the content mint newsletter

As I’ve written about before, the context of our media is just as important as the actual content contained with it.

But what exactly makes up the context of our content?

Here are a few aspects of context to think about before deciding how to form your content:

Proximal

• What other content will be surrounding this piece of content?
• Where will the audience be physically when they are experiencing this content?

Temporal

• When will the audience be most likely to find this content in relation to the time it was created?
• Is this content intended to only be experienced once, or multiple times?
• Is it easy to find again at a later date?
• How long do you expect the audience to spend with the content?

Epistemological

• What does the audience already know about the subject prior to finding this content?
• What does the audience already know about you or your organization prior to finding this content?

Tonal

• What is the tone or mood evoked by the environment surrounding the content?
• What is the possible or likely emotional state of the audience prior to experiencing this content?

Actional / Reactional

• What actions are possible or readily available to the audience during or after experiencing this content?

Once you have an idea of the context of your content, you can start to shape the form of the content in a way that will have the best chance of producing your desired effect.

One way to think about digital communications is that in some ways it petrifies, or sets in stone, a portion of what would otherwise be a real-world conversation.

This petrification can be a useful tool to scale or supplement the in-person communication we engage in every day.

For instance, we can use media to “bottle up” a conversation which we have many times with different clients or customers with very little variation in order to scale that communication of information to a degree that wouldn’t be possible if we had to personally conduct it each time.

Or we can use our media as a sort of personal glossary where we can lay out an explanation of terms or ideas we often use in a specialized way, and then direct customers to those definitions as supplementary information to our media or even to in-person conversations.

While media is great at capturing, freezing, and replicating communication, this petrification process removes the dynamic and organic elements of real-life communication.

So, next time you go to create a piece of media, ask yourself, “how would I get this message across in a real conversation, and what am I losing by petrifying it?”

And, next time you get frustrated with having the same conversation for the fiftieth time with a new customer, think about how you might be able to use your media to have that conversation for you.

A common refrain among marketing agencies is a promise to help you “cut through the noise” or “stand out in the crowd.”

But if you are able to develop an attractive media environment apart from the crowd altogether, in which there is no noise to begin with, then there is no breakthrough or standing out necessary.

When you are the only voice in the room, it is only necessary to say something worth listening to.

Wendell Berry is an American author, columnist, and farmer who has written extensively about agriculture, community, and culture for over fifty years.

In his 1977 essay, The Unsettling of America, he writes about the difference between those who “nurture” the natural environment and those who “exploit” it.

Here is a summary of how he breaks down these categories:

the exploiter (e.g. strip miner)

ultimate goal = money
is primarily concerned with:

• profit
• efficiency
• what is best for the organization
• what is the maximum yield that can be extracted

the nurturer (e.g. farmer)

ultimate goal = health
is primarily concerned with:

• care
• doing things well
• what is best for the people involved
• what is the natural capacity that can be borne

I think these categories translate to almost any area of work, but they seem especially poignant in the realm of the modern “attention economy.”

We have all seen how our attention can be mined for maximal profit while offering little in return, be it via content farms or excessive click-baiting.

At the same time, there are plenty of examples of home-grown content channels through which you can feel the care that was put in to each piece to maximize the value to the audience rather than simply to the creator.

Especially as small-businesses who generally have direct connections to our customers, when we operate our content along the lines of the nurturer rather than the exploiter, we are both developing content which is valuable in itself as well as a healthy and sustainable customer relationship.

~ ~ ~

P.S. It’s worth noting that Wendell Berry would not appreciate me appropriating his principles to advise on digital content of any kind. He opposes the methods of modern energy companies (which he would categorize as exploiters) to the degree that he has famously refused to buy a computer or even to write his essays (via typewriter) by electric light.

You can read Berry’s full quote on nurturers and exploiters ​here​.

I want to be able to provide some simple and specific DIY tips for when you start creating your own content. But since I don’t know what kind of content you specifically are going to be creating, I’m just going to spitball some stuff.

Feel free to bookmark this email somewhere, it may come in handy someday.

Ready?

Here we go . . .

Photography

• It is not a good idea to have a major light source (like a window) directly behind your subject, this causes silhouettes (unless, of course, that’s the effect you’re going for).
  • You might be able to get away with this if you have an equally strong light source in front of the subject or lots of ambient light, i.e. outdoors.

~ ~ ~

Video

• Keep whatever is capturing your audio as close to the source of the audio as you possibly can.
  • This means if you’re filming on your phone from 20ft away to get a nice head-to-toe shot, you probably need a separate microphone that’s in your hand or on your body for capturing audio.

~ ~ ~

Audio podcasting

• Soft things absorb reverberation, have as many of them in the room you’re recording in as possible.
  • The reverse of this also applies: hard, flat surfaces create a ton of reverb, avoid them, especially directly in front of you.

