Content Marketing: The Bane of Online Existence
My friend had invited me over for dinner one evening this past summer. It was a very inviting gesture considering that I had not seen him in a while and I was wondering what he had been up to. We sat down that evening and he talked about his life… I asked him how he was doing with everything and then he mentioned that he wanted to be a Digital Creator and create online content on TikTok.
Before that, he worked as a plumber and didn’t know much about business, let alone online content marketing. It was his first foray into a world of seemingly never ending roads to take in terms of marketing his business and trying to get leads. The only problem was that he never had a product to sell. He just had an idea and an ambition – something that we see a lot of these days online and on social media.
It kind of goes like this: You wake up one day, only to find that the world of business has changed. It’s no longer a brick and mortar run establishment such as the mom and pop shops of yesteryear. It’s made up of intricate web designs with keywords and algorithms that track your every move and place product on your social media feed, all the while targeting you and influencing your every decision.
The world has changed.
And with it a host of not just endless web pages and forums, but influencers who try to push and pedal every product or service that you most likely thought was easier to find before the dot com boom was even a thing. Let’s face it: going “online” nowadays is a chore. It’s harder to find good content than to sift through the daily newspaper and read cringy editorial fluff pieces.
I get it. You want that funny meme delivered to your inbox everyday but you also don’t want the dozen ads that come with it. You also want to read that article by your favorite blogger without getting influenced by a guru pushing their next course.
We’ve all been there. And we’ve all done that.
The problem lies in the way we’ve been led to believe that an “online presence” is something to attain to since sliced bread made its way into our language. At a click of a button we have everything we need, and the price to pay is over stimulated brains and distractions.
But wait…there’s more.
My friend sat down with me and counted his remaining days at his job. He was going to quit cold turkey without any savings to back him up and without any remorse about leaving his career that he slaved away at for the past ten years. In a way, he was right to think that way. The companies that are running the world now are running us into the ground and grinding us into endless episodes of depression and anxiety. And for what cost? At the end of the day, we are left tired and wanting more.
We want to go hang out online and play games. We want instant gratification through porn. We want to watch our favorite twitch streamer beat that level that we have been trying to for so long. We want to shop. We want to listen. And we want to waste what little time we have on things that won’t serve us in the long run. Maybe it will for a moment. But we are essentially playing in someone else’s kingdom.
We have grown to love being online and staying online so much that we have forgotten what the point of it all was in the first place: to be apart of a community.
When AOL started getting hugely popular in the 90’s there was no going back. Users wanted freedom and they found that through chat rooms. It was there that you could be anyone but yourself. Or, you could be yourself and hide behind a computer screen. Hopefully nobody would know the real you.
Now, we have nothing to hide. We want the world to see our newfound glory for all that it is. We want likes, and claps, recognition, points and whole other assortments of online noise.
Most importantly, we desire to be heard and seen, now more than ever.
What’s shocking though is how much time and money we will put forth to do all that.
If the recent Bitcoin catastrophe was any indicator of our presence online and how we use internal feedback systems to justify certain behavior, then it is no wonder we have hit rock bottom when it comes to malleable online content. We just need an audience and the rest will work out on its own.
I am convinced that most people are fake. It only takes a scene of worthy potential to create an audience and then content will spread like wildfire. Now we have little girls turned TikTok famous dishing out relationship advice when they aren’t even old enough to drive a car. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is still trying to find a secret file that the former President won’t give up so easily.
Maybe in the future online content will be controlled by one large corporation. In a way, it already is. We let the masses dictate what’s hip and what’s eco-responsible. We lend influencers to taking our egos and selling us products at the same time. We lend them access to our personal lives because, well most of our lives our controlled by our phones. They can read and write data simultaneously and send it to the ones who created it in the first place.
Nothing is sacred anymore.
Everything that we look at is scrutinized under an algorithm. An online showcase of users is mesmerizing to them. And soon the world and all its content will be on its knees to those who have learned how to exploit it more fully: our privacy.
Online marketing and content is more than just bits and pieces of the whole. It’s a collective nightmare when considered. It’s you and me, your neighbor, your brother, and that girl you thought liked you in the 7th grade. It is the bankers, the plumbers, the influencers and the haphazard conglomerate of data thieves and pirates who would love to steal your identity.
At the core it is our humanity.
And it’s what we love. It’s what we live for.
Online marketing and content is so powerful that it has touched every facet of our lives because our lives depend so much on that algorithm running. In a way, we have created this beast. We’ve set out to sell a product on Facebook because the direct mailers weren’t working for us. Or we’ve grown accustomed to the targeted Instagram ads that promise hope and healing if you’ll buy that course. It’s hard to get away from it all, but secretly we don’t want to.
The system is designed so that you won’t. It will always be there and will always be an ever changing influence in your world.
We market everything now online…even marketing.
We desire feedback and control, so we got it – in the form of like buttons and comments. We sorted through photos and decided it was no easy task, so we got what we wanted – an Insta feed full of dog pics and TikTok #foryou pages full of morning routines.
What made us smarter made us a little more dumber…and what made us stop caring made us work harder. Now it’s hard to find what we really want because we are lost in a maze of haves and have nots. We want nothing more than to be sold something that we really love. We want it to work like the marriages that we care so deeply about, or the job we have clung to for years.
In a way though we want out. We want to get out of the rat race and end this online marketing maze for good. We’ve been sold a bill of goods. We’ve taken the bait and we’ve lost. We’ve toyed with the idea of living off the grid and eating beans and rice for the rest of our lives. Maybe be more sustainable and create a new identity. It’s what we crave. It’s what we long for.
Deep down inside though we just want to get back to our roots. This too has been marketing to us online as well.
My friend is up against a lot. But he has ambitions. He might make it. In the meantime, it’s the content marketing and the content itself that will save the day. He’s thinking about creating “how-to” videos on plumbing.
