AI has made it so much easier for companies to produce and post large amounts of low-quality content.
Social media feeds feel overcrowded. Every company seems to have a newsletter or podcast. Even the mods on r/marketing subreddit are having trouble filtering out all of the content from bots and human-operated Indian/Filipina spam accounts.
Last week, I met with a co-founder of a five-person professional services firm. For his company, he produces a 30-minute biweekly podcast, a weekly newsletter, five LinkedIn posts, and reshares each post with his own thoughts.
He said the only way he managed all of it was by delegating much of the content production to AI agents, and that it sometimes struggled to stay on-brand with his company’s voice and tone.
This push for more and faster content is only increasing as marketing budgets tighten and AI platforms promise to generate 100 posts in just a few minutes (while ignoring the quality of those posts).
This means that simply adding more content just increases the noise and does not help companies stand out—in fact, it makes it harder for anyone to be noticed.
So in this crowded digital environment, the real challenge is figuring out what actually breaks through the noise. The way I see it, human-centric stories—rather than sheer content volume—help brands stand out.
Here are three takeaways from a 2014 report titled “Social Buying Meets Social Selling: How Trusted Networks Improve the Purchase Experience” (page 15 if you want to skip to the good part). The advice is more relevant today than ever:
1. Increase social proximity
“Be at the intersection of conversations, as presence alone helps build familiarity and eventually trust.”
2. Improve social presence
“When sharing thought leadership or expertise, consider the interests of potential buyers with respect to the purchase process stage.”
3. Build social capital
“ Facilitate peer-to-peer recommendations. Make others proud to be a reference. Make it easy to share information.”
