Tech is the fastest-changing industry in the world. New innovations, tools, and capabilities are continuously reshaping the way every company does business….
Companies of all types, then, turn to tech thought leadership to understand emerging trends and potential disruptions.
For CIOs and other tech thought leaders, this presents a huge opportunity. Establishing yourself as a tech thought leader gives you a wide audience and a platform for increasing your brand’s (and your own) visibility.
Benefits for your business and yourself? Sounds like a win-win to me. Be sure to read Brenner’s article for more of his thoughts.
Who should write the thought leadership piece?
Ready to be a thought leader? You need to get someone to write the thought leadership piece.
You could write it yourself.
You could have someone write it for you.
You could work with a writer and collaboratively create the piece.
How you work is up to you. Perhaps you have communication experience and know how to convey technical thoughts to non-technical audiences. Or perhaps you dread writing and would love to pass that task to someone else.
Now what?
Once you’ve decided who will write your thought leadership piece, you don’t want to just start typing. You need to prepare.
Whether you’re writing the first draft, or someone else is writing the first draft, you need to specify your needs for the piece.
And ask some questions before you start writing.
Click on the image below to find out what questions you need to ask.
I know that “when you wear a blindfold you cannot see” is one of those seemingly obvious truths, like “the heat was hot” (the band America) or “water is wet” (a preschool teacher).
You would never intentionally blindfold yourself while driving a car, or while performing any other activity that requires your vision.
Al-Faraq’s client was a “hardcore” American salesperson who was presenting to a Middle Eastern investment firm. His hardcore presentation didn’t go well, especially when he started slamming his hand on the table.
To see how the investment firm reacted, see the original post. (Although I guess you already figured out that the client didn’t get the money. Al-Faraq didn’t bury the lede.)
What the client did BEFORE he slammed his hand on the table
But when I read Al-Faraq’s description of the meeting, I realized that his client lost his audience long before the client pounded the table. Al-Faraq’s post includes this key sentence.
Middle Easterners value cultivating relationships. In fact, this source asserts that “[i]nitial meetings are all about relationship building.” Diving into a presentation during the first meeting before your audience knows about you is understandably upsetting.
But this is not limited to business with Middle Easterners.
Diving into a presentation without understanding your audience is a serious mistake in any culture.
The Work Lady does her homework
Many years ago, before Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility were formed, there was one Motorola. And one year when I was at Motorola, our Biometric User’s Conference engaged Jan McInnis, The Work Lady, as one of our speakers.
When she spoke at our conference, McInnis did not just dive into her morning presentation unprepared. Before her session, she spent some time with the conference organizers and asked questions about her audience, so that she could understand them better and why this “AFIS” thing was so important to these people.
She didn’t just do that for us. It’s a standard part of her process.
Prior to the event, Jan has a conference call with your conference committee to incorporate specific challenges your group is facing into her keynote!
Her homework makes all the difference for her audiences.
Focus on the customer
McInnis, Al-Faraq, and many of you understand that to have success with a customer, you have to understand the customer. As Ali Al-Faraq says: “Knowing your audience is key!”
Don’t intentionally blindfold yourself before approaching your customer.
The idea is that your content creator hosts a kickoff session, asks you the six questions, and only then starts to create the content in question—the blog post, case study, or whatever.
Are the six questions overkill?
But simplicity advocates may argue that those six questions are five questions too many.
Analysis paralysis may prevent you from moving forward at all, much less realizing your content creation goal. Perhaps you should be more efficient and just put pen to paper and, as the shoe people say, just do it.
I found a content marketing expert who agreed with this assertion, and wrote a post entitled “In marketing, move quickly.”
That content marketing expert was…well, it was me.
I ran across a local company (which I will not name) that issued a press release in December 2021. In part, the press release mentioned the local company’s new dedication to the marketing function.
The company had hired an international marketing firm “to develop comprehensive marketing strategies….We expect their work to incorporate a website redesign, brand refresh, new strategic messaging and content, as well as focused video and digital campaigns.”
So, when I wrote the “In marketing, move quickly” post three months later, what had this international marketing firm accomplished in the interim?
