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Cut the Crap - Avoiding the Trap of Crap Content
by Enzo F. Cesario
Advertising Articles
Published on this site: December 8th, 2010 - See
more articles from this month
People are a notoriously self-interested lot. They avoid
activities that don't benefit them, skip events that bore them
and reject content that doesn't interest them in some way. They
aren't going to go out of their way to read up on an article
simply because it has all the information the author thinks is
vital and important if they personally feel that article is a
waste of their time. Indeed, nothing is a surer waste of
someone's time than a crappy, poorly assembled article. A piece
of copy could have the very recipe for successful nuclear fusion
buried on page 14, but if it bored readers away on page 9, no one
will ever dig deep enough to find it and society will continue to
churn out dirty coal and uranium waste.
This raises the natural question: What exactly is "crappy"
content? The short and almost tautological answer is "content
that people don't like," but simply saying that doesn't get a
writer anywhere. There are many kinds of crappy content, each
with its own unique reasons for being a dull and uninteresting
lump rather than a well-polished gem of online commentary.
- SEO Smash
First, let it be said that there are few techniques as important
to online brand marketing at this time than Search Engine
Optimization. Google rightly can claim to rule the web by means
of its indexing power. A recent merger between Microsoft's
software and the Yahoo! search engine was described in terms of
its ability to challenge the reigning king, Google, not on its
own merits. So, the ability to get content noticed by search
engines through the use of keywords, meta tags and proper
formatting is all a vital portion of the content process.
However, any article first approached from the angle of creating
an SEO-perfect piece, rather than with a focus on presenting an
existing idea through the lens of an SEO effort, is going to get
called out as crap. SEO-centric writing leads to articles that
are little more than keyword phrases badly hashed together with
poor grammar and unusual contortions of the English language, and
people notice this kind of writing. They might pop by for a look,
but they won't stick around. First have something to say, then
learn the best way to say it.
- Humor Bludgeon
There's a trend on the web for articles to be entertaining,
funny and even to an extent snarky or sarcastic. This trend can
be seen in the success of biting commentary sites such as
Something Awful or the new Rifftrax DVDs (a series dedicated
entirely to making fun of poorly-made movies).
Everyone wants to imagine they're a clever, witty genius who can
turn a fairly dull piece of writing into biting social commentary
and satire. Most of these people are not such paragons of humor,
however. Instead, their writing comes across as forced and
scraping for obvious jokes that seem tired and strained. As a
rule of thumb, if a funny turn of phrase comes to mind on its
own, a writer should feel free to give it a try. If the writer
has to consciously think about how to make something sound funny,
it probably doesn't need to sound funny - and doesn't belong in
the article.
- The Meme Beam
A variation on the topic of humor and witty banter above,
memetics is a theory of social information transmission. Memes
are ideas that are passed and replicated between people, and on
the web they tend to take the form of popular sayings or pictures
that catch on and go viral. Caturday is a meme, being the
tendency of people to post funny pictures about cats on
Saturdays. Other memes reference an imagined rivalry between
pirates and ninjas, zombie apocalypses and other esoteric topics
of web discussion.
A well-referenced meme can make an article more entertaining. A
forced meme gets nothing more than rolled eyes and a disparaging
snort in most cases, and quickly-spread criticism in the worst
instances. Unless there's a compelling reason to include a meme
- such as a particular target audience, or the fact that your
brand focuses on a specific meme - don't try.
- Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
Few things are more irritating than wasting someone's time. The
above examples are bad, and each one can lead to an article being
dismissed, but they are also forgivable and won't produce as
virulent a reaction as presenting someone a piece of content that
does them no good at all. Avoid this trap with all possible
effort and ingenuity, because the moment it gets out that a brand
has nothing to contribute, that brand is finished.
Instead, make sure every piece of content put up as part of a
brand contributes something to the lives of the readers or
viewers absorbing the content in question. Provide a tip about
acquiring the product, a handy maintenance routine for keeping it
running or even a story explaining how the brand has learned from
its mistakes in its latest ad campaign and that it's listening
to the audience. Do something to contribute to the conversation.
If the brainstorming meeting can't say in less than 2 minutes
why a particular piece of content is going up, don't put it up.
Enzo F. Cesario is an online branding specialist
and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content
agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos
and social media in the "voice" of our client's
brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more
recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at
http://www.iBrandCasting.com/.
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