1. Not only are you competing with others on products and services, but you’re also competing to be your audience’s primary information source.
2. As the quality of your competitor’s content improves, your audience’s expectations increase as well, rendering your content either obsolete or just average.

This article got me thinking about how hard we try here at Intertainment Media to create content and invent new formats. Whether it’s on the Ingaged Blog, the IndyCar fan site Social Racing Grid, or through our services KNCTR and even Ortsbo.

Needs, demand, and figuring out the next big thing in content

Each of the services Intertainment Media produces has different content needs depending on audience demand. But often the audience doesn’t know what it wants and we have to foresee what they want. For example, Apple’s products were not developed out of audience interviews and testing. Henry Ford famously said (or maybe not), “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Asking the audience what they want is often not a good course of action.

Content creation and distribution formats is a never ending game. We constantly have to concern ourselves with the form of content, how it’s being created and presented, plus we have to create the content itself. Each one is a full time job in itself. But to stay relevant, you have to be doing both continuously.

While our content could be very successful today, it could hold no interest tomorrow. We see this all the time as TV shows and bestsellers that were popular one day no longer hold an audience’s interest.

To maintain relevancy, I realized I had to always be asking myself:

• Are you distributing content via a means the audience is currently using and wants to consume (e.g., blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos)
• Are you listening to your audience’s concerns and delivering answers in a timely fashion?
• Is your audience listening to you as a leading voice for information and advice or are they looking to others?
• Are you creating new thought pieces that become pillars for others to create discussions?
• Are you experimenting with different formats of content production and gauging audience reaction and engagement?
• Are you experimenting with different formats of content distribution (e.g., new video sharing tools, chat applications, widgets)?

Uggh, that’s so much, you might think, and you’re right. It is a lot of work. But if you make it a part of your daily thinking then it doesn’t become additional work. It’s part of an ongoing process that’s necessary if you always want to be seen as current, relevant, and interesting with both the content itself and its presentation.

Creative Commons photo attribution to FontShop and Werner Kunz.

How often have you heard that? All you need to do is create “valuable” content. It’s just that simple. Why haven’t you figured that out?

I find that answer, “Just create valuable content,” to be rather dismissive. No explanation is given as to what is valuable content or how one goes about creating it. It’s either a situation of they don’t know how to do it themselves or they’re not willing to open the kimono and show their secrets of creating great content.

Here’s what I believe it takes to create “valuable” content.

Your production skills need to be up to snuff

Whether you’re writing, producing video, or a podcast, your skills need to be up to snuff. This article is not going to make you a better writer, video producer, or podcaster. If you do have your technical skills in check, then read on.

Linkbaiting has a short shelf life

There are certain techniques for getting people to click on and share articles. There is no automated formula for creating “great content.” While there are subject lines that people fall for a lot, it doesn’t necessarily translate into valuable information underneath.

In essence, you can’t “fool” people into thinking you have valuable content. Don’t try to succeed with the idea that people are lemmings that’ll fall for any linkbaiting infographic or top ten list you create. When people get burned they don’t keep coming back.

Build an argument and show your work

People respect and recognize well thought out research and work. One way to create valuable content is to simply research your topic and show you’ve done your work. Quote people, cite sources, and create evidence for your argument.

Share experiential information

If you had something that happened to you, and only you, and the knowledge you gathered from it could help others, that can easily be made into valuable content. Tell your story. People will be able to relate to it.

Interview people with more knowledge than you have

You don’t know everything and no one expects you to, but by interviewing others you build relations and extend your visible knowledge through association with your interview subject.

Deliver on what people are asking for

When I’m prospecting for customers, the number one question I ask is “What is the number one reason you’re losing sales?” They’ll tell me because people don’t understand X technology or we lose out to competitor Y. When I get that answer I always ask, “Do you have a piece of collateral that explains X technology or a side-by-side comparison explaining how you’re different and better than competitor Y?” Almost always they say no and then give a range of excuses as to why they don’t have it. But if this is the number one reason you’re losing sales, it should be the number one piece of content you’re creating. There should be no excuses.