The website has a full slew of data sheets on the company’s products, and I found a 2017 brochure that effectively served as a white paper. But that’s it; no other white papers, and no case studies describing happy customers’ experiences.
The company’s YouTube channel has two videos from 2021.
The company’s Facebook page hasn’t posted anything since 2017.
Neither of the company’s LinkedIn pages (yes, the company has two LinkedIn pages) has any posts.
Now I have no visibility into this particular company, but I’ve been around the block to guess that the international marketing firm was probably still in the analysis stage, optimizing synergies according to “out of the box” criteria, to ensure bleeding-edge revenue maximization.
No, the six questions aren’t overkill
After reviewing what I wrote before in that blog post, I realize that my e-book lacks a very important point.
Don’t spend three months answering the six questions.
I shouldn’t HAVE to say this, but perhaps it’s safer to explicitly say it.
Now practices can very from consultation to consultation, but it’s very likely that a content creator and their client can breeze through those six questions in half an hour or less.
Or maybe the client can answer the questions on their own before the meeting.
If your content marketing expert schedules six one-hour meetings (or worse still, workshops) to address the six questions, run away!
(Is the content marketing expert billing by the hour?)
And the six questions create a content strategy
There’s something else that I failed to explicitly say in my e-book.
Not only do the answers to the six questions benefit that one piece of content, but they benefit everything else that your company does.
For example, let’s say that a content marketing expert is working with a gourmet ice cream shoppe (not a shop, but a shoppe), and the proprietor (Jane Cold) answers the “how” question as follows:
At Jane’s Gourmet Ice Cream Shoppe, we keep the internal dining temperature below 50 degrees Fahrenheit to ensure that our guests enjoy ice cream as it was meant to be enjoyed. We inform our guests of our temperature policy beforehand to ensure they bring proper attire.
While the content marketing expert will use the answer to the “how” question to create the content, the ramifications go far beyond the social media post itself.
Perhaps the new flavor could be branded “Frigid Farkleberry” to suggest how the ice cream should best be enjoyed.
Maybe in addition to branding, the “how” answer may even influence pricing. Perhaps prices incorporate the number “32,” as in a single-scoop price of $4.32. (Yes that price is high, but after all this is an ice cream shoppe.)
And what of future social media posts?
Let me clue you in on a little secret: once your content marketing expert has asked the six questions for the first piece of content, the kickoff is much quicker for subsequent pieces of content.
Chances are the basic “why” and “how” won’t change, although some of the later questions such as the target audience could change for each individual piece of content.
So without explicitly trying to do so, the six questions have created a de facto content marketing strategy. After creating five pieces of content, you’ve essentially defined your company’s mission, purpose, and differentiators, and may have defined as many as five separate vertical markets along the way.
Not a bad investment of thirty minutes of time.
(But a terrible investment of three months of time.)
Biofouling is the buildup of barnacles and microorganisms on ocean-going vessels such as ships and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). This buildup is a naturally occurring process which can increase drag and decrease ship fuel economy, ultimately costing customers hundreds of millions of dollars. The United States Navy needs to eliminate biofouling growth along the underside of its ships, which involves a cleaning process that requires a ship to be out of commission for up to 18 months and hundreds of hours of manual labor.
Because defense contractors think about sea snakes all the time. Or at least Keegan did.
Keegan decided to apply for funding for a project that mimicked how a sea snake mitigates biofouling growth. The sea snake has a clever way to mitigate growth by organically shedding its skin to rid itself of biofouling growth and disease when the growth begins to affect its movement.
OK, an ocean vessel isn’t going to literally shed its hull. But that’s why Keegan needed research funding. And the researchers came up with a solution, and started to test it.
A Lockheed Martin team took the idea from paper to prototype and went to Ventura Harbor, California to conduct static testing of a multilayer mylar skin on various surfaces including fiberglass, steel and aluminum. After leaving the prototype in the harbor for a little over a month, results confirmed that the films were effective in demonstrating that biofouling growth could be easily removed by peeling a layer of the film. The test was also successful in proving that the films did not allow for biofouling growth to occur between the multiple layers of film or underneath the four-layer prototype. No degradation to the films has been observed in the five months of testing.
