I’m not going to provide you with a full script of the interview. Just quoting a couple of sentences that have been interesting to me.

Marvin Minsky introducing himself

I’m Marvin Minsky, and I teach at MIT in subjects of, theories about, how to make machines that are intelligent, whatever that means.

I come from a combination of mathematics and physics and electrical engineering and psychology and biology, and I try to get my students to combine all those ideas to invent new things.

Why we have slow progress in the field of artificial intelligence?

I see a problem with this field of artificial intelligence. Because biology and physics worked so wonderfully that the people are trying to make intelligent machines would like to imitate it… Hundred years ago there were four great psychologists (Freud, Wundt, William James, Francis Galton) who made rather complicated theories about how the mind works. But then a lot of psychologists tried to imitate the physicists and reduce it to a few simple laws and it didn’t work so well.

The brain doesn’t work in a simple way. Because evolution has been going on for 400 million years in building structures upon structures upon structures.

The neurons in our brains are almost the same as they were 400 million years ago but the organization is much more complicated.

Is the brain just a machine?

I don’t use the word smart; I use the word resourceful.

I don’t think there is any self, and I like Sigmund Freud’s old theory: The brain starts out with a lot of little instinctive things… but as we develop, we also develop what Freud calls ideals and aspirations and ethics and constraints. Freud’s image of development is that most of the mind is resolving conflicts between low-level instincts that are not very different from other animals and high-level values and constraints which we develop in social situations.

So, there’s no person in here… Identity is an illusion.

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There are still many content marketers who use content marketing and permission marketing interchangeably. However, permission marketing is just a sub-category of content marketing and, unfortunately, most of the current content marketing campaigns do not fall into this sub-category.

Permission Marketing is a term coined by Seth Godin. This approach to marketing is based on a clear and strict premise:

In the permission marketing, we bound our scope to the audiences who have knowingly accepted to get into communication with us.

Thus sending an email message to someone who has not registered herself on our mailing list is a violation of the permission marketing premise. The same applies to the phone calls to potential clients without their prior permission.

Thus, all of the cold calling activities are outside the permission marketing boundaries.

Considering the above definition, SEO based campaigns looking for organic traffic are one of the best examples of content marketing in the digital world. However, paid advertising in search engines does not comply with the accepted definition of permission marketing.

As the term permission emphasises, many of the current content marketing campaigns are just implementations of the old mass media campaigns fueled with the digital content.

Although most of the content marketers confirm that growing a smaller community of the audiences using permission marketing approach would much more profitable and sustainable in the long run, still many of them are not patient enough to wait for the slow-yet-organic growth of their audience base.

P.S.: HubSpot has a insightful article comparing content marketing and inbound marketing that can be helpful if you are seeking more ideas in this regard, although the author’s personal opinion is in contrast to what I have suggested here.

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• Long form contents have a higher chance of social sharing (Source: Newswhip report)
• Long form contents inevitably lead to longer stay time of the user on the website (Source: Logic!)
• Long form contents have a better chance of getting a great SEO rank (Source: SerpIQ study)
• Long form contents will likely generate more leads (Source: Curata also SignalvsNoise)
• Long form contents outperform a series of shorter blog posts (Source: Problogger)
• Long form contents have a higher perceived authority of the author (Source: Wordstream and Kissmetrics)
• Long form contents cause longer and more engaging conversations (Source: quicksprout)
• Long form contents get more backlinks (Source: Moz report)

But as every belief needs to be evaluated regularly, the reasons behind credibility of the long form content has to be evaluated considering the ever-changing characteristics of the online world. Especially because search engines are not as blind as before.

In the first years of the introduction of the search concept, search engines were more a computation machine considering so many different content parameters such as content length, domain name, domain rank to find the most credible contents. Just check this list of 200 factors in Google ranking provided by Backlinko and separate the factors showing content characteristics from the factors related to the user behavior.

As in the internet old age, it was not so easy (or popular) to trace user behavior, a significant portion of the traditional SEO ranking parameters were related to the content itself, and the length of the content was surely of the most decisive factors in that paradigm. However, as Google and many other search engines have developed the huge human behavior databases, the relationship between content and the audience is a much precise factor in ranking the contents in comparison to the content characteristics itself.

Besides all the above facts, we should not forget that content creation for the sake of content creation or SEO for the sake of SEO is not justifiable in the current content-saturated world. What we need at the end of the day is conversion. We need profitable user action and the relationship between the content length, and the conversion (to the money and not just to the click) is not as straight as before.

So with all respect to David Ogilvy and his famous quote about long-form content, it seems that there are many other factors in choosing content length:

Use long form when you have a rich message

I’m talking about the rich messages, not important ones. Many important messages can be conveyed with a short sentence or small infographic. Your message is rich if you have so much relevant, useful, data which your audience is looking for and S(he) has to find it in other pages just after leaving your page or blog.

Here‘s a sample of not-so-rich content in long form. Even the best SEO rank would not make a serious conversion (subscription in this case) as the content is just long but not necessarily relevant and you feel that the author has made it deliberately and intentionally long just to bait clicks and hold you there.

Consider your subject and industry before deciding about content length

There are many reports (like Viperchill report) which show that the preferred or at least popular content length is highly dependent on the topic. Personal development articles are one of the longest ones and the readers of this category have got used to the long form. However you can’t expect that the reader of the political news be as patient as the reader of the personal development or financial blogs.

Think about your target audience

Statistics says that a longer content has a better chance of receiving a good SEO rank, Ceteris Paribas. But never ignore the last two words, Ceteris Paribas: with other things the same! This condition is not easily met! So, think about your target audience and their preferences. Demographic factors, interests and their previous knowledge can have a serious impact on their preferences about the content length and SEO rank is determined based on users preference and satisfaction more than any other factor.

What are you looking for?

Are you looking for SEO? for user engagement? Or user conversion? Are you looking for loyal users or accidental customers? Are you trying to collect user clicks or aiming to make your visitor delighted? Sometimes these targets do not overlap! Sometimes a short article can win search engines interest by so many happy visitors but a long article can engage a few visitors and leave the others unhappy and dissatisfied.

So, never decide on the content length blind and based on statistics. Statistics is always talking about the average people and average businesses and average contents. Sometimes we need to ignore them if we are not going to be ordinary!

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