Hey, content marketers—does the following criticism make you squeamish?
Factual assertions in a recent piece of content “would not pass muster in a high school research paper,” but that hasn’t stopped some important executives from citing it. Moreover, related content contained so-called “facts” that were “backed up by blog posts, emails or nothing at all.”
If this criticism has you sprinting toward your content library, relax. The reproach wasn’t directed at the rigorously edited and fact-checked content you produce. The criticism was cited in a September New York Times article and was directed at the U.S. Supreme Court and the amicus briefs that justices rely on to build and defend their opinions, on matters such as whether corporations should be afforded some of the same rights as citizens.
I’m not backing in to a broad slam of content marketing; I’m holding up the less-than-rigorous fact-checking Supreme Court justices’ and their staffs’ conduct to send a warning.
The New York Times article, cites some troubling research conducted by Allison Orr Larsen, a law professor at The College of William and Mary. Larsen’s research identifies several statistics within amicus briefs (reports that interested parties submit in favor of a specific legal argument) that come from highly questionable sources, such as discontinued blogs, or have no citation at all. A lawyer quoted in the article crystallizes the issue by saying that the highest court in the land has the same problem the rest of us do: “figuring out how to distinguish between real facts and Internet facts.”
This problem crops up with greater frequency for content marketers. The stakes are also higher, even if they may not seem that way now. Where did that eye-popping number supporting your central argument come from? Who’s in charge of checking figures and claims in each piece of content? How much editorial and fact-checking oversight does your marketing team apply to the creation of content? From what I’ve read and, occasionally performed some cursory fact-checking on, the answer varies widely.
One of the allures of content marketing is that it resembles traditional editorial content (which readers typically trust) without the constraints of objectivity. But effective content marketing still needs to respect the constraints of facts. Readers will not engage with content that they don’t trust, regardless of whether the content is produced under a corporate banner or by an old-media print publication with a stout wall separating advertising and editorial.
Marketers would be wise to educate themselves on the dark side of content marketing so that they can ensure that their growing editorial teams, unlike the Supreme Court, know the difference between real facts and Internet facts.
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