Art of Message
The quest for brain-on-fire
Peter Caputa made some great points yesterday on this LI post. He said:
“The old way of inbound marketing was about proving your own expertise.
…
This new way is about curating the expertise of your market.”
Yes! Stop proving, start curating.
What if?
- TEDx talks are commoditized and mass produced
- Even “real” TED speakers are smug and hard to watch
- Long, in-depth essays are rarely full of insight end-to-end; they are SEO plays
- People read web content even less than in 2022, let alone 2012 (per data Peter cites)
- TikTok-style short videos are now where most people seek “brain-on-fire”
Exceptions prove the rule, of course, but the point is that it’s getting harder to achieve brain-on-fire by reading web content by experts. Traditional expert-content is oversupplied and misaligned with our desire for equal exchanges.
Meanwhile, GPT lets us converse with collective essays of millions.
I think that’s where the brain-on-fire effect is now mostly relegated to – conversations:
- in public on social media, mostly in comment threads
- on conversation-based podcasts, especially when comments are enabled
- on personal newsletters, if replied to
- on cozy web discussions (Slack, Discord)
- in DMs and emails
And it happens between people who don’t necessarily need anything from one another – other than to exchange ideas.
It makes you think about where to take your message – and how.