Malcolm Gladwell Dispels The Myth of Platonic Content
In our digital age, content overload has morphed from claustrophobia-inducing stacks of papers to perpetually-refreshing news feeds and ever-populating inboxes.
Yes, content overload has gone digital, but that doesn’t make it any less daunting; there’s an existential eeriness to feeling overwhelmed by a digital deluge. And that feeling isn’t reserved just for the consumers of digital content, but for the marketers who are creating and curating it as well.
The Content Marketing Collision Course
For some perspective on our vast increases in content production, Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimated that we now create as much information in two days’ time as we did from the dawn of mankind through 2003.
That estimate came in 2010, so who knows how much our information creation has escalated since then. Just looking at the Google Trends results for “content marketing” and “content shock,” it does seem that the two are on a collision course.
Content Marketing: Interest Over Time
“Content Marketing” Interest over Time via Google Trends
Content Shock: Interest Over Time
Image via Google Trends
That’s the argument put forward by marketing consultant and BusinessesGrow blogger Mark Schaefer. Earlier this year, Schaefer amplified the debate about the intersection of content marketing and content shock with his viral post Content Shock: Why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy.
In his original post (and several follow-ups) Schaefer argues that there will come a time when digital content production will so outpace our ability (even our technologically-assisted ability) to consume content, that content marketing will become un-economical.
Image via Businessesgrow.com
So in this environment of escalating content production and an equally escalating sense of content overload, are we entering a period of content marketing shock?
We are creating more digital content than ever before on more platforms than ever before, while simultaneously complaining about the difficulty of cutting through the noise.
It’s the same breed of cognitive dissonance employed on a daily basis by every commuter. We are all guilty of jumping on the content marketing train and complaining about how crowded it is, without acknowledging that we are, in fact, a part of the crowd.
So, what’s a content marketer to do?
Well, there might be some who will sit around and wait for Ray Kurzweil to swoop in with a content consumption singularity solution. And there’s certainly some hope on that front.
Technological advances are continually creating new ways to accelerate our content-consumption capabilities, like Nick D’Aloisio‘s Yahoo-acquired summarization tool, Summly.
Then there’s Boston-based startup Spritz, which has introduced the latest in speed-reading technology designed to accelerate our on-the-go reading speed from 250 to 500 words a minute.
Go ahead, give it a try:
But beyond just producing content as usual and waiting for consumers’ technologically-assisted reading abilities to catch up, a more proactive content marketer will keep one thing in mind: effective content creation is based on the strategic segmentation of your target audience.
There may be a lot of talk about viral content these days, but there is no ultimate piece of content that will suit the masses.
As Malcolm Gladwell put it in his TED Talk “Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce,” there is no “Platonic dish” that can make everyone happy, no “ultimate” spaghetti sauce that will please all eaters.
In fact, Gladwell notes that the food industry fundamentally changed their approach to consumer happiness by letting go of the ideal of universal tastes and embracing taste clusters.
Pasta sauce giant Prego, in Gladwell’s example, was able to make vast gains on its competitor, Ragu, by producing varieties of spaghetti sauce — like spicy and extra-chunky — rather than focusing on perfecting their original flavor.
Gladwell’s spaghetti sauce lesson can apply to content marketers too, particularly amidst the current content shock fervor.
Rather than feeling paralyzed by the sea of digital content we’re all competing against, embrace and cater to the taste clusters within your own target audience.
Give Malcolm Gladwell’s TED Talk a view, and let go of the myth of Platonic content.
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
