commbasics

Lots of journalists have a hard time distinguishing what is good content (in other words, stuff that people will read and watch) and what they actually produce. Facebook recently announced it would be "punishing" users with bad content b y driving it out of friends and followers news feeds. Reports are coming in that most marketers have no idea if their content is actually effective.   More experts are saying there is an extreme disconnect between "best practice" SEO and good content. And it goes beyond marketing.  Lots of journalists have a hard time distinguishing what is good content (in other words, stuff that people will read and watch) and what they actually produce.  A couple of weeks ago the president of a large media company told me in frustation that his advertisers what to tell one story and his journalists want to tell another.  But the readers are asking for something altogether different and he can't get his team or sponsor...

Being able to state what you don’t know can be more engaging that what you do know. We're in the home stretch for this series on creating engaging content.  And here is tip #4... Embrace Ignorance Again a bad thing made good. Being able to state what you don’t know can be more engaging that what you do know.  Note I said “state” not demonstrate.  You can take a strong position but still admit it’s only an opinion, welcome people to prove you wrong and then change your mind when they do.  This builds trust and credibility.   In this blog over the past decade I have made some uncomfortable prognostications about the state of the media and corporate communications.  Many people have disagreed with me and I have never shied away from having others with more knowledge than I show me how I was wrong.  I’ve made this blog a soapbox for a lot of journalists, publishers and marketing people to tell me when I’m wrong, and when I am I fess up.  I...

Last week we began our series on tips for engaging content with a call to brevity, and today we're taking our own advise and giving you a real short tip. Practice Incompleteness This sounds bad, but it is a good thing for engagement. Note that this post is one part of a larger series.  When I was a novice blogger, I would try to write comprehensively and leave no stone unturned.  While unique visits were high, I noticed that after about 15 seconds readers and viewers dropped off and no one commented other than spammers.  So I started serializing my longer ideas.  Not only did unique views go up dramatically, so did time spent consuming content, comments, sharing, likes… every type of engagement you look for. An added plus was the comments often made me change direction, add insight and rethink my positions.  That increased my reputation as a fair-minded source of information and analysis.   When you are exploring concepts that might be new, readin...

Content creation is a big problem for modern corporations.  Not only is it hard to find people inside of the company walls to create it, making it effective is almost impossible.  Sure you can publish something that gets lots of views, but most of those views go to spider bots, not human beings and when you look at the time spent by actual people, finding them spending more than a minute on your site is like finding gold in the kitchen sink.  But there are ways to fix that. For the next couple of weeks we'll be sharing some approaches that will increase the involvement (also known as engagement) of your audience.  Some of these (like today's) may seem counterintuitive, but in the way the 21st century media works, it is crucial to learn how to create content engagingly.  Today's tip is: Pursue brevity Online content tends to be interruptible even when it is great content.  You have about 10 seconds to grab their attention until the next ema...