Top of Mind

by John Hall

  Instinctively, I took out my phone and did some bitter Googling. I was immediately impressed—each of the three CEOs had immaculate results pages. (If you’d Googled me at that point, you’d have had to sift through a ton of stuff about the dozens of English footballers who share my name.)

  I checked out their Twitter feeds, which were all packed with lessons, insights, and reactions from the keynote we had just heard. I snooped on their LinkedIn pages, which read like fascinating, bite-sized professional autobiographies. And I browsed some of the hundreds of articles each had published in top-tier industry publications. Everything I read made me want to read more.

  And then it hit me. Here I was, a digital content evangelist, preaching the necessity of executive branding to anyone who would listen, but my own brand was almost nonexistent.

  The truth is, at the time, I thought personal branding was inherently egotistical—which tells you what I thought about our clients. I didn’t truly believe that it was necessary for growing our business. So I had never tweeted (pretty sure my avatar was still an egg) and never finished filling out my LinkedIn profile, and the few pieces I had written were buried on our then-readerless company blog.

  Until that point, I had been kind of proud of my minimal footprint online; in an age of narcissistic oversharing, I was demonstrating restraint and humility. But in that moment I realized that I was actually failing as a leader. In an industry in which trust was incredibly scarce, I wasn’t giving anyone a reason to trust me or my company. To treat executive branding as if it were beneath me was hurting my entire team.

  After I’d come to that realization, I immediately called Kelsey. In a frantic mess of jumbled words, I explained that we really needed to practice what we preach and invest in our executive brand as our clients were doing. She agreed, and we soon started working on a creative process for developing a robust, thriving presence in the industry.1

  Developing a Creative Process

  Maria Popova has a slight obsession with the habits and routines of her favorite writers. She documents them on her website, Brain Pickings, and it’s pretty fascinating. William Gibson channels his creative spirit by mowing the lawn. Kurt Vonnegut took frequent breaks from writing to do push-ups and sit-ups. Ernest Hemingway would always write standing up.

  Whenever I read about a great writer’s creative process, I immediately conclude that I need to do the exact same thing. And then I’ll realize that although drinking a fifth of bourbon and betting on the ponies every day worked exceptionally well for Charles Bukowski, I’m not Charles Bukowski.

  I’ve come to my process after several years of experimentation, and it works for me because it plays to my strengths, personality, and situation. Your ideal process may be completely different; what matters is that it works for you and that your final product provides value to your audience.

  Research and Ideation

  I recently spoke to a midmarket company that was prepared to hire an outside firm to conduct a massive research project to gather data from its customers. I’m not against hiring companies like Accenture or others to help with research. There is a time and a place for that kind of arrangement—but an internal system for documenting content triggers can help your team collect insight and data directly from your audience through everyday conversations and interactions before you outsource to another company.

  Personally, my best content begins with extensive and in-depth research that my team and I conduct ourselves. I firmly believe that the best researchers are those on the front lines who are speaking to potential customers and current customers.

  My concept of research is not holing myself up in a corner of the library for days on end or asking my team to work with an outside research company. Rather, research happens in conversation with clients, partners, peers, and friends. Every interaction is an opportunity to gain insight into my target audience’s goals, concerns, and pain points—in other words, precisely what they want to read about.

  This is what makes members of your sales team, human resources department, or client service teams such natural researchers. If you’d like to communicate with your audience of prospective customers, your sales team will know exactly what you’re looking for—what kinds of questions do they always have, and what exact problems are they looking to you to solve? With that info, you can (and absolutely should) create content about those topics.

  The same goes for your recruits or current clients. What kinds of conversations is your HR director having with candidates? How can your content speak to their concerns or attract the most qualified people? Your client service teams are in constant communication with current clients, which makes them the perfect researchers for that particular audience.

  I was recently talking to a partner who was struggling to attract investors to his company. I asked him about the content he was publishing: Was it doing enough to convince investors that they should trust him with their money? No, this partner told me somewhat sheepishly—he actually hadn’t even considered investors to be part of his target audience. Shocked, I launched into an impromptu lesson on how to create a stream of content aimed at establishing direct, robust connections between his company and the investment community.

  Aha! This conversation was an obvious content trigger. So as soon as we finished talking, I sat down and typed out everything I had just said in bullet point form. I labeled the note “How to Differentiate Yourself Through Content and Attract Investors”—a clunky title, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that I now had the foundation for an article that my audience would find immediately valuable.

  This is why I consider it so important to do my own research and use the data my team collects through their research in our content. By thinking of ourselves as researchers, we’re always pushing ourselves to be conscious, intentional listeners—especially in personal interactions with our target audience. Not only does this equip me with insight into how to enhance the lives of the people who read my content, it also makes me a more attentive leader.