While Lockheed Martin’s write-up includes the common researcher statement “further efforts are needed to successfully implement this biofouling film technology,” it looks like the project is moving forward.
And Lockheed Martin has already identified the benefits of the completed project. Not the benefits to Lockheed Martin, but the benefits to its customer, the U.S. Navy.
With the potential to reduce the time a Navy ship remains out of commission for cleaning, this nature-inspired design idea could…save money and enable greater mission readiness…
Saving money and getting ships out to battle more quickly. Stuff that the Navy likes.
Of course this benefits Lockheed Martin also, but the company kept the focus on the Navy.
How does this apply to my company?
Even if your customers don’t battle biofouling barnacles, and even if your customers don’t face problems that put their equipment out of commission for 18 months or cost hundreds of hours in labor, there’s a lesson to be learned from Lockheed Martin’s customer focus.
Keep your focus on your customer, not you.
Describe the problem your customer faces.
Define your solution to the problem.
List the benefits your customer receives from your solution.
If your solutions benefit your customers, then you’ll receive benefits also.
If you don’t move quickly, you may miss your opportunity.
The first post mentioned a company (whom I didn’t name) that hired an international marketing company in December 2021, but that hadn’t created any customer-facing content by March 2022.
The first post also mentioned a bank that put a customer-facing email test togehter in eight weeks.
Oh, and John DeLorean took eight years to get his car out, which didn’t help with his financing issues.
On the positive side, the second post described how one company moved quickly. Rather than waiting for a centralized content creator to distribute content, Intuit provided guidelines so that its employees could extend the reach of Intuit’s content through their own social media posts.
The second post also noted that quick generation of content is appreciated by customers, vendors, and partners.
How can you move quickly?
So let’s say you’re an Inland Empire business who needs to create between 400 and 600 words of content quickly, such as the text for a brochure, a blog post, or a LinkedIn or Facebook post.
How can you get it out quickly?
How can you avoid waiting eight weeks, or three months, or eight years for your customers to see your content?
Here are four actions you can take to get your content out.
Specify your content needs.
Ensure you are available.
Ensure your content creator is available.
Book your content creator.
I’ll describe these four actions below.
One: Specify your content needs
If you rush to create content without thinking through your needs, your content won’t be that effective. Take some time up front to plan what your content will be.
Ask yourself critical questions about your content.
Don’t know what to ask? I’ve written an e-book entitled “Six Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You.” You can skim through it here.
“Six Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You.” Download here.
The six questions (hint: you’ve already seen two of them in the first two parts of this post):
Why?
How?
What?
Goal?
Benefits?
Target Audience?
When Bredemarket meets with a customer, I ask more than these six questions, but they’re the most important ones.
If you can answer these questions, either on your own or with the help of your content creator, then you’ll have a roadmap that allows you to create the content together.
Two: Ensure you are available
Note the word “together” in the paragraph above.
After you meet with your content creator, your part of the task isn’t done. Or shouldn’t be.
When Bredemarket creates content for a customer, there are points within the process where the customer reviews the content and makes suggestions. Normally when I create between 400 and 600 words of content using the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, there are two review cycles. Here’s how I explain them:
Bredemarket iteratively provides two review copies of the draft content within three days per review. (The number of review cycles and review time must agree with any due dates.) The draft content advances your goal, communicates your benefits, and speaks to your target audience in your preferred tone of voice. Relevant examples and key words/hashtags are included.
You return comments on each review copy within three days. For longer content, you may provide the draft formatted copy for the final review.
Why? (If you read my e-book, you know the “why” question is important.)
Maybe I have questions that popped up while I was drafting the content. Maybe something occurs to you after you see the draft content. Whatever the reason, these review cycles provide opportunities to improve the content as I develop it.
But to get your feedback, you have to be available. The standard process gives you three days to return your comments, although of course you can return them faster. But if you don’t return your comments for weeks or months…well, that kind of kills the idea of getting the content out quickly.
