Content Is Not King - People Are.
October 18, 2014
Post structuralist readings of the modern mediascape are my jam.
I have loved Ze Frank since THE SHOW - but now I love him in a whole new way.
He is supremely qualified to talk about what kind of content spreads.
The depth is in the exchange not necessarily the content.
As I've written about before - stealing from Duncan Watts and Henry Jenkins and many other smart people - you cannot create content that will be successful, that will earn attention, that will be shared.
You can only create content that has a better chance of being successful.
Even more so in the stream - where content has many different functions beyond simple consumption.
We use content to communicate, taking pieces of it, re-contextualizing it, and using it to efficiently express ourselves ourselves in the stream.
So if we want people to share content - brand content for example - we need to consider what people might want to use it for, not just how beautiful or informative or entertaining it is.
The whole piece is gold. Nature of media and creative and data and that. Watch it. Thank me later.
[THANKS TO the reliably excellent Mitch Joel for this gem.]
He talks about the different functional typologies that Buzzfeed uses. One is indentity - pieces of content that we relate to based on an identity function, that we share because same. In the case of this piece they made for Purina - the indentity reference is cat ownership.