Nowadays, The Only Useful White Papers Are On A Roll In My Bathroom.
Call It Multilevel-Marketing, Pyramid Selling, Network Marketing, Referral Marketing or Automated Inbound Marketing—It All Reeks Of Ignorance.
When was the last time you, or anyone close to you, actually read a white paper?
I thought so.
Now I don’t know about you, but 98% of the white papers I’ve skimmed over the past five years are pure crap. Poorly researched, poorly written and poorly substantiated. No integrity whatsoever. Not even a modicum of effort, either. Funny, we used to call it plagiarizing. Now they call it, “curating.” At this juncture, I do encourage you to read the old chestnut that was required reading in my journalism school days in 1974, entitled, How To Lie With Statistics . It will help you understand just how fast and loose these grind house white paper authors play with the facts. Most of them, anyway. They’ve diminished a white paper’s credibility, potential for “pull through” and besmirched the trust of legitimate marketers offering real value through the information they choose to share.
These white papers and, “social media expert” kibble are so ubiquitous on Twitter that most of them pass by us totally unnoticed in our Hootsuite or TweetDeck streams. Much in the same way that early listeners of AM radio tuned out the static on their handheld transistor radios in 1964 as they dialed to get to the good stuff such as, I Want To Hold Your Hand.
My shortwave radio in the early sixties had filters to improve my selectivity. Thank God my Hootsuite decks have filtering as well.
Funny. Very little has changed. And everything has changed. People still get to the good stuff even if they have to slog through seemingly endless streams of crap to reach it. Think of Andy Dufresne’s sewage pipe crawl to freedom in Shawshank Redemption. Or, more often than not, savvy socializers, storytellers and content creators make sure the good stuff gets to the people who appreciate its value. And know how to best use it. Think of pure molten gold flowing so apparently under the mottled burnt surface of worthless dross.
Cream does rise to the surface and shit eventually sinks.
So, I’ll leave you with two examples of what you’ll see where the bottom feeders lurk.
May you share an honest abundance in all that you do.
Caveat emptor.
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