Content Creator’s Creed Line 5

February 4, 2015 7:46 pm

We Believe…stories are best shared by experts who have lived to tell the tale rather than vicariously through writers and researchers

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: I’m talking today with Dave Young, the founder of Shortcut Content. And, Dave, we’ve spent the last few podcasts going over your Content Creator’s Creed. We’re about half-way through, but we’ve still got a lot of good stuff to get to get through. So, I’d like to talk today about why it’s important that the stories of these companies are shared by the experts, by the innovators, who have been through it rather than through second hand writers or researchers or a PR firm?

Dave: Well, I think that’s just because that’s the way we like to hear it. Everybody likes to hear it from the horse’s mouth. And so people that think about their content strategy and look for a way to outsource it. I mean, the challenge is those experts don’t always have the time, sometimes don’t have the talent to do the writing and so businesses end up looking at an outsourcing method. Let’s find article writers, let’s find freelancers, let’s find people that can write our story for us or write something that relates to our story and what I see in a lot of industries, let’s say you’re a chiropractor or a dentist and if you can find somebody to write an article about a root canal, that’s going to be pretty close to fungible. Remember the word fungible, we talked about that in the last episode. And just about any dentist could use the exact same story about root canals. So if you want copy that and content that could just be swiped by your competitor and used, that’s the kind of content that you feed to a search engine.

But search engines are getting smarter and smarter. And people are smart. We know that, if I’m just looking for information about a root canal, I can find that just about anywhere, including Wikipedia. What I want to know from you the dentist is how your’e’ going to be different from your competitors? What’s the reason that I should go to you when I need that? And so rather than create content that is a hundred percent fungible, meaning that any dentist could use it, create content that is a hundred percent unique, that’s a hundred percent you and what makes you a different dentist, chiropractor, any kind of business owner. And so I see a lot of them taking that kind of approach and I think that’s not the highest and best use of your resources to create content.

Now, there’s another approach, a more journalistic approach. You may have heard the term ‘brand journalist.’ And a lot of big companies are doing this and I think it’s like the next best thing. And that approach is to have actually somebody inside your company that becomes the brand journalist. You have your own reporter in house and that person goes out and interviews your own in-hour experts and then they use those interviews and the information that they gather to create content that is unique to your business. That’s a good approach too, but you’ve got to have that person on board. You’ve got to actually hire somebody. Or use the same person over and over and sometimes that’s hard to do as well; it’s an outsourced kind of approach.

Shayla: That’s a full-time hire.

Dave: Yeah, typically, if you’re going to do it right, it’s a full-time hire and then that person’s going to have to really kind of learn the company. But it always comes down to the experts inside your company. They’re the best people to tell the story. And if you can’t get them to write, you should take an e-journalism approach and do that. Either hire somebody or get the same freelancer every time, record them with audio or video and then make that your original content and then you can transcribe it to derive the written story from that. And, lo and behold, that’s exactly what Shortcut Content does. We just do it that for a lot of companies at the same time. But we help them figure out what stories they need to tell and then provide them with a good quality microphone and do exactly what you and I are doing right now. We sit down over Skype, you and I are not in the same city, but as we continue to do this, we develop that relationship, you get to know the company better and the stories just keep getting better and better. And it’s original content. We’ll transcribe it, we’ll rewrite it, it’ll become a written blogpost; that may be how you’re reading it right now. It’s way better than outsourcing it to someone that you just tell, well, here’s the topic that I want, go ahead and write me something.

Shayla: You’ve heard it from Dave. It’s super easy and the best way to get your stuff out there. I’ve lived to tell that tale. I believe in it. I know you do, too. And if anybody out there has any questions about how that works, how to get your stories from you just speaking into a microphone that’s yours, that’s your words, that’s your stories, how are they going to get a hold of you, Dave?

Dave: ShortcutContent.com just, there’s all kinds of ways to get a hold of us. The phone number’s there, we’ve got forms for email, those kinds of things. We’re pretty easy to find.

Shayla: Alright. Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Thank you.