Last month, Matt Dickman on Techno//Marketer kicked off a great conversation on the need to treat content as commerce. In the post, he outlined a few key steps to succeeding with content-driven sites:

1. Create a clear interface for your users.
2. Rank your site’s content in the order it is valuable to the business and weigh that with the value to the consumer.
3. Visualize your traffic to see where it is going and shift it to the content you value.
4. Track and adopt over time.

What intrigued me here was the ensuing discussion on how to actually assign value to that content. Matt argues that the values can be arbitrary (with some level of executive agreement/approval) as long as the process is helping to more effectively manage the site. Others argued that there was little value in made-up figures. The only consensus seemed to be that this would be a very good, but very difficult exercise. In other words: a nonstarter.
Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Content Marketing, content ROI, content value