Finding content that has long shelf life and high reusability
Who makes your content? Who actually does the interviews, writes the profiles and types your features? Who ever it is, he or she is probably great at writing, interviewing and all the reportorial skills. But how good is that person at discovering minimum information units?
A minimum information unit is a small piece of content. It might be the address of the best Italian restaurant in London, or it could be a picture of Big Ben. Any stand-alone piece of information, whether in text, video, audio or image format, is a minimum information unit.
The people that research and create your content should be masters at sniffing these bits out, because those tiny pieces can be reused to create new products. One information unit could be in several different reports on a wide variety of topics.
Good units have a long shelf life. The address of the best Italian restaurant in London, for example, could be used in reports, books and maps for years to come. An article review of the same restaurant, however, is not as reusable. It’s too time specific and bulky. It’s not a minimum unit.
Entire books are also too bulky for repurposing. They have too much content to be grouped with other media to create a new product. Trying to do so usually results in a package deal of a few books, or a book and a video, rather than a new product.
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So, while your content creators are at work, have them keep an eye out for bits that can be reused. They won’t know until you tell them, though, because they’re probably trained with pre-online skills.
Twenty years ago, most people made content on a project-basis. In other words, they wrote a book, made a film or took photographs for a product that was to be produced, packaged, sold and forgotten.
Now, with digital products, it’s much easier to rearrange parts of old products to create new ones. The parts that can be reused are the minimum information units that your researchers should be seeking.
Finding and archiving these bits might be a new skill for some of your researchers and producers, but most of them should be able to learn very quickly. Sensing long-lasting content is similar to smelling a juicy story—something all writers and producers are great at.
The financial benefit of organizing your content into small units is substantial. It will save you money on research and production, and you can create more products faster.
There is a customer-value question when using recycled content. If you are churning out the same content over and over, with nothing updated or added, then your customers are going to catch on. They’re not stupid.
That’s why it is important to constantly update and add to your archive of information units. The more fresh evergreen content you have, the more diverse high-quality products you can create.
After you have a good archive of units, you can piece a few together, add an introduction, tie the bits together and conclude. That’s a new product. You can repeat that process over and over. But you can’t start until you tell your team to start hunting the units down.
