• by Rob Garner , February 2, 2011

With all of the hype going on now about content being king, (remember the '90s?) and with many enterprises beginning to embrace the concept of their brands as publishers in a new networked world, it's worth spelling out a few of the key differences between being a low quality producer, and being a robust, authoritative publisher (also see Janet Driscoll Miller's column from yesterday for more background).

The concept of content marketing is certainly nothing new in the world of search professionals. Perhaps one of the greatest outcomes of this search view was the "discovery" of keyword demand, and the relative content supply that is available to meet a particular demand.  There are specific search engine patents that address this concept, and of course, no online company has done any better than Demand Media at hedging the content supply against the demand from a pure search level, short of Wikipedia.  Demand's market cap is higher than that of the New York Times as of this writing.  Love them or hate them, they took the advice and practiced it well, and they dominate the search results across a broad spectrum of terms.  Sure, some of it is laughably low quality, but at other times it just might save your neck, because they took the time to write about areas that had never previously been addressed, and in many cases, they have done so in a meaningful way.  One of the unwritten rules of search marketing is that you never go bragging about your rankings; in doing so, Demand has also put themselves in Matt Cutts' and Google's crosshairs.

But with all of the negativity around low quality content, many have overlooked the innovative aspects of the Demand approach.  As brands move forward, they also have an opportunity to own their brand keyword and conversational spaces, provided they take a similar mindset.   But the key point for brands is that they must produce a higher volume of higher quality content to succeed (see "How To Think About Content Like a Forest, Not a Weed"). 

"Higher quality" of content means assessing your own stock of content, and determining how it needs to be addressed to meet both your brand keyword set, as well as the bigger generic keyword set.  I have not encountered any brands that truly have this idea in their grasp, as production of quality content is an ongoing activity, and most brands have many years of production ahead of them to even get in the race. Bottom line: There's a lot of work to be done.

Social dissemination is by no means apart from this, as assessing conversational demand should be a focus of identifying the content needed to address various brand and generic discussions in various networks. 

"Engagement" is the biggest difference between being a publisher and a content farmer.  Being engaging is just as critical in search and social now as it is to properly mark up your digital assets and be sincerely, meaningfully helpful to your audience.  Being engaging will translate to stickiness coming from search, and it will generate the social signals that engines may be looking for to produce search results. 

Sure, you can produce like a factory, but sustainable digital publishing efforts must now be thought of as an engaging publishing, with all of the nuances of search and social media that come along with it.