We’ve finally reached the fourth post in this four-post series. If you missed posts one, two, and three, follow the links.

The series, based upon an article by Andrew Wheeler of Skyword, address four possible concerns that companies may have in using external content creators. Lack of expertise. Lack of brand knowledge. Lack of quality control.

And this one.

The concern

Wheeler’s fourth concern is as follows:

It’s faster/easier to just do it ourselves

There are two reasons why a company may decide to turn to external content creators. One of these was addressed in a previous post: the company is so swamped that it’s hard to get all the work done that needs to be done.

There’s a second reason: the company doesn’t know HOW to do the work that needs to be done. For example, a salesperson might walk up to a technical writer in the company.

“Our customer just published an RFP. Even though we have a really good relationship with the customer, I didn’t know this RFP is coming. Of course we’ll win it if those idiots in finance don’t gouge the customer with a high price. We have to respond to the RFP in three weeks.”

In some cases, the technical writer may turn to the salesperson and ask,

“What’s an RFP?”

Regardless of which of the two reasons is prompting the company to bring in outside help, the company may dread the whole idea of bringing outside help up to speed. Even if the outside help has the required expertise, understands the company’s branding, and can provide accountability and quality control, it’s such a hassle to bring someone new onto a project. If we adjust a schedule here and there, and maybe work just one Saturday, we can take care of all of this ourselves without bothering with an outside vendor!

What Andrew Wheeler said

Again, I encourage you to read the entire article. This is but a short excerpt. But the article makes an excellent point about it being faster/easier to do things in-house.

It is—until it isn’t.

As we all know, internal bandwidth gets eaten up as soon as it’s created. Unless you anticipate zero business growth—and then I’d say you have another problem—you’re going to need creative skills tomorrow that you don’t have on hand today. It makes more sense to work with external resources who can be changed up or tapped the moment you need them than it does to try and hire a team that can cover everything.

From https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/the-truth-about-trusting-external-content-partners/

I won’t go into the flexibility that project-based contractors can provide, but I can say that it’s not only helped Bredemarket’s business, but the business of Bredemarket’s clients, to bring someone on for a few hours or a few weeks to get a particular project done.

It’s better than overloading your in-house staff. I know from experience.

What I say

Let me expand on a story that I’ve briefly referenced before.

In the summer of 1994, Printrak proposal manager Laurel Jew went on maternity leave. This left Printrak in such a bind that the company had to bring on TWO consultants to replace her.

So one day in October 1994 Kimtech sent me out to Printrak’s office on Tustin Avenue in Anaheim to write AFIS proposals. I had never written a proposal, but I knew how to spell AFIS (and didn’t know much more about AFIS at the time). That first day on the job I stayed in Anaheim until 11:00 at night. In a way it was nice because I was getting paid by the hour, but it was a tough road for the next several months. We even worked on Super Bowl Sunday in 1995. The employee who had to cancel his Super Bowl party and bring his TV to Tustin Avenue was not happy.

Eventually both of us consultants were hired and became permanent employees of Printrak, and we weren’t pulling all-nighters any more.

But a few years later our business was expanding, the number of proposals that we had to write was expanding, and we had to bring in a new set of consultants to help with the workload.

I remember one of these consultants was stressed by the heavy workload, and adapted his behavior to fit the environment in which he had been thrust. We realized this when he published his proposal schedule, complete with Saturday meetings.

“We don’t meet on Saturdays,” we told him.

“Why not?” he replied. “We’re working every Saturday.”

Eventually he ended up leaving and presumably took up a more relaxing activity such as high-wire balancing.

And all of this stress happened WITH consultants. Imagine if the decision had been made in 1994 and 1998 NOT to hire consultants. Perhaps Printrak would have scheduled Sunday proposal meetings.

A less stressful example

Fast forward twenty-plus years, and I’m consulting again. And I’ve noticed something.

When a company contracts with me to work on a project, I am focused on that one project for the company. Now perhaps an hour later I am focused on another project for another company, but during that initial hour the project receives my undivided attention.

But the company itself is focused on all the other things that the company has to do. There’s the project for which I’m helping out, and then there’s all the other stuff that the company needs to address. If I’m helping a company with a proposal, few if any of the company employees are dedicated 100% to that particular proposal. Proposal specialists may be simultaneously working on other proposals, and subject matter experts (SMEs) are working on the proposal in addition to their “real” jobs.

