Jonothan Stribling

Way back in the mid 1990′s when the Internet was younger and a little more ragged the pundits were saying “content is king”.

The thought was that whoever owned the best content would own the web.

How we use the Internet has changed a little since, but content is still king. The main difference is that now the content that describes content is emperor.

Google have built an empire on this kind of meta-data and Facebook appear to be about to do the same thing with their Open Graph service.

Clearly content and the content that describes content is central to the Internet.

Without great content the Internet would be a simple request-response medium devoid of the sparkle which gets people online first thing in the morning, all day at work and all night.

With great content the Internet is a playpen, a shop, a map and a million conversations.

Today content production matters more and more. People are still looking at how to create the best content whether it be copy, pictures, video, applications or games.

Apple have built an empire based on the delivery of top content onto a mobile device, Adobe have grown by providing content creation tools, bloggers like copyblogger and problogger are popular because they educate folks about creating stunning copy that works, and of course Google have $26B in the bank because they own the metadata, the content about content.

The art of content creation is more and more relevant today. It is the one thing that continues to hold the web back.

Good content engages, delights, inspires, provokes, pokes and sells.

The businesses that excel on the web are expert content creators or the businesses that facilitate the creation of great content.

The rest of the web is either bad or mediocre.

Buying crap content has never been easier. In places like India and the Phillipines second-rate copy can be bought by the pound. And unfortunately it shows.

Savvy onlinee marketers recognise that without enticing with clever content, buyers will go elsewhere.

So how do you go about creating great content?

Ask your audience

It’s as simple as finding out what your audience are interested in, what beguiles them and what annoys them. If you have a website then take a look at the keywords they use to find your website. If you have an internal search on your site then look at what people are searching for. The difference between what people are looking for and your content is your opportunity. Create this kind of content and your traffic will increase for sure.

Think outside the box

I love words but sometimes a picture will do. Or maybe a video is what’s required. Depending on your audience, your product or services you may be able to entice people with a well crafter product gallery. The great thing about Google images is that there tends to be less competition and thanks to blended search you can often appear at the top of search engines a lot faster. A friend of mine gets heaps of traffic soley from Google images for very competitive search terms.

Gary Vaynerchuk built a million dollar wine business by realising that most wine sites were boring and people wanted to be entertained not intimidated. His website winelibrary.com is a lot of fun and not stuffy and boring.

Study the competition

Your competitors may help you see the opportunity faster. If your industry has always done things a certain way and spoken to customers in a certain way then you could stand out just by being different. Richard Branson’s Virgin are a fabulous example of speaking to customers differently. Who knew that carry-on luggage warnings could emphasise great service and not be authoritative and threatening?

Practice, practice, practice

It’s hard to be great at something if you don’t do it often, so create as much content as you can and if it doesn’t work out, move on and create more. Start the artist pages practice where you write 3 pages every morning. Take a leaf out of the terrific Aspect Jones who shoots and uploads a photo everyday. Practice and you will get better at it.

If you don’t feel confident writing, taking photos,shooting and editing video or spouting poetry at the moon then pay someone who does.

So avoid the crap and get creating. The Internet depends on you!

You see them everywhere – people with their heads down, supplicant hands, silent, staring at a mobile device.

They are praying to the god of the Internet, requesting that the pipes and bytes entertain them, illuminate them and placate the boredom of being alive.

Between 9pm and midnight around the world, the TV sits mute while people hover around the LCD monitor watching a rerun on hulu, or a cat doing backflips whilst wearing a tutu on YouTube.

The Internet has simultaneously gone prime-time and become mobile and this is changing what people expect from their online experiences regardless of a sedentary or nomadic pattern of use. People expect to be entertained, engaged, informed, outraged and delighted from their online experiences. This has implications for online and offline retailers, publishers, bloggers, designers and online marketers.

Everyone needs to be a little more entertaining. Users expect it and businesses creating the best, most entertaining content will win regardless of industry.

Bryan Eisenberg talks about persuasion architecture, I think we should start talking about entertainment experience or lolcats architecture.

I don’t need to be persuaded or cajoled. I just need to be your friend and think that you’re the cleverest, the funniest, the fastest, the most innovative, or the toughest.

Relationships might originate in Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and finish with a purchase being made via a mobile site over a few drinks.

Or a work type relationship with your insurance company might evolve into a casual laugh over madcap YouTube accident videos. CGU are running a pretty good campaign featuring a dancing bricklayer that they are promoting in Facebook.

Seek.com have embraced entertainment commerce offering cute games that are promoted by their job seeker emails.

Google were a very early adopter with their logo memes now widely chattered about and promoted by people.

Zynga have built a billion dollar empire soley on entertaining kids and teaching about raising barns.

Moosejaw, an outdoors brand, made people laugh lots with their break up service that was featured in YouTube.

