Tag Archive for: written communication

Your colleague asks you a reasonable question.  You could take five minutes to write a cogent reply, but instead you say “Let’s hop on a call”.  What you’re really saying, Wes Kao opines in Entrepreneur Magazine, is that “I don’t want to do the work of clarifying my own thinking”. (It’ll be easier, you reason, to think out loud.) The problem isn’t calls, Kao explains; it’s defaulting to calls. When you draft a written reply and your audience takes time to read it and consider the content, everyone is in a better position to move forward, he emphasizes. By writing, Sarah K. Peck agrees,” you’re giving information that is helpful, documented, repeatable, and shareable”. In Rob’s Notes, the reviewer’s “take” is that Kao “encourages readers to invest in thinking and in crafting responses.”

As head of a content marketing team, I found this discussion in Entrepreneur especially interesting. At Say It For You, I’m always talking about the “training benefit” of blogging and content creation in general. While our business purpose is to present our clients as subject matter experts, a “side effect” for the business owners and practitioners themselves comes about in the process of conversing with us!  In essence, a blog is about giving readers information that is “helpful, documented, repeatable, and shareable”. The planning and exploratory conversations between owner and writer are, in effect, “training” entrepreneurs to better understand their own core business principles and practices

One very practical aspect of that “training” benefit accruing to entrepreneurs as they engage with their ghost writers has to do with the competition. Although one aspect of creating content about a business is comparing their products and services to others’, we “coach” our clients to emphasize the positive rather than “knocking” their competitor.  Rather than creating content about what the competition is doing “wrong”, we teach, the content needs to demonstrate what you value and the way you like to deliver your services.

And, for the very reason that Wes Kao encourages thoughtful written responses to workplace questions that arise, the process of creating content that will be “documented” and shareable, the process of owner/”ghost” collaboration results in productive self-examination and “training”.