5
Atomize, Serialize, Magnetize, and Keep Your Velocity
Solving for Distribution
In the age of the educated consumer, every previous solution to a vital problem is now accompanied by a host of parallel solutions. In some ways, the growth of our problems is less worrisome than the need to keep up with the multiplicity of our solutions. Even if they all work, each solution demands a unique approach to execute. This means we have to be flexible and pivot quickly even in moments of certainty.
Education is one example. No part of the working population can rely, as it once did, on the sole solution of finite standardized education by age cohort to prepare it for a career. And at no point can education, including professional and vocational education, be said to be “completed” anymore. The gap between the rate of change and our collective institutional ability to cope with it, what Thomas Friedman calls our “physical technologies” and our “social technologies,” is now too large for that to be the case.1 For education to be relevant, it must be continuously refreshed.
All the traditional activities of education, like meeting in classrooms, doing homework, group work, and studying, are being arrayed in a host of new ways. Collaboration, while once limited to in‐person meetings between students, can now happen asynchronously via the Internet. Startups like the Khan Academy are turning some basic assumptions on their heads—proposing for example that homework be done in groups during class while lectures be consumed in solitude at home online. Silicon Valley startups are now no longer valuing college degrees the same way they once did. Some see them as a liability rather than an asset. And educational reformers, like Ken Robinson,2 are proposing that students of all ages enroll at whatever level they feel best serves their needs, not at the level that society has predetermined their learning trajectory.
In these shifting circumstances, publishers of educational materials are increasingly finding themselves in need of products optimized for whatever radical new solution to education comes along.
The same situation exists for every producer of content, including content marketers. The core questions are as tricky as ever to answer: how do you distribute your content once it's been produced? And what types of content is it wise to have on hand?
At SJR, we believe that even thinking of those as two separate questions is obsolete. The undecided factors of production and distribution feed into one another. The new solutions generated by each are part of a continuous, iterative process. How you produce content—how fast, in what length, and for what platforms—influences what content you produce and vice versa.
This means that the only lasting approaches to distribution are high‐level, strategic ones, based on broad patterns of consumption and not specific platforms, the specifics of which change too frequently to come to any fixed conclusions about them. By the time you've figured out exactly how to game Twitter or Google's algorithm, for example, odds are they've changed it. And by the time I could've walked out onto the busy production floor of SJR and asked our strategists and editors what the best practices of the moment are, typed them up, and waited for them to appear in the print you are now reading, the content ecosystems of the Internet will inevitably have moved on.
That's why this section is called “Solving for Distribution” and not “The Distribution Solution.” In the age of the educated consumer we have never solved. We are always solving.
Each of the following distribution strategies is a metaphor and offers guiding principles, not hard and fast rules. They are meant to be applied to the mechanics of specific platforms on a test‐and‐learn basis. During my years at SJR, I've always seen test‐and‐learn as our basic mode of operation, fitting for the skunkworks or experimental laboratory that we are.
But amidst all that churn, I have seen these four overarching patterns emerge as a way to make content that is not only original but widespread in its distribution and effective in its impact.
ATOMIZATION
Even a perfume's most precious ingredients, like musk or ambergris, which can sell for as much as $5,700 per pound,3 are worthless unless they can be turned into a form that can be absorbed and enjoyed by the senses.
Ambergris is prized as a fixative in the world's finest perfumes. When added as an ingredient in the refining process, it not only adds its distinct aroma but allows the other notes in a perfume to last longer. When sprayed from the atomizing nozzle of a bottle, it settles in fine particles in the air and on the body, spreading its delightful smell to the wearer and those around them.
But ambergris begins life as a greasy, lumpy substance in the intestines of whales. It was once extracted by whalers as part of the refining process that turned a whale's entire body into a number of different substances useful to humans, from lamp oil to braces for corsets. Ambergris is now sold only when it is found washed up on beaches in large, unsightly lumps—an extremely rare occurrence. Unless properly aged and refined, the odor of ambergris isn't especially pleasant.
The journey from unrefined but valuable substance to priceless atomized mist is a metaphor for one distribution strategy great content marketers can employ to get their brand's essential story out into the world in a way that permeates the media landscape.
SJR's name for this process is atomization and we define it this way, “the process of breaking down a narrative into individual pieces to widen reach and deepen the breadth of storytelling.”
Imagine that the human resources department of a large company has recently implemented a new way of doing performance reviews.
It's a less labor intensive, faster, less formal way of getting good feedback to employees. The company finds the new process to be innovative, challenging, and enjoyable. And it's the perfect new piece in the company's evolving strategy to recruit millennials.
