Content is the new currency

Not long ago it was enough to simply have a presence on the Web. You got credit just for being there. You plastered your URL anywhere and everywhere you could.  People came looking to learn, experience or purchase your brand. If you built it, they came. Your site was a destination.

Oh, for the good old days.

It’s no longer about your site being a destination for consumers. It’s the about content–and that content must be desirable. It’s time to pay less attention to awareness (traffic) and more attention to engagement. Yes, you need a site, but, it’s the content that’s gold.

Chris Anderson ponders the value of content in this NY Times review of his latest book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Is your content interesting enough to co-opt? To spread? To share otherwise? If you create the content, the consumer will create the “where.”

It’s not your father’s Internet

In the blink of an eye we’ve become a generation of people who don’t remember when you actually had to sit at a computer to use the Internet. If you had a question, needed information or just wanted to be entertained, you had to make a conscious effort to stop what you were doing, sit down and log on. Smart phones, netbooks and other technology we haven’t even thought of yet guarantee we never have to turn the Internet off. As journalist Daniel Lyon writes in his Newsweek article “The Hype Is Right,” the notion of an always-on, always-there content delivery system could be intimidating if we don’t rethink how we tell stories.