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Content, schmontent … where are the editors?
Some of the very best content about marketing and selling appears right here at Focus.com. But too much content that business prospects and customer see might not even earn a “C” in 11th grade English. Poor composition, mis-spellings, muddled or coarse written expression, and such … producing a “Huh?” at best and full-stop rejection at worst.
In my view, there are two key reasons for this: one can get out of high school and college nowadays without being able to write cogently, and too many businesses let almost everyone write anything … e-mail, social posts, inquiry responses … without anyone else editing them for content, style, or continuity with other messaging.
What’s your take on all this? And what might companies do to improve the written content (on-line and off) so it engages better and produces more leads and sales?
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4 Answers
Well I must say, and maybe I am from the old school, but content errors are a big turn off. I am not perfect in my output at times either, but I sure try to be.
My eyes head straight for grammatical errors in everything I read. On the other hand, many people view web content/writing as casual;and not held to the same standards as off line or hard copy content. I think this is a grave mistake considering the potential exposure of online content tends to be much greater. Overall I personally feel it makes a bad impression. Companies should be very careful to monitor their content output, assuring it of quality. It's an easy and almost feasible assumption to base the quality of their services/offering, on the quality of what they are marketing themselves with.
The most effective way I see for companies to monitor their output is to have a designated or a few designated individuals handling these tasks. Even if the author appears to be someone else within the company. These people should be the voice - assuming, of course, they know how to put sentences together.
Jennifer
I have to agree with this 100%. But with the advent of auto-correct on Mac, even I find myself having to carefully proofread anything and everything I write, because it will inadvertently change some of my words to things that make no sense at all.
I think this could be a reason why you see more basic errors showing up in writing the past few months.
We live in an era where all too often we see the following signature on emails and other forms of communication:
"Sent from my Blackberry so please excuse typos and misspellings"
Note to readers: Not picking on Blackberry - please feel free to substitute your model device of choice.
But as Jennifer points out, we have unfortunately adopted the web/mobile world as the benchmark for what's acceptable in terms of content quality. In today's world it's more about quantity, which includes how many times you can redistribute and re-purpose the same content to extract as much [perceived] value from it as possible - typos and all!
Glad to see someone else from the old school on this subject. Noww iff i colud jsut stopp maknig thoose tpyos mysefl....
I could spend the whole morning ranting about this! There's a big difference between casual (which is okay) and wrong (bad grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.). There's also a big difference between an individual email I send from my phone, where I ask for indulgence because I'm dealing with that frustrating tiny touch keypad, and a blog or social media post that's part of a content marketing strategy.
I think it's less that people think it's okay to be sloppy in the web/mobile world and more that fewer people even know what's right and wrong.
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