Why artists want to kill ‘content’, and why they’re wrong…

January 12, 2012 By 1 Comment

A massive and heinous crime has been committed by the internet against writers and artists. And it isn’t piracy, electronic distribution or increased competition for attention. If you really want to offend a creative person, just watch their response to the prose, film and art they create and love being referred to as ‘content’.

First it was businesspeople talking about content as something to fill the empty space between adverts. Then those SEO types came along and messed around to game the search engines and fool users. And now there’s a growing army of marketing people talking about using artistic methods to power ‘content marketing’ and prostitute noble work even more.

Don’t they understand?
Seven Dirty Words 4/12

 

Writers, artists – it’s OK when people say ‘content’

I consider writing a massive part of both who I am, and also of my occupation. I’ve held editorial roles, and received payment both for writing, and using all forms of media as an integral part of marketing. And I have absolutely no problem with anyone using the term ‘content’, as long as they’re not assuming it magically appears and doesn’t deserve time, resource, effort and reward.

After all, words only have the meanings we infer on them, which is why I might apologise to a section of you still reading who may have been offended by the Lego imagery above. At the same time a section of you might have found it amusing, or just not cared. It all depends on the signification you get from the use of that particular word.

And yes, in a business and web development context, ‘content’ is often almost a dirty word, as if in retaliation against all the people who declared ‘content is king’ for so long in the past.

But it doesn’t have to meant that. All it means to me is a shorthand way to avoid repeating ‘text,images and video’, everytime I want to describe what I do, or what is meant to go on a page. And that’s all I hope it will mean to you in the future…

 

TheWayoftheWeb Wordle

A Wordle for TheWayoftheWeb. Pleased to see how big 'People' appears

 

How your work can avoid being just ‘content’

Here’s the thing to remember – ‘Content’ refers to what’s contained in a box as defined by a dictionary. It isn’t how the people reading or viewing your work are going to refer to it, especially if you achieve something remarkable. Noone in the history of the world, even in business, marketing or SEO, has come home from a day at work and told their partner or family about the ‘amazing piece of content’ they saw. Instead they’ll share an amazing story, a stunning picture or a moving film.

Content as an adjective is about being mentally or emotionally satisfied with the current state of things (the Swedish have one of my favourite related words, ‘lagom’, which is translated as being ‘just right’ ‘not too much, not too little’ etc, and to some extent it continues to permeate Swedish culture). If you’re doing just enough to satisfy the search engines, or the need for some promo text, then why do you deserve to be refered to as more than ‘content’ anyway?

Writing, photography and film-making are not inherently more noble than serving fast food or working in a factory. There will be people who are far more passionate about serving the perfect burger up with good service than some writers are about churning through the latest press release to just get something up which might get a bit of traffic.

So instead of spending time and effort bemoaning how people could dare refer to artistic output as if it was just the result of someone working, just do three things:

  1.  Create stuff that tears through any box it could be put in.
  2. Share and reward the brilliance of others. Comment, tweet,like,donate,flattr,recommend to publishers/studios
  3. Don’t settle for crap. Don’t be lazy and settle for something which is filling space for a brand or media company.

Filed Under: Blogging, Content Marketing, Digital Publishing, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

Breaking Google Reader on the wheel of Google +?

October 21, 2011 By 1 Comment

Google has announced it will make a number of changes to Google Reader ‘in the next week’, and by the looks of it, they’re going to break a great existing product and tool which is used by a lot of professionals to be able to shoehorn some extra interaction into Google+.

Normally, I’d advise waiting and seeing what the changes are to a product before complaining, but the post on the official Google blog gives enough information to be really, really worrying.

‘in a week’s time we’ll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.’

That scares me for a number of reasons.

