What is quality content? The answer is always in the eye of the beholder.
An economics boffin will judge quality content differently to a sports lover or a political junky. Even among the economists, an academic will judge quality differently than a market economist or a student.
One of the great debates inside Fairfax was whether to cover reality TV shows. The argument was that they weren't a Herald or Age thing to cover. But millions of Australians sat down every night to watch them. They were too popular to ignore. Maybe it is voyeurism (Married at First Sight), familiarity (Lego Masters) or habitual (The Block), but reality TV garners big audiences who believe in the quality of the shows, however that is defined.
What about opinion pieces out of news organisations with a political bent? To some they are trash and to others treasure. Who reads opinion pieces is often more important than how many people read them. Morning broadcasters Alan Jones and Neil Mitchell have their critics but they win the ratings. Audiences (and their competitors) believe they produce quality content.
The common factor is audience. Know your audience. Segment your audience. Provide quality content for those segments. Otherwise you are relying on luck.
Quality is one of the two main drivers of successful content (the other driver being frequency).
But it’s difficult to have a universal definition of quality that’s useful for organisations as they create content.
In traditional media, the word “quality” is shorthand for the big issues - politics, economics and the big issues affecting society. The term is used in opposition to the other content that makes up today’s news - crime and car accidents and gossip and reality TV. But that narrow definition is not very useful for corporate content.
Another way to define whether a piece of content is quality is whether it has been paid for – almost always content can be considered quality if the audience is paying for it. But most organisations aren’t in the business of selling content but rather using it to support their business.
Which leads to an even better way to identify quality content – content is high quality if it meets the audience needs, and thereby delivers your business outcomes.
In our view that’s the only way to have the internal debate about whether your content is high quality or not – did it deliver the business outcome you were after?
So how can you put a process in place that creates quality content?
There are two underlying drivers of quality – ideas and timeliness. Good ideas delivered in a timely manner almost always equals quality content.
Link of the day
One of the highest quality corporate content plays you’ll see in Australia is the form guide in your daily paper. It’s produced in partnership with the racing industry in each state with the goal of lifting turnover on racing. It’s chock full of useful info to punters. It’s beautifully packaged and produced. And it works - Australians spend $34 billion a year on wagering.
About this newsletter
Aylmer Anderson has begun producing a fortnightly newsletter based on what we know about content. It’s short and hopefully useful.
Each fortnight we will also include a website we like, or a comment we enjoyed, or a bigger piece that’s worth thinking about.
We think content marketing has had its run, and straight PR is flailing, so organisations that set up newsroom disciplines and processes can distribute their own content to audiences effectively.
We believe corporations need to get good at producing good content, in a form their audiences want, at a regular cadence, based on relevant information.