I’m Bruce Kasanoff, a writer and speaker. On this blog, I share observations about the type of content marketing and thought leadership programs I help create. I also write twice weekly at LinkedIn.
There are so many names floating around for the proven strategy of using high quality content to engage the attention of potential customers. Why so many? Because one company wants to sell you their software to help you attract customers, another wants to sell their web site, and various authors want to sell their catchphrase.
Don’t worry about sorting it out. You just need to remember two things: make sure your content is of the highest editorial quality, and that it appeals to the people you wish to attract.
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In one respect, executives are like teenagers. When it comes to their own writing, they want to write one draft and turn it in.
Of course, that’s not how it works, but try telling a busy executive that he or she will have to write five, six or seven drafts to produce a story that other people will want to read.. and forward to their friends.
15 years ago, I had a bunch of people working for me, and I would write two or three drafts. It made me proud to think that with a couple of revisions, I could produce a nice piece. Today, I write twice as many drafts, at minimum. It’s not because my skills have declined, but rather because my standards have risen.
Over the first few drafts, I get the basic ideas down. But in the process, new ideas often emerge.
Over my next few drafts, the original ideas battle with the new contenders. Many fine sentences die young.
Finally, I go back through the piece a couple of times, to get the wording just right and also to make my phrasing as repeatable as possible. Said another way: I make it easy for readers to know which sentences to tweet.
It’s hard to push a ghostwriter to admit what interests him, because making a living depends on being versatile enough to write about a wide range of topics. But, for me, the answer is easy: people.
All good writing is about human interest. It’s what separates a dry technical paper from a dynamic yarn. Human interest is the difference between #3 and #3,333,000 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
No matter whether your message is about technology, innovation or business strategy… your challenge is to convey what you have to say in human terms. The best writing describes real people with real needs, interests and emotions. It rings true.
My quest is always to find the people in your story. Everything else comes second, no matter what you have to sell.
For those of you who have read my LinkedIn article today, 8 Wharton MBA lessons that stood the test of time, I have a confession: I left one out.
The 9th lesson was: communicators rule the world.
Since I didn’t want the article to sound like an ad for my services as a ghostwriter, I left that one out, but time has proven that this lesson is also correct.
Communication is vitally important. It is what captures the attention of others and gets your point across. It influences opinions, and motivates action. Look at history, and judge for yourself whether you agree.
Kevin Cain has a nice article over at the Content Marketing Institute, in which he gives three examples of financial services firms that are trying new strategies to avoid producing content that “often just wind(s) up in the trash.”
He argues “the problem isn’t a lack of effort, and it’s certainly not a lack of high-quality content. Instead, it’s the way the industry seemingly operates under the misconception that its heavy regulatory burdens both preclude and exempt it from taking a creative approach to content. Remember, those regulations are predominantly focused on what’s being said, not the style and delivery of the message.”
Cain praises Credit Suisse, Sun Life Financial, and Putnam Investments for their out-of-the-box efforts, and links to their work.
You know the feeling… you’re stuck in a bad place. Maybe your boss is taking credit for your work, maybe your relationship is in a rut, perhaps the business you started three years ago is going… nowhere.
If only you had more power, more control.
Flashback to Philadelphia, with winter bearing down. It’s the last day of my first semester as a graduate student at Wharton, a long time ago. My eccentric – some said crazy – professor is asking us for feedback.
Kenwyn Smith drove many of my peers crazy. He was teaching organizational behavior, and once suspended his topic for the day to focus on why we let a female student who was late for class enter and sit down without anyone objecting. He made her sit on the floor until we decided what to do, but she ran out crying before the discussion came to a conclusion.
I liked Professor Smith. He made us think about why we did things, especially how we behaved in groups.
Earlier in the semester, Smith took us on a weekend retreat, to an old summer camp. We engaged in a simulation, in which Smith would set some rules, we’d live with them for a while, and then he’d change the rules again.
So on that last day of class, I raised my hand and told him I thought he’d gone too long between each rule change. He started jumping up and done and screaming, “Yes, yes!” (I was thinking: what? what?)
Fortunately, he explained.
People in groups always feel stuck in the middle. They feel powerless to change things. Even senior executives and CEOs often feel this way.
You might think your CEO has all the power, but she or he might feel trapped between employees, the Board, investors and perhaps regulators.
Smith asked me, “Why didn’t you try to change the rules?”
I replied, “Because you had that role.”
But he pointed out that he’d never said he was the only one who could change the rules, and even if he had, I could have pushed back at any time. But I didn’t.
Of all the things I’ve learned, that lesson has stuck with me the longest.
You have a much greater ability to change your circumstances than it seems. You don’t have to wait for the rules to change; if you don’t like them, change them. Change everything. Don’t wait for someone else to change.
You might also like: Do you give a damn?
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No matter whether you have 100,000 employees or 22, you have to think like a startup.
The wave of disruptive innovation headed at us dwarfs anything our modern economy has seen before. Let me give you one example.
There will be more wireless sensors in our world – by far – than there are smartphones, dumb phones, tablets, laptops and PCs combined.
They will monitor what we say and do. They will track the moisture in our gardens, the proximity of our cars, the location of our kids (and dogs), and the actions of our co-workers.
Refrigerators will know what’s inside them. Pots will know when the soup is warm enough. Companies will, eventually, even know where they made money, and where they did not.
Sensors will change every industry, because they will create exciting new business opportunities and disrupt established product lines. Who wants to pay $78 for a stupid pot when smart ones sell for the same price?
There are other disruptive forces at work, three of which we write about in Smart Customers, Stupid Companies. They combine to ensure that any CEO who doesn’t think like a startup will soon have nothing left to manage.
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