Of course, in some cases delays are unavoidable. One of my customers was dependent on a third party to complete his part of the review, but the third party was not delivering. In that case, there was nothing the customer could do, and that content was delayed.
One critical question: what if you need your content very quickly?
Now if you add up all the times in the Bredemarket 400 process, your total comes to fourteen days: one day for the review, three days for me to create the first draft, three days for your review, three days for my second draft, three days for your second review, and one day for the final copy.
If you need it in one week rather than two weeks, then we jointly need to figure out a faster cadence of reviews. I can adjust the schedule to meet your due dates.
But you have to be available for the reviews.
And as I note below, I have to be available for the creation.
So when you’re planning to have Bredemarket or another content creator generate something for you, remember that you’ll need to spend a little bit of time on reviews.
Three: Ensure your content creator is available
You know how I said that the Bredemarket 400 process gives you three days to review each content iteration? Well, at the same time it gives me three days to draft (and redraft) the content.
Can I, or the content creator you select, hold up our end of the process?
Right now I’m going to tell you something that has happened since I wrote those two “In marketing, move quickly” posts in March 2022. In May 2022, I accepted a full-time position with an identity company, and therefore no longer spend full time on Bredemarket activities.
Therefore, if you need to meet with me Monday to Friday between 8 am and 5 pm (Pacific), I can’t meet you. I have my day job to worry about.
I have regular office hours on Saturday mornings when I can meet with you, and I can arrange to be available on weekday evenings or early weekday mornings. And of course I can draft your content and incorporate your suggestions at those times also, outside of regular business hours.
But if you need a content creator that is available during regular (Inland Empire) business hours, then you’ll need to select someone else.
Just make sure that the content creator you select is available when you need them.
Four: Book your content creator
When you’re ready to move, move. If you don’t start the process of creating your critical content, by definition you’ll never finish it.
So take the next step and find someone who will create your content. There are a number of content creators who serve Inland Empire businesses.
But if you want to use the Ontario, California content marketing expert, contact me at Bredemarket and I’ll arrange a meeting. Be prepared for me to ask you a few questions.
Instead of writing “online,” I should have written “offline.”
I don’t know whether I just made a typo, or if I intentionally wrote “online,” but I shouldn’t have.
Why QR codes rarely make sense online
Because if you’re online, you don’t need a QR code, since you presumably have access to a clickable URL.
But if you’re offline—for example, if you’re watching a commercial on an old-fashioned TV screen—a QR code makes perfect sense. Well, as long as you explicitly identify where the QR code will lead you, something Coinbase failed to do in 2022. “Just click on the bouncing QR code and don’t worry where you’ll go!”
But there’s one more place where QR codes make sense. I didn’t explicitly refer to it in my 2021 post, but QR codes make sense when you’re looking at printed material, such as printed restaurant menus.
Or COVID questionnaires.
Which reminds me…
What I didn’t tell you about the Ontario Art Walk
…there’s one story about the Ontario Art Walk that I didn’t share in yesterday’s post.
After leaving Dragon Fruit Skincare, but before visiting the Chaffey Community Museum of Art, I visited one other location that I won’t identify. This location wanted you to answer a COVID questionnaire, which you accessed via a QR code.
I figured I’d do the right thing and answer the questionnaire, since I had nothing to worry about.
I was vaccinated.
I was boosted.
I hadn’t been around anyone with COVID.
I didn’t have a fever.
I entered the “right” response to every single question, except for the one that asked if I had a runny or stuffy nose. Since I had a stuffy nose, I indicated this.
But hey, it’s just a stuffy nose. What could go wrong?
When I finished the questionnaire, I was told that based on my answers, I was not allowed in the premises, and if I was already in the premises I should leave immediately.
Which I did.
And which is why I didn’t write about that particular location in yesterday’s post.
Bredemarket, pressing the flesh (sometimes six feet away)
But back to non-health related aspects of QR codes.
The Ontario Art Walk was actually the second in-person event that I had attended that week. As I noted on Instagram, I also went to a City of Ontario information session about a proposed bike lane.
