The “Why” of Content

The impulse for most communities is to create content to talk about themselves.

How cool “we are”, what “we” believe, how “we do things”.

This frame affirms the groups identity. Helps define it. By definition it reinforces the boundary between the in-group and the rest of the world. And we want… Well, not that. We want more talent, more clients, more people operating and winning with what we build.

Affirming identity doesn’t move the needle. "Good", high convertion content creates relationships, builds trust and generates opportunity by making peoples lives better. Their attention being its own reward.

This is the main function of the content exercise — to crystallise knowledge, reduce entropy and provide benefits to many, earning attention in return.

How to do this is the main point of Bardic Inspiration 1. This is the deepest and longest article of Bard School, but we strongly recommend you make it through with gusto. All will get more practical from here.

A more Generous Frame

Experiment flipping to a more generous frame. Offer secrets, tricks and advantages to the audience (that are hopefully actually useful). Tick the box of “what’s in it for me” in their heads immediately.

The goal is to give them something that’s immediately beneficial without asking for much in return.

There should be very little effort for the audience to get the treat. Ideally, showing up should be enough. That’s the core of being ‘benefit forward’. Especially closer to the top of the funnel (More on funnels later).

We want to find out what works and give it to others, no strings attached. Over and over again. We are developers and creators fighting against entropy and noise with every new strategy, tool and technology. Content is how we share what we learned and earn the respect and trust of the audience.

We produce content for the benefit of carving this knowledge into collective memory before the next experiment comes along. All of our writing should be about what “we” have learned, that could benefit “them”.

Our communications should feel like a boost, a dirty little trick or an indispensable read that brings practical or tactical results that are felt and seen. If done perfectly, it should feel unfair.

Identify -> Isolate -> Frame

One trick to help identify -> isolate -> frame the benefit is to position your main goal in one of these three pillars:

• Entertain: “I enjoy this.”
• Educate: “Now I know how.”
• Elevate: “Now I see differently.”

The benefit comes first. The mission is to isolate the benefit and protect it through the writing/creative process so that it is delivered with low cognitive cost, in some form of delightful way.

When you’re done, something hard should now be easier. Cheaper. Better. Transform experience into utility that can be shared to facilitate success in the journey of others. Bonus points in helping them journey together.

Be the advantage, don’t take advantage.

Defining “Good” Content

We must methodically address what is the benefit that can fit the format and the context in which it is consumed.

• Identify the benefit: What was learned about the topic or theme that will make the audience better, faster, stronger (or at least happier)?
• Isolate the benefit: What aspects of this can be shared within the context, length, style of the platform, format and media I am using to communicate?
• Frame the benefit: What can be inferred about the audience from how they got “here”, where “here” is, what are their unspoken needs, fears or expectations that can guide the creative process?

Building sustainable influence through content is the result of repeating this exercise. And do it until the effects (entertain, educate, elevate - remember?) are perceived and validated by the audience.

This audience validation comes only in one form: They’ll open, read, watch and share what you put out.

Over and over again. Hopefully leading to deeper conversations around the theme explored. More purchases, more invitations, more inquiries with less effort. And if engagement means “validation”, the shorthand for success should be perceived as increased “access” or… influence.

Influence means simply how much work you have to put into aligning others to your position, opinion or direction. The less brashness, dollars, aggression or polemic you need to give rise to coordinated action, the more influential your efforts have become.

We will take “becoming influential” and “working less hard to do more” as our north-stars when analysing results or inferring judgement on work to be published. We will do this by making our audience do more with less in the process.

Our success comes from their success - and this performance indicator can be tricky. It is very possible to accumulate views and clicks and achieve nothing. It’s also very much possible to build empires with audiences in the low hundreds.

Defining what “good” means in terms of numbers is:

• Hard
• Dynamic
• Contextual

Assessing Success

Tracking and performance is a topic deserving of deep consideration and reverie:
Mid-whits chase numbers, Bards focus on the benefit and look for the effect. Tracking metrics is key, but we track it to understand what content best serves the audience.

More often than not the desired effect is fuzzy as hell. Tracking the numbers is not the same as understanding them. Reducing “sustainable influence”, “more money easier”, “stronger organization” or the myriad of possible advancements to a few key numbers, and assuming "number big = content good" will likely reduce the range of opportunity and agency of the organization as a whole.

Simple linear growth is great at the bottom line. Persuing vanity metrics for its own sake doesn't necessarily translate to multi-layered development contracts.

