Just what is content? And why that definition matters.
Recently, my boss shared this Benjamin Schwartz comic from The New Yorker:
I’ve written before about the numerous definitions of content I’ve heard throughout my career, along with some of the reasons there are so many definitions. In that article, I offer a fairly expansive definition of my own—that content is your customer experience.
I think that’s right, and I’ll talk more about that in a bit, but I also think it’s a definition that’s easy to dismiss. “Yeah, yeah,” I imagine someone saying. “Sure, sure. Everything’s customer experience these days.”
So here, I want to offer another definition, one that is straightforward and hopefully easy to understand. It’s still broader than most people think, so after I’ll talk about why a definition like this is important.
So just what is content? Here’s my definition:
Content is every communication you make.
Now, some quick distinctions. First, I thought about adding “to your customers” or “to your audience,” but the reality is that once you create content, it’s open to anyone, whether you intended them or not. Second, I intentionally did not say “everything you communicate.” In other words, content is not a verb. It’s a noun. It’s not what you want to say, but how you say it. It’s not the act of communicating, but the output of that act.
Some examples.
A banner ad is content.
A blog post is content.
A subject line is content.
A website is both a vehicle for delivering content and a piece of content.
The same is true of an event.
What your chatbot says is content.
The words in your product are content, but in many cases, so is the product itself.
The words your salesperson uses, as well as their tone and voice, are content.
In all these cases, someone identified the need to communicate something (the what). And so someone designed (in the broadest sense of the word) some content (the how).
Why this definition matters.
Many people find my definition excessive. “Matthew,” they say. “A banner ad? A subject line? An event?” One of the unfortunate results of the adoption of content marketing is often an extremely narrow idea of what content is and how it functions in a business. Like having content marketing absolves you from the need of thinking about content elsewhere.
That’s a problem. Because essentially, the model we use for content is the same as it was thirty years ago. And in case you haven’t noticed, the way businesses operate today—and especially the way they communicate with their customers—has radically changed.
Here’s how Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden describe the change in their book Sense and Respond:
“The economy has changed, too. It’s not just the presence of technology. Instead, what has changed is the new things that people are doing as a result of technology. People now have remarkable new capabilities to communicate with one another—both directly and indirectly—and with the organizations that serve their interests. People can share personal messages with friends, groups, and strangers around the world. People can share their opinions of a merchant’s products by posting online reviews. And the organizations serving these people’s needs also can take advantage of these rich communication channels.”
They go on to explain the challenges this creates for the modern business:
“The problem that many of us face is that most of our management techniques were created at a time when this two-way conversation didn’t exist. Instead, our management tools were built for a completely different pace of operations—the pace of the past century’s manufacturing economy. Operations in the manufacturing age were slower and more predictable….
“This is a legacy not only of how we think about technology but also of how we think about and structure our organizations, a legacy we inherited from the very successful innovations of the past century: Henry Ford’s assembly line, Taylor’s scientific management principles, and the engineering model of organizations. This legacy of functional segregation in the name of efficiency makes sense in certain contexts, but unfortunately it doesn’t work in the digital reality. The complexity of software systems, the challenge of predicting what the market wants, the pace of change within the market itself—all this stacks the odds against these stand-alone approaches.”
Gothelf and Seiden go on to explain the ways that successful businesses have transformed themselves to respond to these challenges. Massive shifts in the way organizations operate brought on by Agile, DevOps, and other methodologies have worked because they acknowledge the need for teams to be interconnected and closely tied to their users. This won’t shock anyone.
But it’s ironic that while the way we communicate with other people is at the heart of these seismic shifts, the way we think about content has not changed. Especially in marketing.
Thirty years ago, businesses were basically broadcasters. They created products, sent them into the world, and often never heard anything from their customers but the ka-ching of their payment. They sent their message to everyone and had little ability to listen to the response.
In this world, content was necessarily siloed. The opportunities to communicate with your audience were isolated to specific interactions. A call to customer service. Reading installation instructions. Watching or reading an advertisement. Eventually, digital channels would start to join this club. But even then, each of these communications was highly specialized and independent from the others.
But as Gothelf and Seiden point out, “Increasingly, the relationship with our partners is dominated by the two-way conversation that digital technology allows.” For them, the significance of this is the opportunity to create digital services that evolve based on direct user feedback. But the implications for content are just as enormous.
In the old days, we communicated with our customers in isolated, discreet moments. Today, we’re communicating with them all the time, through a huge variety of channels and in a massive variety of ways. The line between “product” and “marketing,” between “user” and “customer” are blurring. It simply does not work for the blog team to claim what they’re doing is content but the words in the product or not. Or whatever variant of that you want.
The way we communicate with our audiences has changed. The way we think about how we communicate—content—needs to change too, and that’s why this definition matters.
A few final thoughts:
In this context, I don’t think it’s a stretch to see how our content is our customer experience. In The Elements of User Experience, master user experience designer Jesse James Garrett breaks a user experience into two pieces—functionality and content. This distinction scales up or down from the smallest element of UI to the most revolutionary brand experience. A customer’s experience with your brand is made up of those things you allow them to do (functionality) and how you communicate with them (content). Innovation in the former is important. Innovation, consistency, and intention in the latter is what really sets brands apart.
As I said before, I think marketing teams are often the laggards here. Recently I read this article, asking why businesses still see marketing as a cost center. If marketing, the article asks, has become the owner of the customer experience, why don’t businesses see them as a value-add? To me the answer is that in the vast scope of business transformation, somehow marketing got left behind. Sure, they adopt new technologies and new strategies, but they haven’t undertaken the vast overhaul that software and IT teams have. I think this needs to happen before a truly consistent content strategy that accounts for every communication can emerge.
There’s a lot that content teams can learn from Agile and other methodologies that were instrumental in transforming software teams. Especially in terms of process and organization, and I rely on them heavily. But it’s important to keep in mind that content needs are different than functionality needs. With functionality (like software), it’s easy to interpret immediate feedback accurately. Did they click the button? No? Well let’s change it. With communication, it’s different. Understanding what our audiences need, how they’re reacting, and how to create a single, coherent experience for them will require a different, but likely related set of methodologies that can only be developed through an accurate view of the scope of the problem.