As the Internet evolves to become an intricate part of people’s social and personal lives, brands need to be smarter at how they reach their buyers.

If the 2000s were all about getting direct response campaigns right in search engines, then the 2010s will be about getting the entertainment experience right and driving new customers to your online door.

Once upon a time there was a Hollywood star called Tom Cruise who had the world at his feet.

He was famous, rich and in love with a beautiful young woman called Katie. Being rich and successful, woman loved him and men envied him.

Then one day late in 2005 whilst talking with talk-show host Oprah, Tom celebrated his success and the joy of life by dancing a jig on her sofa; by jumping the sofa.

Tom’s fans were appalled and ashamed for him. This irrational exuberance was not the Tom they loved and respected, it was a freaky guy who seemed to be more than a little self-absorbed. Gradually Tom’s fans turned away from him and stopped seeing his movies.

Jumping the sofa, much like jumping the shark for TV shows, was the beginning of the end of Tom’s glittering career. It represents the moment when his star had reached its ascendant and began to fall.

Tom had misjudged his audience and sent out the wrong message. He had the wrong idea about what people expected of him.

Jumping the sofa is pretty easy to do online.

All you need to do is veer off course into the ridiculous – unintentionally.

Change your argument halfway through a blog post.

Go off on an tangent about how there was this guy I went to school with who is now working in Amsterdam and reckons it is one of the greatest cities in the world, not for the drugs but the people.

Oops.

Get your developers to build something without talking to your customers.

Send an email campaign to the wrong customer.

Display the digital camera landing page to someone who clicked on the Ipod advertisement.

Launch a new product without talking to your customers or your market.

In fact it is easier to jump the sofa online than it is in real life (metaphorically of course, you could be jumping on your sofa right now and no one would care).

The easier it is to publish, the easier it is to be ridiculous, comical and absurd – and to turn people off.

There are quite a few examples of jumping the sofa online. Here is a very short list.

Facebook privacy policy change

In January this year, Facebook modified their privacy policy and automatically opted people out of the extra privacy setting that removed a user’s content from being displayed in search engines.

This shocked and dismayed Facebook users as it was a significant breach of trust for fairly transparent commercial reasons.

People need to be able to trust that the online spaces they populate with personal information. Facebook jumped the sofa and betrayed this trust.

Microsoft Vista

Microsoft Windows Vista was launched with a bang in 2006 and very quickly fizzled as users complained about bloated and slow software, random crashes, and pointless steps that made it harder to do things.

Under pressure to release a new operating system after significant market share gains by Apple, Microsoft focused on the flashy unimportant stuff like phat icons and forgot about the things that make an operating system a pleasure to use.

Microsoft jumped the sofa by focusing on pretty graphics and slick marketing at the expense of features that enhanced how people experienced the product.

Aol. logo

The merger between AOL and Time Warner is a great read about hubris overcoming commercial reality. Ten or so years later AOL Time Warner has demerged and AOL has relaunched as Aol., a content and media network polluting the Internet one crappy article at a time.

The story of Aol. is one of jumping the couch so high that a business that had 30 million ISP customers in 2001 is now a media company. Aol. is a great lesson in evolving with the market and listening to customers even if there might be some short term costs.

Google Buzz/Google Wave

Everyone loves Google. Sing it with me. Everyone loves Google.

The Google brand is so strong that they threaten to launch a new product and the Internet goes into meltdown chasing “exclusive” invitations so they can be among the first to get tell their friends about how great Google is and how Google are the next Google.

Sadly, most of these releases are overblown hyperbole. Google Buzz was an exception. Linked to GMail, Buzz had real potential to allow multiple conversations all easily indexable, searchable and findable.

Unfortunately Google forgot to listen to user concerns about privacy and automatically added email and chat recipients as followers in Buzz. This was fine except the follower lists were public.

The fallout was massive, providing “evidence” to many people that Google didn’t care about privacy.

To their credit Google fixed the problem very quickly and proved why they are one of the strongest global brands – they listen to their customers and admit when they haven’t.

These are just a few examples of how some brands have jumped the sofa online by getting caught up in their own hubris and not listening to their customers.

The Internet makes it easy to listen and even converse with your customers. Get online and research your next decision before jumping the sofa. Talk to your customers. Take a moment to think about what you’re trying to achieve.

Have a really good think before you climb up on the sofa and make like Tom Cruise. And if you still want to, then go right ahead.

An expert is an almighty and powerful entity. The expert arrives in town to the sound of cannon firing, jets displaying tricks above, an appreciative crowd and a gleeful clanging marching band.

A fexpert is a fake or faux expert (aka guru) and they tend to slink into town with no one noticing. Some Fexperts even carry their own one man band just to make sure you know that they are there.

