It’s a standard 80/20 rule: investigation should be 80% of the effort and writing 20%.

I have been reading a great deal of content about the creation of content and in fact at this moment are creating content about content. (Feels sort of like lining up two mirrors to see an infinite number of images.) There seems to be a plethora of what seems like sage advice about how to create content some of it painfully bad, some just silly.

First let’s get curation out of the way. Curation is not creation. That’s not inherently a bad thing. Digital curation refers to the preservation and maintenance of digital assets. It’s about collecting, managing, and distributing content. Hopefully value is added to the content via synopsis, cataloging, creating metadata, indexing, etc. All good and important things, but not what we are writing about here.

To create: to cause to exist; bring into being. To give rise to; produce. To produce through artistic or imaginative effort. (http://www.thefreedictionary.com)

There seem to be two or three top approaches in the current dialog:

• SEO based creation – In this approach, an author defines a set of words that will drive traffic via search engines and (believe it or not) creates content around them. We are at least a bit incredulous about this, but have certainly read some of the inane and disjointed products of the process. SEO is, in our opinion, at best a way to tune content to make sure people see it. It’s a process that should be thought of after good content is created and should be applied judiciously and not in a way that damages the message or the experience of consuming the content.
• Atomize/Recycle – In this approach you reuse already created content, perhaps cutting into small single concept pieces (atomize). It’s a great idea and really useful, but again, not really about creating content.
• Get Help (use another brain or brains) – This approach gets closer to a good approach. Unfortunately it reminds me of a poster from Despair, Incorporated (http://www.despair.com/) which states that “none of us is as dumb as all of us”. All kidding aside; brainstorming, debating, dialoging, interviewing, etc. are all valid and useful means of collecting information. Which, assuming you haven’t surrounded yourself with a collection of dolts, is a pretty good idea. .

As a last resort some writers suggest doing the work rather than the approaches listed above.

Recent I asked a friend who is a professional journalist: “Tell me about how you create content?”
He said: “we do the work, 80% of the effort is investigation, 20% is writing”. Doing the work is probably the easiest thing to describe and the least frequently employed approach.

So what is investigation?

First we need to dispel the myth that investigation is the same thing as rigorous research. What we are talking about here is not pharmaceutical research or calculating the appropriate burn for a course correction on Mars mission. We have conducted that type of research for a few clients, most of them didn’t need the rigor and we were unable to talk them out of it. A sample size of 300 is simply not necessary to write a short article or to post a blog. Of course you might do an in-depth, rigorous study to drive multiple content assets and deploy them in multiple locations and slices.

The second idea we need to dispel is that doing an interview (unless it’s with Gandhi, and that would be interesting) is not investigation, either. Maybe a series of interviews, exposing many ideas and differing perspectives qualifies, but a single interview unless it’s with someone really important to your audience doesn’t.

Investigation is somewhere in between those extremes. Merriam-Webster defines investigate as: to observe or study by close examination and systematic inquiry. Sounds like work. We believe that the level of thoroughness in your investigation is entirely dependent on your audience, topic and plans for the content you will develop.

Stay tuned, our next post will outline a process for investigative content creation that you can use immediately.

It will require work.

Filigree Consulting has conducted over 300 investigation projects over the past 20 years with the specific purpose of creating content. Ask us how, we’d love to help.

What do you think: Can you create good content without investigation?

We have built many such tools over the past 30 years. As a result we have a fairly good idea about what makes marketing and sales tools work. We say a tool works if it accomplishes its intended task of facilitating movement in the buying process and has a high level of acceptance and use.

So what makes tools work?

• A reasonable scope. Things change far too quickly to build a tool that has a multiple month development cycle. Realize that an expensive and monolithic tool that is intended to do everything except what the customers (or reps) are asking for is a bad idea.
• User engagement is critical. It makes as much sense for the average marketing person to design a sales tool as the converse, which is to say no sense at all.
• A very clear understanding of the frequency of use – a tool used once a year by a sales rep has remarkably different requirements than one used daily.
• The customers have to believe, too. If the customer can conceive of why the sales rep is trying to engage them in a tool discussion then you are busted.
• If you could develop a tool that replaces sales people (generally it’s marketing that tries to hire us to do this) you could retire and support my family and many, many others.
• You have to think apps not applications. Specifically rapid prototyping, easy to modify, portable, small, limited function, etc.
• Some tools are expensive to build and arduous maintain. Being out of date will make it useless, reconsider your approach.

