This morning, at 4:14, my husband left for work turning the lock behind him. A typical engineer, he wouldn't dream of leaving his sleeping family exposed with an unlocked door. You can argue it's nature or training or experience but one thing's for sure. He doesn't take risks when it comes to his work or his family. While content marketing doesn't present health and safety issues, I see evidence of risky behaviour all the time and am guilty myself.
Going on autopilot
The content marketing recipe for success is simple develop original content, make it findable for Google and distribute it through social media. Early on, we talked about how it's all free of charge, too. But here's the problem; to implement a content marketing system successfully takes:
- Time
- Writing talent
- Networking capability
- Decent idea about how Web 2.0 works
Not many businesses, especially small ones, can become publishers and still run their core business. So what happens? We start taking short cuts or go on autopilot to manage the load. Here are some examples:
- Content aggregators
Not long ago I saw an update on LinkedIn perfectly illustrating the problem. A book publisher I know writes about literacy and curates excellent content on the topic. The post in question was talking about literacy in tarot card reading. I knew immediately it was an example of content marketing by autopilot. I read the post and, sure enough, it was a low quality, SPAMMY article scraped from several sources and loaded with prime keywords. It also had the ability to levy brand damage if the reader didn't know the business as well as I do. When I alerted the publisher, they admitted to using a service to provide content and didn't know what was being posted. - Not doing your homework
I've been caught in the same trap myself. I volunteer with Women in Technology, WA (WITWA). Part of my work involves running their social media activity. During a deadline crunch, I posted an article on Twitter from Fast Company titled, How come there aren't more women in technology? It's a good publication and the title reflected our mission of getting more women into science, technology and math careers. I didn't read the article. It was full of pseudo-science concluding women just weren't up to it due to their "hormones, brain anatomy, and mirror neurons". Believe me when I say I was called on the carpet in the biggest way. - Social Media integration
Social media tools pitch the ability to integrate with other products. Appealing to the harassed and harried content marketer, they seduce us with "post once to all your profiles". The problem is you don't have the same audience on every channel. If you did, there wouldn't be any point in having more than one channel. I can't tell you the number of times I've tried to engage with someone on Twitter only to find out it's a `bot version of their Facebook stream. - Auto posting
Auto posting can be useful when you're away from your desk for certain periods or have something that benefits from repetition – like conference details. You can appear to be active even when you're not. Herein lies the problem; you're not really there. When abused, auto posting turns you into a full-fledged `bot and all the work you've done to build a community is quickly erased.
Despite early claims, content marketing isn't free. It's not a particularly difficult practice to grasp but it takes dedication and persistence to deploy. While tempting to take shortcuts, the risks to your business and your brand are significant. At the very least, make sure you read every word you post. Only distribute your content to channels where you plan to be active. Avoid the lure of autopilot content marketing and you'll save your brand from a crash and burn.
Have you ever been embarrassed by something you did on autopilot?
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