  • A week? Seriously? That makes Yahoo look kind in the way they’ve ended or sold services. Presumably if they do it quick there won’t be enough time for people to organise a concerted campaign of complaints or realise exactly what the changes mean.
  • No following? There’s a reason why I use both Reader and Google+ throughout the day, but spending almost all day, every day in Reader – I use it professionally, and have a very small number of people I follow. Those are people who consistently find things which are important to know about, and I enjoy being able to find out when they’ve just read them – not see a jumble of items which might be new, old, or social items like holiday images etc which are being put on Google+ weeks or months after they’ve happened.
  • Most importantly – No Shared Link Blogs!!!! (Mine is here and has been sharing items for several years now). As a part of curating and sharing information, I’ve used the RSS feed from that page to power various other services, and now it won’t exist? I’ve shared 16991 articles since starting to use Google Reader, and all of the value that has created is going.

I know that people have been requesting a better SendTo integration for Google+, although there is a workaround already in place which does the job, but I can’t believe that people have ‘highly requested ‘ the end of following or shared link blogs? Anyone that doesn’t want to follow or publicly share has the option to never do it already, so turning those features off makes no sense.

Unless you’re trying to artificially inflate the amount being shared on Google+.

Our only hope…

Now aside from reinforcing the fact that if you use a free service, you should expect that they won’t care about you – ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you’re not the customer, you’re the product’, it does beg the question what will happen to those services for people who might be paying for Google Apps? I don’t know how Apps revenue stacks up against the hopes for Google+, but I suspect it won’t make a big enough difference, sadly.

Which leaves Louis Gray as the only hope that this won’t be an enormously painful and damaging moveboth for Google and for everyone that used Google Reader as a business tool. Not only is he smart, but he’s specialised in working with, and making his name blogging about, information services, so if there’s one person at Google who may understand the difference between professional use and social use, you would hope as a Google+ Product Marketing Manager he might have had a chance to speak with the Google Reader team?

The final pain is the comment from Alen Green suggesting that if we decide Google Reader is no longer for us, we can move to another service. Which is technically true, but given that Google Reader has roughly 70% or more of the RSS Reader market, there’s not exactly a huge number of viable alternatives – two of the other services I’ve used in the past both closed after Google effectively crushed them by weight of numbers. It’s not quite like social bookmarking, where I’ve used Diigo and Delicious in tandem for a long time now to ensure that I always have a backup – it means exporting all my data, finding a service which is directly comparable in terms of features, and hoping that everything can be uploaded and work without disrupting my business too much.

Google hording data inside Google+?

Whilst Google does have a data export project, there’s a difference between exporting data and being able to syndicate it. And until I see a handy RSS link for items I +1, ideally with some kind of category filter which means I can take a feed of the information I’m sharing, rather than everything I’ve ever liked, including static content, photos etc, then it appears that Google is intent on following the walled garden approach of Facebook in bringing in as much as possible behind a walled garden. Which isn’t a selling point when Facebook already exists.

I don’t know what will happen in the next week, or how much my business and workflow will be disrupted, but if you know any good, comparable and compatible RSS Readers – paid or free, then let me know. And if there’s an open source option, all the better. Meanwhile when I categorise this post under ‘Tools’ you can assume both meanings of the word are inferred.

 

Filed Under: Content Marketing, rss, Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Content, Marketing and SEO

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I generally stay away from posting infographics, but this one on the value of content and SEO is useful and relevant enough to share, and it reinforces a lot of the messages I’ve given to clients about the increasing need to integrate all elements of digital marketing, beginning with great content which is optimised for conversions/actions, and then building on that with social elements, search engine optimisation, and federated distribution.

It’s also why I’m doing an increasing amount of work to identify the brand story and narrative with a client before doing any other marketing work. If you get the brand story and a handful of pieces of content working well, then you can boost the people who are visiting it in a number of ways. If you do it the other way around, you get lots of traffic costing you in terms of bandwith, and nothing in terms of the desired outcome, whether that’s revenue, interaction, sign-ups etc.
Brafton's Infographic: Why Content for SEO?

