My first stab at a definition of a content garden was this, "A high quality site, edited by journalists and community managers, where there's a combination of paid journalist content, moderated free content, and aggregated content."
Refining the definition of a content garden, today's website has to be developed with an understanding of how the eco-system of the web and internet works. So you have to think about search marketing, social and content generation strategies.
The concept of content gardens really evolved from thinking about works today. Especially in light of the Google Farmer update.
Depending upon your industry and community you may have to have a high quantity of content, but at the same time if you are going to be successful in getting rankings on search engines you have to have an organic strategy for link generation.
Bruce Clay's early online search engine map comes to mind here. Bruce's search engine map played a big part in getting links and helping to build the industry.
Viral marketing, word of mouth marketing, or content that attracts attention is a strategy that works. However, if you know more people the greater the likelihood that your word of mouth campaign will work. Even the Old Spice campaign was an evolution of commercials, an iterative campaign that developed on top of previous campaigns and relationships.
To create a content garden you have to avoid becoming a content farm, but recognize that your content creation process can only be successful if you think about lowering your costs of creation through crowd-sourcing, columnist writing, and that using social has additional benefits for search marketing from the linking strategy that develops as result of the sharing that takes place.
To me a content garden is an effort to manage the content creation process efficiently, and recognize the importance of social media in how the eco-system of how the web works.
Content gardens need social content both because you have the opportunity to create more content at lower costs, and because it helps you build relationships with your wider community. The issue today however, is how do you keep the content quality higher. I think its about giving your social community the tools to manage themselves, and empowering them to manage the community, essentially, community management 101 at its best.