Deliver on what people aren’t asking for, but want/need

Henry Ford was once famously quoted, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

The argument is people don’t know what they want until you create it for them. No one knew they wanted an iPod, iPhone, or iPad until Steve Jobs created one for them.

I’m not suggesting you invent the car or the iPhone. But what you can do is not constantly copy others, but rather offer some new ideas and new suggestions. You’ll have to test the waters many times before you get people to jump on board.

Engage people in an industry debate

One of the best ways to create valuable content is to crowdsource answers to a contentious issue in your industry. Simply ask many people the same question, and then edit their answers. This will start the flow of an initial debate that will usually continue in the comments section of a blog post.

What’s your technique?

Do you have a method for creating “valuable” content? If so, can you share it with us? Let us know.

Creative Commons photo attribution Tracy Hunter.

This got me to thinking, “Why do we consume media?”

I ask you readers this question (please throw in your two cents in the comments), but here’s my viewpoint to launch the discussion.

There are obviously many different kinds of media that all serve a different purpose. To simplify, I break all media into serving three purposes:

• Inform - It heightens our own knowledge and context. Gives us points of discussion, learning, and discourse.
• Educate – Some of the most popular content is “how to” based as people are using for pinpoint ways to learn.
• Entertain - We’re looking for any kind of story to get sucked into, or to be amused.

There’s often a bleed between these three, and if you can produce media that marries two or more of them together it can heighten the value of the content, as they’re serving multiple purposes. And obviously a piece of content’s ability to serve its intended purpose is mediated on the quality of the content.

In all cases of media consumption, the next step is to engage, which cycles back to more media consumption. We want to debate about something we saw in the news, or share the story we heard. If we learned something, we want to connect with experts who can teach us more. And if we heard a good story we want to share it, or point to something we saw that was funny.

We didn’t need the Internet to begin engaging in “social” media.

This all seems so ludicrously obvious, but it isn’t until you realize this is the purpose of media. While content has these initial intentions of informing, educating, and entertaining, its greater goal is to connect individuals and communities. Conversations happen around content.

This circles me back as to why we have these endless discussions about content and then later engagement. That’s the hope for a piece of content, but often content is instantly forgettable and there’s no desire or need to engage.

Is media’s purpose to generate conversation and connect people? If I consume a piece of content and I don’t share it with anyone, is it a bad piece of content? Did it not serve its purpose? Does media have a greater purpose that we should always strive for?

Your thoughts.

Creative Commons photo attribution to IceNineJon and roland.

It was announced today, http://selnd.com/qcySJG – that Walmart, bought One Riot, those with the “Killer Social Targeting Engine” (their words not mine), to better be able to connect with customers.  They speak of the intersection of social, mobile and retail being and how this will help give consumers what they want at any time.  Coming off of the idea that Social Business is the future, this acquisition by the world’s largest retailer, makes for some really interesting thinking.  Big Brands buying out development and research shops…is this what the future of Social business looks like or is it just a case of not being focused on the core business?
Drop up a note and let us know what you think.

This great article by Drew Neisser in @FastCompany (http://bit.ly/q0iOF2) should make you question whether your company is simply waving at social media as the blogs, articles, posts and tweets float by you, or are you truly committed to making your enterprise a social business.

The subject of the article, IBM’s Ethan McCarty, asserts that the time has come to move from social media to Social Business and that Social Business is the future even for companies, like IBM, who are aren’t even selling to consumers anymore. My takeaway…inherently you need to be committed to being social to have a successful social strategy. You can’t farm it out, you can’t set up a page and call it a social strategy. You, and your company as whole need to be engaged, and engaging, in a social dialogue, hey if IBM can do it….

So what do you think, are you a Social Business or a Social Bust? Drop us a note and let us know.

