“I don’t have time for this”, I thought.  My day was already seriously overloaded and by 10 am, relief was nowhere in sight.   I quickly scanned my Google reader, skimming over a long list of blogs content.  The clock was ticking.  I had little time to find something that would create a spark for me.  I knew what I was looking for, sort of.  I needed some insight on an idea that I was working on and was seeking someone or something that touched on the topic that was important to me.  I was stuck and needed something to break my thinking loose.

Nothing. 

Then, there it was.  I found a blog post by an author who I followed on a whim a year ago.  Since then, I hadn’t read anything he’d written.  Frankly, I forgot he even existed.  However, at 10 am that morning, he had my utmost attention.  I followed the argument for the point he was making backward through his earlier blog posts and lingered over a number of the slides he’d included to illustrate his idea.  The author made a really strong point and to tie it all together, he’d integrated the content of others to support his point and in one case used a graphic from someone else, adding a second graphic underneath it to take the idea a step further.

I quickly printed out nearly 10 pages of stuff, and began to scribble on what I’d printed out.  Arrows, boxes and a stream of ideas began to organize themselves.  My hunt was over, the elusive idea I was hunting for was solidly before me.  By noon the next day, a new concept for scoring influence was solidly in an excel file.  Off it went to a number of peers in an email with the subject line that read ‘I need you to take a look at something’.  I teed it up, gave a rationale, described my general approach and indicated what I wanted this process to yield.  That was it.  No hype and no instructions other than the implied ask of tell me what you really think no matter what.

What I got back in some ways both relieved and surprised me.  Additions, tweaks, a few questions and some observations up from some really, really smart people.  Besides their feedback came the observation and question, ‘This is good.  Now what are you going to do with this?

I did do something with it.  It became an important process and later software that today is core measuring and diagnosing the effectiveness of many of the social programs Comblu assists their clients with and shortly will be integrated into Ektron’s software suite.

All of that came out of me hunting for a simple piece of content. More importantly, me finding a piece of relevant content that created a product.

You see, content isn’t king, relevancy is. 

Being relevant is hard, especially in today’s world of big data.  Brands have an astonishing amount of information at hand.  According to McKinsey & Company, embedded costs alone for a content supply chain can range from $50 million to $75 million for a consumer products OEM to over $300 million for a global technology company and these same firms manage over a petabyte of information and content.  Transaction histories, user profiles, product materials, training tools, use pattern summaries, video files, audio files, performance data; the list goes on and on.

Oddly, the more content (and information) you have the less relevant it can become to both you and your customer, especially when it isn’t either integrated or social content.  The good stuff is hidden in the massive and ever growing pile of the useless.  Overwhelmed teams of content curators struggle to organize and publish more and more and more information adding to the growing pile.  For most marketers who use traditional methods of content management and CMS systems, knowing what they have, where it is and effectively managing it is a pipe dream.  The thought of stringing static content and information, let alone dynamic social content together in a cohesive and strategic way is a thought that makes some marketers laugh and others cry.

Branded and content native to the organization (say a user manual) that is tagged, placed on a website or pushed out across the web in an outbound CRM blast just isn’t relevant to most users for a host of reasons.  It doesn’t find them, or they can’t find just when they need or want it.  Yes, SEO helps create some relevancy by sorting content for a user but in the end, this is still a crutch.  Relying on SEO alone to drive content relevancy is a zero sum game.  Why is this?  The law of Exponential Probability proves tells us that getting noticed in a crowd becomes harder and harder as the crowd grows.  Not to depress you but it would take over 5 years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every second in 2015. Every second, 1 million minutes of video content will cross the network in 2015.  Friends, that is one big crowd.

If it is an uphill battle, why even bother?  Because creating relevant content reverses some of the trends working against you and begins to stack the deck in your favor.  If we have so much, why are we creating more content in the first place?  Why do we sweat it?  Simple, 68% of CMOs say they are shifting budget from traditional advertising to this type of content marketing.  All you have to do is follow the money.  Resources that deliver get funded.  Today, the budgets that are growing are tied to content.

For content to be relevant it needs to be properly curated and that requires a process that melds people and software in an organized structure with an orchestrated process. 

WCMS tools and killer, well produced branded content are a great start, but they aren’t the entire solution.  For content to be relevant to every type of user it must be available in the right form, at the right time and in the right place.  In other words it must be social.  In essence, your content needs to be owned and managed in large part by communities of people who have an interest in you and your content. 

Highly relevant content follows a general formula.  Fifteen percent of that content’s material should originate from the brand.  Five percent should be aggregated (links, videos, embedded images, etc.).  That leaves 80% of the content to be socially generated.

When a piece of content, or a content stream achieves this general mix and then is inserted into the process I show above it begins to become relevant and the more relevant it is, the more valuable it becomes.  As users evolve and customize versions of this content and as rep man (reputation management scores of authors, editors and sharers) and content quality scores of the content itself are added, you now find yourself with a body of very relevant content.

Think on this.  According to the Custom Content Association, 25% of marketing budgets are spent on content creation and distribution.  What if the measurable contribution of this content to corporate revenue increased by 25% annually?  What would that be worth?  Yeah, a lot. 

If you think about content as a product or an asset this concept and its impact becomes more real.  Ask Apple about the i-Phone’s contribution to revenue.  Delivering nearly 47% of revenue approaching 27 billion in sales, no matter how much work, the i-Phone was so worth it. You see, this well thought out and designed device, among other things, is a highly relevant device to its users; which it is why it is such a screaming success. 

The i-Phone, like a complete and well-functioning content supply chain requires hard work and a consistent investment of time, energy and money.  The net result of these efforts is achieving a competitive market advantage while your competitors spin their wheels and slowly drown in their ever growing morass of data, materials and information.

So tomorrow, stop thinking just thinking about content and start thinking about relevance.