Click for the large version.

It’ll be interesting to see what effects a rise in content marketing has on the market for content creation. After years of watching rates fall for both freelance and full-time writers, journalists and bloggers, perhaps for those who are able to display quality in terms of optimising for businesses in addition to tone, style and substance, this will see a marked rise.

Filed Under: Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation Tagged With: , , , , ,

Don’t write for SEO and social media marketing from the start…

May 8, 2011 By 3 Comments

That may seem an odd headline for someone who sells digital marketing alongside writing for the internet, but stay with me. I’ve just spent an hour or so reading through my 22-year-old copy of ‘Searching for Robert Johnson‘, a fairly short book by Peter Guralnick about the legendary early blues musician who was supposed to have gone to the crossroads at midnight and sold his soul to the devil to have become so talented, and who was then murdered at an early age, passing into myth and legend for songs like ‘Hellhound on my Trail‘.

Having been blessed with an obsession for music and reading in a just pre-internet age, I’m a big fan of all the Peter Guralnick books I’ve read and owned – he’s covered the history of the blues, soul, and country, as well as works about Sam Cooke, Robert Johnson and Elvis Presley (The Presley ones are the only ones I haven’t read). There’s a pretty good list on Amazon, and as a music writer I’ve read, re-read, and long admired, I wondered what he was doing at the moment – and thanks to Google, found some invaluable quotes on what makes his music writing so brilliant, especially when he writes with more succinct clarity than the likes of Lester Bangs, for example. And they explain why I believe that optimisation for SEO, tailoring content for social media etc all comes second to creating something really brilliant in the first place.

They’re from InsideVandy.com, Vanderbilt University’s student news website:

‘I started writing about music when I was probably about 20, and I started writing purely to tell – I was writing fiction, short stories novels, I still write fiction – but the nonfiction, I just wrote solely to tell people about this music that I thought was so great, it was almost entirely the blues, and I did it at a time when there were almost no outlets where you could even put down the name Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, James Brown, it was such a thrill. I wrote these things telling people how great they were. It wasn’t for money, there was no money; it was just to tell people.

I’ve never written a single piece about anybody or anything that I haven’t chosen myself and hasn’t been out of my admiration for their work. It would be inconceivable for me to write something about a subject that I wasn’t totally invested in.

There have been growing debates about the need for PR and Marketing in technology – the suggestion is that by building something amazing, you remove the need for promotion, which I think is mistaken and disingenuous. A great product should be your focus as it makes Marketing, PR, Advertising etc all easier and ways to boost the natural interest.

And by the same token, SEO, targetting social media etc are all extremely useful, but they boost interest, links etc to great content and writing.

You can argue that plenty of truly great works have never achieved mainstream success, but that’s down to a number of factors, including marketing, timing, and luck. But those great works continue to endure, even if it’s in a small way.

Meanwhile there’s plenty of crap that has become amazingly popular due to well-oiled publicity efforts, but it’s always tended to result in fleeting success at best, despite the work and effort that’s gone into promotion.

And particularly if you’re trying to build a business around content, or by utilising content, it’s better to get a smaller number of truly passionate and evangelistic people who are likely to part with their money or attention on a longterm basis, than to hit a huge number of people who just pass through and move onto something else in seconds.

That’s why I suggest forgetting about SEO and marketing when you first start writing something. If not, you’ll spend hours or days in fear as you build up the worries about putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. And when you finally do, it’s likely to appear faked when you’re shoehorning in keywords and sticking on an irrelevant linkbait headline. Far better to create something incredibly powerful and optimise with a light touch. It’s why the need for copy editors and sub editors remains, but that need evolves into editors skilled in marketing and search engine optimisation alongside more traditional skills.

And it’s why I’m still enjoying, and recommending, music from the 1930s and books written about it which I first enjoyed as a pre-teen.

Filed Under: Books, Content Marketing, Digital Culture, Digital Publishing, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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