Content Creator’s Creed Line 4

February 5, 2015 7:40 pm

We Believe…readers deserve first-hand stories from experienced experts

This conversation was used as the source material for a corresponding blog post.

Grab the entire Content Creators Creed series (9 short episodes) on iTunes.

Transcript:

Shayla: We’re talking today with Dave Young, the found of Shortcut Content and, Dave, we’ve talking the past few podcasts about your Content Creator’s Creed. It’s a lot of fun information about what you do at Shortcut Content and how you do it and why you do it, most importantly. And one of the next steps we’re talking about today is that readers deserve first-hand stories from experienced experts. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Dave: Well, we really believe that. I think that if you’re going to sit down and read some content or listen to content, let me give you an example. Let’s say you wanted to read the Game of Thrones books. Would you rather read the original Game of Thrones book written by George R. R. Martin or would you rather read something that I wrote that summarizes the Game of Thrones series?

Shayla: Absolutely, the original, yes.

Dave: Yeah. You want to hear it from the author, right? You want to read the author. I mean, cliff’s notes and those kinds of things have their place, typically in a college classroom, and you know, you can read the cliff’s notes to Moby Dick, but nobody can make the claim that that’s like reading the book. You might get enough information to pass the test, to prove that you know something about the story, but it’s not the experience that the true author really wanted to deliver.

Are you familiar with the term ‘fungibility’?

Shayla: This is the first time I’m hearing that word, ‘fungibility.’

Dave: So a fungible product is something that can easily be swapped out for something else or swapped out for, so oil, lumber, things like that are fungible products. So if you buy a hundred barrels of oil from somebody and they run out of oil so they get some from somebody else, you’ll never know that it was not the oil that you paid for, because it’s oil. It just doesn’t matter. If you bought a bunch of top-grade two by fours and the person you bought them from swapped them out for some other top-grade two by fours, as long as the same quality there, you’ll never know the difference. Stories can be, we have a place, I’m affiliated with a little place in Austin called Wizard Academy and this is seemingly off-topic but the chancellor at Wizard Academy, I think he’s the vice chancellor, anyway, in his office he’s got a little bar called The Toad and The Ostrich. And one of the rules at The Toad and The Ostrich is any story you tell about yourself, while sitting in that little bar, is a fungible story. That means, if, Shayla, you tell a story and you tell me about the time you were in Paris, blah, blah, blah, whatever happened, that means that I get to tell that same story, first person, as it happened to me, the next time I’m at The Toad and The Ostrich.

Shayla: That’s great. That’s such a great party trick.

Dave: So it’s really a fun thing. I picked up a great story there about a guy who actually came across Steve Jobs and accidentally called him Michael Dell. It’s like, oh, you don’t want to do that. But it’s a good story. But the thing is, that’s a fun thing to do, but it’s not very authentic. So if I’m telling first-hand stories about my company, but I’m not the person that lived those stories, it’s never going to feel as authentic. So the point I’m trying to make here is that if your company has a strong story to tell but you allow your new marketing assistant that you just hired to tell the story about the time that the founder was playing golf with, whatever that story is, it’s never going to feel as authentic as if it came out of the mouth of the person that lived it. If you’ve got experts in your company, and those can be, we’ve had customers who we’ve blogged for, we’ve done podcasting and blogging for the CEO, but we’ve also done it for some of their programmers. If they’re a software company, we’ve actually had their programmers in talking and creating content with them because they live those stories. If you have scientists who work for you and they’ve got breakthrough in their products and their formulas and the things they’re doing for your company, it’s much more important to let the scientists tell the story than it is letting the PR guy tell the story. It’s always going to be more authentic coming out of the mouths of the people that lived it. Our contention is that if you can’t get those people to write, can you at least get them to sit down in front of a microphone so that your customers and potential customers can hear the first-hand stories coming out of their mouths because they are the ones who have experienced growing your company, developing your products and working with your customers and the services you provide.

Shayla: So you’ve heard here from Dave that you and your staff are the experts and you can’t anyone tell you any different. And if they want to get a hold of you, Dave, to get their story out there, get their expertise, how are they going to get a hold of you?

Dave: Well, just go to the website, well, email would be Dave @ ShortcutContent.com or go to the website, ShortcutContent.com and you reach me. And, you know, Shayla, what you are and I are doing right now is the best example of that. You and I have both been working with Shortcut Content for quite awhile now and there’s no two better people to share this story than those of us who have lived it. You interviewing our customers and me founding the company.

Shayla: I’m glad to be part of it.

Dave: I’m glad you are.

Shayla: Alright, thanks, Dave.