But the full story of the new process is a huge, unprocessed lump of information. It reaches deep into the company's institutional history and organizational structure, and its implementation is highly complex and still under way. Furthermore, there are a number of different angles the story could be told from and a number of different contenders to tell the story. To put the burden of all this on a single piece of content would be to produce something that would be impossible to consume in a single setting or risk being incoherent from the sheer number of ideas it attempts to link so closely together.
So, you atomize. You take a quote from an internal presentation and turn it into a tweet, then a graphically formatted quote for Instagram and Facebook. You take employee stories that reinforce the same talking point and put them up on Facebook. And, if the company is smart enough to have a content hub, you launch a series of videos and text pieces detailing different parts of the new process. You devise small, sharable pieces of content for every single platform where the company has a presence.
Like the whale's body, no part of your company's story ends up being wasted. And, like a fine perfume that emerges from the nozzle of an atomizer, your content is designed to spread far and wide in small pieces and delight wherever it goes.
Atomization works because of a fundamental truth about creating content for the web. Unlike every media ecosystem before it, the web has no center. Traditional advertising and PR campaigns were built on a hub and spoke model. The 30‐second TV spot was most often the center or the hub, with radio spots, print ads, and other content extending out from it, referring to it, and directing attention back to it. In the time period when live TV occupied the undisputed center of global attention, this made excellent sense.
Now, attention is diffused. People still watch live TV, but they do it while paying attention to smaller screens at the same time. And people are just as likely to encounter part of your story for the first time in some unanticipated corner of the Internet as they are on your content hub or in a traditional media outlet.
As a strategy, atomization creates content that is capable of drifting into the web's many small communities and mobilizing them in pursuit of your brand.
SERIALIZATION
The American weight loss industry is worth about $60 billion per year, with over 5 million diet books sold, which together account for about half of all health and fitness books in the United States.4 Magazines like Men's Health and Self have circulations well over 1.5 million (putting both comfortably in the top 50 U.S. magazines) with monthly issues promising accessible advice for losing weight and getting healthy. It doesn't matter that, with small variations, the advice and the promised benefits are always essentially the same and have been the same for decades. Even the covers of each issue are nearly identical. In the United States, the appetite for dieting advice in its current form is at least a century old and shows no sign of ever being satisfied.
Why? Because weight loss outlets are masters of a powerful strategy that turns a few core ideas into an inexhaustible stream of fresh, original content worthy of readers' attention.
The term for it at SJR is serialization, and it has only become more essential in our digital communications landscape, where new content replaces old continuously.
Serialization is the art of targeting audiences with the same message repeatedly but in a way that still feels fresh. To be effective, a brand must have a clear sense of what it stands for. But to capture attention, brands must always be saying something new.
The word comes from the extended storylines that we follow on TV shows and, before them, that people read each week or month in magazines and newspapers. And the basic concept in all media is the same: Each time someone consumes serialized content, they are expecting something that's fundamentally the same, but just a little bit different to pique their interest.
Serialization is what makes medical dramas like House or police procedurals like Law & Order so successful. You probably don't quite remember what happens in each episode, but that's not the point. You remember the characters and what they stand for, the ongoing dynamics that make them interact with each other in such memorable ways. And you return to see the endless variations on the main themes.
Serialization is what stories look like when they become regular parts of our lives. As a vehicle for the dissemination of brands, serialization is invaluable.
One of the entertainment world's most enduring characters, Sherlock Holmes, came into being because of the commercial possibilities of serialization. When he was created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 1800s, Holmes was already one of many fictional detectives. Doyle's great style and knack for evoking a sense of mystery set Holmes apart, but it was Doyle's content strategy that made his detective immortal.
The traditional way to serialize novels had been to take a long, continuous story and simply split it up into small parts. If you picked up an issue of a magazine or newspaper that was serializing a novel, and you hadn't read the previous chapters, then you were out of luck. The many beloved novels of Charles Dickens and even Tolstoy's War & Peace were published this way. They would unspool in the public consciousness over several years, but had beginnings, middles, and ends.
But Doyle designed his serialized stories as self‐contained units. At the start of each story, he made a point, with just a few quick strokes of the pen, of informing you that Holmes was an eccentric genius, Watson his affable companion, and that there was a mystery to be solved. For repeat readers, there was the comfort of a recurring formula: A mysterious man or woman visits 221B Baker Street, Holmes deduces something impossible from small clues about their appearance, and then the real story begins. And for first‐time readers, they had everything they needed to join in the fun.
