The 'Content is King' Debate

I just posted this to a discussion thread here on the Social Media Tribes blog:

Content is dead! Long live Content! We all love shiny new stuff. We love more deeply and lastingly the quality old stuff that has stood the test of Time. (Think about marriage/partnership to get my drift... :0)

Re-purposing quality old stuff and presenting it as shiny new stuff is usually short termism. The remake of The Italian Job isn't a patch on the original, but you probably still watched it, because it was 'new'. Which one would you watch again? Will Young's version of Steve Stills' 'Love the One You're With' was a competent copy, not a classic like the original (substitute your own examples here!)

So - not much shiny new stuff is exceptional enough to reach quality old stuff status - but thanks to the web, it's all still out there...

Content is still pretty much king, because we all want loads of what we consider is 'good content' (and that's a subjective term). But there's a new Emperor on the block. It's called 'Time' - the key resource of the 21st Century.

When Content (information, knowledge, wisdom, entertainment...) was limited in terms of accessibility and availability, we had Time to go out and get it. Now the web and other media swamp us with more Content every 24 hours than we could absorb in a life-Time.

The successful businesses of today and tomorrow will sell Time, by providing streamed and selected Content targeted at the individual customer. The stuff we want - collected, selected, collated, repackaged and shrinkwrapped in convenient bite-sized meaty chunks for us to consume where and when we have Time (in the car, in the bath, soon maybe even while we're asleep - spooky!)

The most successful Content providers use their consumers as collectors, contributors and evaluators, then collate and repackage 'the stuff'' for lots of other consumers - saving them the Time of finding it all. Take a bow, Tweetdeck, iTunes, Flickr, You Tube, Amazon, Trip Advisor etc etc...

Hey, old media also collected and repackaged Content to save us Time - The Times, Radio Times, Now That's What I Call Music... but new tech speeds it all up and expands everything exponentially. We who grew up with the old paradigms need to change our expectations of how much (and what) Content we really need (as opposed to want) - because now we really can't have it all!

And if you've read this far, thanks for taking the Time :0)