What’s the point?

Written by Jim Woodcock

A while back I saw a press release announcing that a large, well-known manufacturing company had started a blog.

In and of itself so what, right?

Blogs are a staple of the b2b marketing world. But, a blog that’s worthy of its own PR? A PR that was picked up and published by a major outlet? Must be good. So I took a look.

And, gentle reader, what I found was not good. It was in fact ‘very bad’. It was uncomfortable to read and I felt a bit embarrassed for them — the whole tone was weird.

Now, I am very much guilty of a linguistic flourish every now and again, but before I had finished the first paragraph of the new blog I realised I was reading it in the style of Richard Burton’s intro to the War of the Worlds.

All content needs a bit of drama, some sense of peril. I felt this was a little over the top though.

For context the average word length in the first paragraph of the blog was 6.4 characters (vs 4 so far in this post). Some 57% of the words used in the blog are considered 'difficult' words (24% here) and the reading age is 'college graduate' (13 year old here).

The more I read the post the more I thought ‘who on Earth writes like this’?

The conclusion I came to is that no one writes like this, because no one wrote it. A quick check through some AI detection tools confirmed that 90%+ of the content was generated by AI. 

God knows there has been plenty written about generative AI ‘content’ by minds immeasurably superior to my own, and that specific blog isn’t in any way unique — there’s plenty of AI slop masquerading as human content already.

The company’s newly promoted blog struck me as particularly insane though. The fact that someone read it (you'd hope) and then pressed publish is worrying for everyone involved, not least for those carefully managing the brand identity.

If you’re going to go to the effort of launching a blog, promoting its launch and trying to get people to visit it, is it not also worth the effort of having something worth reading (and readable) when visitors get there?

To quote (again) Scroobius Pip’s Death of the Journalist:

“Throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick. But make no mistake, your wall's still covered in shit”

Great blogs help the reader to solve a problem, entertains them or demands a response. If you get it right the reader comes back for more. You build trust, thought leadership and you stand out for all the right reasons.

So what do great blogs have that AI slop doesn't? A human writer, who knows the subject. Sure, they cost more (quite a lot more) and they will create something worth reading that helps you build an engaged audience. Otherwise, what's the point? Computers talking drivel to nobody at all is a dystopian future H G Wells would surely swerve.

I am waiting for the next post to drop and I will definitely be reading it, but not for the reasons the marketing team had in mind.