Month: November 2009

The ever-wise and observant Jennifer Kane, consultant at Kane Consulting sent this tweet yesterday, causing me to consider my past history with “evergreen content”:

In the radio world, an episode of a program with date-neutral content is produced to fill air time should calamity strike [snapped tapes, sunspots, old-fashioned user error, etc.]  These episodes are called “evergreens,” and are used only as a last resort to avoid the dreaded “dead air.”

They are replaced often to keep things somewhat current, actually making them less “evergreen” than the name implies.

Evergreen content is thought to be a godsend to some content creators and publishers. It was relevant before it was even published.  It will be relevant for all eternity. It is EVER GREEN.

But what content is really evergreen? What content does not require some degree of maintenance? What content is not made out-of-date by SOMETHING? Content that few will find really valuable or compelling.

What could possibly happen if content is dealt with in the RonCo Rotisserie method — set it and forget it? Lots of things. Your content might:

• Become out-of-date
• Gain a new context
• Become unusable due to CMS updates
• Expire, from a legal or rights standpoint
• Confuse people with multiple versions
• And more, unfortunately

All of these can lead to a terrible user experience, and even worse, legal liabilities.

Publishers and content creators are strapped for time and resources. Many are too busy pushing the content out the door, leaving no time to put a proper content maintenance strategy in place.

Having a strategy in place that considers the lifespan and life cycle of content can help avoid these issues.  Good questions to ask when putting one together:

• Is the content good for 6 hours or 6 months?
• How do editorial considerations apply?
• Are different versions of content tracked properly?
• Should it be archived or deleted?
• What triggers activities like archiving and relocation?
• What stays on site, what shows up only in searches?
• Are legal contracts, rights, and obligations in sync with content?
• How are new contextual opportunities managed?
• How are new business opportunities applied to existing content?
• Plus many other considerations.

Plans take time.  Content maintenance strategies take time.  Workable content strategies take time.

Putting a strategy together may add more to existing workflows. Editorial oversight requires staff resources. You’ll confront long-term CMS issues. But, a good maintenance strategy can also provide new opportunities as new business models and development pop up. The final result? Better than evergreen.

You will soon find out that your content can remain vibrant and relevant long after it has been published.

Two posts brought to my attention the discussion starting to take root about the worlds of content aggregation versus content curation.

A post on the Poynter blog back in early October points to the work of journalists engaging in curation via Twitter as a way of “filtering the signal from the noise.” The phrase used was “curation is the new aggregation.”

A more recent post on the Simple-talk.com blog by Roger Hart delves more into the world of content curation in a broader sense, stating that it is a bit of a flavor-of-the-month. I would disagree with that sentiment, having discussed this for years.

My experience with curation is more specific.

Daily, and sometimes twice daily, it is my job to draw from a set pool of content, radio programs’ arts and entertainment segments, and publish them into a CMS with text and audio. There is even a daily podcast, my pride and joy, the PRI: Arts & Entertainment podcast.

Over the past few years, publishing content in this manner makes me a curator of sorts. Not an aggregator. And here is why.

Curation goes one step beyond aggregation by adding an active, ongoing editorial component.

Curation and aggregation are similar in but a few ways. They both want to take lots of content and put it in a place [framework, feed, database, etc.] and they both seek to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Most importantly, they both require a strategy. Why is this content being put together? Who will use it? How will they use it? Are they getting it somewhere else right now? What are the staffing impacts? What are the potential outcomes?

Imagine if the Minneapolis Institute of Art populated their museum based only on aggregation. The people in charge would have noted that the above velvet Mr. T metadata indicated it was a painting, an original, from the 20th century, and possibly placed it next to the Van Gogh or Mondrian. All automatically.

With aggregation the velvet Mr. T painting might end up in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in a totally un-ironic or un-post-modern way.  Aggregation, why would you do that?

• Aggregation is automated
• Aggregation collects content based on criteria in the form of metadata or keywords
• Criteria can be adjusted, but remain static otherwise
• Follows a preset frequency of publishing [as available, weekly, etc.]

Sure, this scenario is unlikely to unfold, but I set it out there to illustrate the point: aggregation excludes the important, active, and ongoing editorial approval from the process of gathering content.

