A client recently asked us to do a content assessment, and develop recommendations for a content architecture program. After reviewing one blog, I said, “oh, you don’t have any SMEs (subject matter experts) available to your writers.”
My client blinked. “How can you possibly guess that from reading one blog?”
Dear readers, it’s easy to watch a company generate long-form content that’s intended to be thought leadership, but is instead proving to the reader that there are no SMEs engaged in the content creation process. And that choice, to continue to produce content that is not legitimized by expertise, is a decision that tells the customer, subtly and subconsciously, that you think you can get away with making it up as you go along.
That is absolutely, 100%, not the takeaway you want your client to have.
And from a fully pragmatic perspective, what’s the point of putting effort into generating content that doesn’t delight your customers? Better to produce no content at all, than to produce content that proves that no one is steering your content practice ship.
So what are some of the dead giveaways? I’m so glad you asked!
Referencing old articles
The hyphen in email
This is a subtler tell, but it’s fun to spot in the wild.
In English, which is a language made up of many other languages, we do a thing called compounding, where we squash two words together to convey meaning across them. The technical term for a word entirely new to the language, describing a previously undescribed event, generated by a subject matter expert in that field, is a protologism. In other fields, like literary criticism, sociology, and politics — places that move more slowly than technology does — a word can remain a protologism for decades while people debate and consider, before finally accepting it, and it becomes a neologism. Neologisms are words that have been widely adopted, and where the initial source can be pretty readily ascertained.
There’s a tech-specific word for how words progress in technology spaces: netymology; the origin and derivation of technical terms. That’s because in technology, the progression of words through the language is much, much faster than in other fields.
In this example, “Email” used to be “electronic email”, two words. Then “electronic” was shortened to “e”, and we hyphenated it, “e-mail”. Then, we decided the hyphen was useless, and as with most compound words, the hyphen dropped out, and it’s “email” now. If you read early documents around ARPANET, it’s “electronic mail”. But no one ever says that now, unless they’re referencing the ancient history of the internet.
So, from a technical perspective, you can see where a writer became familiar with a piece of technology by how far in the progression of the neologism the word they choose to describe the technology, is.
Which means, specifically, that if hyphenated, “e-mail” appears either in reference or in the blog you’re reading itself, you are not dealing with an author that is au courant.
Who, exactly?
All fields have people in them who are acknowledged experts. Generally, people who are familiar with a field know who those experts are, and reference them directly. If you’re writing about cooking, your reader knows that Julia Childs is not interchangeable with Paula Deen, that Anthony Bourdain’s expertise is along very different lines from Joël Robuchon’s, and that Gordon Ramsay comports himself differently from José Andrés.
Every technological field of expertise has its own set of rock stars. If you’re writing about WannaCry, your authority is Marcus Hutchins. If you’re writing about physical security, it’s Deviant Ollam. If you’re writing about social engineering, it’s Kevin Mitnick. Bug bounties definitely involve referencing Katie Moussouris. Granted, there is some argument here or there, but for the most part, authoritative references are pretty universal.
So if your content instead references an agency that your reader has to look up to understand, the SMEs have left the building. People who understand a field write about the other people who understand the field. If that reference to domain-specific authority is missing, it’s highly likely that the SMEs were not consulted in the writing of the piece.
False appeal to relevance
Authoritative language doesn’t need to use anything other than the facts at hand to make itself relevant. If the author is an authority, they simply write about what they know, and assume the reader will come along. Which is why when you start seeing phrases like “now more than ever” and “these days,” the phrase fails to be a call to action and instead becomes a marker of needless hyperbole. If the writing has expertise behind it, the solutions involved in the call to action will be drawn naturally and evidently from the facts discussed.
The reader gives the content importance by choosing to read it in the first place; beating them over the head with your perception of its importance is less than masterful.
Your content is your credibility
The content that you use to represent your business should be content that you can stand proudly behind as representative of your expertise. And while it’s appealing to spend less time and less money on blogs and think pieces written in ways that leverage speed and keywords rather than breadth and depth of knowledge, in the end it won’t give you the credibility that is long form content’s main purpose. If you don’t have an SME behind what you write, as a business it’s better to stick to short-form content, where the lack of expertise is less obvious.
Tl;dr: There’s no sense in driving traffic to your site if you’re not putting your best foot forward.
