Page 14 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

amplifying content and advertisements to the point where tweet velocity is
an important measurement in the traditional Nielsen television rating
system.
Tweets are now being used for political polling, for defining consumer
sentiment, for creating detailed buyer personas, and even for the inspiration
to write new television plotlines.
One blogger counted more than 300 independent applications dedicated to
helping you manage, measure, and engage on Twitter.

… and the list goes on and on. Rarely does a week go by when there isn’t
some significant, new Twitter-related innovation available for marketers. You
could literally make a career out of studying nothing but Twitter.

Now, multiply that by every digital platform in the world and you’ll start to
feel a little dizzy! And while this feverish pace of change is something to reckon
with, it’s not even the biggest worry for marketers. There’s another, more
important, mega-trend impacting almost every marketing strategy, tactic, and
innovation in our industry: Malignant information density.

In the beginning, there was … not much

Sometime around 1987, I plugged my first laptop computer into a wall phone
socket and dialed up an Internet connection through AOL.

Do you remember that buzz-screech-hiss sound of a dial-up connection? That
was the sound of excitement! I vividly recall downloading my first photo of a
galaxy from the NASA site and calling to my wife and children to witness this
miracle. A color photograph through the phone line! In only 10 minutes of
download time!

In hindsight, that seems pretty lame, doesn’t it? But I tell this story to make
an important point. In the early years of the web, interesting content was scarce
and we had lots of time to wait for that download. Grasping all that has
happened between that first buzz-screech-hiss and today is vital if you want to
understand the significance of The Content Code.

Back then, the seemingly astonishing ability to access a single piece of digital
content was a thrill. We were starved for content and stared with wonder at
anything we could obtain through this new electronic conduit.

Fast forward to 2009, the year I became a serious content creator. At that
point, the web was still a relatively uncrowded content space. There were
roughly one-third as many bloggers as there are now … and even fewer podcast