I often tell people that content is king. And you know what—this is not quite right. Why? You see… content is good but great content is “king.” Think about it. Why do you become engrossed in a movie or a show? Why do you send a funny video to a friend? Why do you enjoy talking with certain people? Why do you like to read certain articles? The answer is simple. We do these things because we love watching, hearing, or reading great content.
We are all busy and whether we are in person (offline) or online (virtual) — it takes something special and unique to pull us in and “wow” us. We live in a world where many people have a short attention span. So how do we accomplish this? The secret is simple. It is all about great content. Good content is okay but will always lose to great content. With that in mind I am going to attempt (stress attempt) to show you what I mean.
The next time you have someone fly off the handle at you with the goal of putting you between a rock and a hard place consider their reasoning. If your goal is to be clicking on all cylinders… do not settle for being stuck in a catch 22 situation or being limited by flavor of the month type thinking. Instead, work through all the smoke and mirrors to ensure everyone is on the same page. What does this mean?
Simple– cut to the chase and get to the bottom line. Most organizations seek to raise the bar in performance so they can get their foot in the door with new clients. However, you must be careful not to jump the gun in doing this or you will be going off half-cocked. If you move too quickly without proper planning— it will be– close but no cigar. Then, you will be back to the drawing board and have a hard fall down from cloud 9.
Wow. Did you just read that? How many of these expressions do we hear all the time? A lot of them. So, what is so intriguing about my writing them? First, is it creative to try to put all of these expressions together in an original manner to make a point? Yes. Does it provide good content? Yes.
For blog post to be engaging it must be more than my writing and your reading. It must be a two way dialogue or conversation. It must be about taking the words that are on the device you are reading from—and have them transformed into a story worth sharing and acting upon. Isn’t this what you want your customers to do when they think of you? If you sound like everyone else you are lacking great content.
Always remember, people can duplicate your ideas but cannot replicate your DNA. So, what do you bring to your stakeholders–online and offline—that is great content. Do you ever think about it? If not you should.
What do you think?
@ryansauers
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Smart post Ryan. I would add that even great content isn't good enough any more. There is also a "quantity" aspect. A great blog post, video or photo is fleeting. It becomes part of the conversation and then whithers away. The lifespan of a FB post is four hours, a tweet probably less. A really greatblog post might bump around for a few days. Even the rare "viral" video eventually passes through the pop culture stream quickly. The very difficult challenge is to provide exceptional content all the time. Not easy!
Mark, thanks for the feeback. The difficult part of any such “theory” is consistency– which is one of my 5 C’s of effective communications. So you ask some good questions. How much content? How often? How consistent do you do it? These are all excellent points. However, without great content (even if it has a short shelf life) it is hard to be in the game. Thank you. Ryan