As a “content writer”, my role and my job are to “create content”. Yes, but what else? It’s to imagine, to shape things that will interest audiences and people with my little hands.
As for marketing, when you say content, you mean content strategy. It comes with expectations and objectives. In other words, what I shape with my little hands has to be effective.
But if you think about it, the word “content” means everything… therefore it means nothing at all. So you can expect amalgams or absurdities in your “content” which, unfortunately, will interest no one.
Content itself is its own enemy. In fact, content is stuff we publish and broadcast online. It may take different forms (a blog post like this one, a video, messages on social networks or a publication), but it usually has one purpose in the end: promotion. This may even sound cynical – remember the dictatorship keywords prevailing on quality, for example.
In other words, the use of a word too vague and imprecise is quite symptomatic.
We create “content” instead writing articles (with angles, ideas and a reflection). The very idea of ”creating content” refers to an industry term almost as if the brain was a small “content” factory, a tool to manufacture this stuff which is then broadcast.
We almost reach the point where we forget our own interest, content passes through our heads and we write it because we have to “create content”, even if we have nothing to say. One also finds behind this word, the idea of an expiry date, ready to throw away. One consumes a text or a video and forgets it right away.
In the end, the content is running in circles and completely forgets its original purpose. The basic marketing questions are forgotten. Does this interest anybody? If so, who?
On the one hand, such a classification is understandable. It is a way to put together many different forms of expression and transmission of information. But behind all this, “content creation” encourages a race to the bottom. All is content, anyone can create content, anyone can broadcast it. Certainly, yes, but will it interest someone?