So when someone asks you to reduce the meaning of success of all communications to some silly set of numbers, indulge them:

Add more numbers, caveats, extra considerations, equations and fractal algorithmic exponentials. Confuse them thoroughly to the point that they f-off and let you get back to work.

Jokes aside, do track what makes sense to track, but when sensemaking for real, for real… we might need to just “feel it out”, too. Don't let quantitative analysis drown out your intuition for quality.

Craft as “Skillfull Handling”

It’s often considered somewhat uncomfortable to discuss or strategise around “influence” out in the open.

Our imaginations easily form a pipeline from influence to persuasion to corruption. Words like “manipulation” mire the conversation, especially in the English language, where negative intent and information asymmetry are assumed to come part and parcel with concepts of persuasion, seduction and manipulation.

This often casts a shadow on the fact that manipulation is also a synonym for skill or craft.

• A sculptor manipulates a chisel and movement to shape marble.
• A poet manipulates syntax, sound and rhythm to produce emotion and insight.
• A composer manipulates silence and tension as sound and instruments.

A developer manipulates linguistic symbols within a structured language to produce deterministic effects. Communication is the same. It is structured intervention. It’s not inherently sinister.

To manipulate language is to arrange it with intent. To shape attention. To compress meaning. To create an effect in the mind of another that could influence behaviour.

The issue is not whether we manipulate, because we always do. To do it consciously and ethically, first one needs to admit that all acts of creation contain an editorial position and are manipulative by default.

So just be good at what you do, and do it to try to do good, first. While usually any content that makes you influential is considered good content overall, for us that won't be enough. For our case:

Good content delivers influence while “reducing entropy and increasing stigmergy, leading to lower coordination costs”. That is "good content that does good".

Good content that does good

Developers write code to produce an outcome. Inputs are shaped to yield predictable outputs. In communication, the system is less deterministic because humans are not compilers. But, we structure signals in order to produce understanding, alignment, and action just the same.

Content educates, entertains and or elevates. All other craft related choices in both tactics and style, hope to maneuver the “Brand” to a point where it merges with aspects of the audience's identity. It finds a place to live inside the audience’s emotional memory besides being just ‘information’. The effect lives alongside affection.

To craft with transparent intent you must know and openly address:

• This is the benefit.
• This is the cost.
• This is the direction.
• This is why I believe it matters.
• And here’s the funky way imma gonna give it to ya.

This is authorship. And authorship is responsibility. In decentralized environments especially, silence does not create neutrality. It creates a vacuum. And vacuums are filled by louder actors, not necessarily better ones.

Here’s the catch: Influence can also be built by prioritizing the perception of value without actually providing tangible benefit. And craft, manipulation, skill - is only a knife. It will cut whichever way if yielded well. Regardless of intent.

Slop, wankery and gooner-traps also become part of the audience’s identity. Unfortunately there’s no perceivable difference in the quantitative outcome. It generates clicks, e-mail opens, impressions, views and shares. Oftentimes more. So a note of caution here, because you become what you track. Until the castle comes crumbling down.

So, as a rule of thumb I suggest that at least you believe your content to be actually valuable. I don’t care which way you slop, wank or goon as long as you do it in full delight, bless your soul. Pardon my naivité.

So here’s a polarity for you: To what percentages are you crafting purposeful content or just leaning into hijacking brain chemistry in the interest of mindshare? Is it possible to not do both? How do we exorcise persuasion of its lower nature and allow ourselves to be malefically delicious for the benefit of the audience?

I’m not kidding. It’s not just that a spoonful of honey helps the medicine go down. The history of media and technology (and the infrastructure our opinions live within) were mostly defined by war and pornography. If I spent all this time telling you to methodically isolate benefits and be generous, at least once I need to say:

Embrace Eros and Thanatos - as above, so below. Be fully human, if it helps.

Crafting for Stigmergy

Stigmergy is a very important concept in the realm of DAOs, Governance and any “people doing things together” affair. Ok, I guess that means it’s important for everybody.

We borrowed it from biology, it is used to describe how termites coordinate complex nest-building without central control.

Official dictionary definition:

“A process of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left by an action in the environment stimulates subsequent actions by the same or different agents.”

A stigmergy-based approach to influence does not rely on force. It relies on “trace”. Now that I told you about it, hopefully you can find traces everywhere. From every cultural “lead by example” behaviour we do without being told to, to more obvious trace-following when we lie down on a comfy mattress or pillows, no sign or regulation needed -- and avoid climbing a wall that has glass shards on the top, without consulting an user manual. Works with pigeons and it works with you.

