The Isness Of Content: On Authenticity and Value in Content Writing and Marketing Text

In a world where we all can potentially have any text, any time, for any context in the blink of a ChatGPT’s black pulsating dot, what is it that makes a marketing text valuable? What is it that constitutes the silver lining of statistically speaking a set of words?

It’s the human path – to and from this text. The human condition. Which is never a silver lining only. It is the dynamics born from the everlasting oscillation between depths and shallows, between slow and fast thinking. It is about that oscillation I want to talk about in this text, manifesting as oscillation approaching content as making french fries and approaching content as building semantic capital.

Content as French Fries 

In my content work, creating marketing text for external (and recently internal) organizational communincation, I have strived for clarity, authenticity and dialogue. With time, with my studies and with my recent work, I realized that content is a multifaceted (always intertextual) creature, an artifact of knowledge exchange and also a specific form of knowledge co-creation. And at the same time it is also an operationalized unit. A product created based on heavily formalized procedures where there is no place for ambiguity, creativity or experimentation.

More often than not, content is a product just like French fries at a fast food restaurant.

This metaphor about French Fries came into my world from Bryan Bergeron’s Knowledge management book (Bergeron, Bryan. Essentials of Knowledge Management. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003.). Every successful business operation, writes Bryan Bergeron, (op.cit. p. 30), uses Knowledge Management to some degree, even if only in an unsophisticated, ad hoc way. In some companies knowledge is captured and transferred easily and in some, knowledge is heavily dependent on individual talent. At one end of the spectrum are highly standardized activities – Bergeron gives the example of French fries at McDonald’s.

In my world, French fries are a perfect metaphor for production of content pieces as industrialized output, generated, polished, following rules, seemingly efficient, albeit crying for authenticity and human touch.

AI-generated content is much like french fries: it is highly repeatable, process-driven, and based on explicit knowledge. If you follow the right inputs, prompts, and workflows, you reliably get an acceptable result, just as anyone trained on a standardized process can produce consistent fries. The value lies in efficiency, scalability, and uniform quality rather than originality.

But where is the human connection? Where is the Isness of content in that industrialized landscape? It is on the other end of the spectrum. Where magic, as Bergeron calls it (cf. “Some work […] is unique to the point that it can be considered magic—it’s a special, mysterious, or inexplicable quality, talent, or skill.”)

It is where the notion of semantic capital exists.

Content as Semantic Capital

The tasks related to making French fries are defined in such precise detail that virtually anyone can perform them with minimal training. Even actions as minor as how fries are salted are fully specified, relying on explicit knowledge, optimized processes, and repeatable techniques to ensure consistent results. At the opposite end lies work driven by tacit knowledge and individual talent, illustrated by music in Bergeron’s text, where creativity, interpretation, and years of apprenticeship shape outcomes that are often unique and difficult to replicate.

I see that other end of the spectrum through a semantic capital lens.

Semantic capital, as defined by Floridi (Floridi, L. Semantic Capital: Its Nature, Value, and Curation. Philos. Technol. 31, 481–497 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0335-1) is “any content that can enhance someone’s power to give meaning to and make sense of (semanticise) something.”

Ideas, insights, discoveries, inventions, traditions, cultures, languages, arts, religions, sciences, narratives, stories, poems, customs and norms, music and songs, games and personal experiences, and advertisements – they all are the wealth we produce, curate, consume, transmit, and inherit as humans, argues Floridi. And this wealth of resources is what helps us give meaning to, and make sense of, our own existence and the world surrounding us, to define who we are, and to develop an individual and social life. (read more in Seeing Enterprise Content as Semantic Capital)

With that in mind, let’s head to another wonderful book The Wise Company (Nonaka, Ikujiro, and Hirotaka Takeuchi. The Wise Company: How Companies Create Continuous Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.):

“The preservation and packaging of corporate knowledge (i.e., information in the context in which it is used) is especially relevant today, given that the majority of the service-oriented workforce is composed of knowledge workers.”

Now with this conceptual toolkit of sorts, think about the benefits of content created in a way that serves the purpose of enriching a company’s semantic capital (if I allow myself to think about semantic capital in a business context). In essence, creative, unique, and emergent such content would inspire, provoke, and generate conversations, it will be that silver lining that adds value to the statistically speaking set of words.

Content Doesn’t Want to Be Semantic Capital at the McDonald’s Drive-thru

Oftentimes (I am even tempted to say more often than not) content doesn’t have to be dialogic, it just needs to serve the communicative function of language, not its poetic (meaning- and reality-making) one. I want French fries and that’s it. I have a need. I go through the drive-thru, interact with a display, maybe with a human, using highly formalized exchange protocols (the menu, the script, the payment method) and I am ready. I ordered. And just had the job done.

And that is part of the puzzle. It is not the end. Just a window (pun intended) in the greater scheme of the entire interaction map with the brand.

Actually scheme is a word that misleads.

It is an ecosystem.

In our case, an orchestrated content ecosystem.

One where no content experience lives alone. Just like no text exists alone, and always ends and starts with another one. Same for content.

You don’t create an isolated content piece. You seed a seed. And it becomes part of the ecosystem—growing and adding its footprint in it. And it grows with the interaction it has and the internal enterprise dynamics that feed it.

And there are trees or bushes or some lanes, that need to be there. At the drive-thru. No need to be thought-provoking, poetic, and dialogic. French fries (read AI-generated content) just work. But there are paths that call for lavish greenery and curated spaces for conversations and exchange. Then we need the semantic capital lens. We need a way to work with content as knowledge.

All that said, we do have to be able to shift gears, to think slow and fast. To produce content as if making french fries but also to leave time for cultivating a garden of content, as if building semantic capital. 

Instead of an Epilogue: A Personal Note and Invitation

For me personally the oscillation I’ve described isn’t just a theoretical framework – it’s a daily practice, something worth considering and intentionally cultivating. So that both sides of content are taken care of. I learnt (the hard way 🙂 that I should not reject AI tools, neither should I agree to treat everything as a production line.

I learned that we need to discern  which parts of our content ecosystem need standardization and which need human creativity, ingenuity and depth. Good content practices require us to be able to switch codes from an FAQ page that needs french fries precision to a thought leadership piece which calls us and inspires us to make the semantic capital investment work.

If this essay resonated with you and want to learn how to strategically navigate the entire content spectrum, I’ve designed something for you to learn to:

• Identify which content needs french fries efficiency and which demands semantic capital investment
• Build content ecosystems that orchestrate both approaches strategically
• Develop the conceptual frameworks that separate reactive content from strategic content 

And this  isn’t a course about prompts and hacks. It’s about developing the judgment to know what your content ecosystem needs, when it needs it, and how to deliver it.The oscillation starts here 🙂  Content Writing for the Web of People and Machines.