In a nutshell, think fast, light, single purpose, and easy to modify. Break the task into parts. Not only will you have more to converse about but you will have opportunities for more conversations. Get it into the hands of the customers and let them shape it.

If it costs so much to build that you aren’t willing to throw it out, it’s the wrong thing to invest in. Think small. Repetitively.

Did you experience a guided process to select the right solution? Generally there’s a fair amount of this in tech spaces. Think: buying a Dell pc. Don’t forget that the same thing is happening when a personal shopper fits you for a suit.

Did you get a statement of related and relevant content, products, options, etc . and the reasons why they might be helpful? Think: interacting with Amazon

A quantified statement of benefits – tailored to you? There are a number of ROI tools available, an astonishing number. Think: Hmmm

Did you get all of these things? We suspect the answer is no.

Buyers of large scale IT don’t get them either. We survey sixty-five CIO level individuals asking them about the information they received from their sales reps on recent large solution purchases. The chart at the right summarizes their input. The information items most important to the CIOs were the least frequently provided – and the lower importance items were received most frequently. This is the opposite of what makes sense.

It speaks to the failure of the entire provider organization to quantify the benefits of solutions.

We believe that it is also a statement about the expense of providing information. If you scan from lower right to upper left in the chart (go ahead try it) you may notice what we did. The stuff in the lower right is cheap, produced one time and reproduced, probably generated by a configuration application. The stuff in the upper left is people, time and expense intensive to create. It frequently has to be tailored to the specific customer to be meaningful and valued. Marketing people do a number of things to avoid this – case studies are an example. What we try to do is create a generic justification for the solution.

An alternative is to try a justification tool. Think small. Apps vs. applications. Our next post will address what we mean by think small.

Tell us what you think about this information. Do you agree?

Is it really that hard to justify solutions?

Not all good content is thought leadership. It doesn’t have to be. Sometimes you are providing useful information on how to install your products or where to get some help. Valuable yes; but probably not thought leadership.

Unfortunately not all thought leadership content is good content. Some of the most boring knowledge transfer (even the term is boring) is thought leadership. Try the exciting and frequently thought leading content in the MIT Sloan Management Review sometime.

I’ve been reading many articles that have latched onto the notion of thought leadership as way to add value to their content simply by using the term. Perhaps the SEO professionals are at work here. I have seen many things called thought leadership that (a) seem absolutely without significant value, (b) were not particularly thoughtful and (c) lead to nothing but wasted time.

Trying to define thought leadership may be a lost cause. So we can either consider thought leadership just another lost term buried in the babble of blather or we can take steps to define it. The damaging thing is that at some point we will run out of language. First we will run out of numbers.

The first thing that will happen is a modifier: some bright and witty person will call it Thought Leadership 2.0 (oops, I already tried that – ok 3.0) By the time we get to 4.0 (since everyone is already using 3.0 on a bunch of things) we’ll use a noun modifier – something like “Leveraged Thought Leadership”. It’s no wonder that some NFL football announcers (you know who I mean) can’t utter two sentences without saying “he’s the BEST ___ in the league”.

So back to the initial point. Thought leadership is about providing knowledge to your customers that can change the way they do business. Let me give you an example. One of our clients recently developed an assessment that tests the maturity of  the IT “requirements definition” processes. The put it on their site and have driven over 500 completed assessments in about six months. The assessment (using a set of questions designed to provoke thought) teaches best practices. It causes IT organizations to rethink how they manage application requirements. It is thought leadership.

So I am begging for responses to this blog that do not simple push a URL and some meaningless machine generated text. Something that indicates you actually read my ranting. Tell me, please, what do you think thought leadership is?

People can easily access the information they desire. Providing useful content along with products and services is expected. The sales approach ensures the best customer solution.

All of the knowledge and behavior implied by these actions is integrated into the operational and administrative aspects of the business – it is measured, managed, continuously improved and institutionalized.

Simple stuff.

What do you think?

Does your organization, department or social media program only have one level of listening?