I was inspired to write today’s post after reading Eric Wittlake’s post, Why Your Content Will Never Be Good Enough. In the article Wittlake explains there are two problems with trying to create good content:
- Not only are you competing with others on products and services, but you’re also competing to be your audience’s primary information source.
- 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.