Content is King; Context is Queen

Harry pushed away his bowl of cereal repeatedly, even after his mother pleaded to him that she would be late for work. He wailed and wriggled about in his chair until his mother agreed to get him some ice cream. Harry, then reluctantly, began to eat his cereal in silence.

The content of the above anecdote is quite clear to most readers, in the sense that Harry is a little boy as any other, unwilling to give in to his mother’s wishes, wanting to get his way every time. But what if I told you that Harry is a 31-year-old man suffering from an intellectual disability. This changes everything. The one simple fact that Harry is 31 years old changes the context of the anecdote and in turn changes the way the audience interprets it.

This yin yang relationship between content and context plays an important role in the world of business and marketing. Professional content is in abundance these days with social media being the pioneering factor in spreading the word. People from every nook and cranny of the world want to get their hands first on the new content being updated daily. However, content alone does not benefit these professionals. Content, if taken out of context; supposing during the translation of languages; may fall into the wrong hands. The wrong hands do not necessarily mean people who want to use the information for immoral activities; they can also mean the wrong audience. If the content falls into the hands of the wrong audience, the whole purpose of displaying it to the world is beaten.

To ensure that the content-context relationship never goes through a divorce, certain measurements can be taken; Firstly, the content should be written by experienced professionals. This ensures an automatic inclusion of context within the given information. Secondly, the content should be put out when its context is in relevance to the world. Moving on, we realize that bold, striking headlines pull in audiences of greater masses. Furthermore, the presence of infographics jazz up the content and marries it to the context in a way that it is not monotonous.

Ultimately, as Bill Gates once said, Content is King, and in most ways he is absolutely right; but without context, we would all still picture Harry to be a 5-year-old boy throwing a tantrum.

P.S.
Reading the above article and comprehending the essence of it is easy for us, humans. But in the business world, where “Survival of the fittest” is the war cry, humans do not index the content posted; ‘bots’ do. From the perspective of a layman who wants a certain requirement met, he or she will search on the biggest search platforms, for instance, Google. Google does not comprehend the essence of the article; on the contrary, it searches for keywords or ‘juices’. And if the keywords in the search match the keywords in the content posted, then the company has a winning chance of its content being high up in the search results. The keywords here are the context. In the algorithm of search engines, context is indeed the king and the queen.