WWW and social media. People were making that cake in the late 70s and it became a spring tradition for many families. It became their star content du jour. Baker’s knew it and they used it. It was an anchor in their content strategy.

Every time I hear someone talk about a new business or technology buzzword, I immediately think “That’s the same thing we talked about in the 80s then the 90s, but with a different moniker.” And I’ll bet the same concepts we buzz to death today existed in the 60s, 50s, 40s and beyond, as well, but with different names.

Content strategy is not new, but perhaps it is more complex than in the not-too-distant past, with myriad potential vehicles to consider, an opportunity to hyper-target content and reach, and technology-enabled communications and metrics. But perhaps businesses can benefit from the simple notion implied by that bunny cake recipe forty years ago: If you have a some great content, leverage the heck out of it. It gets people talking (or in this case, shopping and baking) and can, ultimately, sell more of your coconut.

 What’s the “bunny cake” of your content strategy?