Collectively we all are degrading the “Content is King” phrase, to a stooping low.
Am I a writer? This is a vital question everyone should ask before writing a piece of content.
Big-Content is not as good as Big-Data
Every day in 2020, there are over 500* million stories shared on Facebook. 300,000 active BOTs are there to push messages. The average engagement rate for an organic post is a mere 3.91%. Insta has 2 million businesses sharing 2.5 stories a week. LinkedIn gets over 2 million posts, articles published, every day.
The media publishes over 2 million articles a day on the web, as per MarketingProfs. Worldometer gives an interesting live count of Blog posts in a day, through WordPress. I got amazed at the speed at which blogs added every second! A must-watch.
It is an overload of information, from an oversupply of writers — who think they are. This creates unbearable content noise. Even the best search results throw irrelevant links.
How to identify the best and most relevant content?
Once I asked my Professor why there is so much hype on category A+ academic journals, compared to the rest of B or C category ones. He told me to pick any article in an A+ journal and try to delete a statement in it, without distorting the paper’s meaning. I tried my best in vain. To publish in an A+ category journal, academics slog for a period of 6 months to over a year to write, and an equivalent rigor and time to complete reviews.
While the academic world has a way to keep good content with tight journal categorization, commercial content is a huge heap of hay with few needles of good content. There is no way to discern it. The only way to get good content is to help the source of it — the writers.
So, we come back to the core question. Am I a writer?
Before writing: Some questions I ask myself
a) Do I have an idea or insight?
b) Can I articulate the idea/insight in an easy way for the audience to understand?
c) Will the insights I provide help others? To do something better or avoid pitfalls.
d) Am I trying to find answers?
e) Will the answers I search for obtained by writing? Either through my research to write, or by receiving responses or comments from the audience.
f) Is my writing extending the available knowhow? Or Is it creating new knowledge?
g) Is my writing just to gain some likes or camouflage to get business? Or Is it of some use to someone?
h) Am I writing to influence others, for their own benefit, or myself?
i) Am I writing what others like to read? Or what I feel is right?
After Publishing: How do I analyze if my content is useful?
Claps of Medium or Likes of LinkedIn/Facebook are interesting. However, I feel they are kind of cursory. I prefer seeing the stats in Medium — that tells me how much time people read my story — the Average Reading Time. The optimal time they spent, gives a sense of usefulness of the content.
The mix of members vs. the external audiences is another metrics to watch. The references of the audience source give you an understanding of people searching and landing in your article or chanced on it through your reference posts in social media.
Comments or questions give a reflection of, (a) what people understood, (b) how they perceive the topic, and (3) is it creating curiosity in them to know more. You may also receive a counter view that gives you more insights on the topic. Either the audience finds it useful, or you get useful opinions back.
The analytics gives a sense of the content met its purpose and evoked an expected response.
So what? Can you change everyone?
I am just a budding writer, but an avid reader. I have no authority to say my guidelines are good. But collectively we can bring up a checklist, and forums such as @Content Marketing Institute can help to operationalize it with online publishing. Can a LinkedIn or Medium or other such platforms give out a checklist and encourage authors to check if their post /article applies to a minimum of a few checklist items, before publishing? A small push can get people thinking before throwing junk into the web.
What will happen if we don’t establish some norms?
We will make ‘Content is Clown’ sooner.
We will pollute the web so much and talk about the global warming of www!
The importance of content in marketing will wade away. In the past decade, we made huge strides in content marketing. Content is considered fuel. The phrase ‘content is king’ emerged due to this. The other big area of User Generated Content (UGC) which was touted as a big wave, may lose its relevance too.
Good authors will go in the poets’ way. What is this poets’ way? Till a few decades ago, we had a great deal of regard for poets. When I was growing up, there were different flavors of poetry that was popular. I always got amazed by the Haiku form. Today there are few closed forums for good poetry. How many of us know Poetry-on-Medium? I tried registering for a few poet forums, and waiting to get an entry. We may end up forcing good Authors to go underground.
All who writes can’t be a writer, he who is a writer who can write that benefits others!
I will be extremely glad to know your points/guidelines for the content checklist. If you are a writer — share your guiding points. If you are an avid reader — share what guidance you want to enforce, such that you end up getting good things to read. I always wore the reader’s hat, to define my writer’s guidelines.
Adding to this chaos of self-proclaimed writers is the advertised or sponsored content. In the traditional media, we used to see a call-out stating advertisement, for sponsored content. Wherein in online media, it is difficult to decipher promoted content. On top, influencer content makes it almost impossible to identify paid media. For instance, brands pay Instagram influencers between $100 and $2,085 per post, for videos an average of between $114 and $3,138, and for stories, they pay between $43 and $721 — as per a 2020 research. Stay tuned, as I write in this area next.
*research figures available in the link above (brands pay insta)