Differentiating Between Useful and Useless Content

Useless content is rehashed content that is the same old blah blah blah shared from competitor to competitor. So much of it sounds like some boring grade school teacher reciting laundry lists of facts and caveats and advice in a monotone. If your content does not grab your visitor and wake them up and get their attention, it is useless.

Useless content can also be all about the company written with the expectation that the web visitor is dazzled and impressed with your glittering reputation and exciting  intonation of your company virtues and high levels of experience and expertise that you like to talk about.

Useless content is all the stuff on a website that gets between the web visitor and the information that they are actually look for. This often starts with the usual carousel of images that lets the web designer appear to have worked his fingers to the bone. Website owners love these too, because they get to show off what is important to them. Always remember that effective websites are customer centric, not there to stroke the ego. I really dislike carousels.

Useful content is not the usual rehashed blah blah blah but is useful. It is not the writing exercise of english majors writing sentences on subjects they actually know nothing about, but the stories of people engaged in solving problems and creating solutions for customers.

And talking louder does not make boring information any more useful. More volume does not make boring information more impactful. More social media microphones just makes more noise. Extra tweets just make you harder to avoid. . Therefore there is great power is speaking useful information in a still small voice and earning the right to speak as early in the coming conflagration as you can.

Compelling and useful content requires the participation of experts, of sales people, of people in the front office who are dealing with people, their questions, their misunderstandings, their concerns. We describe the only reliable means to get great content here.

We discuss the actual content creation process here. Here is how great content can be created.

So why does useful content happen so seldom? 

This is a critical question, because some of you are going to see the light and decide to step out and be remarkable and you cannot step out and be remarkable unless you can identify what is happening now. We work through the process of how useless content is created here. Maybe you need to look this over and see if anything in particular sounds familiar.

 We talk about antidotes to the industrial brain here.

This is a critical battle for leadership to win. Leadership must be engaged in a strategic content creation system to make content truly effective. It is not something to be left to vendors, or contractors, or the whims of whomever.

Useful content is the only kind of content worth having. Stop and think. Easy brainfart content is a waste of time and it perpetuates the same waste into the future.

Here are some related posts addressing issues surrounding useful content. Understanding the Role of Feedback in Creating Great Content Great Content Matches the Intent of the Web Visitor Strategic Content is Critically Important in Dollars and Cents

OK, who has a thought here? Who have I offended? Feel free to set me straight.