Content Creator’s Creed Line 6

February 3, 2015 7:51 pm

We Believe…the strength of your company rests in the personalities of your leaders

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 founder of Shortcut Content and we’ve got a few more bullet points of our Content Creator’s Creed to go over, something that Dave created for his company to show the foundation of what they do at Shortcut Content. And, Dave, today I want to talk about why the personalities of the leaders of a company, why is that important?

Dave: Well, I think that’s where the strength of a company rests. Those are the people that know why the company was started in the first place. And I think it’s important, if you really want to share the authentic essence of your company, you need those leaders to be out in front creating content and that doesn’t necessarily mean blogging. It’s super easy to use Apple as a good example of a company with personalities that are leading. You start with Steve Jobs, but Tim Cook picked up the ball and has run with it and I think Apple’s doing pretty well right now.

Shayla: I would say so.

Dave: Jony Ives, is it Jony or Joanie, do you know? I think it’s Jony, well, he’s their lead designer and he’s outspoken. There’s been mention of him and I think he’s even written his own book. And so it may not be content that’s landing on the companies blog, but you certainly know what that company’s about, and you know it because the high profile and shared content of their leaders. And so if your company is trying to rely on a marketing assistant to try to relay the genuine passion of your leaders, I think that approach typically falls on its face, unless you’ve got somebody that’s so good, they know how to capture that either in video, in audio or in the written word and share it in a way that seems authentic. But I’ve never seen that really work. It’s not a marketing assistant that jumps on a stage at an Apple keynote to tell about a new product.

And there’s a lot of companies like that. The ones that we tend to talk about are the ones that have strong leaders that you just know them. You end up knowing the company because you end up knowing who the leader is. And even if you think on a local level, there are companies who have their owners as the spokesman in their ads and we tend really understand the values of those companies better if their spokesperson, their owner, is leading the way, showing us what he believes and what he stands for.

Shayla: So a marketing assistant isn’t going to relay the personality of the company in a ten-point post. This is the best ten ways to clean out your plumbing system, that’s not going to get the message across?

Dave: No, I don’t think so.

Shayla: Oh, no. No, those are the ones that you scroll right past.

Dave: We even had, I had a company that I work with, this is not even a Shortcut Content client, it was just in a consulting capacity, and they had, it was a roofing company and they hired a marketing assistant and he was really good with WordPress and posting things and getting that out, but when he was writing things, he kind of went by the roofing rookie moniker because he didn’t know anything about roofing. He was a marketing major. And it didn’t work as well if he would just would point a camera at the owner of the company and get him to talk. When he was trying to relay something that was taught to him while riding around with the company president, that just didn’t work as well.

Shayla: And you mentioned in a previous podcast that someone came into the chiropractor’s office that works with Shortcut Content and felt like they knew the chiropractor, even though they’d never met face to face, because they’d spend so much time listening to the podcasts.

Dave: Exactly. First of all, that’s the reason they came is because they felt like they really understood the company and it’s values and what they could expect and when they finally decided, hey, I need a little bit of help with my back or whatever, that’s the chiropractor they called first. They made an appointment, they came in and their experience was exactly what they expected it to be because the chiropractor had been telling them what the experience was going to be for months. And when they first heard him open his mouth to say ‘hello’ to them it was like, oh my gosh, I feel like I know you.

Shayla: When you get to know someone’s personality, I think you begin to trust them.

Dave: Exactly. And I think that’s the strength of Shortcut Content is we help pull that personality from the leaders, you know, the founder of the company, the experts in the company, the people that are face-to-face with customers- those are the ones that you want to hear, those are the people whose content you want to read, to listen to, to watch, because they’re the ones that you’re going to experience when you actually become a customer of that company.

Shayla: So if I’m a leader of a company or an innovator, how do I get in contact with you to get that started?

Dave: Dave@ShortcutContent.com is my email. You can find our phone number, you can find a contact form on our website at shortcutcontent.com or follow me at @DaveYoung on Twitter.

Shayla: Alright. Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Thank you.