What’s the Market Value of Your Content?

When it comes to creating content (which is the buzz in social), there are really two main categories to consider. Create new or make something old better. I read a great short piece from The Creative Thinking Hub,

“Improvements over innovation”

It isn’t that these new iPhones are not great phones. They improve on the previous models. However, the experts and analysts don’t regard them as being innovative. Improvements to old products are seen as less valuable, than innovative new products.

The lack of innovation in the iPhone 5S and 5C has created some doubt in Apple’s current innovation and creativity. Thus the stock price has headed south. Apple’s next event is expected to reveal an innovative, new product and if it does, the stock price will increase.

In short: Never underestimate the value of innovation. It’s worth the extra time, effort and energy it takes.”

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As I read that I equated it to organizations that are trying to enter the world of content marketing. Notice that they indicated that neither of these are bad, as long as you are either innovating or improving. Creating BAD content (or products) isn’t an option. TCH is analyzing Apple’s stock performance and correlating the performance of its stock price to whether it’s innovating or improving. When Apple has innovated, it’s stock has soared. When it stopped innovating its market price dropped (and the death of its spiritual and innovative leader, Steve Jobs, probably had something to do with it as well). While it has done OK to stabilize its stock by continuing to at least improve its current technology, its innovation that spurs its stock movement upward.

I think it can be similarly noted that when organizations innovate with their content, their social market value increases. People will engage more, share more, comment and take notice of the brand/product/organization. But, you don’t ALWAYS have to innovate. Taking existing content from the archives of your organization (images, videos, books, articles, etc.) and improving it allows you to appear innovative (assuming you don’t have all the same followers/fans/customers today that you had months or years ago) while not binding you to always having to create new. You may not get a huge social market value bump but you won’t see a free fall either.

Moral: when it comes to content, don’t feel overwhelmed with thinking that you always have to come up with clever new things. But, don’t fall into the Apple trap either which is simply relying on just making the old a few features better. And, never put out bad content. Review your content strategy periodically to make sure you are seeing a good mix of innovation and improvement in your content mix. Spike your value periodically with innovation and maintain value through good, consistent engagement making old content better.