CPU No.10: Evaluating remnants of 20th century media-making techniques
Workshops, metrics, copyright, and holistic vs. programmatic media
Content Pros Update is a free, monthly recap newsletter of all goings-on from The Content Technologist. It is distributed on Substack, Medium, LinkedIn Newsletters, and to monthly subscribers of The Content Technologist on roughly the third Tuesday of every month.
This month, The Content Technologist is celebrating five years of weekly publication. Woohoo! If you're interested in hearing from us more often as we update our resources for content professionals, subscribe to the weekly mailing list.
In-person workshop with MIMA August 22
Organic content performance for word people: How to use content analytics for editorial decision-making
Presented with the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) in-person at Br8kthru Consulting in Minneapolis at 8AM
Get tickets: $65 for MIMA members / $95 for non-members
Workshop description
Do you know how well your digital content has really performed this year? Organic digital content performance analytics—for your website, social media channels, email newsletters, and everything else—are widely misunderstood, misinterpreted, and dismissed as less valuable than paid advertising.
But organic content converts at far higher rates and for longer periods than digital paid media. And when audiences connect to authoritative content, they’re more likely to become brand advocates. Too often, brands and agencies leave money on the table by misattributing performance and not giving their organic content the credit and attention it deserves.
In this workshop, we’ll cover how to measure the true business performance of content. We’ll explore what content metrics mean, how to create workable benchmarks, and how to use what you’ve learned from content analytics to inform future planning.
Turn SEO research into a leading audience-first content strategy.
Succeed in the call-and-response between your potential audience and algorithmic recommender systems -- without sacrificing quality.
From the weekly newsletter
Which is more important for publishers: Maintaining a vice grip on our intellectual property or acceding its value to the open web?
Last month, B2B content farm Forbes called out AI startup Perplexity for "willful infringement" of copyright law, according to Axios. From most websites, we'd take it more seriously, but Forbes has never been the pinnacle of business journalism, functioning more as an aggregator of pay-to-play PR schemes.
But should we, as publishers, encourage summary companies like Perplexity to have access to our original content? Our feelings are mixed.
How the history of advertising makes impressions the worst metric for measuring content success
The metric of "impressions" was designed to help media buyers value their purchases across newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and outdoor (billboard) media. Each publication, channel, or venue would measure approximately how many people could have seen each impression based on subscriber bases, distribution estimations, and Nielsen's emerging system of broadcast measurement.
That way, a brand could measure approximately how many people maybe saw the same campaign on a billboard, a tv commercial, and in a magazine, then compare relevant sales to the campaign and say, "I guess it worked!" or "I guess it didn't!"
Want better results from your digital content? Take better benchmarks, based in reality, instead of relying on the automated and imprecise nature of the impressions metric in this explainer.
Against continuous optimization: Does engineered content make Gestalt thinking obsolete?
In media, if you want to distribute a 90%-there product, like a 90% movie, it would likely be considered a B-movie, not suitable for any wide release. But in tech, if a company releases software that's meeting customer needs 90% of the time, that appears to be acceptable in many cases, because tech companies believe they will later make up that extra 10%, usually by leaning too heavily on requests for new features instead of completing the half-done ones.
Gestalt does not appear to be a consideration in DevOps, the corporate tech methodology for continuous software builds that, in my opinion, degrades quality of life and product. Continuous optimization leaves one feeling always pressured to meet the next goalpost, leaving minimal time for reflection on the whole.
How can continuous optimization and programmatic digital content coexist with the holistic approach to other content industries?
Revolutionize your approach to digital content strategy
Level up your methods for the generative AI era with four skill-based self-paced courses, with bespoke recommended toolkits and 1:1 support.
Limited preorder available! When Expansion Pack preorders are gone, they're gone.
Preorder the Expansion Pack today
The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.
Advertise with us | Manage your subscription
Affiliate referrals: Ghost publishing system | Bonsai contract/invoicing | The Sample newsletter exchange referral | Writer AI Writing Assistant
Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd | PI.FYI