Playing the Long and Short Content Game

Your Content Has a Half-Life. Plan Accordingly.

In science, half-life is the time required for a quantity to reduce to half of its initial value.

The content you create and publish has a half-life, too. And it seems as though that half-life gets shorter and shorter with each passing day. We keep increasing the pace at which we consume—or ignore—content, to the point nowadays that your content’s half-life can be fleeting.

So what’s the use in spending two weeks to plan, several hours to write, and maybe days to produce and publish a 1,500-world article that may spend only seconds in a busy scroller’s social media feed, or seconds on screen before a declutterer deletes your marketing email that links to your blog?

We are being bombarded with more and more content, at an increasing pace, that as consumers, we are being faced with split-second decisions whether to click a link, commit to a read, or afford minutes to a well-produced video.

Is it worth the time we put into perfecting this polished content? No. And Yes.

Don’t Bother with Perfect. Get to Published.

If the intended audience isn’t willing to spend more than a few seconds with your content, why take hours, days and weeks creating it for them? In the modern media environment, people are looking for quick hits: byte-sized content in the form of short posts, quick videos and instant gratification. Multiple rewrites and reviews of academic articles, expensive post-production and editing of two-minute sizzle-reel videos, and splashy immersive multimedia productions...most of that time and expense is wasted, if the user’s thumb simply scrolls right past it, onto the next post in the feed.

“Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good [enough],” is the common expression. More and more, I’m advising clients to shorten their time-to-market horizons to match the short game that content consumers are playing. If people are craving for quick hits, give them to them. 

Instead of a perfectly polished 1,500-word article, start with a 700-character LinkedIn post. Instead of expecting browsers to click a link to consume your content, give them the chief takeaways right in that post itself. The article might take hours to create; the post should take fewer than 30 minutes. The former is expected to be perfect; the latter might even have a typo in it! [Gasp!] That’s okay. It’s a different kind of medium, and perfection is not expected.

The name of the (short) game nowadays is to be visible, be ubiquitous, and be relevant. In the time it might take you to plan, write, produce and publish a full-length article, you will have missed as many as 100 micro-moments—opportunities for you to get a kernel of expertise in front of the audience you’re hoping to influence. Don’t waste those opportunities and leave them to your competitors to claim.

Instead of the polished production video, shoot a quick selfie video capturing an idea that comes to mind. Instead of a pre-planned Webinar, hop on a Zoom call with a client or colleague and record a short discussion about a hot topic of interest to your audience.

Not only does this absolve you of the burden of perfection, it allows you to produce more content, more quickly, and to meet your constituents in the moment...literally. Consider the timeline it might take for you to get the “perfect” piece of content produced. How often can you commit to the time, work and attention to get something like that completed? Maybe monthly? At best?

Here’s how I would spend that month instead:

• Start with a weekly post on LinkedIn.
• Once comfortable, accelerate that pace to three posts per week.
• The ultimate goal is one LinkedIn post per day.

In time, you will increase your content “at-bats” from one per month to 30. You don’t have to be a math major to understand the inherent value in that increase in odds.

Don’t Forget the Long Game!

But remember: That fleeting moment in which your content expended its half-life was only one half of the story. Indeed, once the initial moment has passed, your content has only expended half of its initial value! The remaining value looks more like a dinosaur tale, and in most cases, lasts in perpetuity.

Despite everything I advocated above, you cannot only play the short game if you want your thought-leadership content strategy to be fully effective. You must understand the long game as well.

All of those micro-moments are, indeed, fleeting. There is very little permanence to them. What does live forever, however, is that fully produced content published on your owned media platforms: your website, chief among them.

Consider the other two applications in which your content does some business-development heavy lifting for you:

• matching people’s search criteria
• validating your expertise for website browsers who are approaching a purchasing decision

If you only play the short game, and all of your content lives only in posts, it will be invisible to anyone searching for your expertise online or visiting your website to vet you as a service provider. These are the moments that validate your prior commitment to “the perfect.” Here, prospects will be looking to understand your value, learn your differentiators, and glean your expertise. It’s either a first impression you’re making, or a last-ditch pitch to make the prospect’s short list. Better make it count.

Posts, selfie videos and impromptu Zoom conversations won’t cut it here. 

So you have to do both if you want to be truly effective—the short game AND the long game. The nice thing is, one overlays against the other. 

This is how that long-game content calendar might shake out:

• monthly blog
• monthly newsletter
• quarterly video
• two webinars per year
• one conference, event or symposium per year

Both, Not Either/Or

In tandem, your most effective content calendar will both meet prospects in their micro-moments and maximize the entire lifespan—not just the half-life—of your content’s value...even in perpetuity:

• daily posts on LinkedIn
• weekly impromptu videos, Zoom conversations or podcasts
• monthly blog
• monthly, semi-monthly or weekly email newsletter
• quarterly “sizzle” video
• two webinars per year
• one conference, event or symposium per year

In my experience, most would-be content creators get stuck on the enormity of the task at hand, thinking they need to become prolific content creators of perfectly polished prose. That’s only half of the formula, and it’s not the one I would start with today—especially if I needed to get off of the sidelines and into the game. The long game is the traditional paradigm, and it’s still paramount.

But the short game is happening right now...with or without you. The quicker you check in, the sooner your at-bats will start resulting in singles, doubles, runs scored, and games won.

Batter up!