Valuable to me, not to you. It has to be valuable to your consumers (not to you). All too often content produced at the corporate level is self-serving at best and thinly veiled advertising at worse.

Unique perspective. While there is a ton of content that is based on similar content that already exists, no one can bring your perspective to it. It’s your perspective that makes the content unique, and it is your challenge to nurture your content and discover your unique voice, so that more and more people find the value in those unique perspectives. As Oscar Wilde once said, “be you because others are already taken.”

Shareable. Value content gets shared. It not only has to  impresses the consumer, but it must be of such quality that the person consuming it feels like they should share it with the people they know because it will also be valuable to them. Great content gets shared not because you have a widget that makes it easy to share, but because it’s truly valuable.

Findable. Value-based content gets found. In search engines, online social networks and offline. The audience dictates the true value, and the content that is valuable gets linked to, talked about and shared. All of these little actions make the content you are producing that much more findable to those who are looking for it – and for those who will just stumble across it.

Curate the content. Because there is so much content being created, another way to create value-based content is to curate what already exists and focus (like a laser) on what is important to your audience. Nobody will have the ability to read everything that is being published, so any organization that can make sense of the mess is one that is adding tremendous value. I’ve seen great curation happen on Blogs, in Podcasts and in email newsletters. Becoming a respected curator adds value.

Value that I can count on. In a world where any one individual can publish their thoughts in text, images, audio and video instantly (and for free) to the world, it’s hard to tell what is the truth, what is opinion and, ultimately, what has value. Any organization that is creating content must be trustworthy, non-partisan and credible. It’s that last word (“credible”) where your time and energy should be spent. Before publishing any piece of content, ask yourself: “how credible will my organization be perceived once we hit the publish button?” The organizations that produce credible content are the organizations that are creating value-based content.

I tell my ‘students’ that the difference between a thinker and a thought leader is that while they both have a point of view, the thought leader publishes content that is ‘searchable, findable, knowable, usable, shareable’ and through that process they may become ‘credible’ — the six ‘ibbles’ of content marketing! You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source if you’re interested in Mitch Joel’s perspective. You can also follow @danavan on Twitter for lots of great ideas on the topic…