Your content contains your care — Kelford Labs Weekly

“The fastest way to be ignored by anyone is to start talking about something they don’t care about.”

— Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA

Most of the major projects we’re working on these days have a large content creation element to them, so I’ve had content on the brain.

Not just the act of creation itself, but the thinking that precedes it.

In the Marshall McLuhan-ish sense, “content,” like a LinkedIn post, newsletter, or podcast is more than the medium. You don’t just produce a piece of content and shove it online.

Content is better thought of as a container for something else. Something bigger, and much more valuable.

As McLuhan put it in Understanding Media, “The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. ... The ‘content’ of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.”

You see what he means? A LinkedIn post isn’t just a set of words, it’s the medium through which your ideas, beliefs, and knowledge are transmitted. Like speaking aloud, the air is the medium through which sound waves travel, but the content is the voice.

So that forces the question: What should our content contain?

That’s a big question, but I’m so glad you asked it, because it’s something I can’t stop thinking about:

Our content contains our care.

In fact, our content is merely our care made visible.

And by making our care visible, we make it valuable.

Think about it this way: When we make marketing content, it demonstrates to our prospect that we care enough about our work to think about it outside of a specific project. We’re not just “on” when we’re being paid, we’re invested in our work all the time, even when we’re paying ourselves to think about it.

But it also shows we care about our prospects, because it admits to them that we know they’re not yet ready to buy. We demonstrate that we care about their needs, their wants, their time and their budget. It shows we care enough about them to be patient.

And it shows that we care about the same things they do. Our content is an opportunity to demonstrate that what’s on our mind is what’s on their mind. It gives us the chance to show that we value the same things they do, by letting us create resources, documents, and artifacts of our ideas that align with their own beliefs and values.

As Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s former head of design, put it so well, “I do believe that we have this ability to sense care. ... But I think you might understand it more if I said you sense carelessness. You know carelessness. And so I think it’s reasonable believe that you also know care and you sense care.”

We can feel carelessness when a salesperson tries to rush us.

And we can feel carelessness when content does, too. When a website gives us no other option but to book a call or buy right now.

That carelessness comes through and it points a finger at our priorities: Making a quick sale or checking off a KPI, not building a relationship or demonstrating credibility.

Honestly, I think a lot of AI-written marketing content does more to demonstrate carelessness than care. It screams, “I didn’t think about this, so neither should you.”

The idea that the content we create for our customers is something to be done quickly, thoughtlessly, and automatically is in some ways insulting. It’s a way of speaking down to our prospects by assuming they won’t notice that we didn’t expend any effort or time to provide them with value.

It shows them that all we care about are the trappings of content. It shows we care about the container but not what it contains.

That means there’s a tradeoff we need to make. We can’t be as fast or as efficient with our content as we might want to be, but slowness and pace are the building blocks of care.

Effort is a core component of caring, it’s the thing that signals our priorities.

The way we make our content and what it contains shows our prospects what we’re actually thinking about. Either their timelines, their values, their experience... or our own.

Which means the content of our marketing is our care.

And the way we fill our marketing with care is by expending effort. That’s the resource we pour into the container we create that fills it up with value.

Sometimes I think about the fact that I’ve been making marketing content since before it was even called that. Back then we just said “blog,” which itself was a fairly new term. We couldn’t even conceive of other forms of content, like social media, short-form video, even podcasts.

But just because the containers have taken on new forms, that doesn’t mean what they’re filled with has changed.

So to make content that matters, that markets, that means something to the people we’re connecting with, we have to care.

We have to expend effort.

We have to show we’re focused on more than just the container.

We’re focused on the care it contains.

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

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