
Warning: This is a Filler Article.
Some of our posts feature core content — they impart new knowledge, or translate existing evidence, or pull together instructions on how to do something useful, like budgeting for patient & public engagement.
This isn’t that type of post.
In fact, if you’re short on time, low on battery life, or see something shiny, you may want to reconsider reading any further.
This week just so happens to be the last holiday-shortened week before the kids go back to school and everyone comes back from the cabin, the coast, or wherever else they’ve been soaking in this beautiful summer. As such, it doesn’t make sense to create core content because most people — except for you, who are still reading this for some reason — won’t see it, won’t read it, and certainly won’t share it.
Actually, that’s not true. Some people might share it, even if they didn’t get this far. According to a 2016 Washington Post article:
“On June 4 [2016], the satirical news site the Science Post published a block of ‘lorem ipsum’ text under a frightening headline: ‘Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.’
Nearly 46,000 people shared the post, some of them quite earnestly — an inadvertent example, perhaps, of life imitating comedy.”
— Caitlin Dewey
And who can blame them? Their time (especially in health care) is limited and the headlines on social media are so very juicy! (and as it turns out, often overstated):
“Media articles that were most shared on social media in 2015 on academic articles assessing the relationship between an exposure and health outcome have, on average, overstated [the] strength of causal language relative to both the language used in the academic article and independently-assessed strength of causal inference in that article.”
— Haber et al., 2018 (Table 3)
Long story short, there seems to be a lot of junk content out there, and we’re all sharing it and sometimes even amplifying it. So we’re taking a stand. Well, we’re considering it anyway.
Ever since acknowledging our #KTFail over two years ago, we’ve made a point to post content nearly every week. But when we get swamped, or we’re grasping for ideas, or we’re just in a mood, we have a tendency to write filler articles like these just to maintain the flow and stay in your #SoMe feed.
But with over 100 articles in the KnowledgeNudge vault, we believe it’s time to shift gears from focusing on quantity to investing more in quality. So instead of filler content [Editor’s note: like this] on weeks we don’t have something new and meaningful to share, we’ll focus on revamping and/or updating core content from the archives.
Unless, of course, our analytics show our readership falling off a cliff and we’re forced to pen #KTFail2, Lack of Filler Content.
But that’s a filler post for another day.
About the Author
Patrick Faucher is the Creative & Strategic Services Lead for the George and Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation’s Knowledge Translation platform. A communications strategist with over a dozen years experience, he specializes in creating content engineered to build awareness, understanding, engagement, and adoption through an approach rooted in design thinking (rapid prototyping) and behavioural insights (nudging).

