“Feed me more pablum, Seymour.”

So tell me: When exactly did content that’s good enough become good enough?

Seems to me that it was right about the time that “content marketing,” bless its heart, swung the value pendulum from quality to quantity. To play the content marketing game, you’ve got to fill an online pipeline with words. Lots and lots of them, day after day, week after week. The beast is never satisfied — which is why our screens runneth over with insipid listicles and grammar-challenged articles and other utter pablum. That’s what happens when Content Audrey II says “feed me.”

The problem is, it’s nigh impossible to deliver that tonnage of quantity over time without sacrificing quality. And hey, maybe that’s okay with you. Maybe you’re willing to drop down a peg or two in quality if need be (and pay less for it).

But there are companies out there that won’t tolerate it; specifically, companies that stand for quality. They realize that when any key aspect of a brand — like its marketing communications, for instance — cuts quality corners and decides that good enough is good enough, that tends to telegraph an attitude about the company and its offerings. An attitude that’s damaging.

So, in short, your marcom goal can be to enter the social morass and keep talking, until your posts become just more yammering and your brand one more yammerer. Or, you can pay for quality over quantity, and come off as a more thoughtful thought leader, the sharper voice in the room, smarter and more discriminating in what you say, how and to whom you say it.

Does the latter scenario look familiar? It should. It’s the difference between noise and signal. And it’s how strong brands are built.