Now that COVID has (mostly) receded, more of us are going to these in-person events. My target market (businesspeople in the United States) is mostly familiar with the century-old term “press the flesh.” While it usually applies to politicians attending in-person events, it can equally apply to non-political events.
Whenever I go out to these local events, I like to have some printed Bredemarket collateral handy in case I find a local businessperson looking for marketing services. After all, since I am the Ontario, California content marketing expert, I should let relevant people in Ontario know this.
In those cases, a QR code makes sense, since I can hand it to the person, the person can scan the QR code on their phone, and the person can immediately access whatever web page or other content I want to share with them.
On Saturday, it occurred to me that if I ran across a possible customer during the Ontario Art Walk, I could use a QR code to share my e-book “Six Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You.”
Unfortunately, this bright idea came to my mind at 5:30 pm for an event that started at 6. I dummied up a quick and dirty page with the cover and a QR code, but it was…dirty. Just as well I didn’t share that on Saturday.
But now that I have more time, I’ve created a better-looking printed handout so that I’m ready at the next in-person event I attend.
If we meet, ask me for it.
Making myself look less smart
Well, now that I’ve gone through all of this trouble explaining how QR codes are great for offline purposes, I’m going to share the aforementioned handout…online.
Which has probably prompted the following question from you.
“Why?”
Four reasons:
It gave me the excuse to post the question “Why?” above, thus reiterating one of the major points of the e-book.
Because I felt like sharing it.
Just in case you don’t make “Event X” that I attend in the future, you can experience the joy of printing the flyer and scanning the QR code yourself. Just like you were there!
To demonstrate that even when you provide a piece of content with a QR code, it’s also helpful to explicitly reveal the URL where you’ll head if you scan the code. (Look just below the QR code in the flyer above.) And if you receive the flyer in online form rather than printed form, that URL is clickable.
I finally made it to the quarterly Ontario Art Walk in downtown Ontario, California last night. I didn’t make it to all the studios, but here’s a sampling of what I did see.
Socal Trout Cartel
I’ve been following SCTC’s Instagram account for some time, and obviously knew of the interest in fishing and the clothing, but did not know that SCTC manufactured custom fishing rods. The technical specifics are way beyond my understanding (my only fishing experience was at Boy Scout camp, and I bought a cheap pole for that), but SCTC is more than happy to answer any questions you might have. https://www.socaltroutcartel.com/
I Am Threads
Co-located with Socal Trout Cartel, I Am Threads offers women’s clothing. See the website.
Lebec Makeup Atelier
So after looking at women’s clothing, I looked at women’s makeup. A few young women were busily applying makeup to celebrate a “prom night.” Hope they enjoyed it. https://lebeconline.wordpress.com/
Dirty Window Gallery / Rebecca Steen Art
This is another account that I have followed on Instagram for some time, and it was nice to finally meet Rebecca in person. My picture only captures a small part of her art; I should have taken more pictures.
I encountered my first DJ of the evening here. The atmosphere yesterday evening took me back to my college days. (OK, maybe Reed College was a little grungier.)
More information about Geo.Metrics is available at DOIA and on Instagram.
Paul Williams Gallery
Historical note: the gallery was not founded by Paul Williams. Well, I guess it sort of was. Paul Williams was an architect who designed a post office in Ontario in 1925, as David Allen notes. The post office moved to another location in 1941, but the building is still associated with Williams (as are others). The gallery that opened there in 2005 took Williams’ name, although it features art rather than architecture. Another Instagram account I’ve been following.
Dragon Fruit Skincare
I didn’t buy women’s clothes or women’s makeup, and I didn’t buy women’s skincare either (although their products are advertised as unisex). I did want to mention, however, that this was the second DJ of the evening, although this performance was lower key than the other two. https://www.dragonfruitskincare.com/
Chaffey Community Museum of Art
Crossing Euclid, I revisited the Chaffey Community Museum of Art, which featured rare evening hours in conjunction with the Ontario Art Walk. The current exhibits are from Chaffey Joint Union High School District students and faculty. https://www.chaffeymuseum.org/
(This text was primarily created with ChatGPT. For the story behind the text, read my previous post.)
