What do you use to prepare your marketing communications writers for a project? A creative brief? A phone call? Put them on your mailing lists and throw everything at them.
If your writers were groupies – your groupies – would you like them less?
If they’re delivering good content on time, then their groupie-hood should be the least of your worries.
“Put me on all your mailing lists.”
Have your marketing writers ever said that to you? If they did, would you know how to do it?
“How many email lists do you have?” one writer asked her client. “I want to subscribe to all of them.”
Now that’s a groupie.
Have you ever had a writer so voraciously interested in your company and its valuable content that she asked to subscribe to everything you put out, whether she wrote it or not?
“I don’t want to send you comments and suggestions on the content,” the writer explained, “I want to learn from it and do a better job of writing for you.”
Huh?
After you’d picked yourself up off the floor and regained your composure, you might start to mentally enumerate all of the channels and places in which somebody who really wanted to follow you, could follow you:
- email lists
- newsletters
- blog and vlog
- direct mail
- podcasts
- RSS feeds
- Twitter followers
- LinkedIn group
- YouTube channel
- Facebook page
- Google +
- StumbleUpon
- all the blogs in which your managers routinely guest-post
(Note to future readers: Disregard channels that have long since become extinct. There was a time when all of these were popular.)
Do you know all of your channels?
Do you yourself track all of this content? Probably not, because the channels change so quickly.
So, while you’re scratching your writer’s itch to know everything possible about your company and its marketing content, you can secretly thank her for making you stop to count all of the ways you get your message out.
And don’t forget to tell your groupie that the list is likely to change tomorrow.
photo credit: Tawny Rockerazzi
