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Content Drone

I once knew a guy (S) not so different from the one featured in this modern-day parable of a guy who works for a website. S was recruited out of college to be a digital marketer back in the day when that was still a new and sexy thing. This was a very forward-looking company, seeking to reinvigorate the way they marketed and sold their very traditional product hoping to attract a new generation of customers. S had landed his dream job. When I met him during one of my consulting gigs, he had been at this company for over a decade and they were paying off his sizeable student loans. He had by then completed his masters on their dime. He was the resident SEO and social media guru, tweaking content ad-nauseum to achieve the impossible goals laid out for him. Just when he thought he had made it, the goal-posts would change, the ranking algorithm would be updated, the old tricks would no longer work.

For the year that my engagement with that client lasted, I saw him interview scores of vendors, snake-oil providers of various stripe all promising S the nirvana he sought. But he knew better. He vetted them very carefully and almost always discarded them for good reason. Part of it may have been job security but it is also true that no one really has a secret sauce for generating viral content across every business domain, market segment and target audience. S has a much better feel for the market he served as any of these "experts".  

Last time I checked, S was still there and it has been about twenty years. Mostly the same job, though his title is more verbose now. He has stayed so long with this company and done only one thing during that whole time that it would be all but impossible for him to do something else at this point. Those skills are transferrable I am sure, but being a content drone for another company another website may not be the change that S is dying to make.

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