the content mint archive

When you are having conversations about your business in-person, start taking notes.

Pay attention to when people start to lean in, or when they seem to become disinterested.

Pay attention to the specific words that cause those reactions, or the specific topics that people get excited about.

Conversations are one of the best ways to get live feedback on your messaging.

Once you’ve started to compile those notes on messaging and phrases that you know make people pay attention, then you can start thinking about ways to set those messages in stone through your content.

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P.S. A second exercise would be to compare those notes to your existing messaging and see where you find inconsistencies or areas which could be better aligned with your most effective conversations.

Yesterday as I was writing about the medium and the message of McDonald’s, I started to think about the message that McDonald’s tries to convey through its content, i.e. its marketing. We all know what it is:

I found this interesting because what it means is that the gist of McDonald’s marketing is based on an assertion of desirability, or “goodness.”

“I’m lovin’ it” roughly translates to: “see, it is good to eat.”

This seems ironic when put in context of our discussion yesterday, in which we discovered that the underlying message of McDonald’s business and offering is “fast and cheap.”

Now, when you see the words “fast” and “cheap” together, “good” usually follows, but only in reference to the classic trilemma:

Fast, cheap, or good. Pick two.

It’s as if McDonald’s knows that their “meta-message” is “fast and cheap,” so they use their marketing to fill in the “good” which is naturally assumed to be incompatible with the first two.

Notice though that McDonald’s rarely advertises directly for “fast and cheap” in their marketing. They don’t have to. It is the message which already permeates everything they do.

In other words, it’s what McDonald’s doesn’t say which turns out to be their real message.

Yesterday I said that your business is the medium through which the message of all your content is ultimately filtered. So, to provide a more concrete example of this idea, let’s take a look at McDonald’s.

McDonald’s offers fast, cheap food at scale.

To do this, they have mastered the art of translating the technology of the assembly line to food preparation. But not only is the food offered in assembly line fashion, the entire franchise business model upon which McDonald’s is based is in essence an assembly line model.

Fast, cheap, repeatable.

This is the message of McDonald’s which is consistent throughout both their offering and their business.

If they started creating ads which were about slowing down and taking the time to smell the roses, so to speak, it would be incongruous with the entire medium (the business) through which the message was being conveyed.

So . . .

Is the message of your content consistent with the medium of your business?

If not, your message might be something other than what you think it is.

Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase “the medium is the message” back in 1964 with the publication of his book Understanding Media.

This idea has pretty well permeated society by now and the idea that the technology which carries a message affects the content of that message is mostly taken for granted nowadays.

But there is a nuance to the phrase as well which gets somewhat less attention.

The “medium” in the phrase is not just the technology of communication like television, social media, etc.

The “medium” includes the whole “environment of services,” as McLuhan puts it, which develop around the individual technology.

Thus the “medium” of automobiles is not just about increasing the speed of horse travel, it’s also about the roads, gas stations, mechanic shops, and even fast food establishments that exist as support and supplement to those automobiles.

If we take this broader view to our own content, we see that the “medium” of our content is not just about deciding whether to post on TikTok or LinkedIn.

Your whole business is the medium of your content.

So what message are you ultimately conveying?

I don’t know how universal this trait is, but I have a tendency to buy books after I’ve already read them.

For a bit of background, I am a pretty avid user of digital rental services like Hoopla and Libby, and my tastes tend towards the classics which are typically public domain and therefore pretty readily available as eBooks via Project Gutenberg or Internet Archive.

That means I have lots of opportunities to read books for free.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t spend money on books.

Instead, what often happens is: I will read or listen to a book for free via one of the sources above and either enjoy it so much, or find myself thinking about it long after I’ve finished, so that I will have a desire to have the physical copy. At that point I’ll either order it right away or keep an eye out for it the next time I’m out perusing bookstores.

Okay . . . so what?

Giving away expertise for free doesn’t necessarily mean you’re robbing yourself of sales. It just means you have a chance to prove the value you have to offer before asking for a financial commitment.

And, sometimes all it takes to turn that free value into a sale is a change of format.

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P.S. Here’s an interesting commentary by Neil Gaiman (pre-scandal) regarding how digital piracy and free editions actually increased book sales.

If you are an expert or a specialist of some sort, one way to drive demand for your service is to use your content to teach people how to achieve the outcomes you deliver on their own.

This seems counter-intuitive, but what it does is filter your customers into those who have the time or ability to solve their problem on their own, and those who don’t.

Those who can achieve their own outcomes have a lower need for your offering, which means they will value it less.

It’s those who still need help even after being given all the information needed to DIY it who will have the greatest appreciation for your offering (and therefore be the most willing to pay for it).

Have you ever had the feeling that certain brands seem to create content that doesn’t actually come from the real world?

I think the clearest example of this is Apple. All of Apple’s marketing comes from a fantasy land in which there are no other computing brands besides Apple.

Gone are the days of the Mac vs PC ads. Now, rather than wasting time comparing themselves to anyone else, Apple just ignores the existence of PC altogether.

Apple may be an extreme example, but the point is this:

When you start creating media, you are building a world in which your offering exists and you get to decide what else is in that world.

Apple decided that there are no alternatives in the Apple fantasy land.

What does it look like in your fantasy land?

Sometimes when discussing online content, a distinction is made between “long form” and “short form” content. I won’t go into the distinction here (frankly, there is a good bit of gray area between the two), rather my point is that there may be a better distinction in the first place.

Long form and short form are both concerned with outputs, but I think a more useful consideration for the value of our content are the inputs. If we look at content through the lens of how much time and care went into a piece, we’ll find that the final length is neither good nor bad but thinking ahead makes it so.

For instance, on the one hand, it’s very possible to record an hour long podcast with zero preparation that ends up being a series or rambling tangents which provide very little value, while on the other hand you can take the time to make a long piece shorter.

Ultimately it comes down to making sure we are developing and nurturing our content in such a way that the value gained by the audience outweighs the time-cost of whatever format we choose, be it long or short.

This is the one hundredth post of the content mint!

I just wanted to take this chance to say thanks for spending a couple of minutes of your daily attention to think through what makes media valuable with me.

There are a few new things in the works, including some real-world content strategy discussions! Updates on all that will come to you directly right here via the newsletter.

I’d also love to hear from y’all what has been the most valuable part of the newsletter for you personally? Do you have a favorite topic or post? Feel free to let me know—or, better yet, let someone else know who might also find it valuable.

Thanks again for reading!

— JSS

primum non tempus perdere

Think about what you want your business to be five years from now.

What does this business look like?

What kind of customers does it have?

How do those customers perceive this business?

What is the relationship between that business and its customers?

Now consider . . .

What kind of content would that business be posting?