~ ~ ~

Blogging

• Adding tags and/or categories, and making those visible and easily searchable, is a great way to aid navigating an extensive back-catalog of content and extending the longevity of older posts.

Was this helpful? Want more like this? Let me know!

Have you ever played the party game Codenames? Here’s how it goes:

You provide a 1-word clue which, by its various meanings and connotations, you hope your teammates will be able to connect to 2 or more other words from a given word bank.

The more words your team guesses, the more points you all get, but if they incorrectly connect your clue to a word you didn’t intend, then your turn is over.

I think the game is a fascinating microcosm of the interplay between value and risk in any kind of communication.

The more words you try to connect to your single-word clue, the more potential points (value) your team stands to gain, but at the same time you are raising the risk of miscommunicating and losing out on the points you might have gained from a safer clue.

The correlation between value and risk is a pretty common theme in economic studies, but I think it’s worth bearing in mind for our communication strategies as well.

You can see this principle play out in art as the condensing of meaning through words—into a form like poetry, for instance—can at the same time increase the emotional impact on someone who can connect to the depth of the form, but it also runs the risk of falling flat if the audience can’t discover the underlying connections.

The key to a game like Codenames, however, is that the more in-tune you are with the way of thinking of the specific people on your team (i.e. your audience or customers), the greater your chances are for gaining points (i.e. creating value).

The Innoficiency Principle states that innovation and efficiency are mutually opposable goals. In any reasonably functioning organization, one cannot be increased without decreasing the other.
— Blair Enns

When considering your long-term content creation strategy it is important to keep in mind the tradeoffs between optimizing for innovation (or creativity) and efficiency respectively.

The more systems and guidelines you put in place for the sake of speed and consistency in your content, the less wiggle room there will be over time for breaking out of those boundaries while maintaining the pace of production.

On the other hand, the more creativity and innovation you employ, the more difficult it will be to maintain a unified voice or face for your organization.

Obviously there are pros and cons of each, and the balance can shift at times.

For example, if you are just starting a new content channel of some sort, it may be good to begin with a lot of creativity and innovation until you find an approach which is repeatable and resonant, at which point you can start to settle into a more efficient and sustainable routine.

But it’s worth revisiting the principle periodically and considering: where in your current content process could you employ a little more spontaneity, or a little more systemization, as the case may be?

If you had to develop a mission statement, or creed, for your content, what would it be?

This would be separate from a “brand playbook” which dictates the aesthetic and, to an extent, messaging guidelines for consistency across all media. That’s tactics.

A content creed should be concerned with strategy.

It is also separate from, but subsidiary to, your organization’s mission statement. It lays out how the content your organization creates will support the overall mission statement.

The content creed should be a guiding principle that, when in doubt, would ultimately provide the answer and reason to the question “should this content be created in the first place?”

Consider you are standing on a stage in an auditorium presenting information about your business.

Now consider there are 10 people in the front row.

How are you going to speak to them? With a megaphone? With a microphone connected to the auditorium’s sound system?

Maybe.

But you could probably just speak with your voice, maybe projecting a little bit.

However, if there are 200 people scattered across the seating, you might want to shell out $50 for a megaphone of some sort to make sure your voice reaches them.

And further, if the auditorium is packed with standing room only, you will certainly want to make sure you’re connected to the sound system, which cost many thousands of dollars and will have strategically placed speakers ensuring complete sound coverage of the audience.

~ ~ ~

This is clearly a simplistic analogy, but if we consider the arrangement of the audience as comparable to the size and proximity (i.e. familiarity with your content) of your customer base, it can help us consider how important amplification is in your content strategy.

In other words, if your business is local or direct with customers, you can create content locally or directly without stressing too much about global virality.

Moreover, if there are only 10 members of the audience, and they are all in the back row, you should probably ask them to move to the front before you go purchase a megaphone.

~ ~ ~

You can read more about my theory of content acoustics here.

P.S. It’s also worth noting that the addition of amplification will not de facto fill more seats. The amplification level is a result of the existing audience size. How many seats you want to fill, and how you fill them, is another matter.

Mise-en-scène is a French phrase which means “the things in the scene.”¹

This phrase is a classic part of film theory which emphasizes the importance of all the things that go into any shot in a movie. That includes the location and scenery, the actors, the lighting, the motion, etc.

The idea is that every element that you put in front of the camera should have a bearing on the development of the story. In theory, the more “things in the scene” are relevant to or representative of the themes of the film, the more impactful the film will be.

You don’t have to be Steven Spielberg to take advantage of mise-en-scène.

Before posting or recording any piece of content, simply take a moment to ask yourself two questions:

• How many of the things in this post could point to the value I am trying to communicate?
• Is there any minor or background element that was overlooked which might accidentally be detracting from the overall effect?

1. If you are interested in cooking or baking, you may be familiar with a similar phrase, mise en place, or “everything in place,” which is used to describe the first step of collecting all your ingredients and tools in front of you before you begin. ↩︎