Page 105 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

calamities could occur that would cause something I publish to be far
below an acceptable standard.

“But that’s the power of content curation as a brand-builder. These
people build their brands partially by sharing my stuff, and I build my
brand partially because they are sharing my stuff (and I, in turn, am
sharing stuff created by other people). It’s a curation circle, and as
someone who has greatly benefitted from that trend, I certainly will
not indict it universally.

“This is similar to how some musicians, actors, and authors benefit
from a consistent track record. If a new Radiohead album comes out,
I’m buying it, period. I’ll see every Jennifer Lawrence movie. I’ll read
every Bill Bryson book. What we see in social media is just a smaller
and less consequential version of this dynamic, accompanied by
greatly reduced economic stakes since social sharing requires
investment of trust capital, rather than the actual currency used to
purchase movie tickets, digital downloads, or books.

“I believe the central question here is nature versus nurture. Can any
person with smarts, relevant expertise, and an unyielding commitment
create relationships create a brand that would cause other people to
automatically share their work? I think the answer is yes … and no.

“I fully believe that just about anybody can achieve a level of success
by creating and sharing consistently good content about topics people
care about, while also being wise and diligent about content
amplification and promotion. From scratch, you can make someone
good at content. However, can you take the same person under the
same conditions and coach them in a way that they have what you call
a ‘heroic brand?’ I don’t think so, or at least I’ve never been able to do
it for anyone other than myself.

“I think this is because content-driven success is the same as music, or
art, or acting, or comedy, or golf, or any endeavor where you’re
competing as an individual. Competency can be learned. But the
distance from competency to the next level (heroic brand, in this case)
is actually farther than the distance from zero to competency. You can
pick up golf for the first time at the age of 45, put a ton of time and
effort and money into it, and learn how to be a decent golfer. You can