Creek Content

End content chaos. Communicate clearly.

Writing to Demonstrate Thought Leadership

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Many professionals instinctively know that writing (or creating other content) about your area of expertise demonstrates your thought leadership. Yet many professionals don’t do anything with that knowledge. When you have achieved a certain level of expertise and experience, sharing what you know serves several purposes:

  • You can give back to your professional community.
  • You can teach others who aren’t as far along or who have had different experiences than you have had.
  • You refine and increase your own expertise when you write, teach, and share with others.
  • You open the door to new opportunities when more people learn about you and your expertise.

Some of you may be reluctant to toot your own horn, but let me encourage you to set that aside with this reminder: No one else is in charge of promoting you and your expertise. You are the brand manager of what Tom Peters first called in 1997 “the brand called You.” Your boss — no matter how much they love you — won’t do it. They’re busy worrying about their own brand.

I always loved the idea that my work might speak for itself. It’s not that that it can’t; but in our overly cluttered media landscape, my work is a tiny voice. (And frankly, doing the kind of work I do, my work is often invisible and requires explanation to the outside observer, including prospective clients.) I need to amplify the impact of my work, and you do, too.

So, writing for thought leadership. Let’s do this thing.

There are only two hard parts:

  • Learning to capture your ideas
  • Getting into a publishing routine

Fortunately, neither of these two challenges are really significant barriers if you know how to handle them. I’m going to let you in on one of my biggest life secrets:

Any time something seems intimidating, you haven’t chunked it into small enough pieces yet.

Capturing your brilliant ideas to create thought leadership

I talk to people all the time who say, “I know I should be writing, but I don’t have any idea what to say.” That’s BS. Everyone has something to say. I suspect it’s more likely:

Let’s talk more about the first two challenges soon — I’ll link this post to future posts as soon as I can — and let’s deal today with the third barrier: You’re not seeing your ideas as content. Let’s chunk that into a process you can follow.

  1. You’ve got to have an idea.
  2. You’ve got to recognize it as a publish-able idea.
  3. You have to capture it.
  4. You have to put it where you can use it when you have time to write (podcast, video blog, create a presentation, etc.).

I’m crossing off Item 1 right now. You are human. You do work. You have ideas.

  1. You’ve got to have an idea.

Done. However—and I don’t minimize this because it stumps even the most prolific creators at times—you may not always recognize your ideas as worthy of publishing. At the risk of turning this from a blog post into a book, I want to dive into this a bit.

See the publishing possibilities

First, a story. Several years ago, Megan Pacella and I put together some work for a client. It’s the kind of thing we do every day around here. We certainly thought about the work and were intentional about it, but we didn’t think of it as anything out of the ordinary. We went to the meeting, presented it to the client, and they gushed. Yes, gushed. They thought it was brilliant.

We talked about it afterward, and I’ve referred to that moment many times since that day. We all need those reminders that we may actually be very good at what we do. All those hours studying and thinking and honing our craft really do add up to something. And they are very meaningful to your clients, your team, your organization, your whoever-you-serve.

You are most likely having those kinds of moments all the time…you’re doing something fantastic but it’s become like water to you and you can’t see it that way.

So step 1 is, think about the things you do every day: Things you do that are routine, or your special way of doing it, or something new you learned. Any of these will work.

Capture those ideas

You need to make those ideas available to you when you sit down to write or create. For many years after I trained myself to recognize those ideas, I didn’t capture them. Inevitably, they arrive when I’m in the middle of something else: Working on a deadline. Driving the car. Showering. Cooking dinner. Whatever. I can’t write a blog post right that minute.

There’s not a right way to capture and save those ideas, but there is a right way for you. There are only two requirements: The right way must be accessible when you tend to have the ideas, and it must be available when you get ready to create.

Here are some simple ideas. Which one will work for you?

  • A small blank notebook and a pen that you stick in your pocket or purse everywhere you go.
  • Voice dictation to your phone’s default note-taking or reminder app.
  • Voice dictation to a special program like Evernote.
  • Email-to-draft post for your blog.

