artificial standards

Before the internet, if you wanted to establish your credentials as an expert or distribute your thinking and insights to those who might find it valuable, you had more or less two options:

1. become a public speaker at events, or
2. get involved with a publisher

While not eliminating either, the internet has democratized both of those options.

But why hasn’t the internet eliminated these methods altogether? And why, for the most part, do both public speaking and traditional publishing still carry more credential weight than simply posting content online?

There are doubtless a myriad of reasons, but I think most of them probably boil down to this:

They impose a rigid set of standards that must be adhered to before the content can be distributed to and consumed by others.

Here’s the thing about standards though: all standards are artificial.

In other words, you can create your own standards for your content. The key is showing a visible, tangible threshold of quality and restraint in scope regarding what kinds of content is allowed to be released.

The more visible the standard, whatever that standard is, the higher the credibility of the source.

Try it out for yourself. Evaluate your level of trust in the people and brands that you follow, and then compare that trust to the amount of visible standards in the content that they post. Let me know if it checks out.

the publishing process

If you were to consider your content as something of a formal publication, in addition to standards, you might also consider implementing processes for distribution.

According to Wikipedia, here are the various stages that are involved in modern publishing:

1. Commissioning
2. Writing
3. Copy editing
4. Design
5. Copywriting
6. Typesetting
7. Proofreading
8. Correction cycles
9. Indexing
10. Final corrections
11. Web publishing
12. Prepress
13. Printing
14. Post press
15. Distribution
16. Marketing

Not all of these apply to every type of publishing, but if you get creative I bet you can find a principle underlying each phase that could be useful to adopt to your content.

So . . .

What stages are involved in your current content publication process?

wasted time

When it comes to spending our time and attention, “waste” comes in (at least) three forms:

opportunity cost

This is the underlying factor of all forms of time waste. This is what we feel when, after spending time in one manner, we retrospectively feel like we would have derived greater gain from doing something else.

net negative experience

This has to do with the residual emotional effect of an experience. Even if we achieve the greatest ROI from our time, if we are left with a negative feeling about it, we will probably still consider our time better spend elsewise.

unmet expectations

And further, even if our time yielded a positive gain and a net positive emotional experience, still, if we feel the experience fell short of the expected or promised experience, we may nonetheless consider it to have been a waste based solely on the prospect of an imagined opportunity cost which has been left unrealized.

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Admittedly, “waste” is just as subjective of a judgement as “value” is, but understanding and keeping in mind these three aspects of attentional waste can help us to mitigate as much of it as possible when developing our content.

prepare your content

pre (prefix)
before

pare (v.)
to remove excess
to decrease something by small degrees until it is of a desired size

pre · ​pare (v.)
the act of removing excesses or irrelevancies before something is considered ready to use or present to others
q.v.: edit, prune, sculpt

content marketing vs marketing your content

As we saw a few days ago, the final stage of the publishing process is marketing.

Marketing is what you do to point people towards something they might find valuable.

Content is one way to achieve this “pointing.” This is commonly referred to as content marketing.

When the primary value of a piece of content is raising awareness of value to be found elsewhere, around here we say that it has “extrinsic value.” On the other hand, when content has value in-and-of itself, we call that “intrinsic value.”

But, if your content does possess intrinsic value, you might eventually find that you need more content dedicated to “point” to that value extrinsically.

This is essentially the difference between “content marketing” and “publishing,” the former markets something else, while the latter needs its own marketing.

motifs

All art (and, in a sense, all life) is established on motifs.

A motif is simply a single element which is used repeatedly to establish connections between things and form a sense of unity between them.

The form of repeated arches or pillars in a cathedral, big bad wolves and evil step-mothers in fairy tales, and the association of the musical “baaa dum!” with the shark in Jaws are all examples of motifs.

Meanwhile, in the world of business, the systematic application of motifs goes by another name: branding.

Typically these branding motifs are visual: logos, colors, fonts, etc.

But motifs can just as easily be based in ideas and concepts as in sight and sound cues.

So, beyond your brand’s design playbook, what are the recurring ideological and conceptual motifs that could be found throughout your content?

I would venture to say it’s worth hashing those out just as carefully as you choose acceptable heading and paragraph fonts.

branded content

Sometimes, when our content provides a very pointed form of value, it can be helpful to build a distinct motif system which will unify that content separately from the rest of the business. In other words, brand the content.

Here are a handful of benefits of branded content:

maintain focus

Well-branded content can help keep your focus on the primary value you are providing each time you go to create something new.

set expectations

Branding helps others quickly get an idea of what they can expect to gain from your content. If you have complicated or nested content system, it can also help the audience navigate the to the particular value they are looking for.

develop tone

Motifs almost always carry an emotional component to them, so developing a brand system that conveys the tone you want the content to carry can help ensure the message of the content carries the same tone. (Which makes sense because we already know that the entire environment of the content is the message.)

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All that being said, what branding ultimately does is set up guardrails for value. It creates a motif system which delineates what is in and what is out according to the proposed value associated with that system.

For those of us who are trying to maximize the value and minimize the waste in our content, these guardrails can be very useful tools.

pattern and emotion

Yesterday I wrote:

It was one of those statements that, after I wrote it, I had to stop and consider, “wait, can I actually back that up?” I think I can. Here’s my line of reasoning:

Motifs are defined by repetition, which inherently makes them a form of pattern, and patterns—as anyone teaching them to a toddler can tell you—are all about the building of expectations.

Let’s do an experiment. What follows next in this pattern?

A A A __

If you said A, you’re wrong. It’s actually B.

Okay . . . so what comes after A A A B __?

If you said B, you’re wrong again. It’s actually A.

Alright, I’ll give you the rest of the pattern now:

A A A B A C A D A E A F A G A . . .

Ah, now you can figure it out. Feels good right? And it feels even better if I tell you that the next in sequence is, indeed, H.

Phew.

This is how motifs and patterns are tied to emotion. Thwarted expectations produce negative emotion, while realized expectations produce positive emotion.

So . . . what emotions are produced by the brand motifs of your business or the patterns of your content?

managing waste

Believe it or not, I’ve actually been trying to develop one single line of thought over the last week and a half’s worth of posts. Let’s see if we can tie it all together, in reverse order:

Motifs are patterns which set expectations. Those expectations define what is in, what is out, and what is next.

Branding is a system of motifs that communicates to customers whether what they want is inside or outside of that branded offering.

These branding motifs should extend beyond visual presentation through to your ideological patterning.

The act of preparing content is the act of removing all the things (visual and ideological) that are extraneous to the branding motifs of your business or offering.

This preparation reduces wasted time by setting expectations properly, generating positive emotional experiences, and accurately directing customers toward something they will find valuable (and maybe away from something they wont).

Systematizing this preparation can elevate your content from mere posting to something which we could begin to consider publishing.

The more visible your publishing standards are, the more credible your content tends to be for your audience, because it shows that time and care has been taken in advance to do the waste management for them.