I fully expect that marketers will soon offer not just PR and AR and IR, but SR -- for search relations. You have to know how to play the game, and I don't mean to game the system. I have found that the best way to get high search ranking on the native content side of the search results (as opposed to the paid side) is to create great content on your values and services, and get it placed widely.

In a recent podcast I did with Sam Whitmore, the founder and editor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey at www.mediasurvey.com, we delved into the reasons that content is once again king.

Here are some excerpts:

Whitmore: We're now getting people to understand the concept of "You don’t have to browse anymore." They still search, of course, probably more than ever before. But you think about the two ways ... that people get their information now, it's either through RSS syndication, or through search. And it’s almost quaint to think back about, "Yeah, I think I am going to go through my bookmarks and see what I haven’t visited in a while." I don’t know anybody who does that anymore.

Gardner: The thing that’s interesting to me, and what’s changed in my business in the last year or so, is this emphasis on search. And that search, from what some people tell me, is the "new media" -- that when you want something, you know enough about it to start a search. If you are a little bit diligent you can find just about anything you want. That includes B2B content that describes products and values and services that companies want you to know about.

What’s been interesting for me is that as I have created content -- some of it of by my own creation and, and other content that is sponsored -- that people want help in creating content. As an analyst I can moderate a panel or discuss something with users, and then make that available to many people. But that content has now become a very powerful force in search, and I did not intend it that way.

I intended this content to be something that was more of an RSS play value. But what’s happened is that the content is a search ranking benefit for the topics we cover. I will blog about this content on three blogs, and I share it with distribution partners who are often IT media companies like TechTarget and E-Commerce Times. I also share it with direct subscription-based content deliverers to IT decision buyers, including Books24by7's AnalystPerspectives, Gerson Lehrman Group's News, and Insights24.

Because there are a number of channels that this audio and text content then finds its way into -- where it's tagged, and it has a different URL, and it's associated with a different web domain -- the search engine crawlers and the algorithms that rank content take a look at this content and say, “Wow, it's going across multiple domains, it's been tagged a lot, it’s been put into bookmarks, and linked to -- so it must be highly relevant." And this content tends to move up swiftly in the search ranks.

So, my question to you, Sam, is, Are you seeing search marketing as I am seeing search marketing -- that it is becoming as important as advertising?

Whitmore: Yes, in a word. I will know a lot more in a couple of weeks, because at the end of the month out in San Francisco, I will be going to ad:tech and hanging around with that crowd. But, I mean, it's been building for a while, the investment in search engine optimization (SEO) and some of the acquisitions that we have seen such as big, multi-national marketing companies now snapping up the iProspects, and iCrossing is doing a great job. So, it’s definitely being built into the mix. That’s what Content 2.0 is. And you’ve really staked a high ground in that, haven’t you?

Gardner: I am trying.

Whitmore: So, you tell me. How are you doing with that? Is it driving your business?

Gardner: It is. About 90 percent of my business is now supported through custom podcast content creation. And I even hesitate to use the word podcast anymore, because for me, podcasting is really a means to creating content -- and not an ends. Just as you and I are having a discussion now on the phone, and I can create a transcript from this in about two or three days, that means this content can be widely distributed through multiple modes or modalities across different distribution networks and partnerships. We can even license it to people to use and create more content.

That’s sort of led me to another concept, which is what I call the content pyramid. And interestingly enough, I’ve stumbled into this, again, in the same fashion that I stumbled into search as an important element here. Because I look at software development and deployment strategies as my main domain area for coverage -- and then I am more of a practitioner of Web 2.0 in terms of how I deliver content -- I’ve noticed over the past five years or so, a more strategic approach to software development.

That is to say, instead of small groups off doing their own thing, creating their applications that run autonomously on a monolithic stack of some kind, that have no real relationship to one another, and that at some point I might have to integrate and/or assimilate that data that they contain and create, there's a new way. The idea is to take a strategic overview, to think about applications from an architectural perspective.

Let’s think about them for their lifecycle, not just how we create them -- but how we might want to use them in the future, or even sunset them, and then what we’re going to do with this pile of data that in many cases is about the same customer or the same product but in a different format in a different application? This approach is just not productive, and it’s expensive.

Companies are spending 70 percent to 80 percent of their IT dollars on just maintenance of these existing applications, and are not doing innovative new things. And so there has been a whole host of things that have happened around, "Hey, let’s create components and let’s use standards and let’s develop around a common framework such as, say, Eclipse," ... and so there’s more of a strategic approach to software.

Ultimately, the goal is a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) where you have lots of different business services that you can then package and mash up and aggregate to create different processes, and then you can tear them apart and build them up again. And it’s more of a use-reuse, common-repository mentality, and not just one-off production.

Whitmore: All right, so let’s see how you pull this off with content.

Gardner: Right. So the idea is to start thinking strategically about your content. Instead of having thousands of people around your company, each creating their own content without much interaction about it, without much coordination about it, but perhaps a lot of overlap and a lack of reuse, adding to more of a case of redundancy. And that goes for everything from mimeographs to RSS feeds, and all in between.

But when you think about content more strategically, and can plan for and create core content that they can be reused and extended across different uses, like marketing literature, the documentation you provide for your services and products, your advertising, as well as your communications with your investors, with analysts, with press -- you create more of a coordinated core set of messages and documents and content. And we'll be seeing more audio and video increasingly in this mix.

If a company can create this content core and allow people to use it and make it accessible -- in the same way as with the development of software tools and components -- you can better control your costs; you can control better your message because more of your messaging will be in synch because its all coming off of the same core. And you can create a lot of this core without having to go through a sixth-month review process, and without taking up your experts’ and your company’s time by forcing them to write 80-page papers.

Maybe this whole notion of the conversation that is prominent in social networking and in Web 2.0 -- of having a series of conversations, capturing it as audio, creating it into text, reusing it across different aspects of your communications, and increasingly, capturing it as video as well -- will allow for a much easier way of gathering knowledge from your experts and users, keeping it on message, and then making that available as a set of core content.

Now, it’s a vision. There is always going to be a lot of need for exceptions, but conceptually starting to think about content strategically to me makes a lot of sense now.

Whitmore: Well, I know that Netflix has somebody in the CCO position, Chief Content Officer, and that they have looked into that as a fundamental principle of communicating to their constituencies, their prospects, their customers, their investors, people like that. So, it is a good idea.

Gardner: It’s really all about content discussion and community. As more and more companies outsource and offshore elements of their production and distribution, and as more business services become available off the wire, what is it that’s really going to define the business of the future? It’s going to be their relationships, and the way that they foster those relationships is through ongoing content-based discussion.

In the next blog we'll discuss how to take this strategic content creation value out to the web, to give the search engines what they crave -- relevant, vetted, oft-linked to and knowledge-rich content.