Content is king. That’s what we used to say 10 years ago. And it’s still king – sort of. The issue is that as more and more people vie for visibility and authority, the same stories get repackaged in a different wrapper and published over and over. And the overall value of the content diminishes over time. Think about a breaking news story. Many of the news outlets report the event using the same facts but in their own words. This meets our expectation if the story is new. But if the story is no longer breaking then just reporting the facts loses value with each day that passes. The older the event, the less value there is in the story. The story may still be interesting but now it’s time to give it your own personal spin. This is where value-added content comes in super handy.
What is value-added content? It’s when an author takes someone else’s story (the idea or building blocks of the original story), and adds their own ideas to crafts a new story with it. Let me be clear. This isn’t rewriting the story in your own words. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve.
What we’re trying to do instead is to pull out the building blocks of their story (facts, ideas, concepts) and look at them from a different angle. Example: rather than talking about the new social media widget that Blue Company released two days ago, we might think and write about how the widget could be used by audiences that were not the target audience OR how clever integration of the widget might shift social media marketing strategies. The more ways we stretch ourselves to see things differently, the more likely we are to uncover something new and powerful.
Photo: Jamie Crawford (storyteller) taken by Peter Jones.