There are millions of other options, particularly if you start thinking about technology like IFTTT. It doesn’t matter which one you pick. Pick one. Try it for a month.

Write down/dictate/email/whatever every single passing thought you have. If you think, I was pleased with how that worked…write it down. Or, I need to remember to tell Sam about this…write it down. Or, I could use that fact in my presentation…write it down. Or, I disagree with the perspective in that article…write it down.

Keep going

Here’s an important part: Do not stop capturing ideas. The more ideas you capture, the more you will have. These ideas will spawn new ideas. They will get together in your notebook and procreate.

Once you are in the routine of capturing ideas, pat yourself on the back. You have won a very hard battle! Use inertia to keep yourself going. Never stop capturing ideas, even if you’re not working on a new piece right now. You will be soon.

Get into a publishing routine for your thought leadership

The other tricky part is turning those ideas into a form that’s accessible to the world around you. Most of us trap the vast majority of brilliance in our own heads and do not share it with anyone else. No one. Stop it!

You’ve probably heard writing compared to opening a vein and bleeding; I’ll say that’s true in the positive and negative senses. Yes, you can get it to just flow out of you. Yes, it may take some life force from you.

I return here to my thoughts above about chunking up your work. If you’re not already in the habit of writing/creating regularly, you have to schedule this time on your calendar. (Even if you are in the habit, you probably need to schedule it, because anyone who’s got something worth saying is probably also busy.)

When it is time, sit down to write. Pull out your notebook, or open your notes app, and read through your ideas quickly. Pick the first one that strikes you and start writing.

Ignore the editor’s voice in your head

Here’s where you may run into trouble quickly: You start to critique your own work as you write.

  • “I don’t have enough to say about that.” (There’s no rule about how much you have to say.)
  • “I don’t like the direction this is going.” (No rules about starting one place and ending up in another.)
  • “That’s not what I started out to say.” (So change the title to what you did say.)
  • “Somebody wrote about this better before.” (Soooo many options here. Link to what they wrote and add your insight. Share the part where you disagree. Quote a sentence or two from their piece and explain why you think it’s so important that everyone read it.)

The point is, when it’s writing time, it’s not editing time. Those are two separate times. When you’re writing, your goal is to put the ideas down on paper. Metaphorically speaking. Only Alton Brown gets away with using paper in his online thought leadership publications in 2017. (Seriously, the man comments on tweets with post-it notes. It is simultaneously brilliant, meta, and bizarre. Well worth the follow.)

Thought leadership publishing schedule insight

I’ve got another “doh!” idea for you. Your creation schedule and your publishing schedule do not have to be the same schedule. You can sit down on a Sunday afternoon and crank out three blog posts for the week and schedule them to post at the times you choose. You can collect articles you’ve liked all week long, and set up links to them with your commentary to publish on LinkedIn or Twitter over the next few days. Or you can do it as you go, if your schedule allows.

Despite not always taking my own advice here, I highly recommend using a regular publishing schedule, no matter what your creation schedule looks like. You can experiment to find the best creation and publishing schedules for you, of course. But I like getting little things out daily, medium-sized things 1-2 times a week, and at least one large piece a week—to make a real impact.

Here’s a critical piece for me: I need reminders. It is super-easy to put off the work when you are your own client. But remember the adage about paying yourself first? Same goes for thought leadership publishing. Schedule your time first and protect it. Your organization succeeds when you gain stature in your industry. You succeed when you build your network by publishing. It all adds up. Do not put it off.

What are your tips?

I’m curious to hear your tips for identifying ideas and publishing work to demonstrate your thought leadership. I’d also love feedback on other things that are significant barriers to you in doing this work. I’d like to share ideas on overcoming them in future columns!

