My biggest content mistake was correct

The short answer

Not proud of it: in September I built a machine that turns 3,000 of my China photos into Instagram posts. I posted three times. Then I stopped. The posts were correct. They did not sound like me. The restart is one real decision a week, told by me, with the real reasons. It is the same step a learner makes in a second language: from correct to your own voice.

The machine

About 3,000 of my own China photos. A system that sorts them, crops them, writes the words and sets the layout. Scheduling, captions, hashtags, a weekly plan with slots for the brand account and for my own. It worked. Every Monday it produced a week of posts that a stranger would have called fine.

I posted three times. Then I went on holiday and did not miss it. That was the moment I should have taken seriously, and did not, for a while.

What was wrong with them

Nothing you could point at. The photos were good, the crops were clean, the captions were grammatical and on topic. The posts were correct.

They did not sound like me. Nobody reading them would have learned what I had decided that week, or why, or what it cost. A machine had written the kind of sentence a careful person writes when they do not want to be wrong. I had built a very good way of saying nothing.

The look was part of it. In September the brand lived on a newspaper page: sepia, halftone, small text. It photographed well and it said "archive". On 16 September I rejected it: the picture was too small, the text was too small, and it looked old. The bamboo is the look now. One node a week is what the app does, and it is what I do now.

What changes

One real decision a week, told by me, with the real reasons. Not a highlight, not a tip. The decision, the options I had, the one I took and what I expect to happen.

Two accounts, two jobs. The brand account looks like the app: the mark, the bamboo, the programme. My own account stays personal: my face, my week, my decisions. The machine is not gone. It cuts the video, writes the captions, exports the pieces. It no longer decides what I say.

Correct versus your own voice

Here is why this belongs on a language company's blog and not only on mine.

"Wow, your English is so good." If you work in a second language you know that sentence. It is a compliment, and it is also a cage. It means you are polite and correct, and nobody is listening to you yet. People listen to a colleague who takes a position, pushes back in a meeting, writes the email that says what they actually think. Being correct is the entry ticket. It is not the job.

My three posts were "Wow, your English is so good" posts. Polite, correct, and nobody was listening, including me.

The restart is the same step a learner makes

The move from correct to your own voice is not a grammar step. It is the moment you stop producing acceptable sentences and start saying what you mean, in the language your work actually happens in. That is the whole point of nicheAce: a 15-week programme around the niche you work in, so you practise the meeting, the call and the email you will actually have, not the generic ones.

So the content gets the same treatment. Every week one decision, the real reasons. The first one is this one.

The next decisions are already on the list: the iOS launch, the price, the second app. You will hear about each of them from me, with the reasons, whether they turn out right or not.

nicheAce: language is on Google Play. English first, seven more languages.