In today’s social media-immersed, blogosphere saturated, media-driven, net savvy world, the nature of publishing has certainly changed. The very definition of publishing has changed as well – but is that a good thing?

The Internet has provided the everyman a unique opportunity to broadcast their innermost thoughts to the world, no matter how inane or irrelevant, with no editing, correction or restraint. While this may seem freeing, in the end it has lead to a huge, nearly unnavigable mass of questionably valuable information.

Now when researching a topic, you certainly have more information available and in a more convenient format – but is it valid, accurate, vetted and unbiased? Probably none of the above in most cases.

This glut of information has given rise to some unique phenomenon as well – the speed with which urban legends develop and spread is breathtaking compared to just a decade ago. Viral information can be more damaging than real viruses, and travels faster, and with greater impact! Cyber-bullying is now an additional concern parent’s have to deal with, and the youth of today have diluted the accuracy, eloquence and power of their native English nearly to the point of unintelligability, in the interest of speed and convenience, holding true to an artificially-imposed brevity limit. Progress . . .?

Internet publishing has some tremendous advantages, in speeding the exchange and sharing of scientific, philosophical, cultural, economic and ideological information. In the old days, when a book or magazine article was “published” in print, a whole host of scholarly, educated, experienced professionals read, fact-checked, edited, contributed to and proofed a work before it was released to the public. This may have slowed the release of information, but it gave the information a fighting chance to be at least passably accurate and honest.

Today, most of those professionals have been rendered obsolete, and those skills are rolled up into a single individual – the author, right or wrong.

What does all this have to do with marketing? Simply this: take care in assessing what you “put out there” to market your company, build your brand, promote your products – one false step not only travels faster than you can catch, but is permanent, residing in servers and living on hard drives around the world!

Good luck all you nascent publishers out there!

Be sure to pick up my published efforts, “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” – Amazon/CreateSpace can have it to you in a just a couple of days!