Are students and consumers reading truthful information on the Internet? Do they know if what they are reading is being sponsored by someone for money? Thinking is hard work! People are busier than ever and seem to be content with being told what to think. Content marketing alleviates the need to research and spend hours making a decision. It is so much easier to watch a video or read a blog post and be told what to do, how to do it, and what to buy. Content writers and marketers are informing, convincing, and shaping consumer behavior. Content marketing can influence what car you buy or what bank you use. It can influence what hospital you use and college you attend. It can influence the choices you make in life and can even alter your deepest values (Lawrence, 2022).
Content writing and marketing has many good points. Customer reviews can sway a decision. Consumers are relying on customer reviews before making a decision. We trust other people's experiences more than the content writer. Content marketing saves time and gives the consumer lots of information in a short amount of time. We have all relied on the top ten things to do at our vacation destination.
There is also a dark side to content writing and marketing. Consumers can make quick, emotional decisions and spend more on a big ticket item than they should. We have all been victims of the “buy now” button. Quick decisions can be expensive mistakes with serious consequences. It is easy to be fooled by content marketers. Not all information is true or has been tested. We are bombarded with the best of everything. Consumers need to be educated in the difference between sponsored content and what is not sponsored. Sponsored content is all about the money and driving Internet traffic to the company’s website (Lawrence, 2022).
Much of the responsibility to protect consumers lies in the field of education. There is so much misinformation and disinformation at students' fingertips. Disinformation is false information that is deliberately spread to agitate and instigate a behavior. The assault on the Capitol immediately comes to mind. Misinformation is false information that is spread by people that believe it to be true (Lawrence, 2022). Recent examples of misinformation are reports about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. There are posts on social media and websites that they are engaged, secretly married, already engaged and that their relationship is a hoax. What is true? How do we know the difference? Much of the problem of teaching student discernment, is that current teachers are not prepared to teach the intricacies of recognizing the difference between what is true and what is not. Students must be taught to recognize what is sponsored and what is not. Digital skills must be emphasized in our school’s curriculum, and teachers must be trained in the ever-changing landscape of content marketing. The book, Digital Writing: A Guide to Writing for Social Media and the Web, would be a great resource for teachers and students (Lawrence, 2022). Thinking is hard, but we owe it to our students to teach them to be able to recognize the truth.
References
Altmann, G. (2019). [image of hands on keyboard with content words]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/photos/news-contents-keyboard-write-hands-4025602/
Lawrence, D. (2022). Digital writing: A guide for writing for social media and the web. Broadview Press.
Muhammed T, S., & Mathew, S. K. (2022). The disaster of misinformation: A review of research in social media. International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, 13(4), 271–285. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-022-00311-6
Ruiz, C. D. (2023). Disinformation on digital media platforms: A market-shaping approach. New Media & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231207644
