Content Spam: Spam v2.0

"Content is king." I've heard this a lot lately.

In my pursuit of knowledge & experience, I read at least 100 articles (in some form or another) a day on social media, marketing, branding, advertising, etc. There are some conflicting opinions, but content is not debated; for successful online marketing, you must provide useful content that appeals to your target audience.

However, much like every aspect of the Internet, there is far more spam and garbage out there than legitimate sources of information. In a world of short attention spans and dare I say, too much information, Spam v2.0 (content spam) is making things difficult for content marketers.

So how do us lowly marketing professionals overcome this? The only way we can; through hard work, consistency and effective brand strategy. Here are a few suggestions:

• Does your blog have a highly focused target audience? Trying to be too much for too many people will limit your ability to provide relevant content to any one group of followers.
• Don't write blogs for the sake of writing blogs, make sure you are saying something of importance to your target audience.
• Craft your content based on what is important at that moment to your audience. Have the BlackBerry technical issues been over covered by the media in the last week? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean your audience doesn't want to hear your opinion about it.

The importance of being a resource for relevant information is becoming exponentially more important with more spam content muddying the waters.