content is a bad word

This post at SVN got a lot of feedback, some positive, some startingly negative.

If I understand David's intent, I wholeheartedly agree with him – there are a lot of people talking about content as a solution, a strategy or a job in digital. Marketers are especially prone to this habit; we'll just get some content onto our site or Facebook page or Twitter feed, they say, and people will click on it like horny rabbits. Problem solved, now let's collect our cheques and awards, okay?

As commenter Robert Moss says:

Many publishers treat content as a supply chain management issue instead of an act of creativity. They figure more content (good, bad, ugly or indifferent) plus more links equals more people on their sites.

No matter how strategic-sounding the title of the person, it's a very executional attitude toward the word; like a bad art director or developer building a page on his/her own and expecting someone else to make up some "content" for him/her to drop in.

Beyond being a mere generic description of the stuff that consumers actually interact with and care about and return to, what's worse for me, as you can figure out, is that it's disconnected from the real purpose of what you're doing. Using the word content like this means that you've washed your hands of icky details, like thinking about the consumer.

A word like "content" has technical utility – when you're trying to find a category descriptor for the text, images, video and sound that live on a page. But that's about it.

Please – don't use it to describe your purpose or strategy, or worse, in the guise of "content producer," your job; be a storyteller, create experiences, engage people.

Anyone who describes themselves as a "content producer" is, I suspect, creating just that. Generic filler that takes up space and makes you feel like you're "on the web" but which in fact repels real consumers, real reader, real people.

The folks I work with understand that. Make sure the folks you work with understand that, too.