Creed: Stories Are Best Shared by Experts
Stories are best told first-hand. I think everybody likes to hear it from the horse’s mouth. When it comes to creating content for your business, you don’t want to create something that can be copied and pasted. You want unique information, that’s coming directly from you and your experts.
Most experts, innovators and business owners don’t have the time, or sometimes the talent, to do the writing it takes to create content. This usually leads to some method of outsourcing. They look for article writers and freelancers to write the story for them. The tricky part is finding someone that can write stories that are unique to your company.
Let’s say you own a dental office. If I’m just looking for information about a root canal, I can find that just about anywhere on the internet, including Wikipedia. What I want to know about you as a dentist is how you’re going to be different from your competitors. Why should I go to you for my root canal? Rather than creating content that is completely fungible, meaning any dentist could use it, why not create something that it one hundred percent unique? A freelancer or article writer might not be able to do that.
There’s another approach called ‘brand journalism.’ A lot of big companies are doing this and I think it’s the next best thing. In this approach, you have somebody inside your company that becomes your brand journalist. You have a reporter in-house who interviews your experts and uses those interviews to create content that is unique. It can work really well, but you have to have that person on board or you might have to hire someone full-time, which might not be the best use of your resources.
What We Do
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. Either hire somebody or get the same freelancer every time, record them with audio or video, and then make that your original content. You can transcribe it and then 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.
We help them figure out what stories they need to tell, provide them with a good quality microphone, and then record it straight from the horse’s mouth. Our hosts develop that relationship; they get to know the company better and the stories just keep getting better and better. And it’s original content. We’ll transcribe it, rewrite it, and it’ll become a written blog post, which is actually what you’re reading right now! It’s much better than outsourcing it to someone that you just met and saying, “Hey, here’s what I want you to write a blog post about.”
Creating original, thoughtful, effective content can be extremely simple. Your stories are already unique. Now, all you have to do is share them. We’re easy to get a hold of at ShortcutContent.com if you have any questions or comments about what we do.
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.