But I'm Not A Writer
And Other Excuses You Or Your Team Will Use To Not Support A Content Strategy
by Jeremy Nulik
Few moments are more fragile for professional humans than the ones spent staring at a blank Word doc. The cursor blinks. You check Facebook and like some posts. You buy something on Amazon. You return to the blank page. It is a special kind of hell.
You can empathize with this situation because you have been this person - on deadline for that proposal or presentation, and you’re stuck. And the fact that you can empathize with this situation should help you in your endeavor to entreat others to express their ideas. Namely when they are asked to express them in the form of 26 characters, 10 numbers and a handful of symbols on a regular basis.
If you have not yet had the pleasure of proposing your company’s content development (your company’s strategy surrounding blogs and social media), then know that you can be prepared for any number of excuses.
Here is what you will hear:
But I am not in communications/sales/marketing/tech-stuff. I’m not a creative person. I do not have anything to write about. I am not a good writer that is why I have this job. Can’t someone else just write my stuff? (The list goes on ad infinitum.)
The trouble with this, of course, is that you know none of these are really reasons. They are, however, revealing of some latent insecurity. And now the task of undoing potentially years of delusion is yours – the inspirational leader.
This is no small undertaking, and you can take the short route of just hiring a talented writer or agency to build out the content for you. However, if that is not in the cards for you, fear not, there are a few tactics I have seen that work to unlock the hidden knowledge and creative spirit of an organization.
1. Empathize. You’ve been there. You don’t have to say this out loud, but allow some empathy to work like an operating system in the background of any solution. Know their feelings regarding the task are valid.
2. Make it simple. Good writing is only good thinking. The craft of writing is so secondary to the quality of ideas. You can always edit words. But you must start with great raw material.
3. Stage a discovery session with your team. There exists an entire library of knowledge around how best to unlock ideas and stage brainstorming-like sessions. Find one. Gather the smart people in a room. And get the ideas down.
4. Organize the ideas and the experts. Place the topics into themes and find the content experts for those themes. While they do not have to write, they have the knowledge.
5. Ask for more than words. Content does not have to be written word. It can be photos, artwork, designs or videos. If some have an aversion to words, offer a new medium.
6. Enlist an internal communicator. Most of the issues surrounding this have to do with sitting at a monitor for what should be less than an hour and writing. If someone has passion for that, let them express it.
7. Provide achievable formats. If you do not have a communicator, then provide your experts with an essential fill in the blank that can be made into content. Also set some achievable and predictable timelines for that effort.
Jeremy Nulik (jeremy@bigwidesky.com) is evangelist prime at bigwidesky, a design futures agency, in St. Louis, Mo.