When Content Is Not King

You’ve done your homework, listened to customers, provided thought leadership and created great content.  You’re offering relevant, valuable information to your audience.  Now, if content were king that would be enough. But it’s not.

Isn’t providing information that leads people to know, like and trust you the essence of marketing? What more is there?

For one thing, there’s conversion.  Conversion tells you if your content moves people to act.  Did all that content drive people’s behavior in some way?

Content that doesn’t move people to ultimately take some kind of action doesn’t count. 

The action may be three months or a year away, but your messages should result in people making a decision and acting on it.  Do they eventually buy, donate, sign up for a newsletter, join your community, or review your product?

So now you might think that I was going to say conversion is king. But no, conversion is only a result. Sales, subscriptions and downloads are a result.

What is the essence of the process? What is “king” is communication.

When great communication happens, people don’t feel they were convinced to do something—they are moved to do something.  They act on their own, from an energy that comes from them. You become a facilitator. 

One of the most memorable stories I heard as a child is the story of how the wind and the sun competed to try to get a man to take off his coat.  The wind went first. He blew and blew as hard as he could, but he couldn’t get the man’s coat off.  In fact, the harder he blew, the tighter that man wrapped the coat around him. Then it was the sun’s turn. The sun rose high in the sky and warmed up everything below. The man eagerly removed his coat.

I had a front row seat to great communication recently in New York City when I attended a presentation by Simon Sinek.  He spoke about how important it is for a business to have a purpose. Having a higher purpose inspires people to go above and beyond.  Being part of a mission that is bigger than selling a product motivates people to persist and overcome the inevitable challenges. Passion drives people to extraordinary heights.  That was the essence of Simon’s talk.

I’ve heard it before and you probably have too.

But Simon is a great communicator. His Ted talk was one of the most popular Ted talks of all time. When I heard him speak, he helped me understand, and even visualize his message by telling a series of stories that illustrated the point. And he spoke with such passion that I didn’t just get it, I felt it.  As I was listening, I felt my own mindset shifting, while at the same time part of me was aware of the fact that having heard these ideas before, the change in me was the result of communication.

Getting through to people is an art.

There is no formula and nothing you can get out of a bottle. Maybe, great communicators are born with talent that isn’t common.  But we owe it to ourselves to raise the bar on our own communication by observing and learning from the best and by studying the process.

One of the most valuable books I’ve ever read on the subject is Made to Stick and a close second is Switch, both by Chip and Dan Heath.  After reading those books, I realized that a great idea is meaningless unless I can convince others to get behind it. Very little is accomplished alone.

If you’d like to see a great communicator in action, watch this video of Richard Feynman explaining the physics of an electric field.  Anyone—even me, with no grounding in physics—can get what he’s talking about.  But what’s even more amazing is that in his hands this subject actually seems fascinating.  The joy and enthusiasm in his delivery make the subject entertaining.  His use of metaphor and simple language create a path we are happy to take with him as he makes complex concepts accessible.

Another great resource for people who want to learn to communicate better is Nancy Duarte. She helps take the status quo of deathly dull PowerPoint presentations—the ones that make you check your cell phone every three minutes—and turn them into engaging presentations.

Social media increases the speed at which we communicate much like cars and airplanes accelerated the speed at which we could travel.  But Twitter, Facebook, blogs and YouTube are about more than just speed. They also let us communicate around the world in real time, with the added benefit of feedback and participation.

I’m on a personal mission to improve my communications skills by trying to become a better writer and presenter. If I find myself about to use a buzzword like transparency, retention, or engagement without a way of bringing these words down to earth, I remember Richard Feynman. If he can explain the theory of light without buzzwords, then I can talk about social media without using them.  It’s possible to work on this every day because even if you are presenting an idea to one person, it’s wasted breath if you don’t get through. Multiply that wasted breath by the hundreds, thousands or millions of people your digital messages reach.  I don’t want to just have an idea; I want to have it resonate with others.

Because in social media communication is king.

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