[Part 3 of a Series: See: Introduction. See: Links to other posts in this series.]

One of the ways you can measure the importance our culture places on different kinds of content is by observing the awards associated with them. For example, film and video have all sorts of awards that lots of people seem to care about — even people who don’t watch that much film or video. Music has all sorts of awards, and not just Grammys or CMAs. In the headquarters town of Hammock Inc., Nashville, almost every day there are short items on local websites about parties celebrating Gold or Platinum Records (or whatever they call “records” these days).

If you are a marketer, you depend on effective content to reach and serve customers. However, we’re now experiencing a tsunami of change in the ways such content can be created and distributed. Change may be good, but it can be filled with risk and confusion.

[Part 2 of a Series: See: Introduction. See: Links to other posts in this series.]

The subject line of this post is a bit misleading. There is no one wiki entry that will teach you every thing you need to know about research content. Fortunately, you can pick almost any entry on a well organized and managed encyclopedia-model wiki to learn what I’m about to explain. Typically, I’d use a page from SmallBusiness.com, as many of my theories about research content have come while spending hundreds of evening and weekend hours structuring it and learning what works and doesn’t by serving as “head-helper” to people who’d like to add content to it — or who can’t find something they’re looking for.
However, I’ve decided to use the Wikipedia entry Metal umlaut as the example for today’s “lesson.” If you’re curious why, it’s because many years ago, Jon Udell used this entry’s history to demonstrate what a screencast is. Also, after the first draft, I felt this post needed more cowbell.
So here’s what you can learn from a well-done wiki entry about the elements needed in great “research” content:

On a sunny early-March Friday morning, we looked out the office window and saw the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile parked across the street (see previous post). By the time we made it downstairs, the wienermobile was back on the highway. So a group of us did the next best thing: We went to Nashville’s Hot Diggity Dogs for lunch. Yum. Here’s a Flickr set of photos from the hot dog day.

[Part 1 of a Series: See: Introduction. See: Links to other posts in this series.]
Business people do lots of things on the internet other than read or watch or listen to content. So when I say that only two kinds of content matter to them, I don’t mean web-based applications and email.
I mean the kind of content we typically think of as news and information and advertising and the stuff now called “post-advertising” — the kind of content that marketing people and journalists and bloggers and Twitter users create and add to the internet. The kind of content that companies hand over millions of dollars to Google so that business people will click through to see it.
I’ve given these two kinds of content that matter most to business customers the following names:

The following are links to a series of posts written by Hammock founder Rex Hammock in which he explores the various kinds of content that is being used by companies, associations, and other organizations and institutions to build stronger relationships with their customers, members, etc.
The posts also examine ways in which different types of content and different communications channels and platforms can work independently or in a complementary, integrated fashion to help companies reach specific business objectives.

[See also: Table of Contents for this series.]
Over the coming months, I will be writing a series of posts that focus on the role of “content” in how companies and customers connect with one-another. (Of course, when I say “companies,” I also mean associations and governments and churches and schools and candidates. And when I say “customers,” I also mean members and alumni and supporters, etc.) But first, I thought I’d provide an introduction.

Back in the late 1990s, Hammock “Publishing” (our original name) helped to organize a small group of custom publishers into a fledgling trade and professional organization called the Custom Publishing Council. Back then, the member companies primarily published magazines for corporate clients. (Although, at Hammock, we had managed online communities since the Compuserve days.)
But as I’ve noted on this blog recently, the scope of our work, and that of our fellow custom publishers, has broadened to include a wide variety of media beyond magazines — video, audio, all forms of online, digital, interactive and social media.

I’ve been in several meetings with marketers recently in which one person at the table will say something like “our digital strategy” and then, in a few moments, someone else at the table will start talking about “our internet strategy.” Now you may think “digital” and “internet” mean the same thing, but consider this: If two people are having a conversation and there is a word that could be interpreted two ways, then the chances are one-in-four that they will understand what each other means.*

(A similar post appeared on RexBlog this morning, but I wanted to share it here, as well.)
This morning, I ran across one that is not only interesting — it’s inspiring. It’s inspiring because it underscores the dramatic opportunities that exist when a content company doesn’t let its legacy get in the way of its opportunity.