It’s Friday, and Aldous Huxley is turning in his grave…

In Brave New World, the author dreams a dystopian vision of the future in which man’s “limitless appetite for distraction” renders him passive and incapable of self-reflexivity. Media-theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman echoes this sentiment by drawing parallels between Huxley’s fictional world and the state of contemporary media consumption; in a scathing critique of the current media-ecology, Postman declares that “Huxley’s vision – not Orwell’s vision – has become our reality.”

Barely a week into virality, this music video from untalented aspiring teen pop-star Rebecca Black, has 16 million+ more hits than 2011 Grammy Winner Esperanza Spalding! This is a problem – not the actual video, but the social construction that permitted its virality. We’re at a precipice where even the unofficial “authority” on all things social media, Mashable, can’t stay abreast of the growing factors/variables that would permit a video like “Friday” to go viral. It’s remarkable how a “definitive” guide to going viral, published only months ago, needs to be revised to accommodate the phenomenon.

Times are a-changin’.

Here we are, on Friday, March 18th 2011, in a world that allows the spawn of the Arkmusic Factory to flourish in the digital-coliseum of the internet. With every Rebecca Black, are we losing our appreciation of true art? Are we eroding our collective and individual attention spans? Will there come a time where we’ll be incapable of watching such important works as Randy Pausch’s renwned TED Talk?

Media critic and entertainment lawyer, Bob Lefsetz (@lefsetz), certainly thinks so. In a recent blog post, he reiterated his perpetual rant of how “the rules have changed” – against the topic of Rebecca Black’s inevitably fleeting-fame, he states: “Real music requires inspiration and dedication and tons of practice and it lasts.”

We’re not in a homogeneously controlled media landscape anymore. We’ve made gatekeepers irrelevant; we spread the content. Let’s take ownership of our future. Before we completely devolve into a culture obsessed with spreading mediocre and trivial content like teen-sensations, Hollywood train-wrecks and LOLcats, let’s take a step back be critical of our media consumption. As with our nutritional diets, let’s demand better content, or at the very least, strive for balance. The disproportionate number of views between Rebecca Black’s and Esperanza Spalding’s videos are disturbing. There’s a real concern here that if left unchecked, we will desensitize ourselves into a jaded stupor where everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.

Demand better content.

Because I pay for the “Never Not Funny” podcast, I make sure that I always watch it (I pay an extra $5 to get the video feed). I’m paying about a dollar per show, but that’s enough to get me invested into the show that I feel compelled to watch it. That’s not the case for any of my other free podcasts.

I feel the same way about watching films I purchase and download from iTunes. Or music I purchase from iTunes. Or listening to music on the paid service MOG for which I also became a paid subscriber ($5/month).

When I pay for content, I’m compelled to consume it before content I can get for free.

But as we all know, even charging a nickel for content can be a barrier for consumption. Some may see this as dealing with two mutually exclusive issues:

• If people pay for content they’ll be compelled to consume it.
• If you charge for content it will be a barrier to consumption.

I see the ability to overtake these conflicting issues is by not scaring people when you charge for content. Instead, get people excited that you’re going to charge for content. And I believe you can do this by creating your own form of scarcity. Give away a portion of content for free that leads people to want to purchase the rest of it.

How do you charge for podcasts?

While iTunes has an app store, a music store, and a movie store, they don’t make it possible for podcasters to sell their podcasts. Podcasts within iTunes must be completely free. That doesn’t mean you can’t sell your podcasts, you just can’t do it completely within the four walls of iTunes. You have to go outside and create a personalized RSS feed that requires a username and password for access. You can manage that through services like Premiumcast (read and listen to my interview with Premiumcast’s founder, Paul Colligan).

This whole discussion got me thinking about the role of advertising as marketing, as content, as helpful, and as a nuisance. The latter is not something anyone strives for, but it’s the way so many people describe advertising.

Why do they do that? Are they just being pests? Do they just like to complain?