Building Trust Online

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Recently I needed a developer to help me with a small job on this website. I asked on Twitter who people recommended for a WordPress/My Emma integration and styling job. Very quickly, a local WordPress developer got in touch, we agreed on the project and he got to work. (Doesn’t our new spiffy orange email signup form look great in the right column? Please go right ahead and use it if you haven’t already! But I digress….) Over the next few days, many WordPress developers from all over the world reached out to me to offer their services. Many replied to me on Twitter, but others went a step further, found my contact info and sent a proposal.

I was fascinated by this. Most of the people who reached out weren’t my followers before and had never interacted with me before. I suppose they were searching the public timeline for people who need them. When it comes down to it, although the developer I selected was in Nashville just like I was, I found the services I needed by posting online and seeing what happened.

As we build relationships with others via social media, it’s worth thinking about how you go about building trust online. Why was I comfortable immediately working with the developer I selected? In that case, while I didn’t know him before, he was from my city. After a quick check online, I realized I knew the school where he’d received his training well. What if I’d needed his work for a client instead of myself? I could have made one phone call to get a personal reference on him. What if I hadn’t known people running his school? I would have looked harder at what he posts online and other evidence of his expertise. I would have needed more evidence of his trustworthiness.

When you use social media or publish a website, for yourself or for your job, what are you doing that inspires trust? How much do you reveal about yourself? I’ve seen many well-publicized cases where making personal information available online becomes dangerous, but I confess I usually err on the side of revealing a fair amount about myself. I’m in business, after all, and people have to be able to get in touch with me for us to work together. That’s easy to say when I work in an industry segment that’s less likely to be controversial. But you don’t have to be in politics or gaming to deal with a stalker—their terror is agnostic to that.

The Takeaway on Building Trust Online

Do you represent a brand or organization that interacts with the public, or with others in your industry? Take an objective look at how hard it is to find a person and make a connection in your organization. Many organizations err on the side of gatekeeping, locking down employee directories, including email addresses and phone numbers, for both security and competitive reasons. I understand why they do, but I also know that those organizations make it harder to establish and build trusting relationships.

Where do you fall on this continuum? Do your online decisions represent you and your organization accurately? How are you building trust online?

Join Me at the Summit on Content Marketing

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I’m excited to speak at the Summit on Content Marketing on May 31. I think you’ll be amazed at the great speakers on the agenda:

Laura Creekmore is speaking at the Summit on Content Marketing

  • Andy Crestodina
  • Rand Fishkin
  • Carrie Hane
  • Colleen Jones
  • Ahava Leibtag
  • Neil Patel
  • David Meerman Scott
  • Jon Wuebben

and lots more! Best of all, everyone can go to this event, because it’s all happening online. That’s right—wherever you are, you can get the latest insights on content marketing from May 22-June 2.

My session focuses on creating a strategy for your content marketing efforts. We’ll talk about:

  • Understanding your audience and their needs
  • Setting business goals
  • Selecting tactics to reach your goals
  • Iterating on your work

Register Today for the Summit on Content Marketing

No matter where you’re going to be May 22-June 2, you can take advantage of this great opportunity. Register for the Summit on Content Marketing today, and you can watch my session on May 31, as well as dozens of others from fantastic content marketers.

 

Content Strategy for Health Care: The Book

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I’m working on a book about content strategy for health care. I’ve thought about writing a book for a very long time—at least 5 years. I’ve worked on at least 4 different book ideas in that time period, and I wouldn’t even say I’ve discarded the others…there may be more to come on them. But this topic is one that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. So that’s the book I’ve got to write!

I’ve worked in health care off and on for my entire career, but continuously since I started Creek Content in 2008. Health care is its own little unicorn in a lot of ways, and the industry would be the first to tell you that it’s different from everything else. One of the ways it demonstrates this is by its very name: If you’re in health care, you spell the name of your industry as healthcare. (You’ll notice that I typically don’t; yes, I’m an iconoclast, but also an editor at heart. Either way, I’m going with m-w.com and every other American and spelling it health care. My SEO rankings will no doubt hate me for it.)