Through repeated exposure, Holmes took on the stature of a real person in the mind of the public, so much so that Conan Doyle had trouble killing him off and, long after he grew tired of writing Holmes stories, was essentially bullied into writing more of them by an adoring public.
More than any other content strategy, serialization is what has the potential to generate true bonds of affection between a brand and an audience. Anything that is a ritual has the possibility of becoming beloved.
MAGNETIZATION
Despite having no recognizable center, the web has self‐organized into a loose network of communities based on affinity. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are best classified as platforms not communities. They each have users numbering in the billions or millions. But within them and in the open Internet outside their walls, true communities have coalesced.
Author Steven Johnson has compared these communities to the densely settled hill towns in Italy during the Renaissance, which had a population neither too small to contain real intellectual diversity and brainpower nor too large to prevent the growth of useful connections between people and groups that were developing new ideas and ways of doing business.5 The result of the loose network of these communities across Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the massive boost in human processing power that jump‐started the world into a new era of technological and economic growth.
On a macro level, the same thing seems to be happening at this moment in history, but globally and powered by the communities of the web instead. Most remarkably, this process doesn't seem to be happening by chance, as it did in previous centuries. While it's not possible to fully engineer the growth of these communities, it is possible to plant the seedlings for them in the form of engaging pieces of content.
Game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal describes one such moment that happened in the wake of the attacks of September 11th. She had been a member of the tight‐knit group of players of an online game called The Beast. The game was a collaborative murder mystery that played out over a series of fake websites scattered across the web. The entire game was created by Microsoft in cooperation with Warner Brothers as a piece of promotional content for the 2001 Steven Spielberg film, A.I. The game is still celebrated as one of the founding moments of the alternate reality gaming genre, and it was so successful that it outlived the theatrical run of the film. Most remarkable to McGonigal was what happened to the user base after the game ended. When the twin towers in New York City were attacked, The Beast's user forums reactivated and filled up again with gamers who were no longer seeking to solve the puzzles in the game but the urgent, real‐world mystery of how the attack had happened. The players also activated their network to coordinate relief efforts. What began as behavior seeded by a piece of content marketing spilled over into the evolution of a real‐world community with real‐world goals and impact.6 The event was pivotal in McGonigal's career; to this day her research is focused on the latent power of computer games to change the real world.
When users gather around a piece of content and then activate together for a common purpose, SJR calls it magnetization. It is similar to the response that a traditional direct marketing campaign might receive but different in an important way. Magnetization is a natural, loosely suggested response, not one directly suggested by any messages in the content.
Just as a pile of iron filings is drawn to a magnet, users are naturally drawn toward content that takes risks and expresses an opinion, and when they are moved by what they see and read they have a tendency to move together in real ways.
Magnetization is one of the key differences between traditional advertising or public relations and content marketing. Both can spur groups of people to action, but only content marketing creates communities that can be mobilized more than once and, much more important, that mobilize themselves. With every piece of content you release into the world, you create another convening point for potential action.
KEEPING YOUR VELOCITY
The future belongs to those who can maintain their velocity.
It is a fact that the pace of life is accelerating. And it is fundamentally altering the formulation of strategy in all areas of human life, from warfare to business to communications.
Up until the late 1990s, a good book about strategic communications from, say, 1920 would have the same essential advice as one published in 1990. But with the Internet, speed, always a crucial advantage, has become the crucial advantage.
Much has been made of Moore's law, which correctly predicted in 1970 that computers would double their speed and power about every two years. But less has been made of the effect that this exponential rate of change is exerting on every facet of life. Everything that depends, even to a small degree, on digital technology has also become faster.
Because of digital data analysis, the number of planets discovered outside our own solar system has jumped from just a handful a year in 2000 to more than 900 in 2014.7 Since 2009, the average financial transaction is 50 percent faster, dropping from 16 milliseconds to 8.1 milliseconds.8 Since the 1930s, average shot length in movies has been compressed from 12.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds.9 In 2015, the average American checked his phone 46 times a day, up from 33 times in 2013. If you're a millennial, that number jumps to about 74 times per day.10 In every field, the rate at which we make new technology has accelerated, and that technology has, in turn, accelerated us.
The ways we shop, collaborate, learn, and make decisions have all gotten faster. Our effects on the environment, our institutions, and the people around us—all of it—have gotten faster.
This has stripped away a persistent belief that all organizations harbor—the belief that there is time. Time to fully understand the task at hand. Time to build the perfect product. Time to craft the perfect communications strategy.
