How To Apply Authenticity as a Strategy

Private Newsletter

Authenticity, particularly in blogging and microblogging, is the new marketing strategy that companies large and small, via their leadership and their intellectual property experts, are employing, in part, to counter the impact AI has made on SEO and discovery in general.

Yeah. I know that was a long sentence, so let’s go over how we got here, as this is the third in a loose three-part series. You don’t have to read what came before it. I’ll sum it up.

Part 1: This trend has been a long time in the making, but I started diving deeper when I noticed the onslaught of thought pieces becoming more prevalent in my LinkedIn feed a few months back. That led me down the rabbit hole, including digging deeper into what’s been going on with LinkedIn’s proactive shift to be a social network. I also talked to a number of people who had started authentic blogging – some realized it was a trend, others had just sort of picked it up, while others were already calling it a marketing strategy to counter AI.

Part 2: The two biggest hurdles with authentic marketing/blogging are 1) it’s hard to be authentic to begin with, and 2) it’s even harder to sustain authenticity in a business context and still be successful at business. The LinkedIn proactive push for this won’t last because LinkedIn has a history of putting out features without caring about the long term success (also, politics is inevitably starting to trickle in already). Most people doing this won’t last because it’s so hard. The solution to both these problems – channel and message – is to actually be authentic and to understand this is a long game. It looks and works nothing like SEO and digital branding before it.

All right. Let’s bring all this home with shit you can use.