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Content still king? Maybe, but it is not an absolute ruler in a networks media world. You’ve got to be thinking about complex, complementary distribution channels to succeed.

Matthew Hurst at data_mining  has a useful Blogpulse graph and analysis about the upward trend of people attaching “post to del.icio.us” and “Digg this” style buttons.

I’m grateful for the idea. I’m just pondering what the most useful buttons to recommend attaching to good content are. If you include too many things can get confusing – the bottom of an article or post will start looking like an over-achieving cub scout or over-enthusiastic TGI Friday waiter’s hat – a blaze of buttons.

Are del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit now the first choice choice for this sort of thing I wonder?

What we do when we add these buttons is hope to be useful to our readers but also to give them a little nudge to push us out into these aggregator distribution channels.

In the days of channel media we had to think only about one or two channels of distribution for a piece of content. In the age of networks media we need to think about all of the most useful ways to distribute our content.

Editors of online publications think very hard about this sort of thing. Many UK magazines get a significant amount of traffic from the likes of Digg and Newsvine.

Just look at all the ways the Telegraph makes sure its content can be redistributed. Here’s a random article from today’s front page. You can print it, email it, bookmark it to del.icio.us and submit it / vote for it on Digg, Newsvine, NowPublic and Reddit. And there’s all sorts of other distribution approaches being taken. Here’s a visual I knocked together to illustrate this:

Many of these distribution methods can be considered complementary, especially to search engines and making the article more findable. If the article is found and found to be useful by enough people, some may link to it giving search engines more “signs of quality” that will deliver it better rankings and more traffic over time.  

: : So I took a look at a few more titles and how they use bookmarking and aggregator distribution…

New Scientist plumps for a similar list of distribution networks, under its tools section it offers much the same links as the Telegraph, but substitutes My Yahoo! for NowPublic.

Vnunet keeps it simple, with just del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit (although it seems to use the del.icio.us logo for Reddit.

I find it interesting that CNet, the US tech site, which I consider to be one of the most successful traditional media brands when it comes to learning from and engaging with communities and social media, goes for a simple D & D (Digg and del.icio.us) offer on its articles.

At the end of the day though none of these technical distribution techniques make as much difference as providing high quality, useful and engaging content – the Guardian and the BBC don’t go in for aggregator and bookmark links on their articles but both score high in del.icio.us and Digg had a story from each on its front page when I checked just now…

Content still king? Maybe, but it is not an absolute ruler in a networks media world. You’ve got to be thinking about complex, complementary distribution channels to succeed.

* * Update: if you’ve read this far you’ll probably like a post called “Not all traffic is created equal” from publishing 2.0.