For years we’ve heard that “Content is King,” and businesses round the world are listening. The expansion of social media has provided a platform for distribution of content like never before, and companies are churning out articles, blogs, white papers and alternative content at a record pace.
So what’s the problem?
Not too a few years ago, content was created by analysts, researchers, writers and journalists who spent a good deal of time developing well-written, thoughtful and provocative material. This material was printed for readers who had a deep and real interest in the topic at hand.
Whether it absolutely was exploring new vendors and service offerings or researching competitors and market opportunities, customers of this content can be reasonably assured that what they downloaded would be price their time – and the price of their email address or contact data.
Not so much currently. Cranking out content has become an end in itself.
For many content marketers, content is simply a sales hook designed to capture email addresses (aka leads). There is less concern regarding providing a high quality product, as long as the goal of building that email list is achieved.
The result’s an entire lot of noise.
It’s becoming a lot of and more difficult to search out quality content at intervals the cacophony of the online.
People who are legitimately researching a topic must struggle through mountains of low quality, bait-and-switch content so as to search out a couple of gems of information. Even then, stats can be suspect and must be verified through multiple sources (and not just those who blindly quote an equivalent knowledge or “facts”).
I’m not saying there is no nice content out there. There is plenty of smart content. The problem is finding it.
