Understanding an audience and creating great content

At every speech I give, I suggest one of the best ways to create great Web content is for companies to hire a journalist, either full or part time, to create it. Journalists (print or broadcast) are great at understanding an audience and developing information that buyers want to consume.

At a recent speaking gig in North Carolina, I met Kathy Boyd who works in corporate communications at Neighborhood America, a company that creates enterprise social networks for organizations to reach consumers.

Kathy is exactly the sort of person I'm talking about. She studied Mass Media Communications and Broadcast Journalism at Florida State. Upon graduation, she spent a few years as a TV reporter for WFTX-TV, the Fox affiliate in Ft Myers, Florida.

After Kathy honed her journalism skills as a TV reporter, she joined Neighborhood America and now works on the company's corporate newsletter, produces some stellar videos, and develops customer case examples.

Here are two videos Kathy created that you must check out.

The first one is a video case study of Adidas, a Neighborhood America client Adidas Goes Mobile At NBA All-Star Week 2007. Note how different this approach to a case example is compared to most written case examples that are either a) dreadfully boring or b) prattle on about the product or c) both.

This next video Mission Impossible: So, What Does Your Company Do? is Kathy’s video riff on my Gobbledygook Manifesto. After hearing me talk about gobbledygook, Kathy thought it would be fun to cleverly capture interesting information about Neighborhood America in a fun and approachable way. It works, don't you think?

Well done, Kathy. And kudos to Neighborhood America for taking a chance on hiring a journalist to do marketing instead of the "safe" route of hiring someone with a traditional marketing background.

How about your company? When will you hire a journalist?

Comments

[Eduardo Díaz]

Hi David,

As a communication student at SDSU, I got some great advice from my professors. Such advice included this: learn to write.
People who have the ability to write creatively should be able to find a job any where they want. This skill, which some students take for granted, doesn't become obsolete. Good communicators are hard to find, I fear that many business programs and students underestimate the importance of writing and public speaking skills. In addition, I believe that there is one word every professional should keep in mind regardless of his/her line of work: empathy.
This goes double for people in charge of an organization's corporate image.

[Tatiana Tugbaeva]

Eduardo,
Great advice from your professor. But I think that besides superior writing skills one is ought to have the ability to understand his/her audience.

If you don't know who you are writing for, don’t understand your audience’s needs and interests and, finally, can't speak your audience's language, then you are very unlikely to get any message across.

[Robert Weir]

Schooled as a journalist, with marketing experience at Kodak, Hallmark, and Dell, I couldn't agree with you more. It was my writing, curiosity and imagination that made my 25 year marketing career work. The traditional marketers were not as successful 'cause they didn't possess these qualities.

[Kim Albee]

I just attended an Online Marketing Summit and heard all kinds of things about improving SEO, Microsites, and participating with the social media - but there was one common theme - and that was "you must have relevant content". I'm not sure whether that is hiring a journalist - but for sure you've got to have people who are willing to be authentic and real, rather than spin masters. And I think the video on Neighborhood America does that well.

[bruce colthart]

I like too that "journalist" implies investigation and research and not just empathy or a subjective understanding of the audience.

I would think that if you could start out treating your audience as a constituency or as a block (thinking political terms here) with _assumed_ issues, but then dig deeper and deeper and fish out the _real_ story, you've just struck gold.

Or approach the marketplace as a "conspiracy of silence" (or some other overly-dramatic characterization) and then let the journalist expose "the real truth."

To me "journalist" trumps "writer" in terms of ultimately creating valuable personas to then _write_ to.

[Nando]

can you explain to me,please. what big design content to your audience? Thanks before.

[Julie, writer Surefirewealth.com]

Perhaps not a journalist but someone who know how to "know the audience." That is one of the first lessons I learned upon my first year as a Mass Communication student. Knowing your audience allows you to prepare yourself and present yourself in a way that will be understood by your target audience.

[Eric Waldschmidt]

David, watched your presentation over at the B2B Expo and enjoyed it. Some great points in it and this one about hiring journalists struck a chord. The thing about journalists is that they are supposedly paid to be impartial and objective - so naturally, I'm guessing, they are able to cut through the "marketing BS" or gobbledygook as you call it and present the idea from a perspective the reader or viewer can relate to. Do you think that longer term, marketers must become more journalistic in how they create content. Or is it impossible for a paid employee to be impartial enough to capture the right tone? Otherwise, one of the largest pieces of the marketing role, that of content creator, goes away.

[Web Gal]

It's reassuring to hear you say that David. A little overwhelmed by the prospect of keeping our new website (at work) topped up with new content, I suggested to my CEO that we hire a journalist (before reading your post). The journalist is extremely knowledgeable about the film, TV and digital media industries I work in. Her commitment to provide regular, weekly content for our site is good news for our users who will read meaningful stuff rather than filler posts.