Depending upon the craziness of the other work that the company’s employees are doing, I may be the only person who is thinking about the project on a regular basis. If it’s a proposal project, I’m the one who always has the due date in mind, and occasionally have to remind the employees that the proposal has to be submitted in two weeks, or one week, or two days. Sometimes my content projects have due dates of their own.

Enough storytelling.

Doing it yourself doesn’t work if you have too much work to begin with, and doing it yourself doesn’t work if you don’t know how to do it. So in those circumstances, you want to contract with a company such as Skyword (or another company) to help you with your writing project.

And if you contract with Skyword, maybe I’ll be assigned to your project.

Part of a series (which started here) on why companies are reluctant to use external content creators, and how to mitigate those companies’ concerns.

The concern

In his article, “The Truth About Trusting External Content Partners,” Skyword CEO Andrew Wheeler highlighted this concern:

We’ll lose accountability and quality control

Think about this from the perspective of the company. Often (but not always) companies consider using external help because they are overloaded with work. (There’s another reason to use external help, which I’ll address in the fourth post in this series.) The boss is already having a tough enough time getting the worker bees to generate quality content in such a high-pressure situation. The boss is going to be really concerned about some outsider, not under the boss’ thumb. How will the boss control the outsider?

Many bosses are not like this, but even the most enlightened ones will have a concern about how an outsider that they don’t know is going to meet the quality standards of the employees that they do know.

What Andrew Wheeler said

When addressing this concern, Wheeler starts out by presenting an uncomfortable truth.

I’ve found this concern usually resonates with teams for whom process and quality control are already sore spots. Either no content creation infrastructure exists, the current structure is too rigid to scale, or the structure is chaotic and there’s fear that an external partner will exacerbate the problem.

From https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/the-truth-about-trusting-external-content-partners/

Because Skyword is in the business of connecting freelancers with companies needing their services, one of the things that Skyword does is to institute its own process to ensure the maintenance of accountability and quality control. Wheeler’s article describes four key elements that any process should include: documented guidelines, good briefs, dedicated gatekeepers, and good content management technology.

What I say

Every project has a process. Perhaps the process may be chaotic, but it’s a process. It’s better to institute a good one. When Bredemarket takes on a project, there are three ways to implement a process.

1. If I am sent out to a project by a service such as Skyword, SMA, or Dragonfly Editorial, often the service does what Skyword does and institutes its own process.
2. There are some cases in which the client has a mature process, and in that case I just slot myself into the client’s existing process.
3. In other cases, most notably with very small companies, I institute a process myself. When used, my content creation process has a simple order of steps, starting with the kickoff described in a prior post in this series.

Regardless of where the process comes from, the goal is the same: to institute accountability and quality control over the final product.

We’re almost to the finish line. We have one more concern to address: It’s faster/easier to just do it ourselves.

If you missed the first post in this series, I’m looking at four concerns that companies may have about contracting with external content creators. These four concerns were identified by Andrew Wheeler, CEO of Skyword, who addressed each one in turn.

In this post series, I will augment Wheeler’s responses with some thoughts of my own.

The concern

The second concern Andrew Wheeler raised in his article was the following:

They’ll never “get” our brand like we do

This differs from expertise. It’s one thing to have the expertise that a company needs. It’s another thing to know how companies do things.

I’ll choose an example well outside of my areas of expertise to make the point. Specifically, I’ll talk about insurance companies.

Would someone explain to me why multiple insurance companies choose to air ads in which the spokespeople are intentionally annoying? There’s one company that makes a big point about how annoying its white-clothed female spokesperson is. Another insurance company has a spokesperson referred to as “mayhem.” And then there’s the company that used to feature the performing voice of Gilbert Gottfried; if you are not familiar with his voice, it’s not smooth and calming.

Other insurance companies have adopted an older, more traditional branding approach that hearkens back to Allstate’s old “you’re in good hands” or State Farm’s “like a good neighbor.” New York Life still maintains this more soothing approach.

What if an external content creator approached a company with the wrong branding tone? “Your lifestyle commercial is BORING. Here’s my pitch for an ad with an emu and a gecko who are seriously injured in a major automobile accident!”

That pitch meeting wouldn’t end well.

What Andrew Wheeler said

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

Making sure a partner is well-versed in your brand is both a process and a two-way street. 