What the dictionary definition could've done a bit better is the “spontaneous” part. Evolution gave termites their systems, and there’s nothing less spontaneous than evolution. We must be intently stigmergic about the traces we leave behind. And we can’t afford to let random iterations happen over millions of years to get there.

We are gonna need to craft for stigmergy.

Spontaneous in the dictionary definition above is just meant to highlight that the agent acted in a pro-systemic way autonomously without explicit orders or incentives. Nothing has been communicated by another agent as a form of coercion or reward. The map, in this case, was in the territory.

Which when it comes to decentralized autonomous organizations is literally the name of the game.

When the context is a DAO, explicit command and control is rejected to a fault, there’s no systems in place to coerce or enforce and even when there are, the price of the medicine is often too steep to justify the administration. DAOs tend to just “roll with it”.

Crafting for stigmergy is making sure that the traces in our communications form an implicit path to be followed - that the user rolling with it, rolls through a path of least resistance, or uncertainty.

Stigmergic incentives act by reducing the cognitive load by highlighting traces and how they connect down the paths to be trodden.

Others will encounter those traces and act. Not because they were coerced or rewarded, but because friction was reduced.

The more agentic, badass, focused and curious does an agent need to be, to do what you want him to, the worse. No bravery should be required on your newsletter sign up form, your subscription button or anything else you care about having thousands of people using.

Making it easy to do the hard thing

Influence, then, is not dominance. It is measured in reduced friction. The more clearly you crystallize knowledge into utility, the less effort is required later to align action.

That is not manipulation in the pejorative sense. It is coordination efficiency. The following chapters of Bardic Inspiration will do away with anything nebulous and simply outline a clear system of how an idea becomes content and fuels the RaidGuild content funnel, so that we might make more friends for fun and profit.

The system is specifically designed crafted for stigmergy:

• So that anyone can help and that small contributions add up
• That we only have a small number of touch points to take care of, but the ones that we do have, we take good care of.
• That we don’t have to broadcast much, but that we do post consistently.
• And that hopefully, we are driven to do so because it’s fun, light work made by many hands.

The whole stigmergy thing starts with the creation process itself, because in a DAO like ours, the inside and the outside are hard to tell apart. So ideas invite ideas that sit in buckets, that get worked into seeds, that fully manifest across the funnel that turn into conversations and generate work, relationships, products… whatever.

Anyone can start a bucket, anyone can add to a bucket, anyone can go look at what’s in a bucket and craft a seed from it. Anyone can harvest parts of a seed for all other types of content. The content Calendar tells you what we need to make, and you can propose and have an overview of when any piece of output is going out.

Posting will be coordinated by Bard and Sync Steward, acting as filter and trigger finger of our lovely mob.

PS: The Slop-Firehose or “No matter what, sometimes you want Doritos”

All of this sounds very pretty, but our nuggets of wisdom are gonna be competing in an ever more slop rich environment - so be ready to figure out how to compete with the brainrot.

The Slop Firehose plays with the same tools, but exploits brain-chemistry explicitly with no need to enhance it:

• There is no thesis necessarily, it’s just effect driven.
• There is no utility other than immediate reward.
• It’s optimized for reach and does so by bypassing rational scrutiny.

This is powerful. Also doesn’t mean that the content is bad. This form of hedonic capture is behind every fortune, every friendship, every ideology, every joke, porn or action movie. It’s ok to produce nonsensical bangers sometimes.

The doors to hell do open up when the “tool” becomes the strategy. When your results are absent from anything else, congratulations, it’s not content any more: It’s advertising. In our case there’s a difference, but not a value judgement. We can and should do both. And know the difference when doing so.

Standing up against null noise while embracing craft and a little bit of the dark arts of attention maxxing is the challenge. Being a bunch of idiosyncratic dweebs that care only about people who already think like we do is actually the failure mode.

Stigmergy (and evolution) optimise for replication and do not care for high-mindedness. This is an edge we all must walk. Oftentimes, there’s no harm in some good fun, except when there is. So please, feel free to add some honey to the protein shake but, make sure: There is clarity. There is relevance. There is a repeatable benefit. And that for fuck sake, it’s not all just about you.

I hope that this introduction helped spark something in you and help set creative constraints that help you get to creation faster.

Next we will link to all of our funnel touchpoints, provide creative aids and checklists, hopefully turning all of this into a form of creativity game.

Keep Going:

bardschool.