Creed: The Strength of a Company Lies In the Personalities of Its Leaders
The strength of a company lies in the personalities of its leaders. Those are the people that know why the company was started in the first place. If you really want to share the authentic essence of your company, you need those leaders to be out in front creating content.
It’s always easy to use Apple as an example of a company with personalities who are leading. They started with Steve Jobs, but Tim Cook picked up the ball and ran with it. Then, there’s Jony Ives, their lead designer. He is outspoken, and has even written his own book. That information may not be landing on the company’s blog, but you certainly know what Apple is all about based on the high profile, shared content of its leaders.
If your company is relying on a marketing assistant to try to relay the genuine passion of your leaders, I’m afraid that may fall flat on its face. That is unless you have someone so good that they know how to capture that passion, either in video, audio or the written word. But I’ve never seen it really work. It’s not a marketing assistant that jumps on stage at an Apple keynote to tell about a new product.
There are a lot of companies who know how to share the personalities of their leaders. The ones we end up talking about are the ones who have those strong leaders in the first place. Even on a local level, there are companies that have their owners as the spokesmen in their ads. We tend to really understand their values because the owner is leading the way, showing us what he believes and what he stands for.
I once worked with a client in a consulting capacity that ran a roofing company. They had hired a marketing assistant and although he was really good at WordPress, posting things and getting the word out, his writing lacked a major aspect: he didn’t know a thing about roofing! He was a marketing major. It would have worked a lot better if he had just pointed the camera right at the owner of the company to get the stories first-hand. Instead, he tried to relay something that he didn’t fully understand.
On the flip side, we had a Shortcut Content client who was a chiropractor. He used our method of doing podcasts to get his stories out to his customers. He told me that once a week, a patient would come into the office and after hearing him say ‘hello,’ would tell him they felt like they already knew him! It was the reason they came into his practice in the first place. The patient had an experience that was exactly what they had expected to it to be, because the chiropractor himself had been talking about that experience through podcasts for months.
At Shortcut Content, we help pull that personality from the leaders; the people that are having face-to-face interactions with the customers. Those are the people whose content you want to read, listen to and watch, because they’re the ones that you’re going to experience when you actually become a customer of that company. We can make that ‘man, I feel like I know you’ experience happen for your customers, too.
I’ve written a post about each line of the Creed. If you’d like to see them, just click on the links below:
We believe…
…the best content comes from individuals rather than organizations
…your work’s meaning and your company’s purpose are best shared through a human voice of storytelling
…communication derived from story transcends communication derived from product features
…readers deserve first-hand stories from experienced experts
…stories are best shared by experts who have lived to tell the tale rather than vicariously through writers and researchers
…the strength of your company rests in the personalities of your leaders
…sharing your wisdom through story is your best legacy
And the BEST way to write your story is whatever method gets the job done.