Content is hardly the King
Jon Obermeyer
Perhaps writers need to justify it to their bosses (or their parents), but I find the "Game of Thrones" reverence for content a bit overdone. Here are a few reasons why Content might not be worth all the gushing and groveling.
Content gets lost in the UI. Two years ago I had the hiring manager at a major stagecoach-themed bank in California dismiss my 15 years of corporate writing experience, speculating that my proficiency writing in long form (ebooks and books) DQ'd me from writing for the mobile screen. What she did not realize is that I take a copywriter approach to every succinct sentence. that every paragraph is for me a mobile screen.
I use white space judiciously to highlight key concepts.
A single sentence can be an exquisite kingdom, populated by knights, unicorns and magical archers.
A paragraph can be a breakaway republic.
Content gets lost in the Noise. I can write the same sentence twice and you might not notice. I can write the same sentence twice and you might not notice. We are so consumed and distracted by our mobile access, search capability, our instant-all-knowingness that the content that matters often eludes us. The most important topics to me right now are diet and exercise tips, reasonable ranges of Volkswagen Bug repair costs (timing belt, clutch) and finding hiking trails within five miles of my house for Easter weekend. ALL of this content is on the web, but it's rarely served up to me around the time I could use it. And if it was presented to me on a golden platter at precisely the right moment, I would not remember any of it. So much of our content today is check-the-box and reply-to-query/relevant. So much now seems to me to be written as Quora-bait and SEO chum. But is any of it written or packaged in way that you'll remember it?
Content Never Makes it to the URL in the first place. There are millions of subject matter experts out there, geniuses by function and industry vertical, by muscle memory and scar tissue. They can go a mile deep on a topic in their sleep. There's probably a million (no more) writers and editors out here who can translate the most technical material of Eggheads and Phd/Md's into business terms and plain consumer language.
But we don't work hard enough at segmenting and surfacing this expertise in the arenas where it is most useful. And the standard content castles are crumbling, because we haven't taxed flax and mead production enough to repair the infrastructure.
We know the banner ad is broken; so is the white paper. I worry about the blog and the short animated video, both princes of the realm who started out with such promise. I worry about them falling into the moat of mediocrity.
The most interesting artifact these days to me is the infographic, especially infographics which elegantly translate boring gray text into the equivalent of an impressionist painting. The infographic is our lovely fairy princess who kissed the frog (dull prose) and gave him a makeover. What if you could turn your earnings report or your press release into an infographic? Now that might be memorable.
If you say "Content is King," it also means you are relaxing, and not pushing as hard as you should. Content is the stable boy and the village blacksmith, at best a wise courtier or the jester; hardly the king.
Jon Obermeyer is Poet Gecko for the Muddy Gecko fractional marketing agency. He's based in Durham NC. If you want to know what makes a gecko muddy, just ask.