Loved this tweet from Ron Ploof last week:
The content creators’ creed:
We have an obligation to be interesting.
Ron said in a subsequent reply back: ‘It came from a customer considering a company blog. He said, “So you’re saying we have an obligation to be interesting?”‘
We don’t, of course, truly have that obligation.
We are free to go ahead and create the most boring, useless, trivial, mundane, unreadable and unviewable content.
We have that freedom.
There are no set “rules” that dictate what kind of content we must create online.
But…
IF we want people to read, view or listen to our content…
IF we want people to share our content to others…
IF we want people to take action based on our content (visiting a site, downloading something, buying an item, signing up, etc., etc.)…
IF we want people to choose our content amidst the insane amount of content being created each day…
THEN… I agree with Ron…
We have an obligation to be interesting!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Awesome, Dan.
Pure awesome!
Ron
Quoting your footer: “If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either…”
So, useful is the other dimension.
Ha! You know, I’ve been using that footer for years now, and I don’t think anyone’s ever commented on it. Thanks for being the first, Phil!
I guess I’ve always thought that someone could find your content “interesting” but not necessarily “useful”, i.e. it’s interesting to them perhaps intellectually but doesn’t have any real application to what they are doing. Then you could have people who find the info “useful” because it helps them in some tangible way… I guess you could have someone who finds your info “useful” in that it helps, but they don’t consider it particularly “interesting”. Perhaps it solves some mundane issue they have… hmmm… not sure on that. As I think about it, I think to me, “useful” info is probably almost always also “interesting”… so “useful” info is a subset of “interesting”… but perhaps others would find more nuances there.
Whatever the case “We have an obligation to be interesting or useful” doesn’t quite have the same ring, though! 😉
Thanks, Ron… but thank you for that tweet!