CrayCray
OMG Member
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2017
- Messages
- 116
In 1996, Microsoft owner Bill Gates published an essay titled ‘Content is King’. Fast forward two decades: Over 2.5 billion posts have been published on WordPress sites, and over seven thousand tweets are sent every second. Eager to mine the rich seam of connected consumers, North American marketing companies spent an average of 32% of their budget on content marketing in 2016 (up 7% on 2015). It seems Bill was right.
However, content can also prove a potential pitfall if it’s not presented professionally – especially written content. Author Josh Bernoff has suggested that poor writing costs American businesses nearly $400 billion every year. In one extreme example, a simple typo cost Alitalia Airlines around $7.2m in 2006 after they accidentally advertised business class flights from Toronto to Cyprus at $39 instead of $39,000.
Even on the intrinsically informal mediums of Twitter and Facebook, inaccuracies can be damaging and embarrassing. Consistent spelling errors, false claims, and mistaking a council worker from Brighton for his own daughter, do not seem to have damaged Donald Trump’s credibility among his supporters, but the majority of social media content producers are not so bulletproof. A 2013 study revealed that 42.5% of web users found spelling or grammatical errors on social media were the most damaging blunders for a brand’s online reputation.
So, although content may be king, royalty is certainly not above reproach in the self-publishing era and, when skilled writers are not engaged and careful planning is eschewed, the risk of regicide remains real.
However, content can also prove a potential pitfall if it’s not presented professionally – especially written content. Author Josh Bernoff has suggested that poor writing costs American businesses nearly $400 billion every year. In one extreme example, a simple typo cost Alitalia Airlines around $7.2m in 2006 after they accidentally advertised business class flights from Toronto to Cyprus at $39 instead of $39,000.
Even on the intrinsically informal mediums of Twitter and Facebook, inaccuracies can be damaging and embarrassing. Consistent spelling errors, false claims, and mistaking a council worker from Brighton for his own daughter, do not seem to have damaged Donald Trump’s credibility among his supporters, but the majority of social media content producers are not so bulletproof. A 2013 study revealed that 42.5% of web users found spelling or grammatical errors on social media were the most damaging blunders for a brand’s online reputation.
So, although content may be king, royalty is certainly not above reproach in the self-publishing era and, when skilled writers are not engaged and careful planning is eschewed, the risk of regicide remains real.
