Evernote as a content distribution channel

I’m addicted to Evernote. I use it throughout the day to capture my meeting notes and other thoughts. I was recently joking with a fellow Evernote user and colleague about how the tool makes us smarter and dumber; smarter because we now have a record of everything but dumber because that record lives on a device, not in our heads. 

Evernote is an interesting platform to study from a content distribution point of view. There are plenty of users like me who rely on Evernote and interact with the tool a dozen or more times every day. Evernote realizes that and they’re creating an entirely new content discovery ecosystem to make the tool even more useful.

I’m talking about the Context service Evernote added to their Premium version. Buried deep in that announcement is a note about how Context integrates The Wall Street Journal with your notes. It’s a brilliant idea and a content discovery and reuse pattern we’ll see much more of in the future.

Let’s say you’re prospecting for new customers and doing some homework prepping for a meeting with one of them tomorrow. We’ll call them XYZ Corp. You do Google searches, review the XYZ Corp’s website and research new XYZ Corp. contacts on LinkedIn. As you’re doing this you’re gathering details and placing them in Evernote as a cheat sheet for tomorrow’s meeting. Evernote Premium now sees that you’re recording information about XYZ Corp. and pulls up relevant articles about them from The Wall Street Journal; all this takes place within Evernote turning the tool into a new content discovery and consumption resource.

This isn’t rocket science and it’s not anything new. Google’s Gmail scans your inbox and has been serving up related ads for years. But now we’re seeing tools like Evernote take it to a new level: Rather than simply serving links to random sites, Evernote feeds users content from a highly trusted source and brand, The Wall Street Journal.

The key, of course, is to serve this content in an unobtrusive manner. Evernote is a productivity tool and the last thing I want is to be faced with a bunch of popups and annoying interruptions, forcing me to click close buttons so I can focus on the work at hand. Privacy advocates will once again freak out, but over time they too will realize there are benefits to services like this.

This is just the start. Look for tools like Evernote to add more content streams to their Premium version; maybe they’ll even have vertical editions of the tool (e.g., Evernote for Investors, Evernote for Marketers, etc.). Publishers should jump at the opportunity to participate because it extends their reach and helps keep their brands in front of readers, both old and new.

Comments

[C. Lee McKenzie]

I'm not terribly techie, but does this new connectivity rely on keywords to make the selection? Sounds interesting and efficient.

[Joe Wikert]

Yes, I'm assuming Evernote scans your entries looking for keywords they can match up to headlines/stories in the WSJ.