As I’ve worked on the strategy for this book, one thing became obvious early on. There are a LOT of different audiences for a book about health care and content:

  • Writers
  • Editors
  • Marketers
  • Product designers
  • Technical staff
  • Clinicians
  • Business people

I could make that list a lot longer by segmenting several of those categories even farther, but you get the idea.

As high-tech as health care is on the delivery side, it’s simultaneously come very, very late to the party when it comes to using technology in the business. Make no mistake—the industry is right in the middle of catching up, and the amount of tech spending going on in health care delivery and in the business of health care is significant.

For a variety of reasons, a lot of the catching up feels just as frenzied as you might expect.

That’s where I think content strategy should come in. You might think that’s a pretty niche idea to throw at a broad business problem, but I’ll argue it’s actually a great way to tackle the challenges that technology and innovation are presenting for health care today.

Content is information provided for an audience. When you start there, you realize a lot of content is being created, licensed, and provided to many audiences in the health care process today. And if we’re not managing that strategically, we’re rapidly losing control of our assets and perhaps the entire situation.

In health care, the issues are even more critical; they literally can be life or death. It’s essential to get the right information in front of the right audience at the right time. So content strategy matters a lot.

My book makes the business case for content strategy in health care. Right now, I’m writing, talking to people in health care, and writing some more. I’m making some plans for how I’d like to publish and share the book, and I’m hoping for a fall release date.

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You Need a Chief Content Officer

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I’ve worked deeply embedded in several organizations during my career, always focused on content strategy. And I’ve had the pleasure of working with a lot of smart people doing great work. But I have found that seeing content strategically is yet not a common perspective in today’s business world. Fortunately, it’s growing—I find I have to educate far less about what content strategy is than I used to. But I do not find many organizations that have someone with the title of Chief Content Officer. Most of our organizations are still aligned around older models that didn’t anticipate the need for content strategy.

And that’s part of the opportunity; content strategy is a disruptive force in most organizations. We were aligned around products or services or a production team and a sales team, not around intellectual property assets.

Make no mistake—no matter what business you’re in, you have content that is an intellectual property asset.

And that content should be overseen by a chief content officer.

I love the work done by Joe Pulizzi and his team at the Content Marketing Institute, and I give them a lot of credit for beating the drum on this idea for several years now. They’ve got an updated job description for a chief content officer that’s well worth your time.

This job description only goes partway toward what I think many organizations need, however. I do most of my work on product-related content, and CMI understandably focuses on marketing specifically.

I’m an old-school marketer who thinks of marketing in the broader sense of developing products and bringing them to market, so my thinking lines up there, but I’ve seen a number of organizations that don’t use marketing mindsets in their product development work. (Fortunately, I think the digital revolution is changing that, and I give the user experience design world the props for it. Those of us in UX and related disciplines have been pushing audience understanding as the first step in our cycle for a long time, and I think it’s making a difference.)

Regardless of what we call our work, I think it’s essential for every mid-size to large organization to have someone acting as the chief content officer.

The chief content officer must speak for the content—the content as a business and IP asset, the content as the way the brand promise is delivered to the customer, the content as a well-managed operations hub.

The CCO is a strategy officer for the business and collaborates with a multidisciplinary team to determine how content fulfills the brand promise. The chief content officer influences technology choices. The CCO ensures the marketing, technology, design, product and other related teams are aligned with subject matter experts, including the legal team. The CCO finds opportunities that didn’t exist before, from engaging repair staff with content needed to do their work to reducing calls to the 800-number with genuinely helpful help content to envisioning digital apps that engage customers in new ways. The chief content officer ensures the organization speaks with one voice, by sharing brand and style information for content creation.

I’m curious: How well is your organization managing its content? Does it have a holistic view of this work, or is it handled piecemeal in different silos? (Don’t feel bad if that’s the case; you are not alone!)

I’d love to talk to organizations looking to do this work better. Today’s technology makes it possible to do content work very well, and to truly make content the asset many of us have long believed it to be. Let me know if I can help your organization think through these issues.