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Content Hierarchy And The Importance Of Effort

By Tac Anderson ⋅ May 3, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment
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Content and Effort

Have you ever been in the paper? You know the actual one made of trees and ink. It’s pretty cool. I’ve even had some of my work written up in a book and even though I wasn’t mentioned by name it was still pretty cool.

Being mentioned in a blog post or online article is also very cool, as is being called out in a tweet or a retweet. But there’s something slightly different about each of them.

I work at a company that does a lot of PR for companies and no matter how many blog posts and mentions on Twitter and even how many sales you drive clients still love it when they are mentioned (positively) in a news paper or magazine. Even when we know that a blog post mentioning your company can be more impactful than a printed news story.

Some of us may be quick to discredit this as “the old way” but they’re missing something. The overall effort to be included in print is greater than in a blog post. That effort is validating to our egos.  Similarly the effort to be written up in a blog post versus someone sharing something on Twitter or liking something on Facebook is a higher order of effort.

Sharing a link on Twitter or that’s just the headline of the post and a link is not as impactful as adding a short but thoughtful line recommendation of why you shared it. I’ve seen my own stats and when I take the time to add a personal thought I get a much higher level of click through than just the headline. RT’s don’t increase but overall clicks are often greater.

Content and Importance

What kind of content you create is important but the focus of your content says a lot about what’s important to you.

As companies start to launch Facebook pages and Twitter accounts It’s important to remember the value of content and the effort you put into it. Your content shows how much effort you put into it. Not effort as in cost or even quality  but effort as in how much you personalized it for your audience.

The effort you put into the content shows how well you understand and appreciate your audience.

Your content shows whats important to you. What are you talking about? Yourself or your customer?

Are you producing the content you want or the content your customers want?

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About Tac

Social media anthropologist. Communications strategist. Business model junkie. Chief blogger here at New Comm Biz.

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  • http://gumption.typepad.com Joe McCarthy

    I agree that effort - and perception of effort - plays a significant role in the comparative valuation of references on the part of the person or organization being referenced (the referee?). Among the areas where this plays out are politics, where different modes of influence are valued, in part, based on the effort involved in the attempts at influence, e.g., face-to-face meetings, letters, phone calls and emails. I have heard that U.S. members of Congress now place a higher priority on input via their web based “contact” forms - which require manual typing into the fields - than email messages they receive, due to the volume of spam and auto-formatted “input” via special interest group web sites.

    A couple of other interesting takes on this issue can be found in danah boyd's 2007 post on valuing innefficiencies and unreliability, and in a keynote presentation by her former advisor, Judith Donath, at the Communities and Technologies 2007 conference, Standing on Boxes: Signaling Costs and Benefits in Online and Offline Social Networks.

  • http://www.indydisplays.com trade show exhibits

    Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!!I wish you good luck!

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