There is now objectively less time for all of these tasks than at any moment in human history. And by the time you are done reading this page, there will be even less. The ability to shape the future belongs solely to those who can maintain their velocity no matter what.
At SJR, we say “velocity” rather than speed to highlight an important difference. Any object moving through space can have speed. It's only when you move through space with both speed and purpose that you have velocity as we deem it.
Velocity implies speed, but also precision, and above all, purpose, all at the same time.
Everybody knows that it is great to be first to market. But knowing what to do once you get to market is even better.
Velocity Is Transformational
As Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, puts it, there is a persistent belief, endemic either to U.S. capitalism or possibly human nature, that by spending just a bit more time and a bit more money, it is possible to protect our endeavors and by extension ourselves from future harm.
This belief, Ries says, is not only blind but promotes blindness. It is only through the process of trial and error, or, on a grander scale, failure, that we are capable of learning.11
The perennial slowdown that comes from wanting certainty is what eventually leads to the cementing of hierarchies and bureaucracies, the overgrowth of formal communications within a company, and the slow overspecialization of individual jobs.
The process of violent revolution or institutional collapse is the intrusion into this state of affairs of urgent, unmet needs. In our accelerated age, we don't have time for either. And velocity is an engine for avoiding these twin upsets.
Velocity, when applied to content marketing, can be an engine for continuous renewal, because maintaining velocity forces us to move forward without all the answers.
In Ries' philosophy, which is designed to accelerate the creation and launch of digital and physical products, that engine is called the MVP, or minimum viable product. It is the simplest form of your product that successfully meets the needs of the market. It is both effective and necessarily imperfect, and how consumers respond to it shapes the future of your business and your product. The MVP is designed to get you moving and learning at the same time.
SJR takes a similar approach to the creation of content. We believe that if you're not releasing your product with a few bugs, you're almost certainly waiting too long.
For large, legacy companies, this can be a serious challenge but also an incredible opportunity to change.
Scratch the surface of the most imposing, iconic corporate brand, and you are quite likely to find a culture that demands approval and buy in from every disparate part of the organization and every link in the chain of command before it is deemed ready for public consumption.
But by the time this has happened, your product—the piece of content—is not only drained of all coherence and originality, it has been rendered irrelevant by the passing on of attention, from both the public and your own employees, to other issues.
This is not a hypothetical scenario I am building up just to take down. At SJR, we've seen communications as short as a single tweet travel through multiple layers of approval before arriving on the web hours, days, or even weeks after the event it refers to. Scenarios like that represent a misunderstanding of the centrality of speed in a digital world, and also a missed opportunity to shape the conversation sooner, possibly first.
In a news cycle that can be measured in a number of hours, such a failure to move can actually be catastrophic. As the great psychologist Carl Jung said, “The world will ask who you are, and if you do not respond, it will tell you.” At best, the response of the Internet to new information about a brand is impossible to predict. At worst, it is destructive.
Velocity is a broom that sweeps all of this away. As the bringer of speed, digital technology in all its forms is corrosive of hierarchy and overspecialization. It is the enemy of unnecessary formality and bureaucracy. And it has a magical ability to shake up a company and reveal where its treasure (its native sources of wonder, wisdom, and delight—see Chapter 1) is buried. Speed is not only preventative but transformational.
Crisis communications are an instructive example. In the wake of the unthinkable—an oil spill, a lethal product failure, bankruptcy, or scandal—speed above all else is forced on a brand. When the world's attention is turned on you, every moment that passes without a response is one in which the world is busy creating its own narrative about you, and without you.
All good crisis responses have the same characteristics. They are swift, transparent, sincere, and sincerely focused on getting beneficial information to consumers as quickly as possible. To deviate from any of these characteristics, as fear and excessive caution move us to do almost every time, is to court disaster.
To embrace all of them not only gives your brand its surest chances of survival, but also—and this is a fact often overlooked—to transform your company for the better.
Brands are not unlike people. If they can emerge from crisis intact, they are stronger and more knowledgeable than they were before, something they can carry with them throughout their lives.
On the other side of a successful crisis communication is a more educated public, a transformed company, and, in some cases, a transformed world.
Companies that survive brand‐level existential threats tend to have the following changes: a more proactive public affairs department, a better focus on swift and transparent internal communications, a direct relationship between the executive leadership and the public, and overall muscle for the swift, decisive response to any threat.
Embracing SJR's conception of velocity builds this muscle without the need for crisis.