Let's set up a time to talk.
Let’s jump back into our “Five New Laws of Content” series with a discussion of Law #2: The Law of Complexity.
The Law of Complexity is a lot like the Law of Entropy. The Law of Entropy loosely describes something we all know by casual observation: the amount of chaos in a system tends to increase with the complexity of the system. Similarly, the Law of Content can be summarized as follows:
As the complexity of content increases, the challenge of managing it increases.
When your organization was eking out a couple white papers a year, the need for a content plan — much less a content strategy — was nonexistent. Yet, today content is the fuel of the marketing engine. Everything from nurture marketing programs to search engine optimization to social media demand a steady supply of it. With so much content around, it is more important than ever to manage its collective presentation in ways that create meaning. This calls for a new skill set — that of curator.
To return to our science example, a curator is an “information chemist.” He or she must strategically develop, select and place content in the appropriate vehicles, in the appropriate environments, in order to engage the audience, convey a message or inspire action. The majority of organizations are set up to sell products and services, not to manage the production and delivery of a wide array of editorial material. As a result, content can end up being created for content’s sake, with little alignment with the strategic interests of the organization. In other cases, words, images, audio and video can be “shoe horned” into vehicles they weren’t truly designed for, without the real-world content requirements of the audience in mind.
When these things happen, the audience can’t find what it’s searching for, or worse, does not value what it does find. Either of these eventualities can tarnish the very brand the content was meant to burnish.
Organizations need to take a hard look in the mirror. If they don’t have curatorial capability on staff, they need to hire or outsource that capability — and before they execute their next wave of content.
Join us next week when we discuss Law #3, and don’t forget to look for our white paper on the five laws of content, which we’ll release in the last post in our series.
Image Via Softchoice Blog.