From https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/the-truth-about-trusting-external-content-partners/

It’s a two-way street because the company has to communicate to the freelancer its branding standards, while the freelancer has to research the company to get a feel for how the company communicates.

What I say

So how do you make sure this required communication happens?

By allocating time for it at the beginning of the project.

On occasion I’ve described the process that Bredemarket uses when kicking off a project with its clients. I start by providing a high-level overview.

Bredemarket’s content creation process ensures that the final written content (a) advances your GOAL, (b) communicates your BENEFITS, and (c) speaks to your TARGET AUDIENCE. It is both iterative and collaborative.

From https://bredemarket.com/2021/08/04/revising-bredemarkets-content-creation-process/

When I drill down into the content creation process itself, here is how I describe the kickoff meeting with the client.

You and Bredemarket agree upon the topic, goal, benefits, and target audience (and, if necessary, outline, section sub-goals, relevant examples, and relevant key words/hashtags, and interim and final due dates).

From https://bredemarket.com/2021/08/04/revising-bredemarkets-content-creation-process/

Agreement upon the branding strategy can fall into this initial discussion, perhaps when talking about the goal of the content. If the goal is to gently reassure potential clients that the service will ease their burdens, then the content will take one approach. If the goal is to shock and amuse potential clients with a stronger call to action, then you’ll use the mayhem guy.

Regardless of your process, it’s important to communicate and reach agreement on the critical things at the beginning of the project. This saves expensive rework later in the project.

Time to move on to the third concern, “we’ll lose accountability and quality control.“

After reading a SideHusl recommendation for suggested work for nomads (even though I’m not a nomad), I signed up with yet another external referral service, Skyword. My Skyword profile is here, by the way.

After getting everything set up, I explored the company more deeply, and ran across this article by Skyword CEO Andrew Wheeler entitled “The Truth About Trusting External Content Partners.” The article addresses the reluctance of companies to trust outsiders to create their content. Wheeler cataloged four concerns and addressed them one by one.

As I read Wheeler’s article, three thoughts came to mind.

1. I have things to say myself about each of these four concerns.
2. Hmm…four-post series. Because the four-post series last week wasn’t enough.
3. And then I can add the series to my Skyword portfolio.

So, let’s dig in. I’ll summarize the concern that a company may have with using an external content creator, look at how Andrew Wheeler addressed the concern, and then add a few thoughts of my own.

The concern

The first concern Andrew Wheeler raised in his article was the following:

The content won’t be in-depth or expert enough for our audience

From the perspective of the company, they’ve spent years or decades acquiring the expertise in question. What happens if they bring someone off the street who can spell “AFIS,” but has no idea what it is?

What Andrew Wheeler said

Wheeler addressed this concern by noting that there are a lot of people out there who have the expertise that a company needs. This is but a small part of what Wheeler said; read the rest here.

The reason we believe in tapping into freelance creators for content, rather than agencies or insourcing, is that the talent pool is so large it’s guaranteed that people with the skills you’re looking for are out there. 

From https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/the-truth-about-trusting-external-content-partners/

As part of the process of signing up with Skywords as a freelancer, you are asked to go into detail about your specific expertise: identifying the types of expertise that you possess, and where you acquired that expertise.

What I say

From the freelancing perspective, it is incumbent on the freelancer to identify the specific expertise they can provide.

I won’t link to the specific conversations, but I’ve seen social media posts from aspiring freelance writers saying, “Hey, I can write stuff.” When pressed for details, they often respond, “Oh, I can write anything.” No wonder companies get jittery about using freelancers.

If you’ve read any of my stuff, you know that I have identified some specific areas of expertise that I provide. You know, the biometric content marketing expert and biometric proposal writing expert stuff. Although I’m certainly willing to expand beyond these core markets (see my first goal for 2022), I realize that my best chances at writing are with companies in the biometric/identity space.

In fact, my issue is the inverse of the company issue. While companies are looking for freelancers with relevant expertise, I am looking for companies that can use my relevant expertise. There are obviously a number of biometric/identity companies out there, some of which have used Bredemarket, others of which have not used Bredemarket.

Why isn’t EVERY biometric/identity company using Bredemarket?

Well, the concern about expertise is only the first concern. There are three others that must be addressed:

• They’ll never “get” our brand like we do
• We’ll lose accountability and quality control
• It’s faster/easier to just do it ourselves