Creating content for pancake people

Look­ing back on my youth, I used to pride myself on my abil­ity to remem­ber all of my friends’ tele­phone num­bers and every uni­ver­sity lec­ture that I had over the course of a week. Now, such feats of mem­ory are no longer required of my brain – my mobile devices and online ser­vices remem­ber and man­age these tasks for me.

I also used to enjoy get­ting stuck into long arti­cles and curl­ing up with an 800 page novel. Truth is, these days I find it chal­leng­ing to read a lengthy online arti­cle with­out fol­low­ing the mul­ti­ple links embed­ded within the page, the lure of check­ing Twit­ter, my netvibes news feeds and my mul­ti­ple email accounts. Appar­ently, I’m not alone – there is a per­cep­tion out there that the inter­net is chang­ing our brains (and not always pos­i­tively), how we con­sume infor­ma­tion and retain knowl­edge. In effect, Google is becom­ing a replace­ment for our long-term mem­ory and almost as quick at retriev­ing infor­ma­tion (take a look at the new Google Instant).

Pan­cake People

Back in 2005, the play­wright Richard Fore­man wrote a piece about ‘Pan­cake Peo­ple’, and it’s even more per­ti­nent today than when he wrote it:

“I see within us all (myself included) the replace­ment of com­plex inner den­sity with a new kind of self – evolv­ing under the pres­sure of infor­ma­tion over­load and the tech­nol­ogy of the ‘instantly avail­able’. A new self that needs to con­tain less and less of an inner reper­tory of dense cul­tural inher­i­tance – as we all become “pan­cake peo­ple” – spread wide and thin as we con­nect with that vast net­work of infor­ma­tion accessed by the mere touch of a but­ton.“

Ear­lier this year, a client told me that peo­ple don’t read web pages any­more and that much of the beau­ti­fully crafted copy that we had pro­duced was a waste of time. Instinc­tively, I fought back against this state­ment and zeal­ously defended our work. After all, pro­duc­ing con­tent and pub­lish­ing web pages is one of the rea­sons we’re in busi­ness. How­ever, there have been a num­ber of arti­cles lately that have re-ignited the dis­cus­sions and changed my mind as to how the inter­net is alter­ing the way our brains work and, there­fore, the way we con­sume information.

Have we reached a point pre­dicted back in 1985 by Max Head­room where blipverts will be the most effec­tive way of get­ting our mar­ket­ing mes­sages across to our tar­get audi­ence; where high-speed, con­cen­trated, high-intensity com­mer­cials last­ing about three sec­onds are used to sub­lim­i­nally brain­wash the masses?

We may not have reached that point yet, but chang­ing trends in media con­sump­tion must have some real impli­ca­tions for mar­keters. Is the long copy ad dead? Will tech­nol­ogy decision-makers no longer have the time or incli­na­tion to value whitepa­pers? Do we need to fun­da­men­tally address the tax­on­omy and con­tent hier­ar­chy of our web­sites? And, do we need to estab­lish new mea­sures of audi­ence engage­ment? After all, a page view doesn’t mean a page has actu­ally been read…

Bite-sized pay­loads of mar­ket­ing gold

 

If the answer to any of the above is “Yes”, then we need to ensure that we’re pro­duc­ing con­cise mar­ket­ing mes­sages that are laser-targeted at our audi­ences. Let’s not cre­ate reams of writ­ten con­tent that lan­guish on our cor­po­rate web­sites. Instead, let’s embrace the notion of cre­at­ing more engag­ing for­mats of con­tent and dis­trib­ut­ing it in bite-sized pay­loads to the plat­forms where our audi­ences are spend­ing their time. So that means fea­tur­ing con­tent on ser­vices like Scribd and Slideshare and find­ing new ways to fea­ture con­tent on pub­lisher web­sites. It also means mak­ing your blog one of the pri­mary des­ti­na­tions for your mar­ket­ing mes­sages. After all, the con­tent changes reg­u­larly and is gen­er­ally mer­ci­fully short.

Thank you for read­ing to the end of this post. It must have been dif­fi­cult not to fol­low any of the embed­ded links or check­ing the sta­tus on your social uni­verse… I’d be inter­ested to hear your thoughts.