Don't Do It - Don't Ruin Your Reputation

I’m going to double down on a point from last week’s article on content quality versus quantity:

Don’t publish, post, share or re-tweet anything that you haven’t read or fully understand.

Just don’t.

You might experience a short term bump in traffic due to your increased posting frequency but eventually it’s going to bite you in the ass.

Here’s why...

It’s About Trust

As human and machine curation tools get better it’s going to be increasingly easy to publish more.  And while this content promises to be of high quality and relevant to your audience, you’re publishing information that you haven’t read.

Whether I find your content on Google or Facebook or whether I’m already on your digital footprint and I’m looking to see what kind of business you are - if what you publish and share wastes my time, I’m not going to give you my money.

The minute you put your business’ reputation behind a piece of content that doesn’t reflect your brand, you are weakening your credibility and undermining your authority.

In the coming content wars, trust and authority will be everything.

Find yourself procrastinating and avoiding your work?  Listen to this, it really helps you get things done

Image Credit: Don’t Do It!!!!!!! By Greg Andrews on Flickr

The Machines Are Coming

Lots of things in the press recently about machines beating humans, predicting sports and even running for President.  The future is most definitely here and it’s going to have an impact on your marketing strategy.

Right now it’s reckoned there are 1500 stories that could appear in your news feed every time you log into Facebook. 

The primary limiter of that number is quality.

Human Curation

Tools like quuu.co offer the promise of human curation.  Creators pay a fee to submit their content which is vetted by humans for quality.  Fee paying publishers can then have that vetted content sent to their social feeds.

Which sounds great until you find that maybe you don’t agree with the curators, and you end up spending time vetting content you've already paid for.

Arms Race

Of course, the promise of AI content curation is that unlike humans, machines are going to learn faster, not sleep, and they’re going to cost a hell of a lot less.

Which if you extrapolate out means that in the not too distant future, anybody with a digital footprint can pump out huge amounts of super relevant content and the amount of information is going to skyrocket.

That Facebook figure of 1500 is going to look remarkably quaint in a few years time.

What to Do?

It’s time to forgo the false dichotomy of quality and quantity in the content marketing world.  

The only thing we can do as business owners is double down on our unique, personal experiences so that when a prospect does finally see us, we appear radically more competent than our competition.

Publish less, publish better, publish human.

Written while listening to: Bargaining VI - 137 Bpm by musicto

Image Credit: GOOGLE MAN (Alpha Man) 2013 by Christopher Dombres on Flickr