Aggregation has its place. It is easy to set and forget. It requires considerably less staff resources. With carefully selected criteria and sources, it may actually serve the purpose you seek.

There is much more to effective curation than putting similar stuff in a single place.

There are contextual cues that no amount of keywords or metadata can surface.  Sentiment, branding, and time frame issues: a raw aggregating apparatus is blind to them all. Not to mention the fact that the more open aggregation schemes can be gamed in all sorts of bad ways.

Aggregators may have curatorial aspirations. If they could have the same refined output as curation, they likely would. However, that would require more oversight, turning into something else: curation.

So. What does curation look like, then?

• Curation is, in part, a manual task
• Starts with sources to parse
• Evaluates content individually based on established editorial criteria
• Weights content based on context, current events, branding, sentiment, etc.
• Publishes approved content on appropriate schedule

Again, both aggregation and curation can be bad ideas unless there is a workable content strategy in place.

For a good example of a great curatorial strategy, look no further than the true home of the velvet Mr. T, The Velveteria Museum in Portland, OR:

According to Wikipedia, the concept of physical things being constructed out of smaller, indivisible units, or elements, has been around for about 2,600 years.  Science confirmed this about 200 years ago.  Atoms can be broken down further, but any division past that atomic level and the element ceases to be an element.

Why the science lesson?  What does this have to do with content?  I have taken us all back to the science classroom because elements and atoms are a rather fitting analogy.  This element is not on the periodic table: it is known as…Content.

From a production point of view, content has almost always started from the single, discrete piece.  From there, each piece has been combined to make a larger component.  For example, think of a newspaper article: an election story might appear in the politics section of the Monday edition of the local paper.

For newspapers, selling single stories at the newsstand was a tough proposition.  Selling the politics section was too narrow of an appeal.  But, if you put that into a larger framework, a whole newspaper with sports scores and weather and classifieds and advertisements, it starts to make more sense.

The same hierarchy existed for many years on public radio.  A six minute feature was produced, then included in the larger framework of an hour-long show, and on a select day, broadcast on a radio station.  The production direction from small piece to large framework was it.  That was before the advent of on-demand listening and podcasts.

For some, peeling off one layer of that hierarchy to adapt to online consumption habits was seen as enough.  If producers took an hour-long show and placed it online, the work was done.  No additional production required.  Easy.  Take the same hour-long chunk that airs on radio stations and make it available online via on-demand and podcasting.  But that is not serving the needs of the people that actually consume the content.

Using the newspaper example again, imagine that you want to share an article with a friend.  Do you point them to the stack of old newspapers in the garage from the last month? Or the whole newspaper from Monday?  Or the Politics section from Monday? The easier way would be to clip the article out, and give them that specific thing you wish to share.  Your friend will know exactly what you want them to see.

The same thing happens in public radio.  Some programs are two or more hours long, built out of smaller segments.  Wouldn’t it be ideal to have those segments in an easy-to-share format online?  And wouldn’t it be great if you could comment on those individual segments?  Of course.  There are plenty of reasons to publish content at the segment level for consumption online:

• Accurate, focused metadata can be attached
• Proper taxonomy can be applied in the CMS
• It is SEO-friendly, increasing discover-ability
• It becomes much more easily shared via social media
• Easier to output via API, RSS, podcast, widgets, etc.
• Quickly becoming industry standard and convention
• People are beginning to demand it of content producers
• It just makes sense

There are reasons NOT to do it, too.  Some obstacles you may encounter:

• Not in current workflows
• More attention is required
• More steps in publishing process
• Current CMS not equipped to handle it
• Current outputs not configured to handle it [website, feeds, etc.]
• Greater opportunity for user-input error

The benefits are far too great not to put forth the effort to overcome the obstacles in the way of segment-level nirvana.

Author and blogger Seth Godin has made a mantra out of the phrase “Ideas that spread, win.”  If your idea, in the shape of content, can spread, it can win!  Not a jackpot lottery win, but the kind of win that content wants: to be consumed and shared easily.

Atomic segment-level publishing, FTW!