tactical content

It's all writing – the importance of great content

The marketing, the sales work, the strategizing, even the execution — it’s all writing.

(OK, it may not be all about the “writing,” but rather about the conceptualization– what the business people call “concept development.”It’s more than “thinking about.” It’s rigorous, it’s hard, it is adopting a double-mind approach, where the intrinsic properties of the concept are reflected off the intended audience that you plan to introduce to the developed concept.It’s hologram-creation — rays from the concept intersecting with rays of interest from the intended audience.Net result? A hologram of a concept-in-action <so lifelike!!>.)

But, all this sounds too twee for words. Rampaging elegance. Rudderless business poetry.

Said more muscularly and with more grit, it is all about the writing.Because ifyou can’t write it down succinctly and impactfully, then you ain’t finished developing the concept.And if you’ve developed it so far that it can’t be contained in good, clean writing, then you have invented a private religion, not a concept to introduce to others for further development. Adopting it, or even understanding it, would require faith, which is in very short supply now.

And in today’s business environment where any issue (related or unrelated) is only one link away, whatever you’re pursuing is even more about writing now than it ever has been. The mania over content (Thx, Ben Wattenberg, now we’re all trying to keep the media goat fed) — it’s all writing. Why? Because the world is steadily converting what was once an intellectual supermarket stuffed with packaged goods (long shelf-life) into one never-ending “bulk goods” aisle, where you can buy a little or a lot depending on your needs, plus you can mix and match things into the container of your choice (paper or plastic?).

Only some people (both on the buying and the selling side) are wary of things for sale that are not provided by big, established entities (what, you don’t believe that the bureaucratic to-ing and fro-ing that precedes any market introduction constitutes protective vetting?). Can’t get fired for buying Microsoft! Or IBM! Or HP! Really? In which container? The packaged goods with those labels have been replaced with little-or-a-lot services that you measure to order. Some are complementary, other combinations explode on contact. Some hapless purchasers are trying to find the formula that will yield the package they used to buy before the world started turning to jello. (Someday, let’s talk about the intrinsically composite nature of all-that-can-be-said-to-be. That should have a lot of solid ground to it.) All you business people out there — talk amongst yourselves about plethora of choices – how more choices isn’t the goal, but the right choices. That’s plethora, p-l-e-t-h-o-r-a. Don’t scratch the concept, it will spring to life on you, like Mexican jumping beans. Take it from one with tiny bruises all over his forehead.

And this is not made any more comforting since the full range of human nature is at work everywhere along the line from idea through marketing through merchandising through digestion (and maybe beyond?!). Long before you have become thoroughly comfortable shopping for your favorite concepts in the bulk aisle, there are forces at work to make the wheat germ green, or the flour orange, or selling you after-market kits to pump up the fiber content, or even DIY-procedures for rolling your own nutraceuticals from what you were hoping might be food. For many, it’s the world turned to jello, which simply will not stay nailed to your tree for long. Innovation is rarely in the obvious place, it tends to come from the fringes, at least from fringe-thinking, and in our long-tail world, there are some truly mind-bending fringes out where the light of everyday life doesn’t reach.

Which <as I’m sure you see already — > is where writing comes in.

• Not because it forces a focus that imposes clarity (you’ve read college term papers – you know that isn’t true!)
• Not because it takes for granted a linear focus that aids understanding (maybe, but the best readers read almost as if scanning an image – it may not be so linear)
• Not because it is a familiar, pleasurable activity in a series of daily experiences that run the gamut from sublime to murderously frustrating (traffic tickets have to be read too, you know).

It’s all about writing because after all the private fantasizing, team brainstorming, corporate strategizing, resource-gathering, writing is what commits the ephemeral to the world of action.We’re a pragmatic species, (we being living beings, not just humans) — we tend to do what works whether it’s elegant or not, whether it’s efficient or not, whether it advances some discipline nor not. Anyone who’s ever driven staples into a fencepost with a pair of pliers understands that (yes, we all know that there’s a special pair of pliers made exactly for this use).

Writing pitches the tent of action somewhere specific.

Yes, those habitats used to be buildings not so long ago, but so much is provisional now that once felt permanent, about the best we can do to minimize the risk of being wrong is to pitch our tent temporarily, and when the river we’re fishing in changes course, pick up and move.Beats getting the cow off the roof and into the boat otherwise. Or, put better, writing is the tent we pitch on the field of action. I mean, let’s face it, all we do with our days and our energies is to string asterisks together…little fuzzballs of thought, memory, opportunity, fear, doubt, accidental triumph, undeserved perfidy, exemplary assertion, ill-advised caution, etc. and every one of them is itself a mini-universe of almost infinite potential connectedness to everything else.Writing is the frame we temporarily put around stuff we need to take action on — in the words of recently departed Don LeFontaine, “In a world where….”

Writing is our way of serving the jello that we’re pretending is firm enough , and of defining the goals of our action, and the action steps themselves. Like Operation Overlord, no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy — many assumptions will prove insubstantial, many conditions will be encountered that were unforeseen, and , with any luck, the sense of purpose, mission, strapped onto the wheels of strong feeling underneath will be sufficient to win the day, or at least establish a beachhead. Writing defines (albeit provisionally); writing strings together enough asterisks to provide a sense of continuous story (the way we’re wired to make sense of our world); writing doesn’t reveal, it shapes.

One of the dumbest corporate plaques I ever saw hung in the SVP’s office of a company I once worked for — “Seek Truth.” Silliness. Treacle. Worse, irrelevance. The plaque that this one wanted to be would have said “Create Truth.” Create narrative. String your asterisk with others that you’re attracted to. The jello isn’t just in the world, it’s in the heads of well-intentioned but fragile creatures whose herd instincts aren’t serving them well. Given the accelerating pace of change in our world-artifacts, it seems as if coherence (like Elvis) has left the building, leaving all of us wanting much more. So, we huddle ever more frantically together, seeking “authorities” on our condition to align with – and mimicking the transients that garner our attention – celebrities, micro-villains, historical projections. Makes you wish Neil Postman were alive and still writing.

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