Whilst some folks might specialise in an area and have a good knowledge of the tricks, the tips and the pitfalls, few are experts.

An expert, as the word implies, is someone who is highly experienced and has special skills and knowledge in a particular area.

An expert implies someone who has gained Yoda-like skills and has been recognised by their community as a living embodiment of Yoda himself.

They are kind of rare.

After all, if most people were experts we would be living in a state of blissful grace where the world was populated by short softly spoken experts with bad grammar.

And it would be really really boring.

There would be nothing to learn and learning stuff is what makes me get up in the morning.

How do you recognise a true expert?

An expert will never introduce themselves as an expert, “Hi John Smith, social media expert”.

An expert will have an awesome mastery over a subject area, the pitfalls, the opportunities, the tips, the tricks. This will be demonstrated by a long experience in their field.

An expert will be recognised as experts by their peers and may even be introduced as such.

An expert will always accept that there are limits to their knowledge and that they could learn more. They became experts because they were interested in learning.

An expert will accept and thoughtfully discuss alternate ideas. Experts are interested in ideas, not the world of opinions and being right or wrong.

An expert is likely to look just like you and me.

How do you recognise the fexpert?

A fexpert will introduce themselves as experts and be a self-proclaimed genius.

A fexpert will have some experience and reading in a subject area but not accept that there are limits to their experience or knowledge.

A fexpert is interested in being right so you recognise how smart they are. They will argue rather than discuss.

A fexpert is secretive, mysterious and dismissive. This is so you don’t catch them out.

A fexpert thinks you can be a guru without years practicing the spiritual arts and assembling a flock of disciples.

A fexpert is likely to look just like you and me.

How do you avoid being a fexpert?

It is quite simple. You stay interested in ideas. Your ideas, other peoples ideas, your kids ideas, your taxi drivers and your co-workers ideas. The world is made up of many wonderful new ways of seeing and understanding the world. As soon as you proclaim yourself as a guru, a genius or an expert, part of you is closed off to this magical world of ideas and you stop listening.

When I was at Uni there was always “that class”. It was the class with the interesting name like “Sex and Politics” but was really about obscure French theory and the heterogenity of Southern Pacific political parties in the pre-war period.

That’s right, boring!!

I had the same experience the other day when I downloaded an eBook.

It made my blood boil that I had provided my contact information on the promise of receiving something really interesting and useful.

Sadly, it was neither.

Having been disappointed how likely am I to buying the service?

I subscribe to a lot of Internet marketing type, SEO, ecommerce and related services and cannot open my email without being assaulted by emails promising 3 Quick Tips, The 7 Rules Of Engagement and Make Her Big Happy.

The last email I expect. It is clearly spam and I know to ignore it (for now).

What frustrates me is the profusion of guides and white-papers that are really spam masquerading as something useful; kinda like how KFC masquerades as corn fed organic free-range chicken.

I have decided to call it Spamducation.

The problem is that the core goal for many white-papers and guides is not informing and engaging buyers, it is generating leads. This leads to compelling headlines and disappointing content written by amateurs or second-rate copywriters.

What would be great is actionable or useful information that cannot be easily found in a Google search. Without that the eBook business is really just a cynical lead generation exercise.

So before you write a guide or white paper to generate leads consider the following:

Are you qualified?

Do you know enough about what you are writing about? If not then find someone who does. Your brand will be damaged by inaccurate information and your customers will lose trust.

Is the topic right for your buyers?

Knowing what you know about your customers, is the topic relevant?

How does it relate to their tasks and objectives in relation to your products and services?

If it is relevant then write your guide or white-paper. If not, you need to start again.

Is it really valuable for your buyers?

Are you presenting old information in a new way, new information in a new way, or old information in an old way?

What problem are you solving? If what you’re doing is the same old stuff then stop and start again.

Is it annoying?

Your education should have actionable information so your customer can say:

“Wow! I have that exact problem and now I have a clear pathway to solving it.”

Is it lazy?

Finding information using search engines like Google is easy. So much so, that I can do a little research and trot out a plagiarised eBook, learning guide or quick tips document.

This is just lazy and purposeful plagiarism is plain wrong. If your document is inspired by someone then at least credit them. They may have worked hard and deserve some recognition.

Your education should also be unique to your customers and their place in your behavioural model. There is little point offering information about building a space ship if your customers are yet to master basic thermal dynamics.

Do you really need that email address?

This might make some marketing folks turn pale, but do you really need to collect contact information before offering the eBook download?

If the information is engaging and exciting then you will have built credibility and trust with your buyer and they will be more likely to call or email you when they’re ready to purchase.

Education tools like eBooks are a great way to build credibility with your audience, so don’t burn that trust with spamducation.

It’s corny, but I gotta do it:

“educate don’t spamducate”.