9 Lives of Content

Once upon a time, content was scarce and guarded. Content was king in the old world. But there’s been a revolution online and now content’s as common as muck. The whole worldwide web is content – text, data, graphics, video and audio – and has numerous delivery channels, including your website, e-mail, social media, image- and video-sharing sites. In fact, the web is a democracy of content; and democracies need leaders.

The task before you is not only creating content but reshaping  and repackaging it for redeployment along multiple channels – both on and offline. If a story is worth telling once, it’s worth telling again. But different people think in different ways (you’re so right Sir Ken Robinson) – some consume words like coco pops, others respond to imagery, maps, interactivity. Thanks to the internet age, all of this is possibl: one piece of content seen many ways by many people.

When you really think about it, every transaction you make – academic, commercial or social – is based on the transfer, the sharing, of words and images. It all starts with an idea but ends up in myriad manifestations – products, services, knowledge, news. Looking at life this way, it’s clear: content is valuable. And search engines such as Google make it possible for you to go direct to the people you want to reach. You no longer have to find them via mainstream media, like casting sand to the wind. Now you are the media.

We work with our clients to create and manage content – day in, day out. We build the delivery mechanisms, we apply magic to old words and we map the networks. If you have an idea for sharing, we’ll make sure the people who should, are aware and respond. Our personal challenge is to get a minum of 9 lives from every bit of content we produce. In any language, that’s called efficiency.

Here are 10 content insights to make you think differently every time you put place your fingers on the keys.