Yes, that all may be true, but I think the truth of the matter is that advertising becomes annoying when it’s unwanted. And since it’s so difficult to effectively target advertising on a one-to-one basis, so much of it becomes “annoying.” Yet no one realizes when an ad is targeted well. No one announces, “Wow, that ad was targeted so well to me, I’m so glad they sent it to me at just this time.” Instead, they might say, “Oh, that’s just what I want” and completely not be aware of the wizard behind the curtain moving all the levers to deliver an ad to you at just the opportune moment.

So when advertising comes in at an inopportune moment, which is most of the time, how can we make it more useful? Many advertisers realize this and that’s why we see so many ads that appeal outside of their core audience. A purely entertaining ad, even if it’s not targeted to me, is no longer annoying.

But if we get to the point that we can hyper target every single ad right down to the individual, and perfectly time it, will there be anymore need for creativity? If I know at exactly this moment that you want to get a coffee, I don’t need to be creative, I can just tell you that Starbucks is selling coffee right now. Come on in. I don’t have to do anything else. Maybe I have to give you an incentive like a coupon. But really, what more do I need to do?

Could efficient targeted advertising be the end of creative advertising?

Creative Commons photo attribution to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/autohistorian/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

If Google first asked permission, nothing would actually get done. Just think of the simple process you run into where you send out a question to five people via email and you say, “Hey, could I get your response to this?” And then they don’t respond. So then you have to follow up again with them, this time pushing them, “Hey, I really need your response on this.” With all your pushing, you get four people to respond, but there’s always that one person that doesn’t respond and you have to call them. And when you finally get them on the phone you get some excuse, “I’m so sorry I didn’t respond to you, I’ve been really busy. Sure, I can give you a response.” And then in less than 15 seconds, he gives you the answer.

That’s just a story with five people. Imagine thousands or even millions. It’s simply not possible. So the answer Google goes with, “Let’s just do our next project, take the content we want, and let them complain about it afterwards” or more appropriately, “Let’s just do it, everyone will see the enormous value that they won’t care that we didn’t ask for permission first, and for those who do care, we can remove things after the fact.”

It’s a lot easier to operate like Google and like many other similar companies. Simply take the content without permission, and wait until you receive that cease and desist order. If you deal with the consequences after the fact, it’s an unknown quantity that may or may not be costly. The alternative method, ask permission first, is a well known and expensive option.

Is this the new model of publishing and content online? Just go ahead and do it and deal with the fallout afterwards? Look at Napster. That’s how they built their model. Sure it was a completely illegal platform, but they built a brand on it and people wanted that brand.

Google didn’t ask permission to search your site, but why would they?

Not many people realize this but Google Search operates under the same “do first, deal with consequences later” principle. Google indexes your site and the entire web and they do it all without first asking our permission. If you want, you can set up a robots.txt file to alert Google’s web spiders to pass over your site. Very few people know about this, nor do they employ it, because who wants to be invisible to Google? It would be like wanting to take your company’s name out of the phone book.

That’s kind of a dated analogy (“be like taking your name out of the phone book”) since almost nobody uses a phonebook anymore to find phone numbers. We all rely on Google. So go ahead phone company, take my name out of your book, but Google, please keep me in.

But it turns out in Italy, that’s not the case as three Google employees were convicted of a reprehensible video of an autistic kid being bullied. When the video was posted in 2006 and it was brought to Google’s attention, they removed it immediately (Read Google’s full account). The employees were not in any way involved in the video at all, it’s just that they happen to work for the company that hosted the video for a brief period of time. Google says it’s going to appeal Italy’s decision.

This is not the first time an issue like this has come up, but it’s the first time I can think of that a hosting company has actually been convicted of content posted on their site that they removed the moment they were notified. I don’t understand Italy’s laws, but if they require non-stop monitoring of content that travels over wires, why don’t they convict their local phone company every time someone uses a phone to make a drug deal or any other type of illegal activity? It’s absurd to think that such a law could stick. But I’m more intrigued with how they came about thinking that it could. What do you think led them to this decision? And why is this the first conviction of such a case? Are there others?

Creative Commons photo attribution ul_marga / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0