Commune Media | Measurably Effective Digital Marketing™

Content is still king

Posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 11:47 AM by Jebadiah Roberts  |  Comments (0)

If you love words, you know it’s true.

"The ink-based writing implement has been shown to be more efficacious than the blade-centered cutting device."

But only when the blade-centered cutting device is sharp enough to trim the fat.

And so, to mark the launch of our new "say it smarter" positioning, we invite you to translate your own famous quotes into jargon.

Say it stupider

The quote above came courtesy of our own fastidious jargon hunter, Jebadiah.

Here are some more examples:

• "And the omnipotent deity vocalized, ‘Facilitate effective illumination.’"
• "To embody the property of existence or not to embody the property of existence, that is the query posed."
• "What quantity of roads should an adult male endeavour to traverse before said male might accurately refer to himself as having achieved adulthood status?"
• "Levitate precariously in the manner of a butterfly, administer unpleasant sensations in the manner of a bee."
• "I enjoy possession of nighttime visualizations."
• "The sole variable we have cause to express alarm at is the expression of alarm itself."
• "Things of an actionable nature vocalize more noticeably than things of a verbal nature."
• "Frankly, my dear, I’m unequivocally indifferent towards the outcome of this situation. "

Unleash your inner corporation

Have you been SuperPoked lately? Or maybe you’ve been thrown a hot potato by one of your 32 BFFs. (That’s “best friend for life,” for those who aren’t hip to Facebook-widget parlance.) Then again, you might be too busy watching videos of people stacking stuff on sleeping cats while you pick out your most ironic T-shirt for your MySpace profile pic.

Considering the amount of media attention that sites like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube receive, you’d suspect that’s all people do on the web these days. But according the Online Publishers Association, people still spend the vast majority of their time online visiting content-based sites.

The rise of social media represents an interesting paradox for online content providers. As someone who loves the web and revels in its evolution, I’m excited to see it coming into its own as a community-based conduit for collaboration and sharing. But as someone who obsesses over content and—let’s face it—makes a living by studying, producing and polishing it, I sometimes raise an eyebrow at the apparent prevalence of user-generated material.

Numbers never lie

Well, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief: the OPA’s most recent Internet Activity Index, which analyzes Nielsen Online data each month, showed that people spend a scant 7.5 percent of their time online visiting community sites, while they spend a whopping 42.7 percent on content-based sites.

Here’s how it breaks down. The IAI divides sites among five categories:

• Content (news, information and entertainment sites)
• Commerce (sites like Amazon and eBay)
• Communication (sites that facilitate the exchange of information, such as Yahoo! Mail and MSN Groups)
• Community (user-generated sites like Facebook and YouTube)
• Search (sites that provide results based on a user’s request, such as Google Search)

With all the hoopla surrounding social networking, you might expect that community sites, which rely on user-generated content, would account for the biggest piece of the pie. So why is their share so small? According to the OPA, community sites reach a profound number of people, but their reach spans a narrower category—59.5 percent, to be exact. In other words, unless you’re under 18, you probably aren’t spending much time on MySpace. Content sites, on the other hand, reach 92.7 percent of surfers because they’ve got something for everyone.

Blurring boundaries

But here’s where things get tricky. Content-based sites are realizing that their readers want to have a say, which is why you can post comments about breaking news on CNN.com and read blogs on The New York Times online. This means that the freshly drawn lines between content and community are already blurring. But in such cases, it’s still the content that fosters the conversation. And that’s exactly what it should be doing.

The benefits of user-generated content are clear. Not only is it free to produce, but it taps in to our evolutionary drives to be creative and to think and speak for ourselves. These are all good things. Very good things. But when people are actually looking for information rather than an outlet for their opinions, it seems there will always be a demand for expertise.

you acquired the recorded image?

Excellent.

Now show us your skills by posting your own convoluted quotations as comments below.

Tags: content, user-generated content