Human generated, business-oriented content, especially as fuel for good old-fashioned content marketing, is in the throes of an improbable comeback.
It’s almost like the heady business blog days of the mid 2010s, when every startup founder and innovation engineer had something to say that was so important that their own website wasn’t big enough to contain their thoughts, so they all started putting those thoughts on Medium.
Yeah, that happened. Remember? Fun times.
Look, I’m just as guilty as the next ego-driven futurist thought-leader innovation guru expert. While I’ve been writing about what I do since the (cough) early 2000s, and for various publications like the fine one you’re reading right now, I myself jumped on the Medium bandwagon — late — in 2018.
Seven years and 100,000 followers later, I can’t stop. It’s an addiction.
Today, every businessperson with a sales funnel to fill has become an overnight wordsmith, a junkie chasing the dragon of business wisdom in blogs, microblogs and on one particular social media platform.
I’m totally speculating here, but I believe I’ve traced this addiction pandemic back to its patient zero. I think it all started with LinkedIn giving out free samples.
What Is Authentic Content Marketing and Why Does It Matter?
Authentic content marketing uses human experience, expertise and personal insight to build brand trust and shorten sales cycles. As AI-generated content becomes more common — and less effective — businesses that consistently produce original, human-authored content are more likely to stand out, connect with audiences and survive the decline of traditional SEO.
What Is Authenticity in Marketing?
Well, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Authenticity is one hell of a sales tool, as it seeds trust, which lowers the barriers to opening the wallet. But if that last sentence made you feel a little slimy, that’s the exact problem I need to point out about authenticity in marketing. It’s almost antithetical to itself.
It’s very difficult to be truly authentic while selling something, especially under corporate-mandated quarterly sales goals. It makes sense when you look at what I call prime examples of authentic marketing and sales campaigns: “Just Do It” and “Think Different” hit the mark for authenticity. In the long run, these campaigns pretty much made Nike and Apple the brands they are today.
But I’ll give you the opposite argument. Jaguar’s 2025 “Copy Nothing” campaign couldn’t escape the criticism of merely appearing to embrace authenticity. (Part of the problem is the company also called the campaign “Delete Ordinary,” and the dual names led to confusion). Ultimately, the campaign would become the business version of what the (manufactured) Sex Pistols were to punk music. It screamed, “Look how authentic and original and different and edgy we are!”
The thing is, like the old saying goes, if you’re cool, you don’t have to tell people you’re cool. Likewise, you should also never imply that you’re cool because that just undoes your coolness.
I know. It’s tricky. I don’t pretend to understand it. I’m just a blue-collar kid who likes computers. But I don’t have to be Joe Cool to see how LinkedIn got everyone addicted to blogging.
The Short Tail of Marketing Is Broken
About six months ago, I warned that SEO was dying, and last month I declared it dead when Google announced the wide launch of AI Search at Google I/O. Some folks pushed back on me for this, but some of them didn’t. Instead, they did what smart people do — they figured out a plan B.
Speaking of plan B, LinkedIn had one of its own. In fact, I’d speculate that they’d been working on it for at least a couple years as they stealthily rolled out their content-creator mode.
Flash forward to today, and short-tail marketing is broken. Even if SEO isn’t dead, the instant gratification of landing your links at the top of search results is over. And the only forms left with viral possibility are the youth-oriented visual media of TikTok, Instagram and so on. That virality can work miracles for certain kinds of businesses, but only to certain kinds of businesses that show well to youth on video.
So, plan B for most businesspeople is the long tail — brand-building and that kind of thing — in the hopes of turning the long tail into a shorter sales cycle.
And what’s the most valuable currency of brand-building? Authenticity. And LinkedIn was right there just begging folks to splash their authenticity all over its platform, in blogs, videos and even just long story posts like you only see on Facebook anymore.
Look at your LinkedIn feed. Remember when it was all “I got a job/promotion!” or “We launched this awesome new product!” or “I was at this sales conference!”?
Now, it’s mostly thought leaders and opinion slingers and future predictors, all posting with a call to action at the end.
The Obvious: Don’t Use AI For Authentic Marketing
Right? Seems like a no-brainer, but here’s what I mean.
The people thought-posting on LinkedIn as a marketing strategy are prolific. They have to be for it to work as a marketing strategy instead of what I do, which is just shitposting for laughs and maybe getting paid. And yeah, I just said my quiet part out loud.
Are they using AI? Some aren’t, certainly not in a plug-and-produce way, but of course a lot of them are. Again, guessing with first-hand but anecdotal evidence here, I believe a lot of folks are just searching for an artifact or news item pertaining to the topic of the day in their industry or market, throwing that into a ChatGPT or a Claude, refining the results and then editing by tacking on their own expertise. You can tell because all of the authentic personality is in the first sentence or two. And all the experiential advice is at the end.
Look, I’m not sour-graping here. You do you. The problem is, like I said earlier, using AI to create this type of content is antithetical to its own purpose. It works once, maybe thrice, but then it gets real old real quick. Thus, it fails as a marketing strategy.
I mean, how sick of AI are we right now? How cool was it a year ago?
But if you can dedicate yourself to producing authentic, valuable, consistently human-authored content, that might be enough to shrink the long tail into a much shorter timeframe and survive the SEO carnage much better than your competitors.
It takes work. But I can sum up the strategy in one sound bite.
Focus On Why, Not How
This article is somewhat stylistically different from what I usually write for Built In. But it needs to be, to prove my point.
I didn’t start this article by deciding to be authentic, I started this article by not limiting myself to any rules or grounding other than reaching into my own brain and pulling out what I think. I’ve been startup tech-ing for 25 years (AI-ing for 15, by the way), and writing all that time, with nothing to sell.
So, I’ve got some cred here. If the topic were about quantum computing, I’d just be making jokes about Ant Man: Quantumania and really irritating the people who know anything about the actual topic. I’m lucky in that my blathering goes through some of the best editors in the business. Very few people have this luxury.
Anyway, my point is, if you want to be authentic and stand out, you need to lean into your own experience and take some risks. Real risks, not the kind Jaguar thought they were taking. You have to get into your experience-driven position on the why of things and not just retreading the how.
It’s the difference between “How our customers improved their data security by 10 percent” and “Why we’re all sitting ducks as fraudsters lean into AI.” Same premise, different result. One is a recap, telling you about something that happened. The other is reasoning telling you why something will happen. The former is something AI is good at, while the latter is not.
You have to take the same kinds of risks and make the same kinds of educated guesses that good business leaders take and make with their businesses. And you have to do it in front of the curtain, not behind it, with no safety net.
In other words, I need to tell you what I really think is going on out there in the business world. And in doing that, I could be wrong and I could upset people I shouldn’t upset. But if I’m never wrong and I never upset people, I greatly reduce my chances of ever being right. And if that was the case, why would you ever bother reading me?