Inland Empire West business owners, gather around and listen closely, for I bring you a message of great importance. In this age of technology and information, the art of storytelling has become more vital than ever before.
The way a tale is told can determine its success or failure, much like a business in the marketplace. A business must be able to captivate its audience, and draw them in with a story that is both compelling and relevant. This is where content marketing services come in.
By providing services that are tailored to the specific needs of a local community, businesses can reach their target audience more effectively. By understanding the unique culture and values of a region, businesses can craft stories that resonate with the people who live there.
Think of it like planting a seed in fertile soil. When the soil is rich and the conditions are right, the seed will take root and flourish. Similarly, when a business connects with its local audience through the power of storytelling, it will grow and prosper.
So heed my words. Invest in local content marketing services from Bredemarket, and watch as your business flourishes. The world is full of endless possibilities, and by harnessing the power of storytelling, you can tap into that potential and achieve great success.
The journey may be long, but the reward is great. Embrace the power of local content marketing services, and watch as your business blooms like a lotus in the sun.
If you are on the path seeking a talented marketer who has lived in the Inland Empire West for nearly 40 years to help you market your local business, consider Bredemarket.
On Wednesday I successfully logged into Bredemarket’s ChatGPT account.
If you’ve been following stories about how overloaded the free version of ChatGPT is these days, you can appreciate the magnitude of my accomplishment.
This allowed me to conduct some tests that I’ve wanted to perform for some time now. Since these tests related to creating content for my day job, I can’t share them with you here.
But after completing those tests, I took a few seconds to conduct a test for Bredemarket.
Here’s the original text that ChatGPT created, followed by my lightly edited version. The titles are my own.
A sage’s advice on local content marketing services, the ChatGPT version
Wise ones, gather around and listen closely, for I bring you a message of great importance. In this age of technology and information, the art of storytelling has become more vital than ever before.
The way a tale is told can determine its success or failure, much like a business in the marketplace. A business must be able to captivate its audience, and draw them in with a story that is both compelling and relevant. This is where local content marketing services come in.
By providing services that are tailored to the specific needs of a local community, businesses can reach their target audience more effectively. By understanding the unique culture and values of a region, businesses can craft stories that resonate with the people who live there.
Think of it like planting a seed in fertile soil. When the soil is rich and the conditions are right, the seed will take root and flourish. Similarly, when a business connects with its local audience through the power of storytelling, it will grow and prosper.
So heed my words, wise ones. Invest in local content marketing services, and watch as your business flourishes. The world is full of endless possibilities, and by harnessing the power of storytelling, you can tap into that potential and achieve great success.
The journey may be long, but the reward is great. Embrace the power of local content marketing services, and watch as your business blooms like a lotus in the sun.
Bredemarket’s advice on local content marketing services, the edited version
So what if someone detects that I didn’t write the post on local content marketing?
Writer.com has a tool called the AI Content Detector, and I ran it on two lightly edited ChatGPT samples, including my Bredemarket local content marketing post.
For the other sample, the AI Content Detector accurately estimated that only 6% of the text was written by a human.
What of Bredemarket’s post?
I have no idea why this sample appears to be 100% human-generated, even though the true estimate is closer to 6%.
But AI is constantly improving, so maybe if I test it again in a few days I’ll get caught.
I can use ChatGPT…but should I?
Of course, there’s the question of whether I should use ChatGPT for content creation.
In my writing, especially my writing for Bredemarket, I have a clearly identifiable tone of voice, casual yet technical. Anyone reading the ChatGPT-generated “sage” text who has read my other writing will detect a distinctly different style.
And does ChatGPT save time? In some instances it might save time in standard text generation, but I’ll probably have to perform extensive rewriting to avoid the AI detectors and to personalize the text for my specific needs. In the end, it probably won’t save me much time at all.
One potential way to use ChatGPT is to generate the text. and then pick out a phrase that I like and incorporate it into self-written text. Things like “captivate its audience” and “power of storytelling.”
Bredemarket 