  Creation

  Once the research is in, it’s time to create. My next step is to do what my team and I eloquently call a “brain dump,” which consists of me transferring all of my knowledge and thoughts on the article topic into a document. I pay no attention to spelling, grammar, or readability. The goal is to get a stream of consciousness going so that my writing team and I have as much source material to work with as possible.

  When I began doing brain dumps, I knew I wasn’t constrained by the formalities of proper writing, but I still found it difficult to channel my knowledge onto the page. And then I tried to do one on a plane. I was on a flight home from a conference, and I was coming up against a publisher’s deadline. So I ordered a beer, took out my iPad, and started typing out my thoughts. Without any distractions—no Wi-Fi, no e-mails, no coworkers—I got into an easy, leisurely flow. Before long, the words were pouring out of me, and by the end of the flight I knew I had found my magic writing spot.

  So now my account team schedules brain dumps around my travel schedule—most of them, at least. A flight is the perfect environment for me to write about the more rational, logical aspects of running a business. However, for pieces that are more personal—pieces in which I reveal more of myself—I need a different kind of space.

  In a way, my backyard is sacred space for me. It’s a haven from the chaos of everyday life, a place where I can connect with my wife, watch our daughters play, and imagine what life will be like as our little family continues to grow. Sitting in my backyard, I feel centered and connected to my family and my place in the world. In this state of mind, I can process the research I’ve done on a deeper, more emotional level, and it becomes much easier to write about dreams, beliefs, and insecurities.

  Whether I write out my thoughts in the air or in my yard, the next step is to share it with my writing team. This is where the real collaboration happens.

  Once they have the brain dump, they shape the source mat
erial into a cohesive, engaging piece. Now, if I didn’t trust my writers and editors, the prospect of handing off my intimate, unedited thoughts would be nerve-racking—it’d be like standing in front of the class and reading my diary out loud.

  Fortunately, I trust my team; they’re some of the most talented people I have ever met. It’s a beautiful partnership—I bring my leadership experiences and expertise to the table, and they bring an ability to tell exceptional stories and distribute those stories to the right people. Using our goals for the piece and the publication guidelines as a creative foundation, they transform my brain dump into an article that captures my voice and perspective.

  When you’re working with a content team—whether it’s your internal marketing department or an agency you’ve hired to help—there are two rules for creating engaging content. First, your company needs to do everything it can to develop a strong knowledge bank over time with content from key employees or to create a simple process to extract information consistently. In other words, you can’t just hire out the entire process or rely exclusively on a series of ghostwriters—if you’re not present, your voice will be lost, and you’ll risk damaging your brand. Second, nothing should be published without your final approval. This is a crucial step that too many leaders neglect. You need to be aware of everything your name is attached to—always.

  But here’s a secret about this review and approval process: you have to be OK with some imperfections. If you go after every word and break down every comment, you’ll spend way more of your time than you need to.

  When I review content, I look at a couple of things. I ask myself, “Does this make sense?” and “Could anything in here hurt my brand?”

  I’ve learned that writing is subjective, and everyone has an opinion on each point. But in reality, my job is to provide the core message and general direction of the content, and my team’s is to make it consumable to my audience.

  When my team has a draft, they send it to me for feedback. And let me tell you, I am not shy about sharing my honest reaction—my team is too talented to be patronized with false praise. Besides, we all share the same goal. Each of us wants to build the most vibrant connection to our readers possible. To do so, we need to work together until the piece is the best it can be.

  Once the piece is ready to go live, my team submits it for publication. Even after publishing hundreds of articles in more than 50 publications, getting the e-mail from the team that something is published never gets old.

  Distribution

  When the piece is up, my content manager plays quarterback. She immediately throws it to our people in charge of social media and e-mail marketing, who distill the key points into shareable posts, tweets, and newsletter content. She also hits HR and sales; together, they discuss strategies for using the piece to attract talent and nurture sales leads.

  On my end, I’ll personally share the piece with anyone I think should read it. This usually means posting it to LinkedIn groups that are centered on relevant interests. My sales team and I have also been known to e-mail a piece directly to hot leads—doing this can help bring them closer to a purchasing decision not only by educating them on an issue but also by providing them insight into who we are as a company.

  I honestly can’t reiterate enough how critical this step of the process is. The best, most perfectly produced content in the world doesn’t mean a thing if no one in your audience reads it.

  The Impact

  Once I got a team and process in place, I was able to start publishing engaging content fairly regularly. I also began to take my social media presence seriously and quickly found a lot of traction on LinkedIn. After just a few months, it was obvious that the trust barriers that had seemed so insurmountable were beginning to crumble. I was amazed. I wasn’t just some anonymous schmuck anymore—I had a name and a voice now, and people were interested in what I had to say. I had created a scalable, systematic process that put me on top of a lot of industry minds.

