Organic Evergreen Content – User Generated Context – Fools Gold?

One of the biggest challenges in publishing is having enough content.

What is it that we must have in order to become successful on a blog? Some say content.

Others, like David from 37 Signals says that it’s not content.

I’m sick and tired of hearing about how you should be producing “content” to attract a web following. Treating content as a category on its own is missing the point entirely. Nobody cares about content. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, hey, I should read some content today.

What people want is opinions, analysis, techniques, experiences, and insights. The best of all these come as a bi-product from actually doing stuff. The closer you are to the topics, the more natural you’ll be able to extract the goodies.

David has a great point. I think what he is saying is that content, when it’s considered a commodity and is being mass produced on a large scale is non-effective and will dilute the quality of a person’s message.

However, there is a need and until search engines become less greedy and content hungry we’ll all be forced to read it.

Why?

Because for every page of content there is a person who’s wallet gets fatter each time you see it.

What is Evergreen content?

Content that doesn’t expire, or have a shelf life. Its great information that took time to create, compile and add analysis to. The long term investment with the hopes that someday you’ll see the forest for the trees, or however that saying goes.

Then there’s the content vs. context debate.

I see a divide. Covering traditional media’s shift to digital media, I hear strategies for more content, strategies to optimise content and the production of content and ways to monetise content. Content. Content. Content. The content industries think that the recipe for digital success is to digitise and monetise content. It ignores the fact that more content is competing for a finite audience and a reduced advertising spend in the midst of a frail recovery. On the other side of the divide, you have digital companies that know the competition is not over content but attention. Who’s winning in the battle for attention? The average time spent reading news on local newspaper websites is 8-12 minutes a month. The average time spent on Facebook is seven hours a month.

I would agree that context (what happens after a post is made) is much more difficult to counterfeit or mass produce than content. But even when big brands master the art of producing context with clever ideas and ways to keep your attention, nobody questions it. Everyone just seems to think how cool, it’s social media and that means they care.