AI can't change something that was never defined
Content "Quality" is a god that takes many forms
Hello content friends!
This week’s op-ed is by Robyn Showers, marketing and content leader who built and led content teams that drove growth for Saas favorites like Vimeo and Hubspot, among many others in her 10+ years in marketing.
She’s objectifying (speaking of definitions: no, not that objectify, the other one) the holy (no, not wholly) subjective goddess, Quality, to help us create our own tribes and traditions around her (Quality’s, that is) more canonical principles of delight and purpose. With a little help, of course, of our minion AI friends.
Oh shoot, I might have given away the ending. Then again, Quality doesn’t often take the kind of linear form that indicates “one thing” and then “the next”, preferring an everything everywhere all at once kind of vibe most days. In which case this could just be the intro of the century, possibly edging on a pun, surely sparking a little curiosity - her favorite.
❤️ Devin
P.S. You can catch-up on the episode Robyn is reacting to here:
“Content isn’t canon”... but, is anything?
One of the things you said was that quality doesn't have a solid definition, and that’s totally true. But I would argue that in content marketing right now, absolutely nothing is canonical.
I've been on the job hunt recently, and one of the things I’m learning from all these interviews is to always ask what the content marketing department does at that company—because it can change wildly depending on the stage of the company, how they are structured, and what other talent is on board.
Sometimes Content Marketing is also the comms department, sometimes it's all product-led content, sometimes it includes media content and other times it's just written content. It really is wildly different depending on who the marketing leader is and how they have experienced content marketing in their career.
There isn’t one thing that is “content marketing” because everything is content. Because content fuels the entire marketing effort, it's hard to determine how to dole out responsibilities when drawing up an org chart.
Quality has a similar problem: there are a million ways you could define quality, so where do you draw the line?
We don’t always know what good is…but we sure do know 💩 when we see it (smell it?)
There isn’t a shared definition of “quality content” because what makes content “good” is somewhat subjective. People have different preferences: some people like shorter content, some like longer content, some think backing up your opinions with a bunch of research is pompous, while some people only care about what you say if you show your work).
But while quality is a matter of personal opinion, I think there is a shared definition of shit content.
In honor of Devin eating all the grapes in this episode, which I for one thought was really funny (snack on, Devin — snack on), I'm going to use grapes as an example.
Not everyone likes the exact same kind of grapes. I like juicy, red grapes. I know people who like green grapes. My husband likes cotton candy grapes (which are admittedly awesome). So the definition of which kind of grape is the best depends on you and your grape preferences.
BUT there’s one thing we can all agree on: our definition of “bad.” If the grapes are shriveled, have mold on them, or if they look inedible in any way, we will be turned off no matter what our definition of a “good” grape is.
Whether it’s grapes or articles, we all know when we encounter something bad. Like when content has been pumped through an AI system and has no personality of its own, or when content is created just to take over a SERP and not to help the reader solve a real problem.
We agree on what quality isn’t.
How do we agree on what quality is?
How good is “good enough”?
As a content professional, one of the most important things you can do is define quality within your leaders and colleagues early on.
Defining quality is more than establishing editorial guidelines and brand style guides. It’s a set of standards that applies to all content creation that represents the brand. When working with my teams, I include a section in my strategy decks on what makes content “good.” It's a bar I set that all content we create must clear in order to put it out into the world.
I boil it down to three things that every piece of content needs in order to clear a basic, universal bar:
It has to have a purpose. For B2B content, it’s about being useful. For consumer-focused content, it's more about being entertaining. In both cases, the content needs to serve a purpose. It needs to do something internally, and externally, it has to actually provide some kind of value. It has to solve a real problem for the audience, even if it's a small problem.
It has to be original, meaning it has to add something to the conversation. If it's just a rehash of other people’s thoughts, it has to add something new, like framing it in a way that is clearer, more succinct, or easier to digest. It has to do something that other articles or other videos out there aren't doing.
It has to be delightful, even if it's just the delight in the authenticity of the person or the brand. Maybe the delight is that it's funny. Something about it has to leave a positive impression on the person who watches it or reads it.
Shipper vs. Polisher
A few years back, Katie Mitchell (then at Sprig, now at MKT1) posted this on LinkedIn:
I love this point of view (so much, in fact, that we booked her on a Vimeo series we were piloting for an episode called “This v. That: Make it fast or make it great?”).
What Katie is getting at is not necessarily that marketers should lower their quality bar — but she (rightly, I think) argues that you shouldn’t spend most of your time polishing (like Margaret says).e If the content is 85% of the way there? Ship it. There’s still a bar— what is good enough to go out the door—but setting it purposefully lower than “great” makes room for learnings that will come after the content ships.
I like to use social media to test ideas and see if they resonate before we do something bigger. This conserves resources by conducting market research on the fly.
Margaret asks, how can you achieve quality content without shipping? In many cases, you can’t. But in those cases where you need to ship in order to polish, you still have your baseline quality bar, so your followers are still getting a consistent experience.
Is the bar the chicken or the egg?
When it comes to the question of AI’s effect on the credibility of the content, I think we have to remember that content credibility has been an issue for long before AI arrived on the scene. The robots are just picking up a baton we marketers started running with.
AI is definitely not the beginning of untrustworthy marketing tactics. We marketers, SEOs, journalists, companies, etc., have been trying to game the system since the inception of the internet.. We’re complicit, if not totally to blame. As platforms, channels, martech, etc., have evolved, there were more systems that you could take advantage of because they were new and there were more cracks in them.
That’s why it's important to define quality. To set guardrails that help make the internet a better experience, not worse.
I think there's an innate sense of what we want to read or watch and what we don't, based on our own psychology. But I also think advances in technology and the evolution of how we consume content on the internet absolutely changes our definition of the bar.
Here’s an example: The very first time I came across a long, in-depth article— a skyscraper article, for folks familiar with that term—I thought it was brilliant. All the answers to my questions in one place! Up until then, there had been blog posts of 500 words or less, web pages were pretty short, and you ended up having to consume a lot of different pages of content just to get one complete answer. So, the idea that all of the information I needed was on one page was lovely.
It wasn't until I had to wade through a billion long-form articles that they no longer stood out—they were just the bar.
The internet of the past suffered from information scarcity—the exact opposite is true today. AI contributes to this. It is no longer impressive to me that an article clearly states the answer to a question in a logical way, in bullets, and in a scannable format because that's something AI can do well. Now, hat isn't great content, that's just the bar for readable content.
These days, I expect original research, expert opinions, stories, etc. Great content, today, is an experience. It makes us think, makes us feel. It does more than just answer questions. Frankly, ChatGPT can have that!
So here’s to the bar — may our content get better and better (and not devolve into robots talking to robots ever again)!