1. It has to have as its central guiding purpose the creation of a Content Calendar. It is this calendar which defines the whole rhythm of the studio. The inventor Robin Sloan borrowed a term from economics, and did us all a favour when he popularized the idea of “stock and flow”. Stock is the bedrock, what you have to have all the time. But then: Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. It’s the content you produce that’s as 3 interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. In fact, our social managers prefer to subdivide “stock” between “hero” content, planned annually and produced quarterly; and “proactive content”, planned weekly and produced weekly. All the rest is real time. So a perfect Content Studio’s flow looks like the diagram opposite. 2. It has to be dedicated to a second big purpose, which is to measure how effective all this is, and then not just measure but optimize. Initially it worried me that there were no tools available for assessing the effectiveness of different types of content. But then a brilliant young analyst in our New York team developed a system that can sort pieces of content by their performance against different metrics, including those that link directly to sales. She called it “Pulse”. HOW THE CONTENT STUDIO WORKS