So Here’s Your Challenge

Gutless and spineless…and afraid of the marketplace of ideas.  These are not exactly the attributes that most organizations (or people) aspire to. Yet most have a Social Media strategy that conveys precisely that. 

You invest in events, send out emails, educate, and send invoices.  But how well do you really know your target audience?  

Beyond the basic demographics, perhaps not as well as you might think...

Have you ever spent time staring at your blank screen, wondering what your next blog post should be about, then staring at the clock, stressing about the looming deadline.  While it’s tempting to think of this problem as writer’s block, it is really a question of process gone wrong.  (Or rather, gone missing.)

What is the one lesson that appears in every newspaper article, every magazine article, and for that matter, every bestselling book?  Journalists and editors realize that they have to work exceptionally hard to get people to actually read what they write. And unless you actually do so, their work has no value – so they have become experts on “hooking” you in.  Here’s how they do it.

My recent trip to India has once again sensitized me to an assumption that writers and speakers too often make:  that everyone understands what you mean to say.

This is absolutely not the case.  Test yourself – what do the following three words mean?  Flyover, Subway, and Removalist.

Governments use regulation to influence how we each make decisions, either through tax policy or laws. Business uses money to change our behavior, either through commission plans, bonuses, or advertising. But how do we, as individuals, change the attitudes and behavior of those around us?

Where do you call your social home? Likely it includes LinkedIn and Facebook. Perhaps YouTube and Twitter. But what about Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok? Or, the 500+ other social networks that exist?

The significant challenge of social media is that you don’t know who is looking for you (or your services), nor where. What you do know is that if your target users can’t find you on these 500+ sites, then a potentially important opportunity will be lost.

But who has the resources to maintain a presence on 500+ sites, let alone 50? (Or ten?)

Enter the Anchors and Outposts model

While the internet has changed the world of publishing fundamentally, the world of writing has been fundamentally shifted as well.

Consider the vastly different groups who are actually doing the writing:  Professional writers, and Subject Matter Experts...

Is your content really that effective? Do they grab the reader, listener, or viewer, and convince them to continue? And is there a magic bullet that can immediately make this so?

Too often, content is an outgrowth of “stream of consciousness” thinking, and rarely hits the mark.  Adding strategyand structure can make a vast improvement.

Do you actively seek out different opinions than your own, or unwittingly reinforce your personal world-view by only consuming “agreeable” content? While we may think we do the former – who doesn’t have a self image of being open-minded – too often we live in a bubble.