What if we were wrong about relevant, dynamic content?
One of the fundamental premises of the web media world whether consumer or b to b has been the belief and commitment to dynamic content. The idea of taking as much information as we have about a user (content interest, past behavior, search terms, geography) and then threading anything we had tagged with those attributes into a page has been a “best practice” for quite some time. Amazon has built one hell of a business on it and news site have used contextual reference to create wonderful audience engagement strategies, so why then would I pose such a ridiculous question? Because in a world in which 50% of media site traffic is often derived from search, pre-existing, highly edited content may present an untapped opportunity to develop category ownership and sustainable competitive advantages.
We know this works in consumer service journalism. Restaurant guides, movie reviews and product round-ups have always been huge audience generators. But what about topical authorities for less sexy content. Who has the most relevant content on application virtualization or construction methodologies. Many b to b publishers have focused on currency and coverage rather than being the most comprehensive authority on a given topic. Often an inability to integrate with competing brands or to utilize third party content is the primary obstacle. Recently we have seen numerous publishers with multiple titles and deep vertical industry expertise begin the process of building rich information sites with massive amounts of information organized around even the smallest verticals. By providing users with “one stop” comprehensive sites they ensure phenomenal search results and user exploration.
So why isn’t everyone doing this? In short cost and poor content data. Because so many companies have just recently implemented uncomprised editorial tagging, many companies cannot dynamically create this content and must assemble pages and content structures manually. (thats right, I just suggested we use dynamic tools to create static content). Don’t get me wrong, I still love dynamically threaded lead generation, geography centric add programs and topically relevant research, I am just suggesting that perhaps we can leverage all of these dynamic experience tools to create “collections” that serves as authoritative starting points for users to engage our brands.