Wishpurposing

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If you’ve been a subscriber for more than a few months, you’ve seen me document moving this newsletter to beehiiv and try out a bunch of beehiiv’s features.

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Formatting the upcoming events, announcements, and action items and double checking the links was a huge pain every Monday morning.

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It knows my template, so with the simplest prompt it will spin up the Pro email. The draft gets the email 80% to 90% of the way there. I just fill in my blurbs and it’s good to go.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, I’m writing this on a Monday and this is what my conversation in Claude looked like to spin up this morning’s email.

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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

Did you know there's a word for tossing something in the recycling bin that doesn't belong there, wishfully hoping it'll get recycled anyway?

It’s called “wishcycling.”

I recently read this CBC article about my local government attempting to crack down on wishcycling.

To oversimplify: when folks put things in the curbside recycling bin that don’t belong there, it contaminates the rest of the recyclable materials and ultimately creates more waste.

Ironically, wishcyclers are the people who care about recycling—they’re trying to avoid sending stuff to the landfill. They just care in a way that makes the problem worse.

As someone who writes a weekly newsletter about content marketing, this immediately made me think about content marketing—specifically, content repurposing.

For years, the hot advice was to create one big pillar content piece and slice it into 10 LinkedIn posts, three tweets, a carousel, a short video, and a partridge in a pear tree. I did this. Many of you did this. Okay, I still do this sometimes.

But I’d argue that most of that repurposing is actually wishpurposing—wishful repurposing that creates more content waste. Here’s why that’s a problem:

1. Feeling efficient ≠ being efficient

Wishcycling and wishpurposing feel efficient, but you’re often creating more work and waste. "One article → 15 assets" looks amazing on the content plan, but creating 15 derivative assets that nobody engages with doesn’t “save” you anything.

2. Garbage in, garbage out

Of course, most content doesn’t have enough meat on the bone to be sliced and diced in the first place. But I’ve often felt the pull to wishpurpose content purely because there’s a placeholder on the calendar to do so.

3. Someone else has to sort through it

When you wishcycle, someone else deals with the consequences—usually some poor person at the sorting facility sifting through your waste.

Same with wishpurposing. Maybe it's your co-worker who somehow has to turn your SEO blog post into a viral LinkedIn post. Or maybe it's your reader, forced to decipher fragments of an idea plucked from a once-cohesive article.

(This reminds me of AI workslop too. Just because you save time doesn’t mean everyone saves time.)

4. It contaminates the good stuff

The most eye-opening part of that article for me is that one tainted wishcycled item can contaminate the whole load of recycling. So you can turn recyclable items into trash.

Wishpurposing content can do the same thing to your company’s content feed. Most of us throw the odd wishpurposed thing in just to “fill the calendar,” but what if that weak content is just souring your audience?

—

I’m not saying you should never repurpose content. Repurposing, just like recycling, is often the right thing to do. But there’s a difference between repurposing and wishpurposing.

So before you chop up your next article or podcast episode, ask yourself: would I make this if I were starting from scratch? If yes, great, take the idea and build something new with it. If not, let it go. Not every piece of content needs a second life. Sometimes the garbage is the best place for it.

- Eric

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✍ New on the Blog: How to get buy-in for a skunkworks content project

I can’t be the only person who has never heard the term “skunkworks” before.

According to Wikipedia dot org, it means “a small, autonomous group within a larger organization that operates free from normal bureaucratic rules and red tape to develop radical new innovations or secret projects.”

And according to Jimmy Daly of Superpath dot co, the easiest way to get buy-in for a skunkworks content project is as a newcomer or outsider.

He recently joined Miro via acquisition of Reforge, which gave him a short window to make the case to launch a new thought leadership Substack for the company.

Here’s how he made the business case, with some tips on how to get buy-in for your next content project.

Read the blog post.

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