  As exciting and humbling as it was (and still is), this is where things get tricky. Here was this great aha moment when I realized that my content efforts had led to a level of influence that gave me actual authority—and that authority can be dangerous if you aren’t careful and committed to authenticity.

  Once you’ve achieved a certain level of authority, what you say almost doesn’t even matter anymore because all people care about is who you are. I didn’t want that for myself, and I didn’t want to abuse that authority bias. I wanted my content to be why I stayed an authority.

  My friend Tyler Farnsworth runs the BOLO Conference, and when he introduced me as a speaker at his event last year, he said, “Now this guy, John Hall, has been on my mind more than anyone else this year.”

  You might think that wording a little weird, but I consider it a great compliment. He went on to talk about how every few weeks when he’s reading a trade publication or checking his social feeds, he finds something authored by me or another influencer who referenced my content. That’s because of my process, and it works on many levels.

  Today, I can set up a meeting with pretty much anyone in the industry. I’m invited to speak at the conferences that used to charge me thousands of dollars to attend. Brands that wouldn’t give me the time of day four years ago now reach out to me for help. I’m not sharing this to brag (the transformation is still a bit surreal for me, and my wife brings me back down to earth)—this is all proof of the power of content. My content has positioned me on top of a lot of industry minds, which has created huge opportunities for both me and my company. (I’ve even seen my employees who use similar tactics break down more barriers.) Without this written, published content to fuel my top-of-mind strategy, I don’t know where I’d be.

  To stay top of mind, I know that my team and I have to continue to produce and distribute content that people find engaging and useful. I’m thankful that I have such a great team helping me do just that.

  8

  THE GOLDEN RULE OF COMMUNICATION

  SOMETIMES WHAT YOU have to say and how you say it matter less than why you’re communicating in the first place. Your job then becomes to identify why and clearly relay it to your audience to compel them to take some kind of action.

  Consider the following two calls for funding:

  1. The American Red Cross provides services in five key areas: disaster relief, support for America’s military families, blood donations, health and safety training, and international humanitarian work. Donate today to sustain the vital work that we do.

  or

  2. The American Red Cross exists to provide compassionate care to those in need. Our network of generous donors, volunteers, and employees share a mission of preventing and relieving suffering, here at home and around the world, through five key service areas. With your help, we will work toward a world in which everyone can live a full, healthy, and vibrant life.

  Which one makes you reach for your wallet?

  Number 1 is nothing if not informative. Reading it gives you a solid overview of the Red Cross’s program areas. If you already care deeply about any of these areas or if you’re already a longtime Red Cross donor, this could motivate you to make a donation.

  However, most readers will find Number 2 infinitely more compelling. The language is richer—phrases such as “compassionate care,” “preventing and relieving suffering,” and “full, healthy, and vibrant life” grab you on an emotional level. Emotionally charged language can go a long way in establishing connections to potential donors.

  Number 2’s real power, though, is rooted in something deeper than word choice.

  Whereas Number 1 tells the reader what the Red Cross does, Number 2 talks about why the Red Cross exists. And building your message around the why is absolutely vital for effective communication. As Simon Sinek explains in his fantastic TEDx Talk, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” “People don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it.”1

  Sinek represents this concept with a
simple visual diagram.2 He draws three concentric circles. The outermost ring he labels the what: What do you do? What kind of products do you sell? What services do you provide? The second ring is the how: How do you do this? How do you create and deliver your products or services?

  The innermost ring—which Sinek calls the golden circle—is the why: Why do you exist? What purpose do you serve? What do you believe in?

  Clearly, the what and the how are important. Without a well-executed and accessible product, you won’t be able to compete. That’s why plenty of companies attempt to win over consumers by presenting their product or service as the best on the market. After all, doesn’t the best always win out in the end?

  This is logical, but it’s misguided. Sinek argues that the what is merely a product of the why. You don’t exist exclusively to make the product; you make the product because it is a manifestation of your core purpose. So even if you do have the best product on the market, starting with the what will severely restrict the connection your audience can make to your brand. You’re effectively saying to your customers, “By consuming our product, you’re engaging in the deepest possible relationship with our brand.”

  Therefore, in communicating with your audience, it’s crucial that you start with why rather than what. By centering your why, you are opening up the core of your being to the world. You are inviting people to forge a fundamental human connection to your purpose and vision. You’re saying to your audience, “Together, we can create something radically meaningful.”

  What Is the What?

  The choice to open this chapter with an example from the nonprofit world is an intentional one.

  Ask a random sampling of private sector executives why their companies exist, and most will tell you that their core purpose is to maximize shareholder wealth. As I’ve already explained, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of core purpose, and it’s to blame for a lot of ill in the world. When profit is your primary and exclusive motivation, you’re capable of doing some terrible things.