The field guide to content marketers in the wild

A field guide to spotting a content marketer:

This new quasi-professional class doesn’t produce actual contenty kind of content, you know: only thinly-veiled advertisements for their services. It’s really content-marketer marketing, if that makes sense, and they are the product they sell. Helpful e-books and webinars meant to induce you to hire their services, long-ass comments on blog posts that craftily guide back to their own blog posts, maybe the occasional self-published paperback, printed on demand for the upcoming speaking engagement, glossy with snake oil.

They write in the second person, as if they are always having a firm conversation with a beloved client. (“Try this thought experiment with YOUR brand…”) But the writing is consumed exclusively by other content marketers, all busily keeping up their game, all hawking their own half-baked consultancies.

There’s a sad ending to this tale, though. What will happen to all those content marketers when the content bubble bursts*?

[via Neville Hobson on Google+]

*They’ll reinvent themselves as Pinterest consultants or whatever passing bandwagon comes next.