Bad Content, Good Outcomes?

If you are in the content marketing goldfish bowl, you’d need to be living under the fish tank’s decorative castle to have not seen that there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about storytelling, called “Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers” - which created quite a stir.

The premise of the article is that their reporter, Katie Deighton, “had noticed an uptick in mythical skill of storytelling on corporate job ads and delved a little into why that's happening after all those ninja/guru/prophet jobs disappeared…”.

While this suggests a little skepticism, the article then goes on to discuss various roles advertised for storytellers, LinkedIn statistics, the decline in the number of reporters, and a quote from the National Wild Turkey Federation.

It doesn’t, however, really talk about content marketing, the practice and strategy, or recognise that this isn’t suddenly a new buzzy trend. As author Ann Handley commented, “the real issue isn’t that companies need a new role. It’s that they’ve undervalued the one that’s been there all along.”

Just this Ann Handley post elicited hundreds of comments, and there was plenty of other commentary in my feed, poking at what they saw as missing from the article. As an article about content marketing and storytelling, the great and the good of the discipline clearly found it wanting

In the comments to Ann's post, my chum and author of a couple of books on the topic, Robert Rose, described the reporter’s summary as “tell me you don't understand storytelling without telling me you don't understand storytelling”.

However, in a later LinkedIn post, the reporter shared that the original WSJ article “received more feedback on the Storyteller Renaissance than I have on any other story this year”.

So, by any other metric, this article was very successful, as it generated significant engagement, especially with community leaders like Ann Handley (with her half-a-million LinkedIn followers) - the very people who would give this article some energy.

What I am exploring with this week’s thought is, was this a good article? And what makes a good article, the content or the outcome?

By expressing an opinion and leaving lots of gaps, there was room for subject matter experts to pick up the baton, comment, share with their audience, and discuss. If the article had been more anodyne and maybe more academic about the topic, we may never have heard about it.

Whether this was the author's intention or not, it’s proof that our content needs to be for someone, and therefore NOT for someone else.

Its incompleteness (according to the experts) gave room for folks to wade in on the topic, it touched identity and professional pride, and invited correction. The article wasn’t wrong enough to dismiss, but not right enough to settle the conversation.

This suggests that if we want engagement and reach, we need to provoke and leave room for the voice, expertise, and opinion of our audience when we create content.

So, to my question - was it a good article? Well, by the standards of craft and practitioner depth, according to the experts, it’s not. But from an outcome perspective, of reach, conversion, and social energy, it’s good.

Suggesting that content doesn’t have to be complete to be effective; sometimes, incompleteness is the feature, not the bug.

Which is great for me, writing half-arsed articles like this every week ;-)