When I was at University, studying chemistry, we had a course about herbicides which started with the lecturer asking the question "What is a weed?". His answer was the very simple idea that a weed is any plant that is growing in the wrong place. So a rose is a weed in a field of corn no matter how beautiful and, similarly, corn is just a weed if it grows in a rose garden. 

The same approach could be applied to content marketing and spam, where spam is any communication that is delivered to the wrong recipient. It doesn't matter how brilliant any content is, if it is delivered to the wrong recipient, it is just spam.

This analogy makes it clear why management of the delivery of content (often newsletter lists) is so crucial. No organisation wants to be accused of spamming their clients and prospects but in professional services, the firm is often very knowledgeable about a wide range of topics that are all individually highly nuanced and fascinating but rarely of interest to all clients. 

The only way this issue is sensibly addressed is to use a Preference Center that puts the decision about what content to send to which recipient in the hands of the clients themselves. That way they can decide what they want to know about, how frequently and from which authors. 

This has the dual advantages of not requiring any editors to make decisions about what content should be sent to which list and ensuring that none of your clients receive content that they haven't actively requested. 

The open rates and interactions with the content which is sent out are, unsurprisingly, enormously higher than the industry averages (see below).