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wow. for real? sunflower seeds? another wacky example of spam…but i digress haha - autom

Better late then never on feedback, right my friend? Anyway, great post and lots of great feedback to boot! I don’t want to be redundant here, but what kind of seminar did you attend? Who on earth could present Twitter as a fad and LinkedIn as just a directory? How could you stand for such obscenity?

Content is King. Video is underused and we live in a fragmented social web…

After all of our time spent plotting out the distant future… it is by now, you may be getting tired of hearing about how the social networking revolution and Web 2.0 practices will revolutionize the planet. What is more interesting to debate — at least for people like us — is how to morph your own Internet site from a final destination to a virtual syndication.

So the movement out of Web 2.0 to whatever may come next will require all of us to shift from our natural practice of storing data online to empowering data — everywhere you can. One important element in this shift, social networking, has hopefully taught us that it is completely acceptable to syndicate your content on someone else’s platform, a practice virtually unheard of in the previous World Wide Web administration.

What we need to be looking at instead of bringing eyeballs to a specific location is how flexible our content and data are and how easily we can syndicate that data through smart delivery practices and even smarter devices.

That’s all for now

I can see all your points but would comment that some of the most effective videos have been home-made. Think You Tube has lessened people’s expectations for quality in favor of the content. Think about the genious of the e-Trade baby series which tried to emuate a home-made look. A small point, but I think there is a role for the retro video look for the clever marketer. I am going to run an article on my blog (probably next week?) about some B2B success stories. One was done entirely with home-made videos.

Char - hear, hear..again, it’s effective editing that gives way to clarity and immediacy of the gist of a given message. and yes, there should be no reason why depth of meaning is compromised in the process. diction (choice of words) and proper syntax are indeed critical.

Steve - a sound observation on e-based communications and the sense that micro-blogging platforms like Twitter are indeed forcing us to be write more sparingly but concisely at the same time (the first bullet point i highlighted in a previous blog “Six Nuggets from the Twitter Stream“). i also appreciate how you take into account the various forms associated with fulsome communication such as body language, emotion and voice — quite the holistic take and something of which i try to me mindful.

with regard to this mention: “..an interesting discussion is flowing through Twitter right now about it reducing the volume of blog commenting in general. I don’t necessarily agree with that…” i sympathize with this sentiment, as it clearly defeats the purpose of encouraging dialogue. however, as you aptly pointed out, the so-called “headline promotion” trend inevitably builds hype. so one wonders if the swirling debate (in the form of tweets or blogs) are, in and of themselves, painting further obscurity as people continue to fuel the discussion by speculating on long-term implications surrounding Project Retweet..lost in transition? perhaps fodder for another blog

in any event with today’s news of Google launching SideWiki (a method of annotating web pages), my sense is that the overall push to explore sentiment analysis in the social sphere will also likely influence how social sites present similar opportunities in their commenting functionalities.

but i digress..

i think all our thoughts here are essentially in line with each other, illustrating the potential challenges of creating (writing) ‘abbreviated’ content, as it were while ensuring we stay on point and preferably not lose context while capturing the desired nuance in meaning. yeah, that’s a tough call for a tweet. but we get it, we practice and in so doing aim to perfect; hence, i won’t belabour the point further.

thank you for the discussion. may those who stumble upon this thread find it useful. as always, i am indebted to your continued collaboration. cheers! autom
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PS - Steve: what were you saying about ‘miscommunication’? this tweet is too serendipitous NOT to share—courtesy of @mktgdouchebag

Another thing we’re seeing is that vehicles like Twitter are becoming “headline” promotions for referencing deeper content delivered through links to blogs, news and other online documents. So, tweets are getting very creative in order to promote deeper content elsewhere. Although this trend also can promote hype, it does help provide a quick sound bite to attract those interested to the complete document. Again, a very different form of written communication is evolving. As an example, an interesting discussion is flowing through Twitter right now about it reducing the volume of blog commenting in general. I don’t necessarily agree with that because Twitter is being used to attract more attention to blogs from a broader audience than ever before. This broader audience is likely leaving more and more comments just because they are more aware of what is available.

So, not only are our writing skills changing, so are our methods to attract readership and attention. As the proliferation of content continues to explode, it’s our “Attention” that is the scarcest and most valuable commodity. Our writing skills need to change to reflect this new approach to written communications and esure our message is effectively communicated.

Very interesting and yes I think I agree with you and your nameless friend When information is so tightly ground down into merely nothing at all, the information that makes the content can be easily lost. It’s very true that there is a ton of really sound information but because of the need to condense everything down, it is lacking in depth. However, I feel that is where careful editing comes in. You have to be careful not to loose the ‘meat and potatoes’ of the content. I think it’s most definitely possible to condense information (being sure to only extract the fluff) and be left with sound content rich in depth. It’s all in how you chose to edit and what you take out. Thoughts?

Thank you for the thoughtful blog post. To echo Charlotte, people these days want/expect to consume as much information as possible in the least amount of time. If content is portrayed in sound bites, I get it, usually, provided each word serves a purpose – and that’s not necessarily easy to do. Yet I side with less is more; more inviting to read and more easily understood.

I’m reminded of this quote: “… the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what–these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.” William Zinsser, On Writing Well, pp. 7-8.

The more concise the message, the clearer it is— or should be. Effective communications can elaborate on a core message through supporting messages, visuals, audio clips, etc. But if I only have so much time, I’d prefer to read the “headline,” as it were, and decide from there how much further I want to delve into the subject.

Char - as always, appreciate your comments..on a related note, one thing a colleague (who for now shall remain nameless, unless he cares to claim his identity on this comment stream *did* point out to me and which i thought would generate some good debate is the whole notion of “sound bites” within the context of short n concise content. to quote him:

“There is also a theme out there about context relative to content. But, without good content, there is no context to determine. The issue of “consise” is also something you’ve touched on. Everybody is posting sound bites without depth. Anything detailed is ignored. But the risk of these sound bites” is that the real message can be lost. That being said, this trend has led to small frequent posts rather than on larger post. The problem with this is that the train of thought can get lost.”

i see his point. i also recall @debwontheroad (to whom i refer in a former post “So You Think You Can Social Media?” ) giving me her first impressions of Twitter as being “mainly sound bites” to her—now given that she is a social media newbie and not really much of a Twitter user, i can see where she’s coming from, too.

but perhaps what got me was the “Everybody is posting sound bites without depth” statement. is there a perceptible risk in losing the essence of a message when presenting content in a less detailed format? does this merit closer examination?

i’ve always espoused the proven, effective priniciples of web content usability, which entails presenting “digestible”, chunked out content for the user. this typically means having shorter, more concise content. and in terms of blogs, i’d have to say that the more easily digestible the content, the more effective and useful it is.

what do you think?

Anyway, on to answer your question. I also find myself rambling on and talking circles around my point and really have to sit back and asses what is truly important and what’s just ‘fluff’. It’s so important to be clear and precise in your content and most importantly keep it short. Like you said in your post ‘ adjust the content to fit the time frame’. We’re in a fast paced environment and want to consume as much information as we can in the least amount of time. We want content that is short and direct and gets our minds going and those are the things to focus on when writing and editing your content.

Short and sweet (or ..not so sweet)