Why do you read your favourite newspaper? What about your favourite magazine? You’d probably answer that it’s because they print content that you find interesting. Seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

But, if you think about it, you also read your favourite newspaper and magazine because of the content they don’t publish. Lots of the time, whether it’s in knowledge management or content management, we think about getting users more content — the old “if they only had the right information at the right time, things would be better” approach.

I don’t know about you, but I have more content to deal with every day than I can possibly handle. Feed updates, emails, voicemails, podcasts, blog posts, the list goes on and on (and I’m sure you can think of many, many more). I would say that around 90% of the content I get in a day remains unread (and the most often unread items are usually automatic notifications, system-generated emails, mass emails, etc.). And I’m not even taking spam into consideration.

I don’t want more content. Period. So what do I want? I more value from what I already get, based on the following 7 principles:

1. Faster. Get me stuff I already read faster than I get it now. Even if you can shave 5 minutes off the time I get it in, it may make a big difference to me.

2. Smarter. Don’t send me an important system-generated message at 4:00 in the morning. Actually, don’t send me anything at 4:00 in the morning.

3. Shorter. Make existing messages more concise and to the point. Provide summaries instead of the entire piece of content, so I easily scan content to pick what I want to read.

4. Easier. Give me a better user interface, a faster search engine and more relevant search results. The more time I spend trying to figure out the interface, the less time I spend reading content.

5. Profiled. I don’t want messages about things I don’t care about. Let me choose what I get notified about — if I care about the telecommunications industry in the Ukraine, let me opt-in to messages about that industry.

6. Less. I like emails and web pages with lots of easily scannable content — finding the perfect frequency for emails is paramount. Weekly summary emails are usually better than RSS feeds for me — it’s easy to miss things in a feed.

7. Personal. I saved the best for last. Getting email or content from a person is highly preferable to getting it from a database, especially if that person can quickly provide me with context for that content. Not to mention it’s always nice to talk to a person.